A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977. Russian American novelist, poet, scholar, translator, and lepidopterist, whose linguistic facility, erudite style, and eloquent prose helped to establish him as one of the most brilliant and respected literary figures of the 20th century. Nabokov's novels demonstrate great stylistic and compositional virtuosity, and his astonishing imagination often took a morbid or grotesque turn. He is best known for his novel Lolita (1955) . Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg, on (or about) April 23rd, 1899, into a wealthy and prominent aristocratic family. His father was a distinguished jurist and member of Kerensky's government and his mother, Elena Ivanovna, was a noble and wealthy Russian with an artistic heritage. From his father, Vladimir Nabokov seems to have inherited a strong work ethic and a love for butterflies; from his mother, a creative sensibility and innate spirituality. The Nabokov family habitually spoke a melange of French, English, and Russian in their household, and this linguistic diversity would play a prominent role in Nabokov's development as an artist. In November 1917, the Nabokov family left St. Petersburg for a friend's estate near Yalta, in the Crimea, in the wake of revolutionary rioting and the March 15 abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. His father accepted a position in the provisional government, but, after being imprisoned by Bolshevik forces, left Russia to join his family in the Crimea. The Nabokovs remained there for 18 months and following the White Army's defeat in the Crimea left Russia for exile in western Europe. Nabokov attended school in England and from 1919-22, Nabokov studied at Trinity College Cambridge, he began with zoology, but later switched to Romance and Slavic Languages. Whilst in England he wrote two volumes of Russian verse, which were published in 1923. He then moved to Berlin, Germany, where his family was living. That same year his father was accidentally shot and killed. Nabokov lived in Berlin from 1922-37, and here he wrote for the Russian émigré press under the pseudonym of Vladimir Sirin. A lifelong insomniac with a dedication to his art, Vladimir Nabokov wrote mostly at night, which enabled him to lead an aloof but active social life in Berlin. Most of Nabokov's early works in Russian show a strong inclination toward parody, punning, and hoax. These qualities later carried over to his writing in English. Most of his Russian books were translated into English under his personal supervision. They include Mashen'ka (1926; Mary, 1970), Korol', dama, valet (1928; King, Queen, Knave, 1968), Zashchita (1930; The Defense, 1964), Podvig (1933; Glory, 1972), and Camera obscura (1933; revised and translated as Laughter in the Dark, 1938). Other Russian works were Otchayaniye (1936; Despair, 1937), Dar (1937; The Gift, 1963), and Priglashenie na kazn (1938; Invitation to a Beheading, 1959). He married in 1925, but was unable to support himself, his wife Vera and his son Dimitri, by writing alone. He therefore taught, coached tennis and boxing and composed chess problems and crosswords. In 1937, Nabokov and his family left Berlin for Paris due to their disgust with the Nazi regime and Mrs. Nabokov's Jewish heritage. In Paris, he met the Irish novelist James Joyce, continued to write in Russian, composed a few works in French, and also wrote his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (published in 1941), about a young Russian man's relationship to his half-brother, a British writer. He had determined that his most harmonious future lay in the English language; since England was not prepared to supply him with an academic appointment, the Nabokovs prepared to immigrate to America. In 1940 he moved with his family to Boston, in the United States, where he was a professor of English literature at Wellesley College from 1941 to 1948 and a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959 -where he delivered highly acclaimed lectures on Flaubert, Joyce, Turgenev, Tolstoy and others- and a research fellow in entomology at Harvard. He wrote 18 papers on entomology - he was an ardent lepidopterist - discovering and describing several new species. Nabokov became a US citizen in 1945. He wrote in English under his own name. His short stories and poems appeared in periodicals such as the New Yorker. The novel Bend Sinister was published in 1947. The American publication of Lolita in 1958 (it had been published in Paris in 1955, but was considered unfit for the USA and UK) brought him instant notoriety and considerable wealth. Lolita, which was filmed first time in 1962 and directed by Stanley Kubrick, is a brilliantly detailed, unconventional story, and one of the most controversial novels of this century. The story, dealing with the desire of a middle-aged pedophile Humbert Humbert for a sexually precocious 12-year-old girl, is said to be a metaphor for the writer and his art, and for the old world - Humbert is an European expatriate - encountering the new, represented by an American teenage girl, in all its vulgarity. Humbert kees a prison-diary of his lifelong fascination with pubescent "nymphets." The first is Annabel Leigh, who dies of typhus, but then he finds Lolita in a New England town. She reminds him of the little girl he loved as a boy. During the course of the story, Humbert loses her to Clare Quilty, a playwright and pornographic filmmaker. Humbert kill him and dies in a prison of a heart attack. Lolita dies in childbirth as delivering a stillborn daughter. The controversial book caused a sensation in Europe, and when it was published in the United States in 1958, it received a similar reception. This allowed him to give up his post at Cornell and concentrate on his literary work. Nabokov wrote several other novels in English. Pnin (1957) focuses on a Russian professor living in the United States. Pale Fire (1962) is a satire on academic pretentiousness consisting of a 999-line poem and commentary by a demented New England scholar who is the exiled king of a mythical country. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is a complicated work that is, in part, an inquiry into the nature of time. Transparent Things (1972) is another meditation on time, and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) is the autobiography of a fictional Russian émigré writer whose life parallels Nabokov's. Nabokov's short-story collections include Nabokov's Dozen (1958), Tyrants Destroyed (1975), and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1995), which was published after his death and contained 13 previously unpublished stories. His poetry includes two collections in Russian and an English collection, Poems (1959). Nabokov's nonfiction works include Nikolai Gogol (1944), a critical study of the 19th-century Russian writer, and Strong Opinions (1973), a collection of essays. Nabokov's four-volume translation, with commentaries, of the novel Eugene Onegin (1823-1831) by Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin appeared in 1964. Speak, Memory (1966) is a highly evocative account of Nabokov's childhood in imperial Russia and his later life up to 1940, and was originally published in 1951 in a shorter form as Conclusive Evidence. Lectures on Literature (1980) and Lectures on Russian Literature (1981) deal with European and Russian literary masters and are based on lectures Nabokov gave at Cornell in the 1950s. After the publication and success of Lolita, that shocked many people but whose humor and literary style were praised by critics, he eventually retired from teaching and moved to Switzerland in 1958 to concentrate on writing. The Montreux Palace Hotel became his permanent home. Nabokov received the American National Medal for Literature in 1977, but few other official garlands in his lifetime. Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux, of a mysterious lung ailment. |
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