Av. Rambert 28, 1815 Montreux, Switzerland
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 22 (April 10 old style), but celebrated his birthday on the 23rd. This confusion arose due to the discrepancy between the old and new style dates — at the beginning of the 20th century, the difference was not 12 but 13 days. Vladimir Nabokov liked to emphasize: “In the very last of my passports, the ‘date of birth’ is listed as ‘April 23,’ which is also Shakespeare’s birthday.”
Nabokov came from an aristocratic family: his father, Vladimir Nabokov, descended from an old noble family and was one of the leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party. The future writer’s mother, Elena Rukavishnikova, was the daughter of a wealthy gold miner. Nabokov was their firstborn; later Vladimir and Elena had four more children: Sergey, Olga, Elena, and Kirill.
The children received comprehensive home education. The family spoke three languages: Russian, English, and French, so from an early age the future writer “began reading English books by syllables before he learned to write in Russian.” The artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, teacher of Marc Chagall, gave Vladimir Nabokov drawing lessons. He was also fond of tennis and chess and spent much time in the extensive parental library, which contained over 10,000 volumes.
At seven years old, Vladimir Nabokov became fascinated with entomology: “Everything I felt upon seeing a rectangle framed by sunlight was governed by a single passion. My first thought at the morning light in the window was about the butterflies that this morning had reserved for me.” This passion, as Nabokov recalled, was born from a “trivial incident”: a mentor showed the boy a pale yellow butterfly, which was caught in a cap and locked in a wardrobe. The butterfly was supposed to die overnight, but the next morning it flew out the open window. Nabokov liked the insect so much that he “moaned with desire, sharper than anything I have felt since.” After this incident, Vladimir Nabokov found a night butterfly that his mother put to sleep for him with ether. This childhood interest in entomology Nabokov carried throughout his life. When the future writer was eleven, his parents sent him to the newly opened Tenishev School in St. Petersburg. In his autobiography “Speak, Memory,” Nabokov wrote:
“I was accused of unwillingness to ‘integrate into the environment’; of ‘arrogant dandyism’ (mainly due to French and English expressions peppering my Russian compositions, which was only natural for me); of refusing to use dirty wet towels in the washroom; of using the outer knuckles of my fist in fights, not the underside, as was customary among Russian ruffians. One of the mentors, poorly versed in games though approving of their social-group significance, once asked me why, when playing football, I always stood in goal ‘instead of running with the other boys.’ Another cause of irritation was that I arrived at school and left it by car, while other boys, worthy little democrats, used trams or cabmen. One teacher, grimacing with disgust, once suggested that I could at least leave the car two or three blocks from school, thus sparing my schoolmates the sight of the chauffeur ‘in livery’ breaking his cap before me. That is, the school sort of allowed me to drag a dead rat by the tail, but on condition that I would not shove it under people’s noses.”
In the summer of 1914, Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first poem, comparing its creation to “a trembling from a miracle… when heart and page were one.” Two years later, Nabokov’s uncle, Vladimir Rukavishnikov, died. He left his nephew a multimillion fortune and the Rozhdestveno estate. At that time, Vladimir Nabokov published his first poetry collection at his own expense, which included 68 poems. Later, Nabokov never republished it and recalled the book as “exceptionally bad.”
The director of the Tenishev School, V.V. Gippius, once brought a copy of my collection to class and thoroughly tore it apart amid general, or almost general, laughter. His considerably more famous but less talented cousin Zinaida, meeting my father, who was apparently the chairman of the Literary Fund, told him: ‘Please tell your son he will never be a writer’ — a prophecy she could not forget for about thirty years.”
After the 1917 revolution, the Nabokovs left St. Petersburg forever; the family moved to Crimea and settled in Gaspra. Crimea seemed alien to Nabokov: “Everything was un-Russian — the smells, sounds, the Potemkin flora in the coastal parks, the sweetish smoke spread in the air of Tatar villages, the bray of a donkey, the cry of the muezzin, his turquoise tower against the peach sky; all this decisively reminded me of Baghdad.” In January 1918, he published the only poetry collection written in collaboration. The almanac “Two Paths” included 12 works by Nabokov and eight by his classmate Andrey Balashov.
They lived in Gaspra for about a year; in 1918 Nabokov’s father was appointed Minister of Justice and transferred to Simferopol, and the family moved to Livadia. In November of the same year, his father introduced him to the artist and poet Maximilian Voloshin, who became the future writer’s mentor: they talked a lot about poetry, Voloshin introduced Nabokov to Andrey Bely’s metrical theory and the 1910 collection “Symbolism.” Over the next two years, Nabokov wrote more complex and intricate poems, applying Bely’s research on rhythms:
Thoughtfully and hopelessly
Spreads the aroma
And impossibly tenderly
The garden half-wilts…
In Crimea, the writer kept an album “Poems and Schemes,” where he placed his compositions, chess problems, and notes. Nabokov drew diagrams for his poems. For example, the “Big Dipper” diagram, if all pyrrhic feet in the poem are connected, forms the constellation.
