Vladimir Nabokov Biography Quotes 39 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia, into a cultivated, liberal aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a prominent jurist, statesman, and editor associated with the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party; his mother, Elena Ivanovna (nee Rukavishnikova), came from a wealthy landowning family. The household was polyglot and bookish. Nabokov learned Russian, English, and French in childhood and read voraciously in all three. At the family estate near St. Petersburg he developed the passions that would accompany him throughout life: an exacting love of language, a fascination with chess problems, and an enduring devotion to butterflies, which he collected and studied from an early age.

Revolution, Exile, and Education
The upheavals of 1917 shattered the Nabokovs' world. The family left Petrograd, moved to the Crimea during the Civil War, and then emigrated to Western Europe. In 1919 Nabokov arrived in England and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied modern and medieval languages and also pursued zoology. Cambridge gave him a degree, a circle of cosmopolitan friends, and time to shape the disciplined habits of a writer. Tragedy struck in 1922: his father was assassinated in Berlin while attempting to shield the liberal politician Pavel Milyukov from gunmen. The murder fixed in Nabokov a lifelong detestation of political fanaticism and coercion.

Berlin and the Pseudonym "Sirin"
After Cambridge, Nabokov settled in Berlin, one of the hubs of the Russian emigration. To distinguish himself from another Russian writer sharing his surname, he published in Russian under the pen name V. Sirin. He married Vera Slonim in 1925; she became his indispensable collaborator, typist, editor, guardian, and first reader. Their son, Dmitri, was born in 1934. During the 1920s and 1930s he built a substantial reputation among emigre readers with novels, stories, and poems notable for verbal precision and inventive structure. Works from this period include Mary (Mashenka), King, Queen, Knave, The Luzhin Defense, The Eye, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Gift. Political pressures and the rising peril for Jews in Germany prompted the family to leave Berlin for Paris in 1937. In France, Nabokov continued to write and to support his family with literary journalism and occasional teaching.

Flight to America and Academic Life
In 1940 the Nabokovs crossed the Atlantic to the United States, beginning the American phase of his career and citizenship. He taught at Wellesley College from 1941 and worked at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology as a research fellow in lepidoptery, sorting and describing butterflies. In 1948 he moved to Cornell University, where his lecture courses on European and Russian literature became legendary for their rigor, wit, and close attention to the texture of prose. Some of his lectures were later assembled into volumes that revealed the meticulous reading he demanded of himself and of his students.

First English Novels and a Distinctive Voice
Nabokov's first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, appeared in 1941 and already displayed hallmarks of his mature style: playful structures, unreliable narration, and a devotion to aesthetic design over topicality. He followed it with Bend Sinister and the short-story collections that broadened his readership. He refused the notion that literature must serve politics or psychology in didactic ways, and he voiced his skepticism toward deterministic readings, especially those framed by Freudian doctrine. His insistence on craftsmanship and the primacy of artistic delight set him apart from many contemporaries.

Lolita and the Aftermath
The turning point came with Lolita. Rejected by several American publishers, it first appeared in 1955 with Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press in Paris, provoking scandal and admiration in equal measure for its audacious subject and its ravishing, meticulously controlled prose. The book's American publication in 1958 brought fame and financial independence. Critics such as Lionel Trilling recognized the novel's complexity, and Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation, for which Nabokov received screen credit as the principal screenwriter, extended its notoriety. The success of Lolita allowed him to leave university teaching and, in 1961, to move with Véra to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, which became their permanent home.

Friendships, Feuds, and Critical Debates
In the United States Nabokov enjoyed and later quarreled with the critic Edmund Wilson, a friendship that dissolved amid disputes over translation practices and the merits of Russian writers. Their public exchange over Nabokov's rigorously literal translation and extensive commentary for Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin exemplified his perfectionism and his belief that fidelity to form and nuance mattered more than idiomatic smoothness. His relationships with publishers and editors were equally exacting. He worked closely with American editors and with Véra at every stage, and later, scholars such as Alfred Appel Jr. would annotate and analyze his work with a care that suited his craftsmanship.

Later Masterpieces and Style
The post-Lolita years produced some of his most inventive books. Pnin, with its pathos and comedy, offered a portrait of exilic academia; Pale Fire (1962) blended a 999-line poem with an eccentric commentary to create a labyrinth of voices and mirrored truths; Ada, or Ardor (1969) expanded into a vast, time-warped family chronicle and love story; Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) continued his explorations of memory, artifice, and identity. His memoir, first published as Conclusive Evidence and later revised and retitled Speak, Memory, elegantly evoked his Russian childhood and the texture of loss and recovery. He famously composed on index cards, building narratives through modular scenes and meticulous revision.

Lepidoptery and Chess
Alongside literature, Nabokov maintained serious scientific work. At Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology he curated and studied collections of the Polyommatus blues and proposed a bold hypothesis about their migration and diversification in the Americas. Decades later, genetic research would lend support to aspects of his taxonomic insight, vindicating the care he took pinning linguistic and lepidopteran specimens alike. He also composed intricate chess problems, treating them as exercises in aesthetic ingenuity, akin to crafting a novel's hidden design.

Family, Collaboration, and Estate
Throughout his career Véra Nabokov protected his time, negotiated with publishers, and kept the distractions of fame at bay. Their son, Dmitri, became a singer and later took charge of his father's literary estate, translating and editing works and providing authoritative clarifications when needed. Nabokov left an unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura, and his family wrestled with the questions of preserving or destroying drafts, a dilemma consistent with his lifelong concern for artistic control.

Final Years and Legacy
Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux, Switzerland. He had become a Russian-born American author whose English prose achieved a rare, crystalline brilliance without sacrificing wit, play, or emotional force. His work bridged languages and continents, shaped by the dislocations of exile and the steadying presence of Véra, and animated by the exactitude of a scientist of words. Generations of writers and critics have continued to wrestle with his aesthetics, his narrative puzzles, and his ethical provocations. From St. Petersburg to Berlin, Paris, Ithaca, and Montreux, he fashioned a life in letters that remains a model of artistic sovereignty, simultaneously cosmopolitan and intensely personal.

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