Nine Russian novels came before the English Lolita shock
Vladimir Nabokov (22 April 1899 – 2 July 1977), sometimes publishing as Sirin, fled Imperial Russia for Berlin, then reinvented himself in English. Nine Russian novels (1926–1938) preceded the international blast of Lolita (1955), later ranked among the twentieth century’s defining books.
The family traced its name to Nabok Murza, a 14th-century Tatar prince who entered the Tsars' service. His grandfather had been Alexander II's justice minister, his father was a liberal lawyer and leader of the Constitutional Democrats, and his mother was the granddaughter of a gold-mine millionaire. The household spoke Russian, English and French, and to his patriotic father's dismay the boy could read and write English before Russian. Summers at the Vyra estate gave him the vivid memories that run from his first novel, Mary, to Ada.
In 1916 he inherited the neighbouring estate of Rozhdestveno from an uncle and published Stikhi, 68 poems; the poet Zinaida Gippius told his father the boy would never be a writer. A year later the October Revolution took the estate, the only house he ever owned. The family fled to Crimea, where his father served as justice minister in a regional government, then went into exile in 1919. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied zoology and then Slavic and Romance languages, earning a starred first in part one of the Tripos, and resolved to become a Russian writer.
In March 1922 monarchist gunmen in Berlin killed his father as he shielded their real target, Pavel Milyukov, a scene that echoes in Pale Fire, where an assassin's bullet meant for an exiled king kills the poet. His brother Sergey later died in a Nazi camp in 1945 after denouncing Hitler, and his sister Olga was the schoolfriend who first sparked Ayn Rand's interest in politics.
Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and moved to Montreux, Switzerland, in 1961. Pale Fire placed 53rd on the Modern Library list, Speak, Memory eighth among the century's nonfiction, and he was a National Book Award finalist seven times. He was also a serious lepidopterist and composed chess problems.
Source: Vladimir Nabokov