Still in Gaspra, Nabokov met composer Vladimir Pole. At his request, he wrote a cycle of poems “Angels.” It included nine poems — corresponding to the angelic hierarchy. During the Crimean period, Nabokov prepared his first article dedicated to Crimean butterflies, which he published in 1920 in England.
At the end of March 1919, the Nabokovs left Livadia, and on April 15, before the Bolsheviks captured Crimea, they left Russia forever. They sailed on the ship “Nadezhda” to Constantinople. Nabokov stepped onto Greek soil on his 20th birthday. On the very first day, the family visited the center of Athens; Nabokov dedicated several poems to the Acropolis. But overall, Greece disappointed the writer: “I spent two spring months in Greece, enduring the constant outrage of shepherd dogs, searching for Gruner’s orange tip, Heldreich’s brimstone, Kriuper’s white butterfly: searches in vain, for I ended up in the wrong part of the country.”
By May, the Nabokovs moved to London. In England, they rented rooms at 55 Stanhope Gardens. Leaving Russia, they managed to take some valuables with them and lived off the money from them. On October 1, 1919, Vladimir Nabokov enrolled at Cambridge University on the advice of Gleb Struve.
At first, he attended lectures on zoology; Nabokov recalled: “For a whole semester I dissected fish until I finally told my university tutor (E. Harrison) that it interfered with my writing poetry and asked if I could switch to Russian and French philology.”
At Cambridge, Nabokov continued writing Russian poetry and began creating in English: Trinity Magazine published his long poem “The House.” Vladimir Nabokov also engaged in translations. During his studies, he founded the Slavic Society (later transformed into the Russian Society), played tennis, and was a goalkeeper for the Cambridge football team.
After a year in London, the Nabokovs moved to Berlin. Vladimir Nabokov stayed in England, wanting to finish his studies. In Berlin, his father, together with Joseph Hessen, organized the newspaper “Rul.” Its first issue, published on November 27, 1920, featured a story by Ivan Bunin and a poem by the young Nabokov. He signed it with the pseudonym Cantab. From January the following year, “Rul” began publishing Nabokov’s works under the signature “Vlad. Sirin.” This pseudonym was not chosen by chance; in Russian folklore, Sirin is a mythical paradise bird: “I read somewhere that several centuries ago, a magnificent variety of pheasant lived in Russian forests: it remained alive in folk tales as the firebird, and its splendid reflections are preserved in the intricate wooden carvings decorating village roofs. This wonder-bird so struck the imagination that the fluttering of its golden wings became the soul of Russian art; mysticism transformed the seraph into a long-tailed bird with ruby eyes, golden claws, and unimaginable wings; no people in the world love peacock feathers and weather vanes as much.” This signature appeared under most of his works.
During this period, Vladimir Nabokov sometimes visited Berlin. In March 1922, when the writer came to his parents for Easter holidays, his father died. He was killed during a speech at the Berlin Philharmonic by the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, Pavel Milyukov. Terrorists shot Nabokov Sr. in the spine, lung, and heart. He died instantly. Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his diary:
“I remember this night journey as something outside life, monstrously long, like those mathematical problems that torment us in a delirious half-sleep. I looked at the passing lights, the pale strips of illuminated sidewalks, the spiral reflections on the mirror-black asphalt, and it seemed to me that I was fatally separated from all this, that the lanterns and the black shadows of passersby were a random mirage, and the only thing significant, clear, and alive was grief, tenacious, suffocating, squeezing my heart. ‘Papa is no more.’”
Already in April, Nabokov was forced to return to Cambridge — the last semester awaited him there: “Sometimes it is so hard for me that I almost go mad — but I must hide it. There are things, feelings that no one will ever know.” Exams began in May, and on June 17, Vladimir Nabokov received a second-class bachelor’s degree. Four days later, he left for Berlin.
The death of his father shocked Nabokov. He became sullen and depressed. While still a student, he met the cousin of his friend, Svetlana Zivert. He dedicated lines to her: “I dreamed of you so often, so long ago, / Many years before our meeting.” Soon after moving to Germany, Nabokov proposed to Zivert; she recalled that the young man was so depressed she could not refuse him.
