Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-American novelist

Vladimir Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 in Saint Petersburg,b to a wealthy and prominent family of minor nobility. He was the eldest of five children of liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Elena Rukavishnikova.. He spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg and at the country estate Vyra near Siverskaya, to the south of the city.

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Nabokov's childhood, which he had called "perfect", was remarkable in several ways. The family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. In fact, much to his patriotic father's chagrin, Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian. In Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood, and his ability to recall in vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his permanent exile, and provided a theme that echoes from his first book Mary to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.

The Rozhdestveno mansion, inherited from his uncle in 1916: Nabokov possessed it for less than a year before the October Revolution.After the 1917 February Revolution, Nabokov's father became a secretary of the Russian Provisional Government and, after the Bolshevik (October) Revolution, the family was forced to flee the city for Crimea, 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 part of the short-lived first Ukrainian Republic; Nabokov's father became a minister of justice in the Crimean Regional Government.

In 1920, Nabokov's family moved to Berlin, where his father set up the émigré newspaper Rul' ("Rudder"). Nabokov followed them to Berlin two years later, after completing his studies at Cambridge.Nabokov stayed in Berlin, where he had become a recognised poet and writer within the émigré community and published under the nom de plume V. Sirin (a reference to the fabulous bird of Russian folklore). To supplement his scant writing income, he taught languages and gave tennis and boxing lessons. Of his fifteen Berlin years, Dieter E. Zimmer wrote: "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, the petty immigration officials at the police headquarters."

In 1922 Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert; she broke off the engagement in early 1923, her parents worrying that he could not provide for her. In May 1923 he met a Jewish-Russian woman, Véra Evseyevna Slonim, at a charity ball in Berlin[4] and married her in April 1925.Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.

In 1936, Véra lost her job because of the increasingly anti-Semitic environment; also in that year the assassin of Nabokov's father was appointed second-in-command of the Russian émigré group. In the same year Nabokov began seeking a job in the English-speaking world. In 1937 he left Germany for France, where he had a short affair with Russian émigrée Irina Guadanini; his family followed, making their last visit to Prague en route. They settled in Paris, but also spent time in Cannes, Menton, Cap d'Antibes, and Fréjus. In May 1940 the Nabokov family fled from the advancing German troops to the United States on board the SS Champlain, with the exception of Nabokov's brother Sergei, who died at the Neuengamme concentration camp on 9 January 1945.

The Nabokovs settled in Manhattan and Vladimir began volunteer work as an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History.

Nabokov joined the staff of Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position, created specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his lepidoptery. Nabokov is remembered as the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department. The Nabokovs resided in Wellesley, Massachusetts, during the 1941–42 academic year. In September 1942 they moved to Cambridge where they lived until June 1948. Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944–45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. In 1945, he became a naturalised citizen of the United States. He served through the 1947–48 term as Wellesley's one-man Russian Department, offering courses in Russian language and literature. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian.[citation needed] At the same time he was the de facto curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University, where he taught until 1959. Among his students at Cornell was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who later identified Nabokov as a major influence on her development as a writer.

Nabokov wrote Lolita while travelling on butterfly-collection trips in the western United States that he undertook every summer. Véra acted as "secretary, typist, editor, proofreader, translator and bibliographer; his agent, business manager, legal counsel and chauffeur; his research assistant, teaching assistant and professorial understudy"; when Nabokov attempted to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita, it was Véra who stopped him. He called her the best-humoured woman he had ever known.

In June 1953 Nabokov and his family went to Ashland, Oregon. There he finished Lolita and began writing the novel Pnin. He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem called Lines Written in Oregon. On 1 October 1953, he and his family returned to Ithaca, New York, where he would later teach the young writer Thomas Pynchon.

The grave of the Nabokovs at Cimetière de Clarens near Montreux, Switzerland

After the great financial success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to return to Europe and devote himself exclusively to writing. His son had obtained a position as an operatic bass at Reggio Emilia. On 1 October 1961, he and Véra moved to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland; he stayed there until the end of his life.[13] From his sixth-floor quarters he conducted his business and took tours to the Alps, Corsica, and Sicily to hunt butterflies. In 1976 he was hospitalised with an undiagnosed fever. He was rehospitalised in Lausanne in 1977 suffering from severe bronchial congestion. He died on 2 July in Montreux surrounded by his family and, according to his son, Dmitri, "with a triple moan of descending pitch".His remains were cremated and are buried at the Clarens cemetery in Montreux.

At the time of his death, he was working on a novel titled The Original of Laura. His wife Véra and son Dmitri were entrusted with Nabokov's literary executorship, and though he asked them to burn the manuscript, they chose not to destroy his final work. The incomplete manuscript, around 125 handwritten index cards long, remained in a Swiss bank vault where only two people, Dmitri Nabokov and an unknown person, had access. Portions of the manuscript were shown to Nabokov scholars. In April, 2008, Dmitri announced that he would publish the novel.

Prior to the incomplete novel's publication, several short excerpts of The Original of Laura were made public: German weekly Die Zeit, reproduced some of Nabokov's original index cards obtained by its reporter Malte Herwig in its 14 August 2008 issue. In the accompanying article Herwig concludes that Laura, although fragmentary, is "vintage Nabokov".

In July 2009, Playboy magazine acquired the rights to print a 5,000-word excerpt from The Original of Laura. It was printed in the December issue.

The Original of Laura was published on 17 November 2009.