Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born the first of five children in a wealthy family of Russian nobility. Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a lawyer and journalist, and his mother, Yelena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, was the heiress of a successful gold mine. Nabokov enjoyed a privileged childhood on his family’s Saint Petersburg estate, and he developed an early love for literature and writing. Nabokov published his first book of poems, Stikhi (“Poems”), in 1916 when he was just 17 years old. His father was a prominent leader of Russia’s Constitutional Democratic Party, and when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, Nabokov and his family were forced to leave Russia for Crimea. No one expected the revolution to last long, and the family assumed that they would return to Russia; however, by 1919, the entire Nabokov family was exiled in Europe. Nabokov went to England, where he enrolled at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study zoology and language. Nabokov was a gifted student, consistently testing at the top of his class, and he earned a BA in 1922. After college, he moved to Berlin, where the rest of his family was exiled. Nabokov stayed in Berlin for several years and became a popular poet. In 1925, he married Véra Evseyevna Slonim and their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934. In 1937, Nabokov and his young family moved to France, but they then relocated to the United States in 1940 due to World War II. The Nabokovs initially arrived in New York City, but Nabokov accepted a teaching position at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1941. Nabokov published his first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, that same year and later became a United States citizen in 1945. As a lepidopterist (an expert on moths and butterflies), Nabokov was the curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He also taught Russian and European literature at Cornell University in New York from 1948 to 1959, where he had several prominent students, including future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and writer Thomas Pynchon. The success and financial security that followed the 1955 publication of Lolita allowed Nabokov to step away from teaching, and in 1961, he relocated to Montreux, Switzerland, and began writing full time. Nabokov wrote several novels, nonfiction works, and books of poetry while in Switzerland, including Pale Fire in 1962, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited in 1967, and Carrousel, which was published posthumously in 1987. He died in 1977 at the age of 78 after a lengthy and undiagnosed illness. Nabokov is widely accepted as one of the finest writers of English prose, and many critics and scholars count both Pale Fire and Lolita among the best novels ever written.