Background

Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia, as one of five children of a wealthy noble couple. Nabokov's parents encouraged the gifted youth to follow his mind and imagination. Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a lawyer who edited St. Petersburg's only liberal newspaper, rebelled against first the czarist regime, then against the Communists.

Education

Nabokov played with language and linguistics, mathematics, puzzles and games including chess, and soccer, boxing and tennis. He read English before he read Russian. Interested in butterflies, he became a recognized entomological authority while still young and remained a noted lepidopertist his entire life.

Nabokov began to write poems when he was 13. His first book of poetry was published in 1914, and a second appeared in 1917. He called his early writing an attempt "to express one's position in regard to the universe."

After the October Revolution, Nabokov's family was forced to flee first to Crimea, then to Livadiya and after the withdrawal of the German Army in November 1918 and the defeat of the White Army (early 1919), the Nabokovs sought exile in western Europe. They settled briefly in England and Vladimir entered Trinity College of the University of Cambridge, first studying zoology, then Slavic and Romance languages. He graduated with honors in 1922 and rejoined his family in Berlin. Later Nabokov's father was gunned down by a monarchist there.

Career

Nabokov began writing under the pseudonym "V. Sirin", selling stories, poems and essays to Russian-language newspapers in Berlin and then, after fleeing the Nazis in 1938, in Paris. His work included translations as diverse as Alice in Wonderland and the poem La Belle dame sans merci into Russian, literary criticism, short stories, plays, and novels.

He began writing in English and in 1940 moved to the United States. In 1940, Nabokov taught Slavic languages at Stanford University. From 1941 to 1948 he taught at Wellesley College and became a professor of literature. He also was a research fellow in entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University from 1942 to 1948, and later discovered several butterfly species and subspecies, including "Nabokov's wood nymph".

While teaching, he wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), a parody of the mystery-story genre, whose hero is derived from the author's own life. A Guggenheim fellowship in 1943 resulted in his scholarly 1944 biographical study of Russian author Nicolai Gogol.

Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and by then was a regular contributor to popular magazines. Nabokov's 1947 novel Bend Sinister is about an intellectual's battle with a totalitarian police state. It is considered a parody of the utopia genre.

In 1949 Nabokov was appointed professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University, where he taught until 1959. His memoir of his early life in Russia, Speak, Memory (1951), is a charming autobiography. Several short sketches published in the New Yorker, were incorporated into Pnin (1957), his novel about a Russian emigre teaching at an American university.

Despite Nabokov's vast productivity, scholarly status, and high standing in literary circles, he remained relatively unknown to the general public until Lolita, a sadly hilarious account of Humbert Humbert, a pompous middle-aged professor who is seduced by a 12-year-old schoolgirl. It was first published in Paris in 1955. After its first American edition came out in 1958, some U. S. libraries banned it. The scandal helped the book become immensely popular. Critical reaction ran the gamut from outrage to high praise. Nabokov sold the film rights and wrote the screenplay for the 1962 movie directed by Stanley Kubrick. With royalties from the novel and the film, Nabokov was able to quit teaching and devote himself entirely to his writing and to butterfly hunting.

In 1950 Nabokov published Invitation to a Beheading, a story of a man awaiting execution, which he had first written in Russian in 1938. In 1960 he and his family moved to Montreux, Switzerland. Nabokov received critical acclaim for Pale Fire (1962), a strange, multidimensional exercise in the techniques of parable and parody, written as a 999-line poem with a lengthy commentary by a demented New England scholar who is actually an exiled mythical king.

In 1963 Nabokov's English translation of Alexander Pushkin's romantic verse novel Eugene Onegin was published, the four-volume scholarly work was, Nabokov said, his "labor of love." Several translations of earlier Russian works followed, including The Defense, a novel about chess.

Nabokov's Ada (1969), an "autumnal fairy tale" whose principal characters are imprisoned by time, is subject to many levels of interpretation, with its intricate construction, complex allusions, word games, staggering erudition, chronological ambiguities and literary parody. Time in this novel is blended into a totally free-ranging and distorting present, what Nabokov called "the essential spirality of all things in their relationship to time".

Achievements

• Vladimir Nabokov was one of the most productive and creative writers of his era, best known as the author of Lolita, the scandalous 1950s novel about an underage temptress. The novel was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels.
  
  Nabokov was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times and in 1963, he was nominated for an Academy Award in the 'Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium category'.
  
