Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. He was born in Saint Petersburg on 22 April 1899, in the last decades of Imperial Russia, and died on 2 July 1977. His life crossed borders, languages, and political upheaval: Russia, Crimea, England, Germany, the United States, and Switzerland all formed part of his story.

Nabokov came from a wealthy family of the Russian nobility. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal lawyer, statesman, journalist, and a leader of the pre-Revolutionary Constitutional Democratic Party. His mother, Yelena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, was an heiress. At home, the family spoke Russian, English, and French, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. He later recalled that he could read and write in English before he could in Russian. His childhood in Saint Petersburg and at the family estate Vyra was, in his own words, “perfect” and “cosmopolitan.”

The Russian Revolution changed that world completely. In 1916, Nabokov inherited the estate Rozhdestveno from his uncle, but lost it in the October Revolution the next year. It was the only house he ever owned. After the revolution, the family fled first to Crimea and then to western Europe with other Russian refugees. In England, Nabokov studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, first zoology and later Slavic and Romance languages. His BA was conferred in 1922. Cambridge, exile, and memory later fed into works such as Glory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

After Cambridge, Nabokov joined his family in Berlin, where his father had set up the émigré newspaper Rul’. Between 1926 and 1938, while living in Berlin, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian. It was also in Berlin that he met Véra Nabokov, née Slonim, who became his wife. After moving to the United States, he began writing in English and gained international attention. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, lived mostly on the East Coast, and taught Russian literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.

Nabokov is best known for Lolita, published in 1955, which ranked fourth on Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 best 20th-century novels and is considered one of the greatest works of that century. His novel Pale Fire, published in 1962, ranked 53rd on the same list. His memoir Speak, Memory, published in 1951, placed eighth on Random House’s ranking of 20th-century nonfiction works. He was also a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, an expert lepidopterist, and a composer of chess problems.

In 1961, Nabokov returned to Europe and settled in Montreux, Switzerland. His work remains striking because it joins exact memory, linguistic play, and close attention to detail. Time magazine wrote that he had “evolved a vivid English style which combines Joycean word play with a Proustian evocation of mood and setting.” That blend of precision, wit, exile, and remembered childhood is why his sentences still speak so strongly to readers.