Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history.

I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this episode we discover the tale of a couple so deeply entwined

they practically shared an identity, and yet one of them is known to all while the other stayed

practically invisible. This time, on Significant Others, meet Vera Nabokov.

In 1948, a Russian emigrate raised partially in Berlin, for whom English was his third language

began writing the great American novel. The final manuscript was feared in Britain and rejected

by every major imprint in the States, and was only released after being acquired by a French

publisher of Highbrow's Smut. Ten years later, it was breaking industry sales records.

Ultimately, the book, minted its author's celebrity, spawned two films,

raked in piles of cash, and coined a label for a type of preteen that is now its dictionary

definition. And the book would never have existed at all if its author's wife hadn't rescued

that same manuscript from the trash can in which her husband was trying to incinerate it.

The book, of course, is Liza, and its author is Vladimir Nabokov.

And while those names might be fairly familiar to anyone who's ever laid eyes on a pair of

heart-shaped sunglasses, there is another name, just as vital to the saga, which very few people

today have ever heard. And that might be exactly how Vladimir's wife Vera wanted it.

I'm doing my best with the pronunciations, but in case you couldn't tell, I am not Russian.

And Nabokov himself even quibbled with the way some Russians pronounced his name, so apologies if

it just doesn't sound right. The alliance between Vladimir and Vera reads like a novel of its own,

in which two characters form a single protagonist. From opposing cultural ends of the Russian

diaspora, they met in Berlin in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, and proceeded to weave over

the next half-century a joint existence that culminated in the sharing of what they called a

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