  The PEN/Nabokov Award is awarded biannually by the PEN American Centre to writers, especially novelists. The winner receives a prize of $20, 000.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time

    (Insomniac Dreams presents the text of Nabokov’s dream exp...)

    2017
  • Speak, Memory

    (Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evid...)

    1951
  • Despair

    (Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - thirty years aft...)

    1934
  • Pale Fire

    (In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive ple...)

    1962
  • The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

    (Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tal...)

    1996
  • Lolita

    (Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tell...)

    1955
  • Laughter in the Dark

    (An elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of de...)

    1932
  • Pnin

    (Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who...)

    1957
  • Lectures on Literature

    (For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, ...)

    1980
  • Letters to Véra

    (Vladimir’s letters to Véra chronicle a half-century-long ...)

    2014
  • Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

    (Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, ...)

    1969
  • Bend Sinister

    (The state has been recently taken over and is being run b...)

    1947
  • King, Queen, Knave

    (The novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterou...)

    1928
  • Invitation to a Beheading

    (Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre ...)

    1935

Politics

Nabokov was a classical liberal, and as his father was against despotism and opposed capital punishment. Nabokov also opposed the Soviet government that came to power following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Tsarist autocracy, communism and fascism. Vladimir fiercely denounced anti-semitism and racism against African-Americans.

The author supported the Vietnam War effort and voiced admiration for both Presidents Johnson and Nixon.

Views

Nabokov constructed his novels like puzzles, rather than working from beginning to end. His themes are universal: the role of the artist in society; the myth of journey, adventure, and return; and humanity's concepts of memory and time, which he called a tightrope walk across the "watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future".

Quotations: "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip."

"Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime."

"Russia has always been a curiously unpleasant country despite her great literature. Unfortunately, Russians today have completely lost their ability to kill tyrants."

"There's nothing to look at. New tenement houses and old churches do not interest me. The hotels there are terrible. I detest the Soviet theater. Any palace in Italy is superior to the repainted abodes of the Tsars. The village huts in the forbidden hinterland are as dismally poor as ever, and the wretched peasant flogs his wretched cart horse with the same wretched zest. As to my special northern landscape and the haunts of my childhood – well, I would not wish to contaminate their images preserved in my mind." (when asked, in 1969, whether he would like to revisit the land he had fled in 1918, now the Soviet Union)

"Our imagination flies - we are its shadow on the earth."

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes."

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska (Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness). At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom."

"Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture."

"Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece."

"Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards."

Personality

Nabokov was one of the most productive and creative writers of his era. His novels, short stories, essays, poems, and memoirs all share his cosmopolitan wit, his love of wordplay, his passion for satire, and his complex social commentary.

Physical Characteristics: Nabokov was a self-described synesthete, who at a young age equated the number five with the colour red.

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  boxing, tennis

Connections

In May 1923, he met a Russian-Jewish woman, Véra Evseyevna Slonim, at a charity ball in Berlin and married her in April 1925. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.

Father:

Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov

Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (July 21, 1870 – March 28, 1922) was a Russian criminologist, journalist, and progressive statesman during the last years of the Russian Empire. He was murdered in Berlin on 28 March 1922 by far-right Russian monarchists.

Mother:

Yelena Ivanovna née Rukavishnikova

Yelena Ivanovna was the heiress and the granddaughter of a millionaire gold-mine owner.

Spouse:

Véra Nabokov

Véra Nabokov (January 5, 1902 – April 7, 1991) was the wife, editor, and translator of Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, and a source of inspiration for many of his works.

Son:

Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov

Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov (May 10, 1934 – February 23, 2012) was an American opera singer and translator. He was the only child of author Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera, and was in his later years the executor of his father's literary estate.

References

• The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
  2013
• Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing
  2017
• Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) Stacy Schiff’s Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time - Vladimir Nabokov and his second wife, Véra.
  2000
• The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship The Feud is the deliciously ironic (and sad) tale of how two literary giants destroyed their friendship in a fit of mutual pique and egomania.
  2016
• The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov: A Novel In his novel based Paul Russell re-creates the rich and changing world in which Sergey, his family and friends lived; from wealth and position in pre-revolutionary Russia, to the halls of Cambridge University, and the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
  2011
• Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov's Scientific Art The first comprehensive, interdisciplinary accounting of Nabokov’s scientific work, its significance in his artistry, and his contribution to evolutionary theory.
  2016