Vladimir
Nabokov
Week of January 8, 2001
 Nabokov
was born in April 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia. His parents were wealthy
and had a commitment to public service. Nabokov, who categorized himself
as "a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library,"
attended the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, the most advanced and expensive
school in Russia. In addition to his avid participation in sports, Nabokov
indulged in what would become a life-long passion for him— butterfly collecting.
In November 1917, after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas, the family
fled to a friend's estate in the Crimea. Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich
Nabokov, a leader of the Kadet party, accepted a position in the provisional
government. When the Bolsheviks took over, the family fled to England.
Nabokov attended Trinity College, Cambridge, studying ichthyology and French
and Russian literature.
The family settled in Berlin which had a large Russian ÊmigrÊ community.
Nabokov began writing poetry and short fiction, using the pseudonym of
V.I. Sirin. He also earned money by giving tennis and English lessons,
acting, and translating. He published his first scholarly article on butterflies
in The Entomologist, and composed the first Russian crossword puzzles.
On April 15, 1925, he married VÊra Slonim. Their son, Dmitri, was born
in 1934.
Soon, world events forced him into exile again. In 1937 Nabokov and
his family fled Hitler's Germany for Paris. The 1940 German invasion of
France forced them to flee once more— this time to New York. In the U.S.,
Nabokov taught, collected and studied butterflies, and wrote. He became
a U.S. citizen in 1945.
 Nabokov
came to Wellesley College in 1941 for a year as a lecturer in comparative
literature. He returned to teach Russian, first in a non-credit course
(spring of 1943), then as a regular part of the curriculum. In addition
to the introductory course, as the sole member of the newly formed Russian
Department, he taught courses on Russian poetry and prose in translation.
While at Wellesley College, Nabokov also held an appointment at the Museum
of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. In 1948 Nabokov went to Cornell
as chair of the department of comparative literature.
At Wellesley, Nabokov's courses were very popular. One of his students,
Hannah Green '48, talked about being in his class in a February 1977 New
Yorker article. "He didn't talk about conflict or symbols or character
development," she said. "He didn't talk about the things that were usually
talked about in literature courses. He didn't try to make us state the
underlying meaning of something. He didn't make us talk about themes.
He never took the joy out of reading... In the gayest, most natural way
in the world, he opened the door and led us into the world of Russian literature.
He taught us to take literature seriously and what is ordinarily said about
it lightly. He gave me back my passion for reading."
An insomniac, Nabokov did most of his writing at night. Zembla,
a web site devoted to Nabokov contains
a list of his works and critical comment on them. His publications
included poetry, translations, essays, short stories, novels, plays, and
scholarly treatises on butterflies. His autobiography, Conclusive Evidence:
A Memoir (1951) was first published in England as Speak, Memory:
A Memoir.
Nabokov's best known work, Lolita, a novel about a man's affair
with his twelve-year old stepdaughter, initally was refused by four American
publishers as too scandalous. It was eventually published in Paris in 1955
by Olympia Press; the American edition appeared in 1958. The success of
the book and the subsequent movie version gave Nabokov the financial security
to give up teaching. He moved to Switzerland in 1959.
 Nabokov
died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux, Switzerland, leaving behind a unique
literary legacy. The New York Times obituary explained that "his
writing often perplexed his readers. 'For some weeks now I have been floundering
and traveling in the mind of that American genius, Vladimir Vladimirovitch
Nabokov,' wrote the critic Alfred Kazin on reading the writer's novel Ada
in 1969. His remark echoed the attitude of many readers... These readers
recognized Mr. Nabokov's technical brilliance and mastery of form, but
were frequently baffled by his irrepressible sense of flippancy and his
penchant for parody. Was he, it was asked, a gifted artificer entranced
by fun and games, or was he a creative and profound artist?"
Perhaps a 1977 article in Time said it best: "[Nabokov's] challenging,
intricate fiction, which miraculously demonstrates that art is not a mirror
held up to nature, but rather a prism that refracts blinding reality into
rainbows of wisdom and feeling."
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