" An extraordinary woman!" exclaimsTolstoy's Levin after a chat with Anna Karenina. "I'm awfully sorry for her." We might say the same about the real-life figures who populate Alexandra Popoff's "The Wives" and whose astonishing virtues and afflictions often seem the stuff of fiction. This collection of biographical essays about the companions of great Russian authors—Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn—buzzes with both literary insight and gossipy intrigue, exploring the wives' relationships not just with their husbands but also with their husbands' books."
"Tolstoy drew on Sophia's diaries and letters when crafting his female protagonists, basing several of his best characters on her. Bulgakov was thinking of Elena when he invented the romantic heroine of "The Master and Margarita"—"the ultimate literary wife," who harnesses supernatural forces to save both her husband and his novel. And as for Véra Nabokov, flashes of whom appear in "Ada," "Pale Fire" and other works, Vladimir explained: "Most of my works have been dedicated to my wife and her picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflected color in the inner mirrors of my books." ..."Forgoing genteel society was 'a grave misfortune,' Sophia Tolstoy wrote, even to serve a 'genius' like Leo. Just as Nabokov dedicated his works to his wife, she—like the other women in Ms. Popoff's account—dedicated herself to her husband's work. The wives typed dictation, assisted with research, offered editorial advice and preserved archives. They often took care of business—correspondence, negotiations, contracts—so their husbands could write.[...] "The Wives" invites us to perceive both symmetries and incongruities among the couples and reveals distinctions between the czarist and Soviet periods. In this chronicle of miseries, Véra and Vladimir Nabokov stand out for long, happy lives spent—luckily for them—mostly outside the oppression of their home country. "You and I are entirely special," Vladimir wrote her in 1924. "Such wonders as we know, no one else knows, and nobody loves the way we love." The couple was indeed singular. Véra manned the microscope when Vladimir, a lepidopterist as well as a novelist, was unable to show up for work at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and she taught his Wellesley language courses when he was ill (to the pleasure of his students, who considered her a superior instructor)./All Ms. Popoff's wives prove "extraordinary" in their ways, and just as Levin pondered Anna Karenina, so do we wonder about the women filling Ms. Popoff's pages. What might Véra have accomplished on her own? "