Vladimir Nabokov

The Nabokovs kept a townhouse in Saint Petersburg and a country estate south of the city, spoke three languages at dinner, and raised a son who could read English before Russian. His father was a liberal lawyer who defended Jewish rights under the tsars and served the Provisional Government. The revolution took the property. Berlin took the father: in March 1922 two Russian monarchists shot him dead at a political meeting as he shielded their target. Nabokov spent 18 years in Berlin and Paris writing novels in Russian, as Sirin, for an émigré readership with no country behind it. In 1940 he fled the German advance to New York with his Jewish wife Véra and their son, and gave up the only language he had ever written in.

He lectured at Wellesley, naturalised in 1945, and moved to Cornell in 1948, teaching Flaubert and Joyce to undergraduates he addressed by seat number. Every American publisher he tried refused Lolita. It appeared in Paris in 1955 from Olympia Press, three-quarters of whose list was pornography, and in America from Putnam in 1958, where it sold 100,000 copies in three weeks and made teaching unnecessary. Pnin followed, then Pale Fire. His four-volume Eugene Onegin, literal to the point of ugliness, ended his friendship with Edmund Wilson. Six English novels, and the argument has only ever been about one.

Lolita is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a man who takes possession of a 12-year-old girl and rapes her for two years, and who spends 300 pages explaining, in the most beautiful English available, why it was something else. The method is the trap. The reader is charmed first and implicated after. Nabokov denied the book was pornography, denied Humbert was sympathetic, and said flatly that it carried no moral. Readers have taken it both ways since 1955 — as a love story, which requires disregarding what Humbert himself admits, and as evidence about the author, an argument the psychiatrist Brandon Centerwall pressed in print in 1990. Nabokov scholars reject that reading, and nothing in the documented record of his life supports it.

The other career was not a hobby. Through the 1940s he was the de facto curator of lepidoptery at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, sorting the butterfly collection, publishing 18 scientific papers, naming 12 valid species and genera, and wrecking his eyesight at the microscope. Professional entomologists mostly ignored the work. In 1945 he argued that the Polyommatus blues had reached the New World from Asia in waves across the Bering Strait, and in 2011 a DNA study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B found exactly that, in five waves. He had died on July 2, 1977, of bronchitis, in the Montreux hotel where he had lived since 1961.

Vladimir Nabokov's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Gift book
  The last and largest of the Russian novels, published as Sirin 1938
• Lolita book
  Refused across America, printed in Paris, then a US sensation in 1958 1955
• Pnin book
  A Russian émigré professor loose in an American college 1957
• Pale Fire book
  A 999-line poem and a commentary that devours it 1962
• Eugene Onegin — translation and commentary book
  Four volumes of Pushkin, and the end of a friendship 1964
• Speak, Memory book
  The memoir, rewritten across three decades and two languages 1966

• April 22, 1899 aged 0 Born in Saint Petersburg to a wealthy liberal family He preferred to celebrate on April 23, which he shared with Shakespeare.
• 1919 aged ~20 The family leaves Russia for western Europe He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and never saw Russia again.
• March 28, 1922 aged 22 His father is shot dead in Berlin while shielding another man Two Russian monarchists fired on Pavel Milyukov at a political meeting.
• April 1925 aged 25 Marries Véra Slonim in Berlin She typed, edited, drove and, once, pulled the drafts of Lolita out of the fire.
• May 1940 aged 41 Reaches New York aboard the SS Champlain, fleeing the German advance His brother Sergey stayed in France and died at Neuengamme in 1945.
• 1945 aged ~46 Becomes a naturalised citizen of the United States
• September 1955 aged 56 Lolita is published in Paris by Olympia Press Two green paperbacks, swarming with typographical errors. No American house would touch it.
• 1961 aged ~62 Moves into the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland He wrote on index cards from the sixth floor for the rest of his life.
• July 2, 1977 aged 78 Dies of bronchitis in Montreux at 78 His ashes were buried at Clarens.

• Thomas Pynchon b. 1937
  The great American postmodern novelist, who has not been photographed in public since the 1950s. taught
• John Updike 1932–2009
  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose Rabbit series chronicled the anxieties of suburban American men. reviewed by
• Philip Roth 1933–2018
  Novelist whose explorations of Jewish American identity and sexuality earned him a Pulitzer Prize. influenced
• Susan Sontag 1933–2004
  Against Interpretation, On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor influenced