Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 10, 1899, in Saint Petersburg, the eldest of five children in one of the wealthiest and most cultivated families of the late Russian Empire ^[1]. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a prominent jurist, newspaper editor, and liberal politician who helped found the Constitutional Democratic Party and served in the first State Duma. His mother, Elena Rukavishnikova, came from a family enriched by gold mining. The household kept a mansion on Bolshaya Morskaya Street in the capital and a country estate at Vyra, south of the city, which Nabokov later remembered as the paradise of his childhood ^[2].

The boy grew up trilingual. English and French governesses meant he could read and write English before Russian, an accident of upbringing that would shape his entire career ^[1]. He also showed two early passions that never left him: chess problems and butterflies. By his teens he was hunting lepidoptera through the marshes around Vyra with a net and a copy of entomological journals, and he published a slim volume of love poems privately in 1916, while still a student at the progressive Tenishev School ^[2].

The Revolution of 1917 ended this world abruptly. The family fled first to the Crimea, where the elder Nabokov briefly served as minister of justice in a regional government, and then, in April 1919, left Russia for good aboard a ship out of Sevastopol ^[1]. Vladimir never returned. The confiscated estates, the lost library, and the severed language became the raw material of nearly everything he later wrote.

In exile the family settled in London and then Berlin, while Nabokov went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship. He studied zoology briefly, then switched to French and Russian literature, taking his degree in 1922 ^[1]. That same year his father was assassinated in Berlin: right-wing Russian monarchists opened fire at a political lecture, and Vladimir Dmitrievich was killed while shielding the intended target. The murder marked the son deeply, and echoes of mistaken or displaced killing recur through his fiction ^[3].

For the next fifteen years Nabokov lived in Berlin's large Russian emigre community, supporting himself with language lessons, tennis coaching, and the composition of chess puzzles and crossword-like word games for emigre newspapers. Under the pen name V. Sirin he became the leading young prose writer of the emigration ^[2]. Novels such as Mary (1926), The Defense (1930), about a chess master consumed by his own game, and Invitation to a Beheading (1936) appeared serially in Paris-based Russian journals. His last and longest Russian novel, The Gift, ran in the review Sovremennye Zapiski between 1937 and 1938 ^[3].

In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, a Russian-Jewish emigre who became his typist, editor, driver, business manager, and first reader for the rest of his life. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934 ^[2]. Hitler's rise made Berlin increasingly dangerous for a family with a Jewish wife, and the Nabokovs moved to Paris in 1937. In May 1940, weeks before German troops entered the city, they sailed for New York on one of the last crossings of the liner Champlain ^[1].

America required a second beginning. Approaching forty, Nabokov abandoned Russian as his language of composition, a decision he later described as a private tragedy, and set about mastering English prose at the highest level. His first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, appeared in 1941 ^[3]. He taught Russian and comparative literature, first at Wellesley College and then, from 1948 to 1959, at Cornell University, where his lectures on Flaubert, Kafka, Joyce, and Tolstoy drew crowded halls and were later published from his notes ^[1].

During the 1940s he also pursued serious science. As a research fellow at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology he reorganized the museum's butterfly collections and published technical papers on the classification of the Polyommatini, the group known as blues. His 1945 hypothesis that these butterflies colonized the New World from Asia in successive waves across the Bering region was largely vindicated by DNA sequencing studies published in 2011, decades after his death ^[4].

Then came Lolita. Written in the early 1950s during summer butterfly expeditions across the American West, the novel, narrated by the self-justifying pedophile Humbert Humbert, was refused by four American publishers and first issued in Paris by Olympia Press in 1955 ^[5]. Graham Greene named it among the best books of the year, a British editor denounced it as filth, and the ensuing controversy made it famous before most readers could obtain a copy. The 1958 American edition sold one hundred thousand copies in its first three weeks, a pace then compared to Gone with the Wind ^[5]. The book's success let Nabokov resign his professorship and write full time. Pale Fire followed in 1962, a novel built as a 999-line poem with a deranged scholar's commentary, and in 1964 he published his four-volume, deliberately literal translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which ignited a famous public quarrel with his friend Edmund Wilson over translation principles ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Vladimir Nabokov behind the books finds a man of settled habits and strong opinions. He never owned a house in America, preferring rented professors' homes and, later, hotel rooms, a rootlessness he traced to the loss of Vyra: no other property, he suggested, could replace the one childhood home ^[2]. He wrote his novels in pencil on index cards, often standing at a lectern, shuffling and reordering the cards before Vera typed the result ^[1].

