NABOKOV

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Russian-born writer who emigrated to America. It has been said that Nabokov arrived in America without knowing English. But that is not true. He knew English earlier than his native Russian and studied it at the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg along with Russian. In his memoir Speak, Memory he describes his language background. Nabokov not only learned English but wrote in it with "erudition, multilingual wordplay and narrative frolics" according to Time writer R.Z. Sheppard.

In his book “The Magician's Doubts”, Micheal Woods summed up the Nabokov's life: "There was once a Russian writer, let's call him V, who was prodigiously gifted, learned, intelligent, observant, inventive. A scandalous book brought him late and surprising fame and wealth, and he moved to a hotel in Switzerland, where he continued to write, enjoying both glory and privacy." The scandalous book of course was “Lolita”.”

Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899 into a wealthy St. Petersburg family with several country estates, which he inherited at the age of 16. As a young man he was a first rate soccer goalie and tennis player.

Nabokov left Russia on a ship called Hope in 1919, two after the Bolshevik Revolution. An intellectual aristocrat, he left his homeland during the revolutionary period after the liberal democratic government was crushed by the Bolsheviks. He lost everything and had to leave behind his treasured collection of butterflies and books. His life of pampered comfort was replaced with one of poverty and uncertainty.

Books: “Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years” by Brian Boyd (Princeton University Press, 1991); “The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov” by Andrew Field (Crown); autobiography “Speak, Memory”.

Nabokov, the Russian Émigré, and Vera

In the 1920s and 30s Nabokov wrote for Russian émigré publications in Berlin, As a poor struggling writer in Berlin he wrote under the name V. Sirin and often "read whole books little by little in bookshops" because he couldn’t afford to buy book outright.

In 1925, Nabokov married Vera Evseevna Slonim, a strikingly beautiful woman with a fine-boned face and snowy white hair. Many scholars believe that the character Clare in “The rRal Life of Sebastian Knight” was Vera. They had one son, Dmiti, born in 1934. Vera and Nabokov met in Berlin in 1923. The daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist from St. Petersburg who had lost his fortune, she was twenty one and Nabokov was twenty-four when they were married. Vera knew of his work before they met and she considered him one of world's best living writers.

Nabokov lived in Nazi-controlled Berlin with his Jewish wife and half Jewish child in the 1930s. One reason he stayed in Berlin for so long was that he was absorbed in writing “The Gift” (1938). In 1937, he escaped to Paris, where again he wrote for Russian émigré publications, .

Nabokov studied at Cambridge University. He often listed his occupation as a "one-man finishing school," tennis coach and a movie extra. He liked chess. His passion was butterflies. He suffered all his life from neuralgia, headaches, heart palpitations and dental trouble.

Nabokov in the United States

To escape World War II, Nabokov fled again, this time to the United States, where he arrived in 1941 at the age of 41. With many professional researcher taking part in the war efforts, he was able to land a job at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Later Nabokov worked as a part time zoologist at Harvard for $1,200 a year and then as a popular literature instructor at Cornell (between 1948 and 1958) and Wellesley. At Cornell he taught a Masterpieces of European Fiction course, which including lectures of Gogol's “The Overcoat”, Kafka's “The Metamorphosis” and Stevenson's “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. He translated Pushkin's “Eugene Onegin” into English.

Vera always accompanied Nabokov to his Cornell lectures and performed duties like erasing the blackboard and finding his notes. She sat at his side or in the front row and never spoke a word. When Nabokov made a reference to her she was his "assistant." When Nabokov was sick she did his lectures and usually graded tests and met with students during office hour times.

Nabokov and Butterflies

Nabokov was deeply interested in butterflies. He once speculated that if there had been no Russian Revolution who probably wound have ended up a butterfly specialist at a Russian museum. He wrote, "I have hunted butterflies...as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts...Few things could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration."

From the age of seven he dreamed of discovering a new species, something he achieved at an elevation of 4,000 feet in the Alps in the summer of 1938 and in the United States, with the discovery of “Neonympha dorothea” at the Grand Canyon, in 1942. He worked on producing the most detailed and comprehensive butterfly catalogue ever produced but abandoned the project after two years because it was just too ambitious

Nabokov interests in butterflies crept into his fiction. Several of his characters were lepidopterists (butterfly scientists) and others—Vanessa Van Ness, Percy Elphinstone, Electra Gold and Avis Chapmen— had butterflies incorporated into their names.

In the 1940s, Nabokov held a part time position at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and also worked as a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Most summers were spent driving around the Rockies and the West looking for butterflies. His experience in American motels late showed up in “Lolita”. One of Nabokov's colleagues at Harvard was the famous biologist Edmond Wilson, who Nabokov once accused of cutting out the bottom of one of his butterfly nets.

Book: “Nabokov's Blues” by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates (Zoland Books, 2001) on butterflies.

Nabokov, the Writer

Nabokov was introduced to the American public through his articles in the Atlantic Monthly. He was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Nabokov taught Russian literature and European literature at Cornell in to order pay his son's tuition at Harvard. After Lolita became a bestseller in 1958, he quit his position at Cornell and traveled to Europe.

Nabokov wrote in Russian, English, French, German and Italian. He wrote feverishly between 1925 and 1935 and completed his first novel eight months after his wedding. Vera took upon her self to create a protected world for her husband so that his genius could flourish. While Nabokov wrote and did who knows what before he established, she met with publishers and earned an income doing translation work and giving French lessons. She even typed all three thousand pages of his “Onegin” manuscript and answered all his phone calls. She memorized most of Nabokov's poetry by heart.

