Vladimir Nabokov

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This page is about the novelist. For his father, the politician, see Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Born April 22 [O.S. April 10] 1899
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Died July 2, 1977 (aged 78)
Montreux, Switzerland
Occupation novelist, lepidopterist, professor
Literary movement Modernism, Postmodernism
Influences Andrei Bely, Anton Chekhov, Gustave Flaubert, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mayne Reid[1]
Influenced Martin Amis, John Banville, Andrei Bitov, Jeffrey Eugenides, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Edmund White, Richard Rorty

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, pronounced [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr nɐˈbokəf]) (April 22 [O.S. April 10] 1899, Saint Petersburg – July 2, 1977, Montreux) was a Russian-American novelist and short story writer.

Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to entomology and had an interest in chess problems.

Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterised all his works.[1]. Nabokov himself regarded his four-volume translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin as his other major achievement.[citation needed]

Contents

Nabokov House - the house in Saint Petersburg where Nabokov was born and lived the first 18 years of his life
Nabokov House - the house in Saint Petersburg where Nabokov was born and lived the first 18 years of his life

The eldest son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife, née Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, he was born to a rich and prominent Orthodox family of the untitled nobility of Saint Petersburg. He spent his childhood and youth there and at the country estate Vyra near Siverskaya. Nabokov's childhood, which he called "perfect", was remarkable in several ways. The family spoke Russian, English and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. In fact, much to his father's patriotic chagrin, Nabokov could read and write English before he could Russian. In Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood, and his ability to recall in vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his permanent exile, as well as providing a theme which echoes from his first book, Mary, all the way to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. In 1916 Nabokov inherited the estate Rozhestveno, next to Vyra, from his uncle Ruka, but lost it in the revolution one year later; this was the only house he ever would own.

The Nabokov family left Saint Petersburg in the wake of the 1917 Revolution for a friend's estate in the Crimea, where they remained for 18 months. The family did not expect to be out of Saint Petersburg for very long, but in fact they would never return. Following the defeat of the White Army in 1919, the Nabokovs left for exile in western Europe. The family settled briefly in England, where Vladimir enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge and studied Slavic and Romance languages. His Cambridge experiences would later help him in the writing of the novel Glory.

In 1922, Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by Russian monarchists as he tried to shelter their real target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This episode of mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in the author's fiction, where characters would meet their deaths under mistaken terms. In Pale Fire, for example, the poet Shade is mistaken for a judge who resembles him and is murdered.

In 1923 Nabokov graduated from Cambridge and using a Nansen passport relocated to Berlin, where he gained a reputation within the colony of Russian émigrés as a novelist and poet, writing under the pseudonym 'V. V. Sirin'. Sirin refers to an owl as well as to a mythological bird, and he apparently used the pseudonym as to not to be confused with his father. He married Véra Evseyevna Slonim in Berlin in 1925. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.

Nabokov left Germany with his family in 1937 for Paris and in 1940 fled from the advancing German troops to the United States. It was here that he met Edmund Wilson, who introduced Nabokov's work to American editors, eventually leading to his recognition.

Nabokov came to Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position, created specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his lepidoptery. Nabokov is remembered as the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department. His lecture series on major nineteenth-century Russian writers was hailed as "funny," "learned," and "brilliantly satirical."[citation needed] The Nabokovs resided in Wellesley, Massachusetts during the 1941-42 academic year; they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in September, 1942 and lived there until June, 1948. Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944–45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. He served through the 1947-48 term as Wellesley's one-man Russian Department, offering courses in Russian language and literature. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian. At the same time he was curator of lepidoptery at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Biology. After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Also in 1945, Vladimir Nabokov was told by a relative that his homosexual brother, Sergei (b. 1900,) who had lived most of his adult life in Paris and Austria, had died in a Nazi concentration camp at Neuengamme, Germany, shortly before Germany's final collapse.

Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita while travelling in the western United States. In June, 1953 he and his family came to Ashland, Oregon, renting a house on Meade Street from Professor Taylor, head of the Southern Oregon College Department of Social Science. There he finished Lolita and began writing the novel Pnin. He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem Lines Written in Oregon. On October 1, 1953, he and his family left for Ithaca, New York. [2]

After the great financial success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to return to Europe and devote himself exclusively to writing. From 1960 to the end of his life he lived at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland.

Nabokov was born on April 10, 1899 according to the Julian calendar in use in Russia at that time. The Gregorian equivalent is April 22, which is achieved by adding 12 days to the Julian date. Some sources have incorrectly calculated a date of April 23, by inappropriately using the 13-day difference in the calendars that applied only after February 28, 1900. In Speak, Memory Nabokov explains the cause of the error and confirms the correct date of April 22. But he himself celebrated his birthday on April 23, and stated in an interview with The New York Times, "That is also Shakespeare’s and Shirley Temple’s, so I have nothing to lose by saying I was born on the 23d."[3]

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May 23, 1969 TIME magazine cover
May 23, 1969 TIME magazine cover

Nabokov's first writings were in Russian, but he came to his greatest distinction in the English language. For this achievement, he has been compared with Joseph Conrad; yet some view this as a dubious comparison, as Conrad composed only in English, never in his native Polish. (Nabokov himself disdained the comparison for aesthetic reasons, declaring, "I differ from Joseph Conradically.") Nabokov translated many of his own early works into English, sometimes in cooperation with his son Dmitri. His trilingual upbringing had a profound influence on his artistry. He has metaphorically described the transition from one language to another as the slow journey at night from one village to another with only a candle for illumination. Nabokov himself translated two books which he wrote in English into Russian, Conclusive Evidence, and Lolita. The first "translation" was made because of Nabokov's feeling of imperfection of the English version. Writing the book, he noted that he needed to translate his own memories into English, and to spend a lot of time explaining things which are well-known in Russia; then he decided to re-write the book once again, in his first native language, and after that he made the final version, Speak, Memory (Nabokov first wanted to name it "Speak, Mnemosyne").

Nabokov is noted for his complex plots, clever word play, and use of alliteration. He gained both fame and notoriety with his novel Lolita (1955), which tells of a grown man's devouring passion for a twelve-year-old girl. This and his other novels, particularly Pale Fire (1962), won him a place among the greatest novelists of the 20th century. His longest novel, which met with a mixed response, is Ada (1969). He devoted more time to the composition of this novel than any of his others. Nabokov's fiction is characterized by its linguistic playfulness. For example, his short story "The Vane Sisters" is famous in part for its acrostic final paragraph, in which the first letters of each word spell out a message from beyond the grave.

Nabokov's stature as a literary critic is founded largely on his four-volume translation of and commentary on Aleksandr Pushkin's epic of the Russian soul, Eugene Onegin. That commentary ended with an appendix titled Notes on Prosody which has developed a reputation of its own. It stemmed from his observation that while Pushkin's iambic tetrameters had been a part of Russian literature for a fairly short two centuries, they were clearly understood by the Russian prosodists. On the other hand, he viewed the much older English iambic tetrameters as muddled and poorly documented. In his own words:

I have been forced to invent a simple little terminology of my own, explain its application to English verse forms, and indulge in certain rather copious details of classification before even tackling the limited object of these notes to my translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, an object that boils down to very little—in comparison to the forced preliminaries — namely, to a few things that the non-Russian student of Russian literature must know in regard to Russian prosody in general and to Eugene Onegin in particular.

Nabokov's translation was the focus of a bitter polemic with Edmund Wilson and others; he had rendered the very precisely metered and rhyming novel in verse to (by his own admission) stumbling, non-rhymed prose. He argued that all verse translations of Onegin fatally betrayed the author's use of language; critics replied that failure to make the translation as beautifully styled as the original was a much greater betrayal.

Nabokov's Lectures on Literature also reveals his controversial ideas concerning art. He firmly believed that novels should not aim to teach and that readers should not merely empathise with characters but that a 'higher' aesthetic enjoyment should be attained, partly by paying great attention to details of style and structure. He detested what he saw as 'general ideas' in novels, and so when teaching Ulysses, for example, he would insist students keep an eye on where the characters were in Dublin (with the aid of a map) rather than teaching the complex Irish history that many critics see as being essential to an understanding of the novel.

