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N
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich
(1899-1977)
writer
The product of a prominent noble family, Nabo-
kov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899.
His father, V. D. Nabokov, was a well-known lib-
eral politician who took part in the Provisional
Government of 1917. After the
OCTOBER REVOLU
-
TION
of that year, the Nabokov family fled Russia
for Berlin, where the elder Nabokov was assassi-
nated in 1922, the victim of a bullet intended for
his colleague, Pavel
MILIUKOV
. His son Vladimir
graduated from Cambridge University, and after
marrying his lifelong partner, Vera Slonim, in
1925 settled again in Berlin to work as a writer.
Under the pseudonym of V. Sirin, he wrote a
series of works in Russian that focused on the
themes of loss and exile, of which
Dar
(
The Gift,
1937) is perhaps the most representative. Fleeing
the Nazis, the Nabokov family moved to France
in 1937, before settling in the United States in
1940. Nabokov embarked on a new career as an
academic, teaching at Wellesley College and Cor-
nell University, and more remarkably as an
English-language author, beginning with
The Real
Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941). An American citi-
zen since 1945, Nabokov combined the charac-
teristic themes of the émigré writer, such as loss
and longing, with a more modern literary fasci-
nation with illusion, parody, distortion, multiple
worlds, and language itself. The publication of
Lolita
(1958) thrust Nabokov onto the center
stage of public notoriety that included an obscen-
ity trial as many readers fixated on the love affair
between a middle-aged émigré and a teenaged
girl and ignored other themes of the topic. The
Nabokovs moved to Montreux in 1959, his final
Vladimir Nabokov
(Library of Congress)
stopping place, where he continued to publish,
notably
Pale Fire
(1962), his autobiography,
Speak
Memory
(1966), and the family chronicle
Ada
(1969). He died in Montreux at the age of 78, his
reputation firmly established as a Russian and
American writer and with his devotion to record-
ing precise details above generalities, a major
influence on contemporary literature.
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