Nabokov’s love letters are some of the most rapturous ever written

After the publication of The Original of Laura, Nabokov’s last and most disappointing novel in a very sketchy draft, you might have been forgiven for thinking there wasn’t much left to discover in the great novelist’s writings. If the posthumous fiction has been mostly fairly thin, this extraordinary and wonderful collection of letters to his wife restores him to us as the virtuoso of prose. They are some of the most rapturous love letters anyone has ever written, love letters from the length of a lifelong marriage; beautiful performances for Véra, Nabokov’s wife, and incidentally for us. The publishers have immediately issued this volume as a Penguin Classic. I don’t think we will quibble with that.

Vladimir and Véra met at a charity ball in Berlin in 1923, a pair of Russian émigrés fleeing from the storm of the revolution. He was already making a name for himself as a poet and translator — his translation of Alice in Wonderland would be published that year.