Vladimir Nabokov

Biography

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was born into Russian aristocracy in St. Petersburg, fled the Bolshevik revolution, was educated at Trinity College Cambridge, lost his father to a political assassination in Berlin, escaped Nazi Germany to France, and emigrated to America in 1940. He taught literature at Wellesley and Cornell while writing in English — his fourth language after Russian, French, and German. He was a world-class lepidopterist (butterfly scientist) who spent summers driving across America cataloguing butterfly species. Lolita was written during those road trips, by a man who knew the American motel system, the American vernacular, and the American landscape intimately — as both an observer and a deeply ironic outsider. The novel was rejected by four American publishers before Olympia Press in Paris (which primarily published erotica) accepted it in 1955. American publication came in 1958 and made Nabokov financially independent for the first time in his life.

Vladimir Nabokov at a glance