Nabokov's detractors fault him for being an aesthete and for his over-attention to language and detail rather than character development. In his essay "Nabokov, or Nostalgia," Danilo Kiš wrote that Nabokov's is "a magnificent, complex, and sterile art."

Not until glasnost did Nabokov's work become officially available in his native country. Gorbachev authorized a five-volume edition of his writing in 1988.

Nabokov was a synesthete and described aspects of synesthesia in several of his works. In his memoir Speak, Memory, he notes that his wife also exhibited synesthesia; like her husband, her mind's eye associated colors with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colors he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle".

Vladimir Nabokov's case of synesthesia can be described in more detail than merely the association of colors with particular letters. For a synesthete letters are not simply associated with certain colors; they are colored. Nabokov frequently endowed his protagonists with a similar gift. In Bend Sinister Krug comments on his perception of the word "loyalty" as being like a golden fork lying out in the sun. In The Defense, Nabokov mentioned briefly how the main character's father, a writer, found he was unable to complete a novel that he planned to write, becoming lost in the fabricated storyline by "starting with colors." Many other subtle references are made in Nabokov's writing that can be traced back to his synesthesia. Many of his characters have a distinct "sensory appetite" reminiscent of synesthesia.

Echinárgus in the family Lycaenidae: one of the many genera discovered and named by Nabokov
Echinárgus in the family Lycaenidae: one of the many genera discovered and named by Nabokov

His career as an entomologist was equally distinguished. Throughout an extensive career of collecting he never learned to drive a car, and he depended on his wife Véra to bring him to collecting sites. During the 1940s, as a research fellow in zoology, he was responsible for organizing the butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His writings in this area were highly technical. This, combined with his specialty in the relatively unspectacular tribe Polyommatini of the family Lycaenidae, has left this facet of his life little explored by most admirers of his literary works. He identified the Karner Blue. The genus Nabokovia was named after him in honor of this work, as were a number of butterfly and moth species.[4]

Butterflies drawn by V (Vladimir) for V (Vera).Nabokov House of Saint Petersburg.
Butterflies drawn by V (Vladimir) for V (Vera).
Nabokov House of Saint Petersburg.

The paleontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould discussed Nabokov's lepidoptery in an essay reprinted in his book I Have Landed. Gould notes that Nabokov was occasionally a scientific "stick-in-the-mud"; for example, Nabokov never accepted that genetics or the counting of chromosomes could be a valid way to distinguish species of insects, and relied on the traditional (for lepidopterists) microscopic comparison of their genitalia. The Harvard Museum of Natural History, which now contains the Museum of Comparative Zoology, still possesses Nabokov's "genitalia cabinet", where the author stored his collection of male blue butterfly genitalia. [2], [3] "Nabokov was a serious taxonomist," according to the museum staff writer Nancy Pick, author of The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. "He actually did quite a good job at distinguishing species that you would not think were different—by looking at their genitalia under a microscope six hours a day, seven days a week, until his eyesight was permanently impaired." [4]

Many of Nabokov's fans have tried to ascribe literary value to his scientific papers, Gould notes. Conversely, others have claimed that his scientific work enriched his literary output. Gould advocates a third view, holding that the other two positions are examples of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. Rather than assuming that either side of Nabokov's work caused or stimulated the other, Gould proposes that both stemmed from Nabokov's love of detail, contemplation and symmetry.

Nabokov spent considerable time during his exile on the composition of chess problems. Such compositions he published in the Russian émigré press, Poems and Problems (18 chess compositions) and Speak, Memory ( 1 problem). He describes the process of composing and constructing in his memoir: "The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one consciousnesss..." To him, the "originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity" of creating a chess problem was similar as in any other art.

