[22], Nabokov wrote Lolita while travelling on the butterfly-collection trips in the western United States that he undertook every summer. He was brother to Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov did not again draw so heavily upon his personal experience as he had in Mashenka until his episodic novel about an émigré professor of Russian in the United States, Pnin (1957), which is to some extent based on his experiences while teaching (1948–58) Russian and European literature at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In 1936, Véra lost her job because of the increasingly anti-Semitic environment. His wife, the former Véra Evseyevna Slonim, whom he married in 1925, worked as a translator. Last modified on Thu 4 Mar 2021 05.58 EST. Writing the book, he noted that he needed to translate his own memories into English, and to spend a lot of time explaining things that 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"). Vladimir Nabokov in New York in 1958. [37] He firmly believed that novels should not aim to teach and that readers should not merely empathize with characters but that a 'higher' aesthetic enjoyment should be attained, partly by paying great attention to details of style and structure. Lolita (1955), with its antihero, Humbert Humbert, who is possessed by an overpowering desire for very young girls, is yet another of Nabokov’s subtle allegories: love examined in the light of its seeming opposite, lechery. [40], Nabokov was a self-described synesthete, who at a young age equated the number five with the colour red. Vladimir was the family's eldest and favorite child, with four younger siblings: Sergey (1900–45), Olga (1903–78), Elena (1906–2000), and Kirill (1912–64). "[34], Nabokov's creative processes involved writing sections of text on hundreds of index cards, which he expanded into paragraphs and chapters and rearranged to form the structure of his novels, a process that has been adopted by many screenplay writers in subsequent years.[26]. 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's consciousness". That commentary ended with an appendix titled Notes on Prosody, which has developed a reputation of its own. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin; 22 April 1899 – 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American novelist, translator and entomologist. [61] His insomnia contributed to an enlarged prostate later in life, which only exacerbated his sleeplessness. The Nabokovs resided in Wellesley, Massachusetts, during the 1941–42 academic year. After the withdrawal of the German Army in November 1918 and the defeat of the White Army (early 1919), the Nabokovs sought exile in western Europe, along with many other Russian refugees. 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. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. Link to Wikipedia biography 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. Proffer, Elendea, ed. He knew few Germans except for landladies, shopkeepers, and immigration officials at the police headquarters."[17]. The genus Nabokovia was named after him in honor of this work, as were a number of butterfly and moth species (e.g., many species in the genera Madeleinea and Pseudolucia bear epithets alluding to Nabokov or names from his novels). Hänen isänsä Vladimir Nabokov oli perustuslaillisdemokraattisen puolueen johtohahmoja ja kirjoitti useita kirjoja ja artikkeleita rikoslaista ja politiikasta.. Vladimir Nabokov omaksui jo lapsena venäjän, ranskan ja englannin kielen. Vladimir Nabokov (vene Владимир Владимирович Набоков; 22. aprill 1899 Peterburi, Venemaa – 2. juuli 1977 Montreux, Šveits) oli vene päritolu USA kirjanik. Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 (10 April 1899 Old Style) in Saint Petersburg[a] to a wealthy and prominent family of the Russian nobility. He never purchased a house, preferring instead to live in houses rented from other professors on sabbatical leave. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Nabokov's fiction is characterized by linguistic playfulness. In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or blunders. 1987. His first two novels had German translations, and the money he obtained for them he used for butterfly-hunting expeditions (he eventually published 18 scientific papers on entomology). Nabokov died on 7/02/1977 in Montreux, Switzerland of a mysterious lung ailment. Nabokov were a noble and rich family. [52], Throughout his life, Nabokov would remain committed to the classical liberal political philosophy of his father, and equally opposed Tsarist autocracy, communism, and fascism. Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944–45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. [citation needed], Nabokov's adolescence was the period in which he made his first serious literary endeavors. Nabokov's father became a minister of justice in the Crimean Regional Government. He died on 2 July 1977 in Montreux. He devoted more time to the composition of this novel than any of his others. He wrote to Edmund Wilson, who had been making suggestions for his lectures: "I dislike Jane Austen, and am prejudiced, in fact against all women writers. The Russian literary critic Yuly Aykhenvald was an early admirer of Nabokov, citing in particular his ability to imbue objects with life: "he saturates trivial things with life, sense and psychology and gives a mind to objects; his refined senses notice colorations and nuances, smells and sounds, and everything acquires an unexpected meaning and truth under his gaze and through his words. Shortly after his father's death, Nabokov's mother and sister moved to Prague. Vladimir Nabokov Biography Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on April 23, 1899, into a family with a long history of public service and scholarship. He was the eldest of five children and was trilingual from an early age. [28]:xxix–l, At the time of his death, he was working on a novel titled The Original of Laura. 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. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colours he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle". Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. 