The eldest son of
Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife, née Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, he was born to a rich and prominent
Orthodox family of the untitled nobility of
Saint Petersburg. He spent his childhood and youth there and the country estate
Vyra near
Siverskaya. Nabokov's childhood, which he called "perfect", was remarkable in several ways. The family spoke Russian, English and
French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. In fact, much to his father's patriotic chagrin, Nabokov could read and write English before he could Russian. In
Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood, and his ability to recall in vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his permanent exile, as well as providing a theme which echoes from his first book,
Mary, all the way to later works such as
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
The Nabokov family left Saint Petersburg in the wake of the 1917
Revolution for a friend's estate in the
Crimea, where they remained for 18 months. The family did not expect to be out of Saint Petersburg for very long, but in fact they would never return. Following the defeat of the
White Army in 1919, the Nabokovs left for exile in western Europe. The family settled briefly in England, where Vladimir enrolled in
Trinity College, Cambridge and studied
Slavic and
Romance languages. His Cambridge experiences would later help him to write the novel
Glory.
In 1922, Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by Russian monarchists as he tried to shelter their real target,
Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This episode of mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in the author's fiction, where characters would meet their deaths under mistaken terms. In
Pale Fire, for example, the poet Shade is mistaken for a judge who resembles him and is murdered.
In 1923 Nabokov graduated from Cambridge and using a
Nansen passport relocated to
Berlin, where he gained a reputation within the colony of Russian
émigrés as a novelist and poet, writing under the pseudonym 'V. V. Sirin'. He married Véra Evseyevna Slonim in
Berlin in 1925. Their only child,
Dmitri, was born in 1934.
Nabokov was a
synesthete and described aspects of synesthesia in several of his works. In his memoir
Speak, Memory, he notes that his wife also exhibited synesthesia; like her husband, her mind's eye associated colors with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colors he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if
genes were painting in
aquarelle".
Nabokov left Germany with his family in 1937 for
Paris and in 1940 fled from the advancing German troops to the United States. It was here that he met
Edmund Wilson, who introduced Nabokov's work to American editors, eventually leading to his recognition.
Nabokov came to
Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. The position, created specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his
lepidoptery. Nabokov is remembered as the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department. His lecture series on major nineteenth-century Russian writers was hailed as "funny," "learned," and "brilliantly satirical." During this time, the Nabokovs resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944–45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. He served through the 1947–48 term as Wellesley's one-man Russian Department, offering courses in Russian language and literature. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian. At the same time he was curator of
lepidoptery at
Harvard's Museum of Comparative Biology. After being encouraged by
Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at
Cornell University. In 1945, he became a
naturalized citizen of the United States.
Also in 1945, Vladimir Nabokov was told by a relative that his
homosexual brother, Sergei (b. 1900,) who had lived most of his adult life in Paris and
Austria, had died in a
Nazi concentration camp at
Neuengamme, Germany, shortly before Germany's final collapse.
Nabokov wrote his novel
Lolita while travelling in the
western United States. In June, 1953 he and his family came to
Ashland, Oregon, renting a house on Meade Street from Professor Taylor, head of the
Southern Oregon College Department of Social Science. There he finished
Lolita and began writing the novel
Pnin. He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem
Lines Written in Oregon. On
October 1, 1953, he and his family left for
Ithaca, New York.
After the great financial success of
Lolita, Nabokov was able to return to Europe and devote himself exclusively to writing. From 1960 to the end of his life he lived at the Montreux Palace Hotel in
Montreux, Switzerland.
