"For the more mortal among us, there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion."

Writes Stacy Schiff in a biography of Vladimir Nabokov's wife Véra. The quote appears in a New Yorker piece by Judith Thurman titled "Silent Partner/What do Nabokov’s letters conceal?" Nabokov and his wife had a long, extremely close relationship, and he wrote many letters to her, praising her in terms that, as Thurman puts it, are "hard to distinguish from self-infatuation ('It’s as if in your soul there is a prepared spot for every one of my thoughts')." But he cheated on her and, at one point, "Nabokov is enjoying torrid sex with his worshipful mistress while lying to his wife about ending the affair," and:

He suffers not a little shame, yet tells Irina he can’t live without her. He even hints that he will leave Véra—given time. And, in letters that might have made a fascinating appendix, he extolls his and Irina’s uncanny compatibility in suspiciously familiar prose. “For the more mortal among us,” Schiff observes, “there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion.”