Hallmarks of Nabokov's fiction include impersonators, distorted mirror images and parodies of the self. Describing Nabokov's switch from writing in Russian to English, Wood wrote he "found, through his very loss, a fabulous, freaky, singing acrobatic, unheard of English” and found that "the second language could flower for him only at the cost of the first."

Nabokov once said good books should not make us thinks; they should make us shiver. He railed against Dostoevsky in his Cornell lectures and condemned “Doctor Zhivago”. In his view Biely's “St. Petersburg “is the greatest novel of the 20th century. Nabokov greatly admired James Joyce. The one time the two writers met, Joyce asked him about the "history of mead in Russia." Nabokov's works were banned during his lifetime in the Soviet Union.

Nabokov's works include the novels “The Gift”, “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight”, “Pale Fire” and “Laughter in the Dark”. His last novel “Ada”, was loftier and more incomprehensible than his earlier works. A superb collection of 65 short stories (“Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”) was released in 1995. Some regard “The Gift” as his greatest work and “Ada” as his worst (although some consider it failed magnus opus). “The Gift” was written in Russian and is regarded by some as the greatest 20th century Russian novel. It was a story about Russian emigres and all that they lost and left behind in Russia.

Lolita

Nabokov's most famous work “Lolita” (1958) is a controversial. bestselling novel about a middle-age man, Humbert Humbert, and his lust towards his stepdaughter, a 13-year-old "nymphet" named Dolores Haze. The climax of the book is when Humbert brings himself to orgasm by rubbing against the unknowing buttocks of Lolita, who he had described as the "light of my life, fire of my loins. My Sin. My soul. "

While the book contained no obscenities, only suggestive language, it was banned in Britain, confiscated by police in France and labeled as immoral in the United States. Later a priest said the novel played a part in the breakdown of Western Civilization and linked it to murders of young girls in Belgium prostitution ring.

The book was set in 1947 in the New England town of Ramsdale, where Humbert takes out a room with Lolita's mother Charlotte. When Charlotte accidently dies, Humbert and Lolita take off on a long road trip in which imagined sex becomes an integral part of their relationship. At one point Lolita put his hand on Humbert's thigh and says, "You know how my allowance is a dollar a week...Well, I think it should be two."

Modern Library choices for best English-language novels of the 20th century: 1) “Ulysses” by James Joyce; 2) “Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald; 3) “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce; 4) “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov; 5) “Brave New World “by Aldous Huxley; 6) “The Sound and the Fury “by William Faulkner; 7) “Catch-22" by Joseph Heller 8) “Darkness at Noon” by Arthur Koestler; 9) “Sons and Lovers” by D.H. Lawrence; 10) “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck.

Nabokov, Lolita and Lolita Films

“Lolita” was Nabokov's twelfth novel. Most of it was conceived while riding in the back seat of a Buick on road trip in the West. It was turned down by five American publishers who feared being arrested on obscenity charges before it was first published by Olympia Press in Paris. It was published by Putam in the United States in 1958. “Lolita” changed Nabokov's life and made him a controversial international success. It also changed the world. Nabokov once said, "I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't name their daughter Lolita anymore."

More scandal broke out when “Lolita “was made into movies: first by Stanley Kubrik in 1962, with the 20-something Sue Lyon playing the part of the lollipop-sucking 13-year-old Lolita and James Mason as the charming but seedy Humbert. The screenplay had as much input from Kubrik as Nabokov and New Yorker film critic Pauline Kale called it a "wild, marvelously enjoyable comedy." It was big commercial success.

The controversial 1997 version of “Lolita” cost $50 million and stared Jeremy Irons as Humbert and Dominique Swain as Lolita. It was truer to the book a but dull and gloomy. It was largely a flop that was aired in the United States on cable television not movie theaters. In 1971, a musical inspired by “Lolita” was released.

Samples of Nabokov's Writing

In the three-page short story “The Wood Sprite”, a forest elf ("hunched, gray, powdered with pollen") explains why he left the Soviet Union: "Once, towards evening, I skipped out into a glade, and what did I see? People lying around, some on their backs, some on their bellies. Well, I think, I'll wake them up, "I'll get them moving! And I went to work shaking boughs, bombarding with cones, rustling, hooting....Then I took a closer look, and I was horror-struck. Here's a man with his head hanging by one flimsy crimson thread, there's one with a thick heap of worms for a stomach...I could not endure it. I let out a howl, jumped in the air, and off I ran."

Describing a pretentious fop in “Spring in Fialta”, Nabokov wrote" "Lean adn arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents."

Describing a character in the “Vane Sisters”, Nabokov wrote: "the roofs blaze like oblique, sunblinded mirrors, A winged woman stands on a window still washing the panes. She bends over, pouts, brushes a strand of flaming hair from her face. The air is faintly redolent of gasoline and linens."

Nabokov's Later Years

Nabokov lived at the Montreaux Palace Hotel in Switzerland from 1961 until his death in 1977. He spent much of his time butterfly hunting in the Alps.

Nabokov died in 1977 at the age of 78 of complications related to a flu infection. Some say that his death was caused in part by a fall that occurred the year before on a butterfly hunting outing in Davos, Switzerland. It one of his last visits with his son, Nabokov reportedly began weeping because, his biographer Brian Boyd wrote, "a certain butterfly was already on the wing, and was made clear that he expected never to see it again." Vera died in 1991.

Image Sources:

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, U.S. government, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, and various books, websites and other publications.

Last updated May 2019