Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977) was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator and lepidopterist who wrote acclaimed fiction in two languages. [1] After emigrating from revolutionary Russia he published nine Russian novels in European exile before turning to English, in which he produced Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire and the memoir Speak, Memory. [2] He was also a serious scientific student of butterflies and published on the taxonomy of the blues.
Early life and exile
Nabokov was born in April 1899 in Saint Petersburg into a wealthy and prominent aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal jurist and politician in the pre-revolutionary Duma. The household was trilingual, and Nabokov read and wrote in Russian, English and French from childhood. The family's estates and fortune were lost in the Russian Revolution, and in 1919 they fled the country. [1]
He studied Russian and French literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1922, the same year his father was killed in Berlin while shielding another man from assassins. Nabokov settled in Berlin, where a large Russian émigré community sustained a literary press, and he published poems, stories, chess problems and novels under the pen name V. Sirin. [2]
The Russian novels
His Russian-language fiction of the Berlin and Paris years includes Mary, The Defense, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift, works that established him among émigré readers as the outstanding writer of his generation in exile. He married Véra Slonim in 1925; she became his editor, translator, secretary and lifelong collaborator, and their son Dmitri was born in 1934. [1]
The rise of Nazism forced the family to leave Germany for France in 1937, and in 1940, as German forces advanced, they sailed for the United States. [3]
Writing in English
In America Nabokov taught at Wellesley College and then for more than a decade at Cornell University, where his lectures on Russian and European literature became celebrated. He simultaneously worked as a research fellow in lepidoptery at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, publishing technical papers on the classification of the blue butterflies; a hypothesis he advanced about their migration from Asia to the New World was supported by later genetic research. [1] He held a Guggenheim Fellowship during these years.
Lolita, the story of a manipulative literary narrator's sexual obsession with a twelve-year-old girl, was rejected by American publishers and first appeared in Paris in 1955. Its American publication in 1958 made it both a scandal and a bestseller. [3] Critics have read it as a study of self-deception and predation, told in a prose style whose beauty is deliberately at odds with its narrator's crimes.
Later years and legacy
The income from Lolita allowed Nabokov to give up teaching. In 1961 he moved to Switzerland, living at the Montreux Palace Hotel on Lake Geneva for the rest of his life. There he wrote Pale Fire (1962), a novel in the form of a poem with a deranged commentary, and Ada or Ardor (1969), and completed his heavily annotated translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. He also oversaw English translations of his early Russian works, often with his son. [2]
Nabokov died in Montreux on 2 July 1977. His reputation rests on an exacting attention to language, elaborate formal games, unreliable narrators and a lasting preoccupation with memory and loss, and he is regularly named among the major novelists of the twentieth century. [1]
