🌿 Beautiful Questions: Nabokov's Letters to Véra Edition
Vladimir Nabokov was many things — novelist, poet, professor, chess composer, lepidopterist — but above all, he was a man in love. Not just with language or aesthetic perfection, but with a woman named Véra Slonim, whom he met in 1923 and married soon after.
For the next fifty years, she would become not just his wife but his editor, translator, business manager, protector, and creative confidante. She typed his manuscripts, drove him to lectures, shielded him from critics, and even carried a pistol in her purse to protect him from death threats after the publication of Lolita.
Without Vera, there would be no Nabokov as we know him.
Their correspondence, later collected in Letters to Véra, reveal a bond that was both fiercely intellectual and emotionally charged. They also open a window into Nabokov’s playful, brilliant mind. Scattered throughout are riddles, poems, clever games, and one especially strange delight. In the summer of 1926, while Vera was recovering from an illness at a sanatorium in Germany, Nabokov sent her a handwritten quiz titled the Questionnaire for the Immodest and Curious. It read like a love letter disguised as a game, half intimate provocation, half psychological puzzle, and unmistakably Nabokov.
Framed as a personality quiz, the questionnaire is at once absurd and philosophical, flirtatious and penetrating. It's a testament to the depth of their romantic, intellectual, and irreverently joyful connection. Beneath its surface lies a real invitation to be known fully, without shame.
Nabokov doesn't just want answers. He wants Véra's soul revealed to him.
This edition in the series presents the full list exactly as Nabokov wrote it. Tender, bizarre, playful, all revealing.
Nabokov's questionnaire may have been intended for Véra, but it now belongs to all of us. The curious, the seekers, the slightly immodest. Try answering a few. Try answering all of them. See what comes out. Some questions may make you laugh. Others may unsettle you. A few might stay with you for days.
They are meant for the curious. And the immodest.
That's what makes them beautiful questions.
Questionnaire for the Immodest and Curious
- Name, last name
- Pen-name
- Age and preferred age
- Attitude to marriage
- Attitude to children
- Profession and preferred profession
- What century would you like to live in?
- What city would you like to live in?
- From what age do you remember yourself, and your first memory?
- Which of the existing religions is closest to your worldview?
- What kind of literature do you like the most? What literary genre?
- Your favorite books
- Your favorite art
- Your favorite artwork
- Your attitude to technology
- Do you appreciate philosophy? As a form of scholarship? As a pastime?
- Do you believe in progress?
- Your favorite aphorism
- Your favorite language
- On what foundations does the world stand?
- What miracle would you perform if you had a chance?
- What would you do if you suddenly got a lot of money?
- Your attitude to modern woman
- Your attitude to modern man
- What virtue and vice do you prefer and disapprove of in a woman?
- What virtue and vice do you prefer and disapprove of in a man?
- What gives you the keenest pleasure?
- What gives you the keenest suffering?
- Are you a jealous person?
- Your attitude to lies
- Do you believe in love?
- Your attitude to drugs
- Your most memorable dream
- Do you believe in fate and predestination?
- Your next reincarnation?
- Are you afraid of death?
- Would you like man to become immortal?
- Your attitude to suicide
- Are you an anti-Semite? Yes. No. Why?
- "Do you like cheese?"
- Your favorite mode of transportation
- Your attitude to solitude
- Your attitude to our circle