Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and lepidopterist whose work in both Russian and English placed him among the leading prose stylists of the twentieth century. He was born on April 22, 1899, in Saint Petersburg, into a wealthy and politically liberal Russian family, and he died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux, Switzerland. His father, V. D. Nabokov, was a jurist and a leading figure in the Constitutional Democratic Party.

His family fled Russia in 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution, and he completed his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Slavic and Romance languages. The interwar decades were spent largely in Berlin and Paris, where he wrote nine novels in Russian under the pen name V. Sirin, including The Defense (1930), Despair (1934), and Invitation to a Beheading (1936). He married Véra Slonim in 1925, and the couple's only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.

His move to the United States in 1940, ahead of the German occupation of France, marked the beginning of his English-language work. He taught Russian and European literature at Wellesley and then at Cornell from 1948 to 1959 and continued original entomological research on the genitalia of blue butterflies, publishing in scientific journals. Lolita, written during summer butterfly-collecting trips across the American West, was rejected by American publishers and first appeared in Paris in 1955; the 1958 American edition became an international bestseller.

His later novels — Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), and Ada or Ardor (1969) — extended his stylistic range, and his four-volume English translation and commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964) remained controversial for its aggressively literal approach. He moved with Véra to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland in 1961 and lived there for the rest of his life, writing, lecturing, and pursuing butterflies in the Swiss Alps.

His name Vladimir is a Slavic name combining elements meaning "to rule" and "world" or "peace," historically borne by the tenth-century Vladimir the Great of Kievan Rus'. He used the form Vladimir in Russian and English alike, and signed his correspondence with the short form Volodya among family.