Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-American novelist, poet, and critic, whose brilliant and challenging novels and stories earned him the highest critical acclaim as a major international literary figure.

Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, in St Petersburg, into a prominent and wealthy aristocratic family. They fled to the West in 1919 in the wake of the Russian Revolution; Nabokov graduated (1922) from the University of Cambridge with highest honours. Under the pseudonym of Vladimir Sirin, he began writing for the Russian émigré press in Berlin, where he lived from 1923 to 1937. His chess novel The Defence, published in 1930, won him recognition as one of the best of the younger generation of Russian émigré writers. Over the next few years he wrote four novels and a novella including Despair and Invitation to a Beheading, which are considered among his most important works. During the next three years he lived in France and there began to write in English. In 1940 Nabokov moved to the United States and five years later became an American citizen. His first novel in English, Bend Sinister, appeared in 1947. He had a minor literary reputation until the publication in Paris of Lolita (1955) made him a major literary figure. The astonishing novel recounts the intense and obsessive involvement of a middle-aged man with a sexually precocious young girl, and can be seen as a study of love and lust. Having caused a sensation in Europe, the book was published in the United States in 1958 and received a similar reception.

During the 1960s some of Nabokov's early work in Russian, such as Invitation to a Beheading, was translated into English and other languages. Pale Fire (1962), his first published novel after Lolita, was also widely acclaimed. His translation, with commentaries, of the Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin (4 vols.) appeared in 1964. Speak, Memory (1966) is a highly evocative account of his childhood in imperial Russia and his later life up to 1940; the memoirs were originally published in 1951 in a shorter form as Conclusive Evidence. King, Queen, Knave, which was written in Berlin and appeared in Russian and German editions in 1928, was published in an English translation in 1968. Ada appeared in 1969, and the English translation of Mary, first published in 1926, appeared in 1970. Glory, first published in 1932, appeared in an English translation in 1972. In 1973 he published two books: A Russian Beauty and Other Stories and Strong Opinions, non-fiction pieces. In 1959 Nabokov moved to Switzerland, where he led a reclusive life until his death on July 2, 1977, at Montreux.

Nabokov's unique province is the complex tragicomedy, with time and space telescoped or expanded and metaphors and similes juggled. As he has said, “While I keep everything on the very brink of parody, there must be, on the other hand, an abyss of seriousness…”