Samizdat copies of Nabokov's works on display at Nabokov House
Samizdat copies of Nabokov's works on display at Nabokov House

  • (1926) Mashen'ka (Машенька); English translation: Mary (1970)
  • (1928) Korol' Dama Valet (Король, дама, валет); English translation: King, Queen, Knave (1968)
  • (1930) Zashchita Luzhina (Защита Лужина); English translation: The Luzhin Defense or The Defense (1964) (also adapted to film, The Luzhin Defence, in 2001)
  • (1930) Sogliadatai (Соглядатай (Eavesdropper)), novella; first publication as a book 1938; English translation: The Eye (1965)
  • (1932) Podvig (Подвиг (Deed)); English translation: Glory (1971)
  • (1932) Kamera Obskura (Камера Обскура); English translations: Camera Obscura (1936), Laughter in the Dark (1938)
  • (1936) Otchayanie (Отчаяние); English translation: Despair (1937, 1966)
  • (1938) Priglasheniye na kazn' (Приглашение на казнь (Invitation to an execution)); English translation: Invitation to a Beheading (1959)
  • (1938) Dar (Дар); English translation: The Gift (1963)
  • (Unpublished novella, written in 1939) Volshebnik (Волшебник); English translation: The Enchanter (1985)

  • (1916) Stikhi ("Poems"). Sixty-eight poems in Russian.
  • (1918) Al'manakh: Dva Puti (An Almanac: Two Paths"). Twelve poems by Nabokov and eight by Andrei Balashov, in Russian.
  • (1922) Grozd ("The Cluster"). Thirty-six poems in Russian, by "V. Sirin".
  • (1923) Gornii Put' ("The Empyrean Path"). One hundred and twenty-eight poems in Russian, by "Vl. Sirin".
  • (1929) Vozvrashchenie Chorba ("The Return of Chorb"). Fifteen short stories and twenty-four poems, in Russian, by "V. Sirin".
  • (1952) Stikhotvoreniia 1929–1951 ("Poems 1929–1951") Fifteen poems in Russian.
  • (1959) Poems. The contents were later incorporated within Poems and Problems.
  • (1969) Poems and Problems (a collection of poetry and chess problems) ISBN 0-07-045724-7
  • (1979) Stikhi ("Poems"). Two hundred and twenty-two poems in Russian.

  • (1944) Nikolai Gogol
  • (1963) Notes on Prosody (Later appeared within Eugene Onegin.)
  • (1980) Lectures on Literature
  • (1980) Lectures on Ulysses. Facsimiles of Nabokov's notes.
  • (1981) Lectures on Russian Literature
  • (1983) Lectures on Don Quixote

  • (1951) Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir - first version of Nabokov's autobiography. (British edition titled Speak, Memory: A Memoir)
  • (1954) Drugie Berega (Другие берега, "Other Shores") - revised version of the autobiography
  • (1967) Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - final revised and extended edition of Conclusive Evidence. It includes information on his work as a lepidopterist.
  • (1973) Strong Opinions. Interviews, reviews, letters to editors.
  • (1979) The Nabokov–Wilson Letters Letters between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson
  • (1984) Perepiska s Sestroi (Переписка с Сестрой (Correspondence with the Sister)) Correspondence between Nabokov and Helene Sikorski; also includes some letters to his brother Kirill
  • (1987) Carrousel. Three long-forgotten short texts that had recently been rediscovered.
  • (1989) Selected Letters
  • (2001) Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971. A revised and augmented edition of The Nabokov–Wilson Letters.

  • Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-691-06794-5 (hardback) 1997. ISBN 0-691-02470-7 (paperback). London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. ISBN 0-7011-3700-2 (hardback)
  • Boyd, Brian, Vladimir Nabokov: The American years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-691-06797-X (hardback) 1993. 0-691-02471-5 (paperback). London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 0-7011-3701-0 (hardback)
  • Field, Andrew. VN The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Crown Publishers. 1986. ISNB 0-517-56113-1
  • Proffer, Elendea, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: A pictorial biography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1991. ISBN 0-87501-078-4 (a collection of photographs)
  • Schiff, Stacy. Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). New York, NY.: Random House, 1999. ISBN 0-679-44790-3.

