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The Life of Vladimir Nabokov

(1899-1977)

            Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist best known for LOLITA (1955), a novel detailing the lusting of a pedophile named Humbert Humbert over a young girl named Lolita. Originally banned, LOLITA was eventually published three years after it was written in the United States, the U.K., and France. The novel gained its author immense fame, but also overshadowed the man himself, as Nabokov made apparent when he admitted, "Lolita is famous, not I." Besides this popular work, Nabokov also published 18 novels during his lifetime, and was a noted lepidopterist.

            Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899, the son of Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov and Elena Ivanova. Despite having numerous brothers and sisters, Nabokov was raised in a wealthly aristocratic family. As a child, he was taught how to speak Russian, English, and French. Naturally active, Nabokov enjoyed playing soccer and tennis, but the hobby he enjoyed the most was butterfly catching. He supposedly learned it from his father at an early age, and continued to have an interest in Lepidoptera until the day he died. As a teenager, he attended the Tenishev School, where he was known as a spoiled prude. Despite this reputation, Nabokov found acceptance at the school due to his superior skill at soccer. In 1915, Nabokov inherited a fortune and a towering mansion, but was only able to enjoy his new found wealth until 1919, when the family emigrated to escape the newly established Communist state.

            Following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the Bolshevik Revolution, and the resulting rule of Vladimir Lenin I, looting broke out across the Russian countryside, and Nabokov fled the country with his family. They were not able to escape Russia completely unharmed, though. In 1922, Nabokov's father intervened during an assassination attempt, and was murdered. During the years leading up to and after his father's death, Nabokov had attended Trinity College in Cambridge and had been an average student, at least until the death of Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov, when the young man pressured himself to focus entirely on his studies. His determination paid off, for Nabokov graduated the following year.

            That same year, Nabokov left for Berlin, where he work in a number of positions, get married, and begin his career as a writer. Nabokov met a fellow immigrant from Russia named Vera Slonim in 1924, and the two were wed the following year. During his stay in Berlin, Nabokov worked on novels, short stories, and poetry, and gradually gained a reputation as an up and coming writer. In his early work, Nabokov seems entirely focused on death, as if possessing the memory of his father's death for a good majority of the beginning of his writing career. If he was hoping that the memory of the murder of his father would slowly leave him, he was in for a rude awakening. In 1937, Nabokov, his wife, and their three-year-old son, Dimitri, fled Berlin after Adolf Hitler freed the murderer of his father. The Nazis were slowly but surely taking over Western Europe, and they were another reason the Nabokov family fled to Paris, France, the last refuge of the world weary traveler trying to escape someone or something.

            During the time he spent in the City of Light, Nabokov met the writer James Joyce, whose famous novel, ULYSSES, would encounter the same trouble as Nabokov's LOLITA in getting published in France, the U.K., and the States. After three years in Paris, Nabokov left with his wife and child, once again fleeing the Nazis, who were beginning to take over France. They arrived in New York, and Nabokov began his literary career anew in America. Virtually unknown with an English-speaking audience, Nabokov began writing short stories. Such respectable publications as The Atlantic and The New Yorker published his first stories in English, and after only a single year, Nabokov had a novel entitled THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT (1941) published. Originally begun in Paris in a cramped apartment, the novel was completed in the U.S., and was his tenth novel written, but the first published in English. The story involves the brother of a dead English writer named Sebastian Knight, and his search for the truth behind Sebastian's life.

            The novel received good reviews, but did only modestly commercially. Following the publication of his first novel published in North America, and until the publication of LOLITA, Nabokov continued to write short stories, and published an autobiography, a collection of nine stories, and finally another novel in 1947. BEND SINISTER (1947) concerns a European philosopher named Krug who refuses to get involved with the political regime led by a former peer named Paduk. The one-time classmate writes a political doctrine known as Ekwilism, a satirization of Communism, which Kurg sees as inherently flawed. He forms a resistance to the Ekwilist movement, and squares off against Paduk in a political battlefield.

            After BEND SINISTER, Nabokov did not write another novel until LOLITA. The story of LOLITA (1955) is that of Humbert Humbert, a pedophile who is obsessed with young girls, or as he sees them, "nymphets." Writing from a jail cell, Humbert reflects over his life in a prison diary that details his entire life, his loves, and his final downfall. From the money earned from this novel, Nabokov was able to devote himself to writing full-time. Though the novel was not published in its original entirety until 1958, the book still received excellent reviews and did well commercially in America. It was late in his literary career, but Nabokov had finally gained recognition in America for his talents in writing.

            After LOLITA came PNIN (1957), the story of a Russian professor on an American college campus. PALE FIRE, written in 1962, was a poetic mishmash of an epic poem, and the commentary of an insane king currently living in exile who studies the poem. By the time that PALE FIRE was published, Nabokov and his wife and son were living in Switzerland. ADA, (1969), TRANSPARENT THING (1972), and LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! (1974) were all written in rapid succession, until Nabokov slowed in his velocity of writing novels. Though he was more interested in being well-known in America, Nabokov was by far more famous in his fatherland.

            On July 2, 1977, Vladimir Nabokov died of a viral infection. Today, he is widely known as the author of LOLITA, but sadly the majority of his work gets the cold shoulder from readers. Whether readers find LOLITA as genius or trash, and its author a literary giant or relative nobody who will fade out of the collective memory of the literary world in time, it cannot be argued that Vladimir Nabokov and his stunningly original work detailing the life of a pedophile did not create a stir in the world of literature that still is forming styles and redefining the novel to this very day.

The Works of Vladimir Nabokov

Written by Cyanne Topaum

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