Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov entered the world on the 22nd of April 1899 in Saint Petersburg. His family belonged to an ancient Russian nobility granted a coat of arms by Emperor Paul I on the 1st of January 1798.
The boy grew up speaking three languages within his household: Russian, English, and French. He later became a trilingual master writing also in French alongside his native Russian and adopted English.
In March 1922 Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky shot and killed Nabokov's father while shielding their target Pavel Milyukov. This tragedy occurred shortly after the family fled the city for Crimea following the February Revolution of 1917.
He left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University where he taught there until 1959. Among his students was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who later identified Nabokov as a major influence on her development as a writer.
Museum staff writer Nancy Pick noted that he worked six hours a day seven days a week until his eyesight was permanently impaired. During this extensive career of collecting he never learned to drive a car and depended on his wife to take him to collecting sites.