VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH NABOKOV was born on April 23, 1899, in
St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high
culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was
an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the
opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik
revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was
shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to
shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was
already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine,
Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments
of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he
studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge,
taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he
lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under
the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations,
lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword
puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he
had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee
once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the
United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell.
He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in
English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private
tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern,
is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich,
and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of
English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror,
the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and
traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can
magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317]
Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably
his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita
(1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as
the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also
undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin
and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in
Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
"...the reader of Lolita attempts to arrive at some sense of its
overall 'meaning,' while at the same time having to struggle...with
the difficulties posed by the recondite materials and rich,
elaborate verbal textures. The main purpose of this edition is to
solve such local problems and to show how they contribute to the
total design of the novel."--From the Preface by Alfred Appel,
Jr.
"Fascinatingly detailed."--Edmund Morris, The New York Times Book
Review
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