Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg into a wealthy, aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal politician, lawyer, and journalist. The household was Anglophile—Nabokov spoke Russian and English, and at the age of five he learned French. Nabokov received his education at the Tenishev, St. Petersburg’s most innovative school. At 16 he inherited a large estate from his father’s brother, but he did not have much time to enjoy his wealth. During the Russian Revolution his father was briefly arrested. The family emigrated to Berlin and Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1923. Vladimir Dimitrievich was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a Russian monarchist.
Nabokov lived in Berlin for 15 years and worked as a translator, tutor, and tennis coach. He won acceptance as the leading young writer in the Berlin Russian community. Most of his readers were Russian emigrates—in the Soviet Russia his books were banned or ignored. In his early works Nabokov dealt with the death, the flow of time and sense of loss. Already using complex metaphors, Nabokov themes became later more ambiguous puzzles—he was a remarkable chess player—that challenge the reader to involve in the game. In Lectures On Literature (1980) Nabokov wrote that to be a good reader one do not have to lean heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle, or belong to a book club.
In Zashchita Luzhina (1930, The Defence) Nabokov took the role of a grandmaster and played with the expectations of his readers.
As a writer Nabokov gained his first literary success with his translations of some of Heine’s songs. Nabokov’s first novel, Mashenk (1926), was written in Russia. In 1924 Nabokov married Vera Evseevna Slonim, who came from a Jewish family; they had one son, Dmitri. Nabokov’s early nine novels were published under the pen name Vladimir Sirin. These works included The Gift (1937-38), a novel and an intellectual history of 19th-century Russia, and Invitation to a Beheading (1938), a political fantasy, in which the remaining days in the life the central character correspond to the length of his pencil.
When Hitler released the killer of his father, Nabokov moved to Paris in 1937. There he met the Irish novelist James Joyce. With a loan he received from the composer Rachmaninov, Nabokov moved three years later with his wife and son to the United States.
Nabokov taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University, delivering highly acclaimed lectures on Flaubert, Joyce, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others. He also continued his extensive researches in entomology, becoming a recognized authority on butterflies. He also held a modest but official position at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The job lasted until 1948. As a lepidopterist he was self-taught, but his attitude to scientific work was serious, not dilettantish. Especially he was interested in Blues, the tribe Polyommatini, found all over the world. Later Nabokov estimated that between the years 1949 and 1959 he travelled more than 150,000 miles on butterfly trips. Nabokov’s first publication in English was an article titled ‘A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera’.
Nabokov’s first novels in English were The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947). The Atlantic and the New Yorker started to publish Nabokov’s short stories in the early 1940s. In America, apart from collecting his shorter prose of the 1930s into one book, Vesna V Fial’te Nabokov published only memoirs and verse in Russian. Conclusive Evidence (1951) was an autobiography, which was later revived as Speak, Memory (1966), set mainly in pre-revolutionary Russia.
It took six years before Nabokov finished Lolita, a literary bomb. The English writer Graham Greene cited it among the best books of 1955. With Lolita Nabokov gained a huge success, although it was banned in Paris in 1956-58 and not published in full in America and the U.K. until 1958.
Lolita is one of the most controversial novels of the 20th-century, in which the rhetoric of the protagonist both captivates and repels.
Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the book was based on Nabokov’s screenplay.
Lolita allowed Nabokov to abandon teaching and devote himself entirely to writing. In 1957 Nabokov published Pnin, a story of a hapless Russian professor of literature on an American college campus. Pale Fire (1962) was an ambitious mixture of literary forms, partly a one-thousand-line poem in heroic couplets by John Shade.
From 1959 Nabokov lived in Switzerland, where his permanent home was at the Montreux Palace Hotel. He continued to collect butterflies, which after his death were stored at the Cantonal Museum of Zoology of Lausanne. Nabokov’s later works include Ada (1969), a love story set on the planet of Antiterra, a mixture of Russia and America, Transparent Things (1972), and Look At The Harlequins! (1975), in which Nabokov’s own life coincides occasionally with the protagonist’s, also a writer.
The writer’s son Dmitri has undertook the translation of several of Nabokov’s books from these later years. Nabokov himself wanted to be valued more as an American writer than a Russian one. In the Soviet Union he perhaps enjoyed greater fame than in the West. Among Nabokov’s major critical works are his study of Nikolay Gogol (1944), and translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s masterpiece Eugene Onegin (1964), with commentary. The ten-year-long work was first brought out by the Bollingen Foundation in four volumes.
Nabokov died in Lausanne on July 2, 1977.
