Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian and American writer, poet, translator, literary scholar, and entomologist.

He was born into an aristocratic family of the well-known Russian politician Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. Three languages were used in the Nabokov household: Russian, English, and French; thus the future writer mastered all three languages perfectly from early childhood. By his own account, he learned to read in English before Russian. Nabokov’s first years were spent in comfort and affluence in the Nabokov house on Bolshaya Morskaya Street in St. Petersburg and in their country estate of Batovo near Gatchina.

He began his education at the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, where Osip Mandelstam had studied shortly before. Literature and entomology became Nabokov’s two main interests. Shortly before the revolution, he published a collection of his poems at his own expense.

The Revolution of 1917 forced the Nabokovs to move to Crimea and then, in 1919, to emigrate from Russia. Some of the family jewels were taken with them, and on this money the Nabokov family lived in Berlin, while Vladimir studied at Cambridge, where he continued to write Russian poetry and translated L. Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland into Russian.

In March 1922, Vladimir Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was killed. This happened at a lecture by P. N. Milyukov, “America and the Restoration of Russia,” in the Berlin Philharmonic building. V. D. Nabokov tried to neutralize the radical who had fired at Milyukov, but was shot by his accomplice.

From 1922, Nabokov became part of the Russian diaspora in Berlin, earning his living by teaching English. Nabokov’s stories were published in Berlin newspapers and publishing houses organized by Russian émigrés. In 1927 Nabokov married Vera Slonim and completed his first novel, Mary. Thereafter, until 1937, he wrote eight novels in Russian, continuously making his authorial style more complex and increasingly daring in his experimentation with form. Nabokov