In Berlin, Nabokov earned money by tutoring: he gave lessons in French and English, taught tennis and boxing. In 1922, the publishing house “Gamayon” commissioned Nabokov to translate Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” The writer preserved Carroll’s humor and irony but, as he noted in the introduction, “Alice became Anya, began a new life”: he brought Russian color to the work and changed the names. Nabokov also had to compose “commercial descriptions of some cranes” for money. About this period, he wrote:
“…I see myself and thousands of other Russians leading a somewhat strange but not unpleasant life in material poverty and spiritual neglect, among phantom foreigners who play no role whatsoever, in whose cities we exiles had to physically exist.”
In the early 1920s, Berlin was the center of Russian emigration: over 300,000 Russian writers, diplomats, artists, and politicians moved to this city. The German capital had about a hundred Russian publishing houses and many bookstores. Berlin was called the literary capital of Russian emigration. Vladimir Nabokov entered this literary environment.
In April 1922, he joined the community of writers and artists “Vereteno” (Spindle), writing poems for the group’s almanac. Later, together with Leonid Chatsky and Gleb Struve, he organized a secret literary circle “Brotherhood of the Round Table.” It included Sergey Gorny and Vladimir Tatarinov, Sergey Krechetov and Vladimir Amfiteatrov-Kadashev. Nabokov’s closest friend during this period was Ivan Lukash. As Brian Boyd noted in the book “Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years,” “Nabokov would never again have such close contact in work with any writer as with the feisty Lukash.” Indeed, they worked together on pantomime scripts “Agasfer,” “The Blue Bird,” “Living Water,” and “Locomotion.”
In November 1922, Nabokov’s first Berlin book was published — a translation of Romain Rolland’s “Nicola Persik.” A couple of months later, he published poetry collections “Grape Cluster” and “Mountain Path.” Around the same time, Zivert’s parents broke off the engagement between Nabokov and their daughter: the future marriage seemed doomed due to the writer’s unsettled situation.
On May 8, 1923, Nabokov met Vera Slonim: “I met my wife, Vera Slonim, at one of the émigré charity balls in Berlin.” They corresponded for two years, and on April 25, 1925, secretly — since Slonim’s parents opposed their marriage — they married. Soon after the wedding, Vladimir Nabokov completed his first novel “Mary.” It was published by the Berlin publishing house “Slovo” in February 1926 under his permanent pseudonym “Sirin.”
“My hero is not a very likable gentleman, but among the other characters there are the sweetest people. I get to know them closer, and it already seems to me that my Ganin, my Alferov, my dancers Colin and Gornotsvetov, my old man Podtyagin, the Kiev Jewess Clara, Kunitsyn, Mrs. Dorn, etc., and — least but not last — my Mary, are real people, not invented by me. I know what each smells like, how they walk, how they eat, and I understand so well that God — creating the world — found in this pure and moving delight. We, the translators of God’s creations, little plagiarists and imitators of Him, sometimes, perhaps, embellish what God wrote; as it happens, a charming commentator adds even more charm to a line of genius.”
Vladimir Nabokov in a letter to his mother dated October 13, 1925.
This novel brought Nabokov fame — he was talked about as one of the most talented writers of the young generation.
Over several years, Nabokov wrote the novels “The Defense” about a genius chess player: “I’m finishing, finishing… In three or four days I’ll put a period. I won’t take on such monstrously difficult topics for a long time, but will write something quiet, smooth. Still, I’m pleased with my Luzhin — but what a complex, complex machine,” Nabokov wrote to his mother.
In 1933, the Nazis came to power, and the situation in Germany worsened. A peculiar response to political and social events was the novel “Invitation to a Beheading,” in which the main character is sentenced to death for being unlike others — “epistemological nastiness.” In 1934, Nabokov’s son Dmitry was born. Two years later, Vera Nabokov — Jewish by nationality — was fired from her job as anti-Semitic sentiments intensified in the country. In 1937, the whole family was forced to leave the country.
They first settled in Paris. Here Vladimir Nabokov finished one of his most famous novels — “The Gift.” Part of the work appeared in the Paris almanac “Contemporary Notes,” but the full publication only happened in 1952. In the preface to the English edition, Nabokov wrote:
“I lived in Berlin from 1922, i.e., simultaneously with the young hero of my book. However, neither this circumstance nor the fact that I share some interests with him, such as literature and lepidoptera, means that the reader should exclaim ‘aha’ and connect creator and creation. I am not Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev and never was; my father was not an explorer of Central Asia (which I myself may someday become).”
“The Gift” was and will remain the last novel I wrote in Russian. Its heroine is not Zina but Russian literature. The plot of the first chapter centers around Fyodor’s poems. In the second, Fyodor’s literary creativity develops toward Pushkin, and here he describes his father’s zoological research. The third chapter turns to Gogol, but its real core is a love poem dedicated to Zina.”
After three years in France, the Nabokovs fled to America on the last passenger liner Champlain.