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. All his Russian novels were published in very small editions in Berlin and Paris. Selected by the site's editors, articles will be featured free of charge and will vary quarterly.Full access to all of the print and electronic issues of The Nabokovian are available on this site to members of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society (IVNS). Aleksandar Hemon, whose high-wire wordplay and sense of the absurd are often compared to Nabokov's, has acknowledged the latter's impact on his writing. Vladimir was not forced to attend church after he lost interest. Nabokov's brother Sergei did not leave France, and he died at the Neuengamme concentration camp on 9 January 1945. Nabokov, was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) in Russia and was the author of numerous books and articles on criminal law and politics, among them The Provisional Government (1922), which was one of the primary sources on the downfall of the Kerensky regime. This lament came in 1941, when Nabokov had been an apprentice American for less than one year. [49][50] In Speak, Memory, Nabokov proudly recounted his father's campaigns against despotism and staunch opposition to capital punishment. … Please select which sections you would like to print: While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Settle in for this novel-length quiz and find out what you know. Any palace in Italy is superior to the repainted abodes of the Tsars. During the period in which he wrote his first eight novels, he made his living in Berlin and later in Paris by giving lessons in tennis, Russian, and English and from occasional walk-on parts in films (now forgotten). "[69] The critic James Wood argued that Nabokov's use of descriptive detail proved an "overpowering, and not always very fruitful, influence on two or three generations after him", including authors such as Martin Amis and John Updike. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian. [79] Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides said that "Nabokov has always been and remains one of my favorite writers. In 1961 he and Véra moved to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland; he stayed there until the end of his life. Nabokov’s first novels in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947), do not rank with his best Russian work. Born in Russia, he wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin. Some time after the publication of Stikhi, Zinaida Gippius, renowned poet and first cousin of his teacher, told Nabokov's father at a social event, "Please tell your son that he will never be a writer."[15]. [32]:50 [33] Later in a November 1950 Wilson letter, Nabokov offers a solid, non-comic appraisal: "Conrad knew how to handle readymade English better than I; but I know better the other kind. [8][9]:16[10] His father was Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870–1922), a liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist, and his mother was the heiress Yelena Ivanovna née Rukavishnikova, the granddaughter of a millionaire gold-mine owner. Nabokov feared he might fail the exam, but his script was marked second-class. His childhood, which he called "perfect" and "cosmopolitan", was remarkable in several ways. He described the Karner blue. "[32]:282 Nabokov translated many of his own early works into English, sometimes in cooperation with his son Dmitri. Nabokov followed them to Berlin two years later, after completing his studies at Cambridge. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 978-0872494954. "A writer who truly and greatly sustains us is Vladimir Nabokov," Hawkes stated in a 1964 interview. [59] Nabokov was very open about, and received criticism over, his utter indifference to organized mysticism, to religion, and to the church—any church. Biography of Vladimir Nabokov This page is for listing biographical (and autobiographical) publications on Nabokov. Many of his representatives reached serious social heights, for example, the future grandfather of the writer Dmitry Nikolaevich Nabokov was Minister of Justice, one of the authors of the judicial reform of 1864. I detest the Soviet theater. They lived at a friend's estate and in September 1918 moved to Livadiya, at the time part of the Ukrainian Republic. In March 1922, Nabokov's father was fatally shot in Berlin by Russian monarchists Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky as he was trying to shield the real target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. "[80][dubious – discuss] T. Coraghessan Boyle said that "Nabokov's playfulness and the ravishing beauty of his prose are ongoing influences" on his writing,[81] and Marisha Pessl has also been influenced by Nabokov. Nabokov was a proponent of individualism, and rejected concepts and ideologies that curtailed individual freedom and expression, such as totalitarianism in its various forms, as well as Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. (He also wrote a number of short stories and novellas, mostly written in Russian and translated into English.). In Bend Sinister Krug comments on his perception of the word "loyalty" as being like a golden fork lying out in the sun. Among his students at Cornell was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who later identified Nabokov as a major influence on her development as a writer. As a trilingual (also writing in French, see Mademoiselle O) master, he has been compared to Joseph Conrad; Nabokov, however, disliked both the comparison and Conrad's work. Gould notes that Nabokov was occasionally a scientific "stick-in-the-mud". Many of his characters have a distinct "sensory appetite" reminiscent of synesthesia. Nabokov's story "Signs and Symbols" was on the reading list for Hawkes's writing students at Brown University. [16] Of his 15 Berlin years, Dieter E. Zimmer has written: "He never became fond of Berlin, and at the end intensely disliked it. [9]:24–36, Nabokov's father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was the most outspoken defender of Jewish rights in the Russian Empire, continuing in a family tradition that had been led by his own father, Dmitry Nabokov, who as Justice Minister under Tsar Alexander II had successfully blocked anti-semitic measures from being passed by the Interior Minister. He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem called Lines Written in Oregon. "Actualism: Pynchon's Debt to Nabokov", "John Hawkes: An Interview. He knew little German. The subject matter of Nabokov’s novels is principally the problem of art itself presented in various figurative disguises. Vladimir Nabokov Biography, Life, Interesting