Vladimir Nabokov Biography and List of Works

Russian-born American novelist and critic, who wrote both in Russian and English, and spent most of his life in exile. Nabokov's best-known novel, LOLITA (1955), shocked many people but critics praised its humour and literary style. The first version of the story, VOLSHEBNIK (The Enchanter), was written in 1939 in Paris. The Enchanter centred on a middle-aged man, who falls in love with a young girl and marries her widowed mother to satisfy his erotic desires.

"Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose designate as "nymphets."
(from Lolita)

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg as the son of Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov and Elena Ivanovna (Rukavishnikov). His aristocratic family was wealthy and British and French tutors educated Nabokov. After the Russian Revolution his family emigrated to Berlin In 1920 Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated three years later. A Russian fascist murdered his father in Berlin in 1922; subsequently the word of God disappeared from his texts.

Nabokov lived in Berlin for 15 years and worked as a translator, tutor and tennis coach. He won acceptance as the leading young writer in the Berlin Russian community, with a major publishing house and two literary journals. In his early works Nabokov dealt with death, the flow of time and the sense of loss. Already using complex metaphors, Nabokov's themes later became more ambiguous puzzles that challenge the reader to become involved in the game.

As a writer Nabokov gained his first literary success with his translations of some of Heine's songs. His first novel, MASHENKA, written in Russia, appeared in 1926. In 1924 Nabokov married Véra Evseevna Slonim, who came from a Jewish family; they had one son, Dimitri. Nabokov's nine early novels were published under the pen name Vladimir Serin.

In 1937 when Hitler released the killer of his father, Nabokov moved to Paris. There he met the Irish novelist James Joyce. Three years later, using a loan he had recieved from the composer Rachmaninov, he moved with his wife and son to the United States. Nabokov taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University, where he delivered highly acclaimed lectures on Flaubert, Joyce, Turgenev, Tolstoy and others. Nabokov's first novels in English were THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT (1941) and BEND SINISTER (1947). The Atlantic and the New Yorker started to publish Nabokov's short stories in the early 1940s. In America, apart from collecting his shorter prose of the 1930s into one book, VESNA V FIAL'TE, Nabokov wrote only memoirs and verse in Russian.

Zashchita Luzhina (1930, The Defence) - The protagonist, Aleksandr Luzhin, is a shy and lonely young man, who becomes a chess phenomenon. He finds it increasingly difficult to make the transition from the world of the game to everyday reality. Luzhin suffers a mental breakdown, and recuperates slowly with the help of a young woman, who loves him. However, he starts to believe that certain events and periods from his life recur in the present and that a cunning opponent is trying to manipulate the moves, which Luzhin makes in his life. He decides to throw himself out of a window and notices that the courtyard below seems to look like a giant chessboard. - In this Borgesian novel Nabokov has created a network of allusions. Luzhin is right: there is an opponent and he is Nabokov himself, who makes the point that the story is an artistic creation.

In the 1950s Nabokov published CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE (1951), an autobiography, which was later revised as SPEAK, MEMORY (1966). Lolita, which was filmed first time in 1962 directed by Stanley Kubrick, is one of the most controversial novels of this century. The story, dealing with the desire of a middle-aged paedophile Humbert Humbert for a 12-year-old nymphet, is said to be a metaphor for the writer and his art, and for the old world encountering the new in all its vulgarity. Nabokov gained huge success with the book It allowed him to abandon teaching and devote himself entirely to writing. In 1957 Nabokov published PNIN, a story of a hapless Russian professor of literature, and in 1962 appeared PALE FIRE, an ambitious mixture of literary forms.

From 1959 Nabokov lived in Switzerland, where his permanent home was at the Montreux Palace Hotel. His later works include ADA (1969), a love story set on the planet of Antiterra, a mixture of Russia and America, TRANSPARENT THINGS (1972) and LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! (1975). The writer's son Dimitry undertook the translation of several of his books in these years. Nabokov died in Lausanne on July 2, 1977. Among Nabokov's major critical works are his study of Nikolay Gogol (1944), and translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964), with commentary.

For further reading: The Annotated Lolita by A. Apper Jr. (1970); Nabokov's Garden by B.A. Mason (1974); Vladimir Nabokov by L.L. Lee (1976); Nabokov Translated by J. Grayson (1977); by D. Rampton (1984); VN: Thw Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov byA. Field (1986); Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by H. Bloom (1987); Freaud and Nabokov by G. Green (1988); by B. Boyd (1990); Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years by B. Boyd (1991); Vladimir Nabokov by T. Sharpe (1991); Small Alpine Form by C. Nicol and G. Barabtarlo (1993); The Magician's Doubts by Michael Wood (1994); The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Vladimir E. Alexandrov (1995); Lolita: A Janus Text by Lance Olsen (1995); Pniniad by Galya Diment (1997) - SEE other writers who combine fantastical elements, fabulations, with realistic narrative: Italo Calvino, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco.

STIKHI, (1916)