In the 1940s, the Nabokovs moved frequently in search of work and housing. They lived in New York, Palo Alto, Middletown, Cambridge, and other cities. For some time, Vladimir Nabokov still hoped to publish his works in Russian but soon was forced to publish exclusively in English: “My personal tragedy — which cannot and should not concern anyone — is that I had to give up my native speech, my unrestrained, rich, infinitely obedient Russian style for a second-rate kind of English…”
Even in Europe, he began working on the novel “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.” This was his first major work in English. Nabokov published it in 1941 with the American publisher New Directions. His friend, the influential literary critic Edmund Wilson, commented on the novel: “It’s simply amazing — you write such magnificent English prose and are so strikingly different from other English-language writers… All this at the highest poetic level — it turned out you are an excellent English poet. The novel delighted and inspired me like no other new book I can recall for a long time.”
In America, Nabokov began teaching: he gave courses on Russian and world literature at Wellesley College, Cornell University, and Harvard. He lectured students on Pushkin and Lermontov, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, Gogol and Tolstoy. His distinctive view of literature and writers made him famous among students: his lectures drew full halls.
During vacations, traveling across America, Vladimir Nabokov began work on his most scandalous novel — “Lolita.” He wrote it for about five years: gathering material, lengthening the manuscript: “Humbert Humbert wrote it thirty times faster than I did. I only revised it in the spring of 1954 in Ithaca, my wife typed it in three copies, and I immediately began looking for a publisher.” As the author said, it is “a book telling the sad fate of a child: a perfectly ordinary little girl captured by a disgusting and heartless man.”
The novel was not published immediately; American publishers refused to take responsibility. It was published in 1955 in Paris by Olympia Press, which published avant-garde erotic works. A scandal soon erupted around “Lolita”: critics debated its cultural value, accused it of pornography, and attributed “atrophy of moral sense” to the author. “Lolita” even became the center of a court case, and the print run was temporarily seized. However, in 1958, the novel was finally published in America.
The uproar around the novel brought fame to its author: the book stayed at the top of bestseller lists for a long time, and the film rights for “Lolita” were worth $150,000. Vladimir Nabokov himself called this novel his favorite:
“It seems to me that every true writer continues to feel a connection with a printed book in the form of its constant reassuring presence. It burns steadily, like an auxiliary gas flame somewhere in the basement, and the slightest touch to our secret thermostat immediately produces a small muffled explosion of familiar warmth. This presence of the book, shining at an unchanging accessible distance, is an amazingly intimate feeling, and the more precisely the book coincided with its conceptual outlines and colors, the fuller and steadier its light. But however successful the book is as a whole, the author has favorite spots here and there, cherished nooks that he recalls more vividly and enjoys more tenderly in retrospect than other parts of the book. And when I recall ‘Lolita,’ I always somehow choose for my special delight such images as courteous Taxovich or the class list of Ramzdel School, or Charlotte pronouncing ‘waterproof,’ or Lolita approaching Humbert’s gifts in slow motion, or the photographs decorating Gaston Godin’s stylized attic, or the Kasbim barber (which cost me a month’s work), or Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital in Elfinstone, or pale, pregnant, irretrievable Dolly Schiller and her death in Gray Star, the ‘gray star,’ the capital of the book, or, finally, the composite chime from the town deep in the valley, reaching up to the mountain trail.”
The success of “Lolita” also brought Nabokov financial independence. In 1960, he moved with his wife to the Swiss town of Montreux. During this period, Nabokov translated Alexander Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” into English with commentary, gave English-speaking readers translations of Mikhail Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time” and “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” In 1962, Nabokov published the anti-novel “Pale Fire”: a work consisting of a poem by a fictional writer, commentary on it, a preface, and an index. Nabokov playfully called the novel “completely simple”: “This book is much more fun than others, it contains many little raisins, and I hope someone will find them.”
In 1967, the Russian translation of “Lolita” was published by the New York publisher “Fedra.” Nabokov himself worked on it.
In 1977, Vladimir Nabokov fell during his favorite butterfly hunting — at an altitude of 1900 meters, he slipped and fell down a slope. There were no fractures, but the writer spent some time in the hospital and underwent surgery. On July 2, 1977, Nabokov died from complications. He was buried in the Clarens cemetery, near Montreux.
The last novel, “Laura and Her Original,” the writer did not manage to finish — he wrote a will asking his wife to burn the manuscript. Vera Slonim did not do this, nor did Nabokov’s son. In November 2009, “Laura and Her Original” was published in English, and in the same year, a Russian translation appeared.
Sources:
https://www.culture.ru/persons/9830/vladimir-nabokov
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Набоков,_Владимир_Владимирович
