Vladimir Nabokov – Author Biography
Early Life
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia, into an aristocratic, liberal family. The Revolution of 1917 destroyed his world; the family fled, and his father was assassinated in Berlin in 1922. Nabokov studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and became a Russian émigré writer in Berlin and Paris.
Career
Writing first in Russian as “Sirin,” Nabokov produced novels like The Defense and Despair before switching to English after moving to America in 1940. He taught literature at Wellesley and Cornell — his lectures are legendary — while writing Lolita (1955), the story of Humbert Humbert’s obsession, which made him internationally famous and financially free. He spent his final decades in a Swiss hotel, producing masterpieces including Pale Fire (1962) and the memoir Speak, Memory (1951). He died in 1977.
Major Works
Speak, Memory (1951), Lolita (1955), and Pale Fire (1962).
Writing Style and Themes
Nabokov wrote English of unmatched precision and playfulness — puns, patterns, and traps for the attentive reader. His recurring themes are memory and exile, the unreliability of narrators, obsession disguised as love, and art as a game the reader is invited to play. He was also a serious lepidopterist, and butterflies thread through his work.
Legacy
Nabokov is widely considered the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century in English — a non-native speaker who out-wrote the natives. Lolita remains both a masterpiece and a moral provocation, and Speak, Memory is among the finest memoirs ever written.