The marriage to Vera lasted fifty-two years and functioned as a working partnership with few parallels in literary history. She carried a pistol for his protection, graded his students' papers, negotiated with publishers, and famously rescued the manuscript of Lolita when he moved to burn it in a backyard incinerator in Ithaca ^[6]. Their son Dmitri became an opera singer and, later, the principal translator of his father's Russian works into English.

Nabokov experienced synesthesia, seeing letters of the alphabet in specific colors, a trait he shared with his mother and described in detail in his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966) ^[2]. He professed indifference to music, scorned Freud (whom he called the Viennese witch doctor), dismissed writers as celebrated as Dostoevsky and Faulkner, and refused all involvement in politics after his father's death, though his hatred of both the Soviet and Nazi regimes was absolute. His brother Sergei died in a German concentration camp in 1945 ^[1].

In 1961 the Nabokovs moved into the Montreux Palace Hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, intending a short stay. They remained for the rest of his life, occupying a suite of rooms on an upper floor ^[1]. The location kept him near Dmitri, then singing in Italy, and near the Alpine meadows where he continued to hunt butterflies into his seventies, net in hand, in walking shorts and sturdy shoes.

The Montreux years were productive. Ada or Ardor, his longest and most elaborate novel, a chronicle of an incestuous love affair set on an invented planet blending Russia and America, appeared in 1969 and put him on the cover of Time magazine ^[3]. Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) followed, along with English versions of his early Russian novels, prepared with Dmitri, and the interviews and polemics collected in Strong Opinions (1973). He was repeatedly discussed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature but never received it ^[5].

His health declined after a fall on a butterfly-collecting slope above Davos in 1975. Hospitalizations followed, and he died in Montreux on July 2, 1977, at the age of 78, with an unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, existing only as a sequence of index cards ^[1]. He had asked that the fragment be destroyed; after three decades of hesitation, Dmitri published it in 2009, a decision that divided critics and scholars ^[6]. Nabokov is buried beside Vera, who died in 1991, in the cemetery at Clarens near Montreux.

Any honest Vladimir Nabokov biography must reckon with a double achievement almost without precedent: major bodies of work in two languages, each good enough to secure a reputation on its own. Critics routinely place Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory among the finest books of the century in any language; the Modern Library's 1998 panel ranked Lolita fourth among the century's English-language novels ^[5]. Writers as different as Martin Amis, John Updike, Zadie Smith, and Salman Rushdie have acknowledged his influence, and the word Nabokovian has entered critical vocabulary to describe prose of patterned precision, buried clues, and unreliable narrators ^[3].

Among Vladimir Nabokov achievements outside fiction, his scientific work has aged remarkably well. More than twenty butterfly species and genera carry names honoring him or coined by him, including the genus Nabokovia, and the 2011 confirmation of his Polyommatus migration hypothesis prompted biologists to reassess him as a genuine taxonomist rather than a gifted amateur ^[4]. His Cornell and Wellesley lectures continue to shape how literature is taught, with their insistence that a reader should notice details, reread, and fondle the specifics of a text.

The basic Vladimir Nabokov facts, exile, bilingual mastery, scandal, butterflies, only sketch the outline of a writer who insisted that art exists for the sake of what he called aesthetic bliss. His archives are held at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library's Berg Collection, and the definitive two-volume biography by Brian Boyd remains the standard account of his life ^[3]. The Saint Petersburg mansion where he was born now houses a Nabokov museum, a small restitution of the world the Revolution took from him ^[2].