Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a wealthy aristocratic family. His grandfather was a Justice Minister to Czar Alexander II, while his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal political leader and editor of a liberal newspaper. Nabokov's mother, Elena Ivanovna (née Rukavishnikov),was the daughter of the wealthiest Russian goldmine owner.
The Nabokov family was trilingual, and Vladimir was already reading foreign writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Flaubert as a child. He excelled in languages and literature, as well as in sports like soccer, tennis, and chess. Nabokov was also inspired by his father's studies in lepidoptery from the age of 7 and spent summers collecting butterflies on the family estate of Vyra, near St. Petersburg.
Nabokov's family emigrated to London and then to Berlin after his father was arrested during the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The family's estate was confiscated by the communists, and Nabokov's father was murdered at a political meeting in Berlin in 1922. This traumatic event would have a lasting impact on Nabokov's writing.
Nabokov graduated with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied zoology and literature. He worked as a translator and tutor in Europe for 18 years before marrying Vera Evseevna Slonim, a Russian-Jewish woman, in 1925. Their son, Dimitri, was born in 1934.
Nabokov's writing often explored themes of emigration, loss, and the sense of displacement that resulted from his family's forced departure from Russia. His novel "The Luzhin Defence" (1930) is an example of this, as is his later work "Lolita" (1955),which tells the story of a pedophile's desire for a 12-year-old girl.
Nabokov's work was not without controversy, and "Lolita" was banned in the United States and the United Kingdom until 1958. However, he continued to write and publish, producing works like "Pale Fire" (1962) and "Ada" (1969). He also translated works by other authors, including Alexander Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin," and published scholarly works on writers like Nikolay Gogol, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka.
Nabokov's personal life was marked by his love of butterflies, which he collected on his many travels and kept a large collection of. He was also a talented chess player and composer of chess problems. He never learned to drive a car and relied on his wife to drive him around.
Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux, Switzerland, where he had lived for many years. He was buried in the Clarens Cemetery, Montreux, alongside his wife, Vera Slonim, who died in 1993.
