Written across exile, poverty, academic appointments, butterfly hunts, and the slow construction of novels that would define twentieth-century literature, the letters track both a partnership and symbiotic minds at work.

This tome gathers of decades of correspondence between Nabokov and his wife, editor, translator, driver, agent, and fiercest ally, Véra Slonim. They are tender, impatient, funny, obsessive. Nabokov reports on lecture tours, quarrels with publishers, the progress of manuscripts, the weather in Ithaca, the price of groceries. He flirts, frets, instructs. The tone shifts from ardent to irritable to incandescent within a page.

For readers of Nabokov’s fiction, this is the backstage wiring: drafts of ideas, anxieties about reception, flashes of cruelty, flashes of devotion. For others, it’s simply the record of a partnership that made the work possible.