Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia, into one of the wealthiest and most distinguished aristocratic families in the country. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a prominent liberal politician and jurist; his mother was the daughter of a gold-mining millionaire. The family lived in extraordinary privilege — with multiple estates, a staff of servants, and a house full of books in three languages — until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 swept it all away. The family fled to the Crimea and then to Western Europe, and young Nabokov, who had already demonstrated precocious gifts as a chess player, poet, and lepidopterist, enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied French and Russian literature.
Nabokov spent the 1920s and 1930s in Berlin and Paris, writing novels and stories in Russian under the pseudonym V. Sirin and establishing himself as the leading writer of the Russian emigre literary community. His Russian novels — including The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Gift — are works of dazzling formal invention and demonstrated from early on the verbal precision, the structural cunning, and the preoccupation with memory, exile, and the nature of art that would characterize all his work. In 1940, fleeing the advance of Nazi Germany, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught literature at Wellesley College and Cornell University and worked as a lepidopterist at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Lolita, written in English and published by the Olympia Press in Paris in 1955 after being rejected by American publishers on grounds of obscenity, is the novel that made Nabokov’s name worldwide. It is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a cultivated European pedophile who becomes obsessed with and eventually abducts Dolores Haze, the twelve-year-old girl he calls Lolita. The novel’s central moral challenge — that it is narrated by a monster whose prose is among the most beautiful in the English language — is also its central achievement. Nabokov’s stylistic brilliance simultaneously seduces the reader and implicates that seduction in Humbert’s own predatory aestheticism, making the novel a sustained meditation on the complicity of beauty and cruelty.
Nabokov’s prose style in English is one of the most astonishing achievements in literary history: a non-native speaker writing sentences of greater richness, wit, and precision than almost any native speaker. He constructs elaborate word games, puns, and allusions that reward multiple readings; his metaphors are physically precise and intellectually playful; and his sentences move with a feline elegance that is entirely his own.
Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux, Switzerland, where he had lived for the last decade and a half of his life in the Palace Hotel. He left an unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, which was published posthumously. His influence on subsequent literary fiction — on writers as various as Martin Amis, John Updike, and Salman Rushdie — has been enormous, and Lolita remains one of the most discussed and debated novels in the Western canon.