Michael Juliar, "Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography," New York, Garland Pub., 1986. ISBN 0-8240-8590-6.

Peter Medak's short television film, Nabokov on Kafka, is a dramatization of Nabokov's lectures on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The part of Nabokov is played by Christopher Plummer. Nabokov makes three cameo appearances, at widely scattered points in his life, in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.

  • Johnson, Kurt, and Steve Coates. Nabokov's blues: The scientific odyssey of a literary genius. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-137330-6 (very accessibly written)
  • Sartori, Michel, ed. Les Papillons de Nabokov. [The butterflies of Nabokov.] Lausanne: Musée cantonal de Zoologie, 1993. ISBN 2-9700051-0-7 (exhibition catalogue, primarily in English)
  • Zimmer, Dieter. A guide to Nabokov's butterflies and moths. Privately published, 2001. ISBN 3-00-007609-3 (web page)

  1. ^ Nabokov said, "I do not believe that any particular writer has had any definite influence on me." (Strong Opinions, p. 46.) The list given above includes writers who he admired (including Mayne Reid, whose work Nabokov admired as a child) and writers he alluded to in fiction (such as Poe). Such a list might be extended greatly.
  2. ^ Article, Medford Mail Tribune, Nov. 5, 2006, p. 2, "Snapshot: Nabokov's Retreat"
  3. ^ Whitman, Alden. "Nabokov, Nearing 70, Describes His 'New Girl'." The New York Times, April 19, 1969, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed December 12, 2007).
  4. ^ http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dzbutt6.htm

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v • d • e
Works by Vladimir Nabokov
Novels:
Short stories:

"The Wood-Sprite" • "Russian Spoken Here" • "Sounds" • "Wingstroke" • "Gods" • "A Matter of Chance" • "The Seaport" • "Revenge" • "Beneficence" • "Details of a Sunset" • "The Thunderstorm" • "La Veneziana" • "Bachmann" • "The Dragon" • Christmas" • "A Letter That Never Reached Russia" • "The Fight" • "The Return of Chorb" • "A Guide to Berlin" • "A Nursery Tale" • "Terror" • "Razor" • "The Passenger • "The Doorbell" • "An Affair of Honor" • "The Christmas Story" • "The Potato Elf" • "The Aurelian" • "A Dashing Fellow" • "A Bad Day" • "The Visit to the Museum" • "A Busy Man" • "Terra Incognita" • "The Reunion" • "Lips to Lips" • "Orache" • "Music" • "Perfection" • "The Admiralty Spire" • "The Leonardo" • "In Memory of L. I. Shigaev" • "The Circle" • "A Russian Beauty" • Breaking the News" • "Torpid Smoke" • "Recruiting" • "A Slice of Life" • "Spring in Fialta" • "Cloud, Castle, Lake" • "Tyrants Destroyed" • "Lik" • "Vasiliy Shishkov" • "Ultima Thule" • "Solus Rex" • "Mademoiselle O" • "The Assistant Producer" • "That in Aleppo Once..." • "A Forgotten Poet" • "Time and Ebb" • "Conversation Piece, 1945" • "Signs and Symbols" • "First Love" • "Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster" • "The Vane Sisters" • "Lance" • "Easter Rain"
Plays:

Death • The Grandfather • The North Pole • The Tragedy of Mr. Morn • The Man from the USSR • The Event • The Waltz Invention
Non-fiction:

Speak, Memory • Strong Opinions • Nikolai Gogol • Lectures on Literature • Lectures on Russian Literature • Lectures on Don Quixote • The Nabokov-Wilson letters • Selected Letters, 1940-1977 • Notes on Prosody
Miscellaneous :

Poems and Problems • Lolita: A Screenplay • The Annotated Lolita • Carrousel



Persondata
NAME Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
DATE OF BIRTH April 22 [O.S. April 10] 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Petersburg, Russia
DATE OF DEATH July 2, 1977
PLACE OF DEATH Montreux, Switzerland
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov"
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