Facts Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-American entomologist and novelist who worked under the pen name Vladimir Sirin. In 1916, Nabokov inherited the estate Rozhdestveno, next to Vyra, from his uncle Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov ("Uncle Ruka" in Speak, Memory). [54][56][57][58] Racism against African-Americans appalled Nabokov, who touted Alexander Pushkin's multiracial background as an argument against segregation. In the same year, Nabokov began seeking a job in the English-speaking world. [72] Of the authors who came to prominence during Nabokov's lifetime, John Banville,[73] Don DeLillo,[74] Salman Rushdie,[75] and Edmund White[76] were all influenced by him. [32]:274 Although Véra worked as his personal translator and secretary, he made publicly known that his ideal translator would be male, and especially not a "Russian-born female". [11] His cousins included the composer Nicolas Nabokov. Sergey died on 9 January 1945 in a Nazi concentration camp located in Neuengamme. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945, but he and his wife returned to Europe in 1961, settling in Montreux, Switzerland. The paleontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould discussed Nabokov's lepidoptery in his essay, "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov" (reprinted in I Have Landed). The song cycle "Sing, Poetry" on the 2011 contemporary classical album Troika comprises settings of Russian and English versions of three of Nabokov's poems by such composers as Jay Greenberg, Michael Schelle and Lev Zhurbin. Both Cambridge and Cornell Universities held celebrations of the centennial of Nabokov's birth during 1998/99. Nabokov published two collections of verse, Poems (1916) and Two Paths (1918), before leaving Russia in 1919. 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. Please expand with any materials you know of, particularly memoirs by others that include descriptions of Nabokov and his family members. "[50]:148, In the 1940s, as an émigré in America, Nabokov would stress the connection between American and English liberal democracy and the aspirations of the short-lived Russian provisional government. Vladimir and Sergey in 1916 Sergey Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian poet and pedagogist who was born on 12 March 1900 in Saint Petersburg. Vladimir Nabokov, in full Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, (born April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia—died July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switzerland), Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. [13][14] Elena, who in later years became Vladimir's favorite sibling, published her correspondence with him in 1985. Of these, Despair and Invitation to a Beheading were his first works of importance and foreshadowed his later fame. His ability to recall in vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his permanent exile, providing a theme that runs from his first book Mary to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. His first short story had already been published in Berlin in 1924. In the next five years he produced four novels and a novella. The novelist John Hawkes took inspiration from Nabokov and considered himself his follower. [42], For some synesthetes, letters are not simply associated with certain colors, they are themselves colored. Vladimir Nabokov (April 22, 1899 – July 2, 1977) was a Russian-American author.He wrote his first books in Russian, and after he moved to the United States, he wrote in English.His most famous book is Lolita, but others have also become famous, such as Pnin, Pale Fire, and Ada or Ardor.. Nabokov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the first of five children. Alison Flood. 10 April] 1899c – 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American novelist. His longest novel, which met with a mixed response, is Ada (1969). Russia has always been a curiously unpleasant country despite her great literature. His father, V.D. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all."[26]. 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. "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. In 1922, Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert; she broke off the engagement in early 1923, her parents worrying that he could not provide for her. : Алетейя, 2011. His final examination result was second-class, and his BA conferred in 1922. 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". She was an important source for later biographers of Nabokov. Writer Ayn Rand recalled Olga (her close friend at Stoiunina Gymnasium) as a supporter of constitutional monarchy who first awakened Rand's interest in politics. "[32][65] But after rereading Austen's Mansfield Park he changed his mind and taught it in his literature course; he also praised Mary McCarthy's work. [7] He was a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. He and his family made their way to England, and he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile. Many other subtle references are made in Nabokov's writing that can be traced back to his synesthesia. He was the father of Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov is known as one of the leading prose stylists of the 20th century; his first writings were in Russian, but he achieved his greatest fame with the novels he wrote in the English language. Between 1922 and 1940 Nabokov lived in Germany and France, and, while continuing to write poetry, he experimented with drama and even collaborated on several unproduced motion-picture scenarios. [28]:628ff On translating Lolita, Nabokov writes, "I imagined that in some distant future somebody might produce a Russian version of Lolita. In his cosmopolitan home, he learned to read and write in English, Russian, and French. After the 1917 February Revolution, Nabokov's father became a secretary of the Russian Provisional Government in Saint Petersburg. [18] In May 1923, he met Véra Evseyevna Slonim, a Russian-Jewish woman, at a charity ball in Berlin. On the other hand, he viewed the much older English iambic tetrameters as muddled and poorly documented. The eldest of five children, he grew up in a wealthy and aristocratic family, moving between two homes (one in St. Petersburg, and an estate fifty miles to the south in the countryside). 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