Last reviewed: June 2017
Russian-born novelist, short-fiction writer, dramatist, and poet
April 23, 1899
St. Petersburg, Russia
July 2, 1977
Montreux, Switzerland
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov occupies a unique niche in the annals of literature by having become a major author in both Russian and English. He wrote nine novels, about forty stories, and considerable poetry in Russian before migrating to the United States in 1940. Thereafter, he not only produced eight more novels and ten short stories in English but also translated into that tongue the fiction he had composed in his native language. His fifty-year career as a writer included (besides fiction and poetry) drama, memoirs, translations, reviews, letters, critical essays, literary criticism, and the screenplay of his novel Lolita.
Nabokov’s life divides neatly into four phases, each lasting approximately twenty years. He was born to an aristocratic and wealthy family, with his father a prominent liberal politician. He eloquently evokes his affectionate upbringing in his lyrical memoir, Conclusive Evidence, later expanded and retitled Speak, Memory. The results of the October Revolution forced the Nabokovs to flee Russia in 1919. Vladimir, who had learned both French and English from governesses during his childhood, enrolled in the University of Cambridge and took a degree in foreign languages in 1923. Meanwhile, his parents settled in Berlin, where his father was assassinated in 1922 by right-wing Russian expatriates. Vladimir took up residence in Berlin in 1923, and in 1925 he married a beautiful Jewish émigré, Véra Slonim; they maintained an unusually harmonious union. In the mid-to late 1920’s, he published, in Russian-language exile newspapers and periodicals, dozens of poems and more than twenty short stories. Many were later translated into English, with the stories distributed among several collections and the poems published in 1952. Vladimir Nabokov
xlink:href="ph_0111201257-Nabokov.jpg"/>
The Nabokovs stayed in Berlin until 1937. During that time, their only child, Dmitri, was born. The family then moved to Paris for three years. In his writings during these years, he continued to dramatize the autobiographical themes of political exile, nostalgic anguish, displacement, and other variations of vagrant rootlessness. His most important novels during the 1920’s and 1930’s are commonly considered to be The Defense and The Gift. In the former, a genius of a chess master finds refuge from an incomprehensible world in the ordered clarity of the chessboard’s threats and defenses. Chess feeds the protagonist’s delusions, haunts him, and drives him to madness and eventually his last move—suicide. In The Gift, the young hero, like his author, lives in Berlin and tries to get his prose and poetry published in émigré periodicals. The novel, centering on the development of aesthetic consciousness by a lord of language, is written in a dazzlingly evocative style.
The third phase of Nabokov’s life started in 1940, when he escaped the Nazis by emigrating to the United States. There he taught primarily at Wellesley College in the 1940’s and Cornell University from 1948 to 1958. In 1944 he published a brilliant as well as eccentric study of Nikolai Gogol, whose absurdist perspective on life deeply influenced Nabokov. For a decade, Nabokov became a celebrated ornament of Cornell’s upstate New York campus, specializing in a course called Masters of European Fiction, alternately charming and exasperating his students with witty lectures and difficult examinations. Three volumes of these lectures were issued after his death. Two of his best novels were written during this span: Pnin and Lolita. Pnin deals with a plodding Russian émigré professor at a small eastern college who wins a Pyrrhic triumph over the English language, wrestling comically with American idioms.
Lolita was for years refused publication by American firms; Olympia Press in Paris was first to publish it, in 1955. By 1958 the work had become celebrated and notorious, and its American publisher, Putnam’s, found itself with the year’s best-seller. The novel is now recognized as a major achievement, uniting wildly grotesque humor with both the shock value and tragedy of its protagonist’s attraction to young girls. It succeeds on many levels: as a satire of billboard America, progressive-school education, and teenage promiscuity; as a commentary on Continental-American cultural relations; but above all, as a gripping, yet disturbing love story, with the perverted Humbert Humbert captive to the cruel caprices of his indifferent child-mistress. Lolita was later adapted for film, with Nabokov himself writing the screenplay, and for the stage, as a 2006 opera.
After he became famous and rich, Nabokov abruptly broke off his academic career in the winter of 1958 and moved to an elegant hotel on the banks of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva for what were to prove nineteen more fecund years. He produced a four-volume translation of and commentary on Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 Yevgeny Onegin in 1964 and wrote several new novels, including two—Pale Fire and Ada, or Ardor—deserving consideration among the twentieth century’s leading literary texts. Pale Fire is an extremely complex and ingenious satire, a work consisting of a thousand-line poem by a fictional mad poet, swathed in more than 250 pages of inappropriate commentary by an equally fictional mad editor. The book is both parody and allegory, with the failure of adequate communication its commanding theme. Ada, or Ardor has divided Nabokov’s critics into those who laud it as a superb dynastic novel, loaded with spectacular romance as well as witty wordplay, and others who regard it as an unduly intricate, overly cerebral, and emotionally distancing book.
During this last arc of his career, Nabokov basked in an aura of worldwide acclaim as an eminent writer. Whether he is to be ranked alongside Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges or Samuel Beckett, Nabokov is a modern master who has influenced such diverse writers as Anthony Burgess, John Barth, William Gass, Tom Stoppard, Milan Kundera, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon. Nabokov’s writing is never intentionally didactic. He detested message-ridden, moralistic fiction. Instead, he delighted in playing brilliantly with the reader’s credulity, regarding himself as a fantasist, a Prospero of verbal enchantment. Few writers produced art for the sake of art with his talent and discipline.
Nabokov died in July 1977 in Montreux, Switzerland. His son, Dmitri, had long aided in the translation of Nabokov's Russian-language works and then served as literary executor of his estate. In that capacity, Dmitri oversaw the posthumous publication of The Enchanter, a proto-Lolita novella, in 1986 and The Original of Laura, Nabokov's final, unfinished novel, in 2009. Following Dmitri's demise, Vladimir Nabokov's correspondence with Véra and his dream diary also appeared in print, providing further material on which Nabokov scholars can draw to better understand the man and the writer.