Anonymous; Johnson, Donald Barton, 1933-

Biography

VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH NABOKOV (1899-1977)

Vladimir Nabokov, Russian and American novelist, short-story writer, poet, memoirist, scholar, translator, lepidopterist, and chess problemist, was born into a wealthy, multilingual St. Petersburg family on April 22, 1899. From his idolized father, legal scholar, journalist, and founder of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, Nabokov inherited his Anglophile inclinations; from his mother-his sensitivity to color, light, and visual detail. Nabokov's first love was poetry and he published two slim volumes of verse before the family emigrated in 1919. Taking a Cambridge degree in Slavic and Romance literatures in 1922, he rejoined his family in Berlin where his father, who had continued his newspaper and political activities, was killed protecting a colleague at a public political meeting. Nabokov supported himself by giving lessons, chiefly language and tennis, doing translations, devising chess problems and the first Russian crossword puzzles, and writing reviews for émigré publications. Two additional poetry volumes of appeared, but he was gradually turning to prose, first, stories, and then -- plays and novels. Nabokov's career as a novelist was launched with the appearance of Mary soon after his 1925 marriage to Vera Slonim. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.

By 1930 Nabokov had written three novels and had established himself as the leading new writer of the emigration. The thirties, the high point of Nabokov's career as a Russian writer, culminated in his best Russian novels: Invitation to a Beheading (1938) and The Gift (1937-38). Remaining in Berlin until 1937, the Nabokovs emigrated to France before once again fleeing the Nazis, arriving in New York in May 1940. Nabokov had begun a new career as an English language novelist with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) while still in Paris. He had continued, however, to write in Russian and French. Once in America he was never again to write Russian prose.

In his early American years Nabokov taught at Wellesley College while also pursuing his professional interest in lepidoptery at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. From 1948 through 1959 he was Professor of Slavic Literature at Cornell. Summers were devoted to travelling, writing, and butterfly collecting in the Far West. Only three novels were written during the American years: Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), and Pnin (1957). The 1951 memoir Conclusive Evidence (originally published mostly in The New Yorker ), later revised and expanded as Speak, Memory (1966), was also a product of this period, as was its Russian version Drugie berega (1954). Much time was also devoted to translations of Russian classics and, particularly, to his four volume translation of and commentary on Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964).

The American success of Lolita (1958) restored to Nabokov the fortune that the Russian Revolution had deprived him of some forty years earlier. Now, at sixty, Nabokov once again emigrated, settling permanently in Switzerland, but retaining his American citizenship. The Swiss years saw the creation of Pale Fire (1962), Ada (1969), Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins (1974). Although Nabokov's final term of European residence was of great importance to his career as an American writer, it was also saw the resurrection of his reputation as a Russian writer. All eight of his Russian novels were reissued in the U.S. by Ardis Publishers and, in turn, translated into English where they found a new, much larger international audience, thus belatedly making Nabokov one of the most widely read contemporary Russian authors.

Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland in July 1977.

D. Barton Johnson, October 28, 1997