Vladimir Nabokov

• 1. Introduction

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  Vladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke, and about to reinvent himself in a language that was not his first. Fifteen years later, a book he tried to burn would become one of the most celebrated and contested novels of the twentieth century. How does a man shaped by the estates of imperial Russia and the cafes of Berlin's emigre community become a towering figure in American literature? What drove him to cross between languages, between disciplines, between worlds? And what do butterflies have to do with any of it?

• 2. A Gilded Childhood Lost

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  Saint Petersburg in 1899 was a city of ceremony and inequality, and the Nabokov household occupied one of its most privileged addresses. Vladimir was the eldest and favorite child of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a liberal lawyer and statesman who led the pre-Revolutionary Constitutional Democratic Party, and of Yelena Ivanovna, granddaughter of a millionaire gold-mine owner. The family could claim descent from a 14th-century Tatar prince named Nabok Murza, and Vladimir's paternal grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov, had served as Russia's Justice Minister under Alexander II.

  The household was trilingual from the start. Russian, English, and French moved through the rooms interchangeably, and Vladimir learned to read and write in English before he could do so in Russian, to his patriotic father's quiet disappointment. His mother first read to him in English from a book called Misunderstood, by Florence Montgomery. Summers were spent at Vyra, the family's country estate near Siverskaya, where Nabokov's lifelong passion for butterflies first stirred after he discovered books by the naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian in the attic.

  In 1916, at seventeen, Nabokov published his first book, Stikhi, a collection of 68 Russian poems. That same year he inherited the neighboring estate Rozhdestveno from his uncle Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov. One year later, the October Revolution stripped him of it. It was the only house he ever owned. Zinaida Gippius, a renowned poet, told his father at a social event shortly after Stikhi appeared: "Please tell your son that he will never be a writer."

• 3. Exile and the Pen Name Sirin

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  Trinity College, Cambridge, is where Nabokov studied zoology and then Slavic and Romance languages after the family fled Russia in early 1919. His results on the first part of the Tripos exam were a starred first. He sat the second part just after his father's assassination in Berlin, feared he might fail, and came away with a second-class mark. His BA was conferred in 1922.

  The killing happened in March of that year. Russian monarchists Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky shot Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov as he was physically shielding their actual target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. Nabokov drew on his father's death repeatedly across his fiction. One reading of Pale Fire holds that its assassin kills the poet John Shade by the same kind of mistaken-target mechanism.

  Nabokov settled in Berlin, where the Russian emigre community was large and nearly self-contained. He published under the pseudonym V. Sirin, borrowing the name from a fabulous bird of Russian folklore, sometimes to shield himself from critics. To pay his bills he taught languages and gave tennis and boxing lessons. As the scholar Dieter E. Zimmer later wrote, Nabokov "never became fond of Berlin, and at the end intensely disliked it." He knew little German and had almost no German acquaintances beyond landladies and immigration officials.

  In May 1923 he met Vera Evseyevna Slonim at a charity ball in Berlin. They married in April 1925. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934. In 1936, Vera lost her job in the increasingly antisemitic climate. When Nabokov discovered that the man who had killed his father, Sergey Taboritsky, had been appointed deputy head of Germany's Russian-emigre bureau, he began looking urgently for a way out.

• 4. Lolita and the Reluctant Masterpiece

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  Nabokov wrote the 55-page novella The Enchanter in Paris in 1939, his final piece of Russian fiction. He later called it "the first little throb of Lolita." The novel itself was composed across multiple summers in the western United States, written during butterfly-collecting trips Nabokov undertook every year while teaching at Cornell. Vera served, in his own account, as "secretary, typist, editor, proofreader, translator and bibliographer; his agent, business manager, legal counsel and chauffeur; his research assistant, teaching assistant and professorial understudy."

  In June 1953, Nabokov and his family went to Ashland, Oregon. There he finished Lolita and began the novel Pnin. He called Vera the best-humored woman he had ever known. When he tried to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita, Vera stopped him.

  Published in 1955, Lolita recounts a middle-aged man's obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The critic John Gordon of the London Sunday Express called it "sheer unrestrained pornography." In 1998, the Modern Library ranked it fourth on its list of the 100 best twentieth-century novels. Pale Fire, published in 1962, ranked 53rd on the same list. Lolita earned enough to allow Nabokov to leave Cornell in 1959 and return to Europe, where he and Vera settled permanently in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland in 1961.

