Born 1899-Died 1977.
Author of 17 novels.
Born 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia to an aristocratic family. Also a trilingual family (Russian, English, French).
1919-1939. In exile in Europe because fleeing the Red Army (i.e. the communists). Often in Berlin.
1922. Father, a reporter for an émigré newspaper, shot during an assassination attempt on a Russian politician.
Educated at Cambridge. Writes poetry and translates Alice in Wonderland into Russian.
Marries Véra Slonim and lives with her in first Berlin and then Paris. Has son named Dmitri.
Emigrates to America in 1940 to flee the Nazis (Véra was Jewish).
Although already known as stylistically virtuosic in Russian, switches over to English.
1958 publishes Lolita, about a middle-aged man’s pedophilic affair with a 12 year old girl.
1961. Moves to Montreux, Switerzland.
1962. Pale Fire.
1977. dies in Montreux.
Nabokov’s interests: a set of eccentric passions that surface in his fictions again and again.
Butterfly collecting and classification, also known as Lepidoptera
andChess (Not so much chess playing as chess problems, which involve composing difficult configurations of pieces and how to achieve checkmate within a certain number of moves.)