For The St. Petersburg Times The Nabokov museum is located in the Nabokov house at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya.

In April, the Vladimir Nabokov Apartment Museum located in the former Nabokov family mansion on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa in St. Petersburg celebrates Vladimir Nabokov’s birthday and the 10th anniversary of the founding of the museum.

The latter commemoration is simpler to observe than the former. Nabokov, author of “Lolita,” “The Gift,” “The Luzhin Defense” and other 20th century classics, poet, lecturer, professor and lepidopterist, was born in the Bolshaya Morskaya house on April 10, 1899, according to the Julian calendar in use in Russia at the time. But the Gregorian calendar in use after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 means that the birthday is celebrated on April 22.

However, this coincides with Vladimir Lenin’s birthday, and since the writer hated Bolshevik tyranny and believed in the magic of numbers, Nabokov supposedly preferred to mark his birthday on April 23, William Shakespeare’s birthday.

Nevertheless, the Nabokov Museum observes April as his anniversary month and last week unveiled newly acquired photographs of the Nabokov family country estate.

Leaving St. Petersburg for the Crimea in 1917 to flee the Bolsheviks, the Nabokov family and 18-year-old Vladimir probably expected to return — but they never did. A happy childhood before emigration became a boon to Nabokov during his life in exile, as well as providing a theme which echoes from Nabokov’s first books to later works such as his autobiography “Speak, Memory” (1967), where the author recalls vivid details of the family mansion, and “Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle” (1969). Nabokov died in Switzerland in 1977.

Twenty years later, with the Soviet Union gone, it was decided that the Nabokov house, which had been used as a laundry, a warehouse and offices during the Soviet era, should open as a museum dedicated to the writer.

But very little remained from the Nabokov family life in the house. The museum’s curators have had to search in Russia and abroad to recreate the Nabokov house he would have known and form a collection about his life. The museum is situated on only the first floor of the large building. The top floors are occupied by the offices of a local newspaper — Nevskoye Vremya. Unfortunately, visitors of the museum can’t see the magnificent children’s room on the second floor decorated with wooden panels and with an old-fashioned fire-place. This room is now an editor’s office.

The house wasn’t destroyed during the Soviet era but almost all the family’s valuables, furniture, art collection and books were plundered, scattered to different museums or sold to foreign collectors.

In the words of Tatyana Ponamareva, director of the museum, and Yelena Kuznetsova, curator, it was only thanks to a strong desire to establish a Nabokov museum in the building and donations from the writer’s son Dmitry Nabokov, living in Switzerland, that the museum’s collection has expanded. The collection contains items that once belonged to Nabokov and his family, books from the writer’s own library, photographs and a part of Nabokov’s remarkable butterfly collection. In Nabokov’s own words: “The pleasures of literary inspiration are nothing beside hunting butterflies and studying them.”

In recent years the museum has operated as both a traditional literary museum and an actively developing cultural center. The museum has a gallery and a lending library. The museum is a non-profit organization and is not supported by the state, which is unique in Russia.

Now it is preparing to set up a modern, information library and internet center where visitors will find different Russian and foreign publications about Nabokov and his books.

The culture program this month includes Nabokov Readings, a conference on April 23-24, an art exhibition by Nadjezjda van Ittersum, a Dutch artist closely related to the Nabokov family, and the unveiling of the first monument to the writer in Russia.

http://nabokovmuseum.org