Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov — writer with roots in the Russian Empire

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in St Petersburg on 22 April 1899, the eldest son of a wealthy and cultivated family, in a house on Bolshaya Morskaya Street. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a jurist and a leader of the liberal Constitutional Democratic party; his mother, Elena Rukavishnikova, came from a family of great landowners. He grew up trilingual in Russian, English and French, divided his summers between the family estates of Vyra and Rozhdestveno, and began collecting butterflies as a child.

After the October Revolution the family moved to the Crimea, and in April 1919 they left Russia from Sevastopol. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then joined his family in Berlin, where in March 1922 his father was shot dead while shielding the politician Pavel Milyukov from an assassin. For the next fifteen years Nabokov lived in the Russian émigré world of Berlin, writing novels in Russian under the name V. Sirin, among them The Defence and The Gift. In 1925 he married Véra Slonim.

In 1937 the Nabokovs left Germany for France, and in 1940, weeks before the German invasion, sailed for the United States with their son Dmitri. He switched to writing in English, worked on butterflies at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and from 1948 to 1959 taught literature at Cornell. His lepidoptery was serious science: his 1945 hypothesis on the migration of the Polyommatus blue butterflies from Asia into the Americas was confirmed by genetic analysis in 2011.

Lolita, published in Paris in 1955 and in the United States in 1958, made him famous and wealthy. It was followed by Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969), and by his memoir of his Russian childhood, published in its final form as Speak, Memory (1966). He also translated Pushkin's Eugene Onegin into English, with a commentary of more than a thousand pages, and translated several of his own Russian novels.

In 1961 he settled at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland. He never returned to Russia, and his books were not published in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s. He died in Montreux on 2 July 1977, aged seventy-eight.

Tracing the roots — St. Petersburg

Born in St Petersburg in 1899 into a liberal aristocratic family, he left Russia with his family in 1919 and never returned. His Russian childhood is the subject of his memoir Speak, Memory.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

St. Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition