Love Letters: "Infinitely and inexpressibly."
Excerpts from the love letters between Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera over their 52-year marriage.
An Aspirational Marriage
It is easy to get caught up in the world’s problems. Often, that is all we hear in the day-to-day with little encouragement towards anything but despair. Think of today’s post as an encouragement against despair, towards a life of love, joy, and vocation. These are not things that happen to us, but that we choose to have. Nowhere is this choice more potent than in a marriage. The fake statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce has percolated for years. Consequently, young people tend to view the success or failure of their relationships as beyond their control. We lack models for strong, enduring marriages.
Below is not a ‘how-to’ guide nor dating advice. Rather, it is a short compilation of love letters from Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov to his wife Vera. Married 52 years, until his death in 1977, the couple’s love letters share some insight into their enduring, if imperfect, marriage.
19 January 1925
I love you. Infinitely and inexpressibly. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and here I am writing this. My love, my happiness.
27 February 1936
I think of you with the most excruciating tenderness, my darling.
8 November 1923: Vladimir to Vera
How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden, wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours — with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it — and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret — so sharp! — that we haven’t lived through it together — whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissible — or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road — you see what I mean, my happiness?
And I know: I can’t tell you anything in words — and when I do on the phone then it comes out completely wrong. Because with you one needs to talk wonderfully, the way we talk with people long gone, do you know what I mean, in terms of purity and lightness and spiritual precision — but I — je patauge terribly. You can be bruised by an ugly diminutive — because you are so absolutely resonant — like seawater, my lovely.
I swear — and the inkblot has nothing to do with it — I swear by all that’s dear to me, all I believe in — I swear that I have never loved before as I love you, — with such tenderness — to the point of tears — and with such a sense of radiance.
26 July 1923
Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds. […]
So I will be in Berlin on the 10th or 11th…And if you’re not there I will come to you, and find you…See you soon, my strange joy, my tender night. Here are poems for you: [photo above].