Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Nabokov (biography)
Main Published Biographies
            Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years by Brian Boyd
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years by Brian Boyd

            Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff

• Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 10/22/23, 1899
• His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a wealthy landowner, a lawyer by training who in the early 1900s was a leader of the liberal Consititutional Democrat Party. In this capacity he became a member of the first elected Russian parliament, the Duma, in 1906.
• When the Tsar dissolved the parliament later in 1906, Nabokov's father, along with other Consititutional Democrats, signed a manifesto of protest, for which he was ultimately arrested, tried and briefly imprisoned.
• After his release, he worked as a journalist, served in the Russian Army during World War I, then became a member of the Provisional Government after the Tsar's abdication
• Nabokov's mother, Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, also came from a wealthy, liberal gentry family.
• Nabokov had two sisters and two brothers.
• The children grew up during the winter in the family's Petersburg home and during the summer on their estate at Vyra near Petersburg (the grounds of which it is now possible to see on a tour).
• His education was provided first by tutors and then in an exclusive private school, the Tenishev School, whose students also included the poet Mandelshtam, in Petersburg
• He studied English from earliest childhood, even learned to read and write in English before he could do so in Russian (to the horror of his father); he also became fluent in French
• In childhood Nabokov was (as might be expected) an avid reader
• Nabokov (like his character Fedor in The Gift) had what he would consider a happy and even idyllic childhood
• Early on he discovered two passions besides literature which were to occupy him throughout his life: lepidopterology (the study of butterflies), and chess.
• He was also an accomplished athlete, a goaltender in soccer and good enough at both tennis and boxing to support himself (in part) by giving private lessons when he emigrated.
• In 1917 there occurred the Bolshevik coup, followed closely by the Russian civil war. Nabokov's father served in the White Government in exile in the Crimea until forced to evacuate with his family in 1919, first to Constantinople (like thousands of other Russians) and ultimately to Berlin.
• Nabokov was thus a part of the great "first wave."
• The family lost all its considerable wealth, with the exception of some jewelry that helped to support Nabokov during his first two years of college. Nabokov upon turning 18 had inherited from an uncle a fortune worth several million dollars -- virtually every cent of which was left behind in Russia.
• One of the main contentions in Boyd's biography is that Nabokov, although he would have loved to retain his fortune, was never terribly troubled by its loss, derived happiness in life from sources other than money, and was in fact happy.
• This is one of the findings that Schiff (another biographer) views differently, portraying the Nabokovs as constantly struggling and arguing over a lack of funds.
• In 1919 Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge University, England
• While at Cambridge he began writing prose in Russian for the Russian émigré press under the pen name Sirin (primarily to avoid confusion with his father, still famous in the emigration, whose name also was Vladimir Nabokov).
• He also published his first work in English while at Cambridge -- a short scientific paper on butterflies.
• In Nabokov's final semester at Cambridge, on March 28, 1922, his father was killed in Berlin by an assassin who was actually trying to kill another émigré politician, Pavel Miliukov.
• Miliukov and Nabokov's father -- although they were political adversaries -- appeared together at a public forum.
• When a gunman rushed the stage to kill Miliukov, who was the more prominent political figure, Nabokov's father helped to tackle him and hold him down, whereupon a second gunman shot Nabokov's father, who died almost instantly from bullets through the heart and lungs.
• Nabokov was in Berlin on vacation at the time, but nonetheless was able to come back to Cambridge and take his exams in French and Russian literature
• He graduated from Cambridge in June, 1922.
• In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, a Russian-Jewish émigré.
• They would have one child: In 1934 their son Dimitrii was born.
• During his years in Europe, Nabokov continued to write under the pen name Sirin
• He supported himself by giving lessons and through various literary endeavors including, ultimately, contracts and royalties earned from his writing
• He remained poor. He was unpublished and unknown in the Soviet Union (save for one poem about life in exile, which was published in Pravda together with a derisive response), and his readership, drawn entirely from the emigration, was therefore necessarily small.
• Among that readership, however, his reputation steadily grew during the nineteen twenties and thirties, until he became one of the leading émigré (and therefore Russian) writers.
