Literary Giants - Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He was the oldest of five children born to Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova. His father was a lawyer, politician and journalist. The family was wealthy and prominent and a member of the untitled nobility. Nabokov was a multilingual (Russian, French and English) novelist and short story writer. His first 9 novels were written in Russian but his international fame did not come until he became a master of the English prose style.

Nabokov considered his childhood to have been perfect. After the 1917 February Revolution, the family was forced to flee the city. They did not expect to be away for very long, but the forced exit turned out to be a permanent exile. In April, 1919, the family left on the last ship and stayed briefly in England. While there Nabokov went to Trinity College, Cambridge and studied Slavic and Romance languages. In 1922 after his studies were done he followed his family to Berlin where his father was assassinated by Russian monarchists as he fought to protect a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This mistaken, violet death would appear several times in Nabokov’s writing. He stayed working under the pen name V. Sirin. He was forced to supplement his writing income by teaching languages and giving tennis and boxing lessons.

He met and married Vera Evseyevna Slonim in Berlin and they had one child, Dmitri, born in 1934. In 1937 he left Germany for France. In 1940 the family fled the advancing German troops and sailed to the U.S. aboard the Champlain. They settled in Manhattan and he worked at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1941, at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, he was a resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position was created just for him and it gave him time to pursue his writing while still supporting his family. They moved to Cambridge in 1942 and stayed until 1948. After a lecture tour through the U.S. he returned to teaching. His classes were popular due to his teaching style. He was also curator of lepidoptery at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1948 went to Cornell University to teach Russian and European literature. In 1945 he became a naturalized citizen of the U.S.

Nabokov wrote Lolita while traveling through the western U.S. looking for butterflies. He never learned to drive so his wife acted as his chauffeur. He considered her the best humored woman he had ever known. In June of 1953 the family moved to Ashland, Oregon. While there he finished Lolita. Four months later they left for Ithaca, N.Y.

With the financial success of Lolita, Nabokov returned to Europe and spent all of his time writing. On October 1, 1961, he and Vera moved to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland and he lived there for the rest of his life. He continued to hunt butterflies on excursions to the Alps, Corsica and Sicily. In 1976 he was hospitalized with an undiagnosed fever. In Lausanne in 1977 he was again hospitalized with severe bronchial congestion. He died on July 2. He was cremated and is buried at the Clarens cemetery in Montreux.

When he died, he left an unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. Several short excerpts have been made public. In July of 2009, Playboy Magazine acquired the rights to print an excerpt that will be published in the December issue.

Nabokov wrote 19 novels (10 in Russian, 9 in English). He wrote 68 short stories (56 in Russian, 11 in English and 1 in French). He wrote 7 plays in Russian. In the non-fiction category he wrote 4 memoirs and letters and 6 criticisms. He wrote 6 miscellaneous works including the screenplay for Lolita.