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.
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.