• Among Nabokov's works in Russian written during this period were his early poetry, numerous short stories, and several novels, including Mashenka (Mary) (his first), Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense) (about a chess player who goes mad, recently made into a movie), Priglashenie na kazn' (Invitation to a Beheading), Otchaianie (Despair, made into a movie some time ago), and his last and best, Dar (The Gift), the story of a young émigré writer who has a certain amount in common with Nabokov himself.
• In 1938, after a stay of several months alone in Paris beginning in 1937, Nabokov moved his family to that city — quite a bit later than most Russian émigrés — and in 1940, with the Nazis fast approaching, they moved to the United States.
• This period of Nabokov's life constitutes the main controversy of his biography
• It was during his time alone in Paris that Nabokov began a lengthy extra-marital relationship with a young Russian woman named Irina Guadanini
• Boyd points out mitigating circumstances: This was Nabokov's only affair, it was short-lived, it convinced Nabokov of how much he truly loved his wife, hence in effect it became a positive element in their marriage (see The Russian Years p. 444).
• Reviewers of Boyd's book pointed out that in order to carry on the affair Nabokov left his wife and three year old son, both Jews in the eyes of the Nazis, alone in Germany for several months, before finally bringing them to Paris
• Schiff argues persuasively that the affair was one of many that Nabokov engaged in until his mid forties, and was a source of serious conflict in the Nabokovs' marriage
• Nabokov and his wife lived for twenty years in the United States
• He continued to write. He decided that he wanted to write for the American audience. Initially he attempted to write in Russian and then translate his own work into English, but this proved cumbersome. He found himself thinking in English as he wrote, and finally made the decision to write in English.
• He became one of the greatest prose stylists in English, whose works were and are cited as examples in composition and creative writing classes; nonetheless he always spoke of the necessity to switch to English as one of the great losses of his life.
• In the United States, Nabokov supported himself primarily by teaching Russian language and literature, and eventualy world literature in translation, at several American universities, including Stanford, Wellesly, Harvard as a visiting professor, and Cornell, where he taught for more than ten years and was one of the most popular literature teachers ever. Among his better-known students were the American novelist Thomas Pynchon and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg.
• Nabokov also worked for several years in the 1940s at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, organizing the butterfly collection.
• He had no formal training in biology and did not achieve the status in lepidopterology that he achieved in other areas
• He did publish about a dozen scientific papers on one type of butterly [family: Lycaenids; sub-family: Plebejinae, aka, blues], plus a number of very short publications on butterflies such as book reviews, and his work evidently still has some merit.
• His particular contribution was until recently considered to be his description of the species in greater detail than had been done before.
• In a recent work entitled Nabokov's Blues, two entomologists, Kurt Johnson and Steven Coates, argue that one of Nabokov's articles proposing a new system of classification for a large group of butterflies has been justified by recent esearch and will have far-reaching implications.
• All of Nabokov's writings on butterlies, including his articles and excerpts from his fiction and many illustrations including his drawings and photographs of him hunting butterflies, are now available in a collection entitled Nabokov's Butterflies, edited by his son (show book).
• In keeping with his work as professor of literature, he published numerous translations, a book on the nineteenth century author Nikolai Gogol, various articles on Gogol', and most important, a four-volume edition, with translation and annotation, of the nineteenth century novel in verse Evgenii Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. It is probably the most thorough annotation ever done of any literary work, it contains many discoveries about the novel, and it involved Nabokov in a literary controversy for several years because the translation was a radical departure from earlier versions and it was attacked by many other scholars and translators.
• Nabokov also, of course, continued to write. His first novel in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
• His novel Pnin (1957), about a Russian emigre college professor, was published serially in the New Yorker, with which Nabokov had a long-term relationship.
• When it appeared in book form it was nominated for but did not win, the national Book Award.
• His work Pale Fire (1962), a novel in the form of a long poem and accompanying commentary, is arguably his most inventive work and many consider it his greatest acheivement.
• His most famous novel, published in 1958, was Lolita. Lolita became a notorious best-seller, making Nabokov both famous and rich.
• His final published novel was Ada (1968)
• In 1960, now aged 61, Nabokov was free of the necessity of teaching. He resigned his position at Cornell and moved with his wife to a luxury hotel in Montreux, Switzerland.
• He continued to live and write there until his death in 1977.
• At the time of his death he was working on a novel called the Original of Laura, the notes to which were recently published, somewhat controversially, by his son Dmitri