Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian while living in Berlin, where he met his wife, Véra Nabokov. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Trilingual in Russian, English, and French, Nabokov became a U.S. citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.
From 1948 to 1959, Nabokov was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University. His 1955 novel Lolita ranked fourth on Modern Library's list of the 100 best 20th-century novels in 1998 and is considered one of the greatest works of 20th-century literature. Nabokov's Pale Fire, published in 1962, ranked 53rd on the same list. His memoir, Speak, Memory, published in 1951, is considered among the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th century, placing eighth on Random House's ranking of 20th-century works. Nabokov was a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. He also was an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems. Time magazine wrote that Nabokov had "evolved a vivid English style which combines Joycean word play with a Proustian evocation of mood and setting".
Early life and education
Russia
Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 in Saint Petersburg to a wealthy and prominent family of the Russian nobility. His family traced its roots to the 14th-century Tatar prince Nabok Murza, who entered into the service of the Tsars, and from whom the family name is derived. His father was Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist, and his mother was the heiress Yelena Ivanovna née Rukavishnikova, the granddaughter of a millionaire gold-mine owner. His father was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, and wrote numerous books and articles about criminal law and politics. His cousins included the composer Nicolas Nabokov. His paternal grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov, was Russia's Justice Minister during the reign of Alexander II. His paternal grandmother was the Baltic German Baroness Maria von Korff. Through his father, he was a descendant of the composer Carl Heinrich Graun.Vladimir was the family's eldest and favorite child. He had four younger siblings: Sergey, Olga, Elena, and Kirill. Sergey was killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 after publicly denouncing Hitler's regime. Writer Ayn Rand recalled Olga as a supporter of constitutional monarchy who first awakened Rand's interest in politics. Elena, who in later years became Vladimir's favorite sibling, published her correspondence with him in 1985. She was an important source for Nabokov's biographers.
Nabokov spent his childhood and youth in Saint Petersburg and at the country estate Vyra near Siverskaya, south of the city. His childhood, which he called "perfect" and "cosmopolitan", was remarkable in several ways. The family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. He related that the first English book his mother read to him was Misunderstood, by Florence Montgomery. Much to his patriotic father's disappointment, Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian. In his memoir Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood. His ability to recall his past in vivid detail was a boon to him during his permanent exile, providing a theme that runs from his first book, Mary, to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. While the family was nominally Orthodox, it had little religious fervor. Vladimir was not forced to attend church after he lost interest.
In 1916, Nabokov inherited the estate Rozhdestveno, next to Vyra, from his uncle Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov. He lost it in the October Revolution one year later; this was the only house he ever owned.
Nabokov's adolescence was the period in which he made his first serious literary endeavors. In 1916, he published his first book, Stikhi, a collection of 68 Russian poems. At the time he was attending Tenishev school in Saint Petersburg, where his literature teacher Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius had criticized his literary accomplishments. Some time after the publication of Stikhi, Zinaida Gippius, renowned poet and first cousin of his teacher, told Nabokov's father at a social event, "Please tell your son that he will never be a writer."
After the 1917 February Revolution, Nabokov's father became a secretary of the Russian Provisional Government in Saint Petersburg.
October Revolution
After the October Revolution, the family fled the city for Crimea, at first not expecting to be away for very long. They lived at a friend's estate and in September 1918 moved to Livadiya, at the time under the separatist Crimean Regional Government, in which Nabokov's father became a minister of justice.University of Cambridge
After the withdrawal of the German Army in November 1918 and the defeat of the White Army in early 1919, the Nabokovs sought exile in western Europe, along with other Russian refugees. They settled briefly in England, where Nabokov gained admittance to the University of Cambridge, where he attended Trinity College and studied zoology and later Slavic and Romance languages. His examination results on the first part of the Tripos exam, taken at the end of his second year, were a starred first. He took the second part of the exam in his fourth year just after his father's death, and feared he might fail it. But his exam was marked second-class. His final examination result also ranked second-class, and his BA was conferred in 1922. Nabokov later drew on his Cambridge experiences to write several works, including the novels Glory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.At Cambridge, one journalist wrote in 2014, "the coats-of-arms on the windows of his room protected him from the cold and from the melancholy over the recent loss of his country. It was in this city, in his moments of solitude, accompanied by King Lear, Le Morte d'Arthur, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Ulysses, that Nabokov made the firm decision to become a Russian writer."
Career
Berlin (1922–1937)
In 1920, Nabokov's family moved to Berlin, where his father set up the émigré newspaper Rul'. Nabokov joined them in Berlin two years later, after completing his studies at Cambridge.In March 1922, Russian monarchists Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky shot and killed Nabokov's father in Berlin as he was shielding their target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. Shortly after his father's death, Nabokov's mother and sister moved to Prague. Nabokov drew upon his father's death repeatedly in his fiction. On one interpretation of his novel Pale Fire, an assassin kills the poet John Shade when his target is a fugitive European monarch.
Nabokov stayed in Berlin, where he had become a recognised poet and writer in Russian within the émigré community; he published under the nom de plume V. Sirin. To supplement his scant writing income, he taught languages and gave tennis and boxing lessons. Dieter E. Zimmer has written of Nabokov's 15 Berlin years, "he never became fond of Berlin, and at the end intensely disliked it. He lived within the lively Russian community of Berlin that was more or less self-sufficient, staying on after it had disintegrated because he had nowhere else to go to. He knew little German. He knew few Germans except for landladies, shopkeepers, and immigration officials at the police headquarters."
Marriage
In 1922, Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert, but she broke the engagement off early in 1923 when her parents worried whether he could provide for her. In May 1923, he met Véra Evseyevna Slonim, a Russian-Jewish woman, at a charity ball in Berlin. They married in April 1925. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.In the course of 1936, Véra lost her job because of the increasingly antisemitic environment; Sergey Taboritsky was appointed deputy head of Germany's Russian-émigré bureau; and Nabokov began seeking a job in the English-speaking world.
France (1937–1940)
In 1937, Nabokov left Germany for France, where he had a short affair with Irina Guadanini, also a Russian émigrée. His family followed him to France, making en route their last visit to Prague, then spent time in Cannes, Menton, Cap d'Antibes, and Fréjus, finally settling in Paris. This city also had a Russian émigré community.In 1939, in Paris, Nabokov wrote the 55-page novella The Enchanter, his final work of Russian fiction. He later called it "the first little throb of Lolita."
In May 1940, the Nabokovs fled the advancing German troops, reaching the United States via the SS Champlain. Nabokov's brother Sergey did not leave France, and he died at the Neuengamme concentration camp on 9 January 1945.