  The novel also generated a persistent controversy about its author. In 1990, the psychiatrist Brandon Centerwall argued in Texas Studies in Literature and Language that Nabokov was a "closet pedophile". He expanded the thesis in 1992, citing details such as the doubling of "Humbert Humbert" against "Vladimir Vladimirovich" and biographical material relating to Nabokov's uncle. The scholarly consensus in Nabokov studies has consistently held that his personal conduct toward children "was, and remains, unimpeachable", with most academics reading his literary treatment of the theme as an expression of empathy for victims.

• 5. The Scientist Behind the Stylist

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  Nabokov published 18 scientific articles on lepidoptery and named 12 valid species and genera. His specialty was the relatively unspectacular tribe Polyommatini of the family Lycaenidae, including the Karner blue, which he described. The genus Nabokovia was named in his honor, as were numerous butterfly and moth species bearing epithets drawn from his novels.

  During the 1940s, as a research fellow in zoology, Nabokov was responsible for organizing the butterfly collection at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he worked six hours a day, seven days a week studying male blue butterfly genitalia under a microscope until, as museum staff writer Nancy Pick put it, "his eyesight was permanently impaired." The Harvard Museum of Natural History still holds his "genitalia cabinet."

  Professional lepidopterists did not take this work seriously during his lifetime. New genetic research has since supported his hypothesis that a group called the Polyommatus blues crossed into the New World over the Bering Strait in five distinct waves, eventually reaching Chile. In 1967, Nabokov said: "The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all."

• 6. Colored Letters and Sleepless Nights

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  Nabokov described himself as a synesthete, a person whose senses cross-wire so that sounds or letters carry colors. In his autobiography Speak, Memory, he wrote: "The long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony." He identified steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k in the blue group. His wife Vera also had synesthesia. When their son Dmitri proved to share the trait, Nabokov observed that Dmitri's letter-color associations were in some cases blends of his parents' hues, "which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle."

  He wove synesthetic perception through his fiction. In Bend Sinister, a character perceives the word "loyalty" as like a golden fork lying out in the sun. The short story "The Vane Sisters" contains an acrostic final paragraph whose first letters spell a message from the dead. Another story, "Signs and Symbols," features a character suffering from a fictional illness called "Referential Mania" that causes him to see the world as saturated with coded messages.

  Nabokov was also a lifelong insomniac who called sleep a "moronic fraternity," "mental torture," and a "nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius." He once said that "the night is always a giant." In 2017, Princeton University Press published a compilation of his dream diary entries under the title Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov.

• 7. Teaching, Influence, and the Index Card

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  Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended Nabokov's lectures at Cornell in the 1950s and later identified him as a major influence on her development as a writer. Thomas Pynchon also sat in those lectures; his debut novel V. resembles The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in plot, character, narration, and style, and the title is a direct allusion to the narrator "V." in that novel.

  Nabokov's teaching methods were unconventional. He believed novels should not aim to teach, and he wanted students to pay close attention to style and structure rather than to narrative or "general ideas." When teaching Ulysses, he insisted students track the physical location of the characters in Dublin using a map. Students were not known by name in his classroom but by their seat numbers. In 2010, a student publication at Cornell called Kitsch ran reflections on his lectures and explored his long connection with Playboy.

  Nabokov composed his novels by writing sections on hundreds of index cards, then expanding them into paragraphs and rearranging them into a structure. He noted that many screenwriters later adopted this method. He also translated many of his own works between languages, sometimes with Dmitri's collaboration on the prose, but always alone when it came to poetry. Of his decision to translate Lolita into Russian himself, he wrote: "I imagined that in some distant future somebody might produce a Russian version of Lolita... In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or blunders."

  Time magazine wrote that Nabokov had "evolved a vivid English style which combines Joycean word play with a Proustian evocation of mood and setting." The critic James Wood argued that Nabokov's descriptive detail proved an "overpowering, and not always very fruitful, influence on two or three generations" of writers after him, including Martin Amis and John Updike. Michael Chabon, who listed both Lolita and Pale Fire among the books that changed his life, described Nabokov's English as combining "aching lyricism with dispassionate precision in a way that seems to render every human emotion in all its intensity but never with an ounce of schmaltz or soggy language."

  Nabokov died of bronchitis on the 2nd of July 1977 in Montreux. He was buried at the Clarens cemetery there. At the time of his death he was working on a novel titled The Original of Laura. Vera and Dmitri, acting as his literary executors, chose to publish it in 2009, ignoring Nabokov's request to burn the incomplete manuscript.