Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Nabokov - Biography, Work, Nabokov's Synesthesia, Lepidoptery, List of works, Works about Nabokov

Writer, born in St Petersburg, Russia. He studied at the Prince Tenishev School, St Petersburg (1910–17), and at Trinity College, Cambridge (1922 BA). To escape the Bolshevik Revolution, he and his family left Russia (1919) and moved to Berlin, Germany. He taught English and tennis, as well as composing crossword puzzles for the Russian emigré newspaper, Rul (1922–37), and gained a reputation as a fiction writer (in Russian) under the pen name, V Sirin. He moved to Paris (1937–40), then fleeing the Nazis he emigrated to the USA with his wife and child (1940). He taught at Stanford during the summer of 1941 and at Wellesley (1941–8), and as an authority on butterflies he became a research fellow in entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (1942–59). During 1948–59 he also taught at Cornell. An accomplished linguist, he had known English since his childhood but did not begin writing in it until after he settled in the USA. His varied work includes poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, translations, and literary criticism, as well as works on butterflies and chess problems. He is most widely known for his novel, Lolita (1955), conveying the infatuation of a middle-aged man with a 12-year-old girl; many critics and moralists attacked the novel, but it became a best-seller, if for all the wrong reasons. With the financial security that followed the success of this novel and several later books, he retired from teaching and settled at the Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, and continued issuing his literary works and pronouncements until his death.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Born:	April 22, 1899 [O.S. April 10] Saint Petersburg, Russia
Died:	July 2, 1977 Montreux, Switzerland
Occupation(s):	novelist, lepidopterist, professor
Literary movement:	Modernism, Postmodernism
Influences:	Anton Chekov, Andrei Bely, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Edgar Allan Poe
Influenced:	John Updike, Edmund White, John Banville,Thomas Pynchon

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, pronounced [vlʌˈdʲimʲɪr nʌˈbokəf]) (April 22, 1899 [O.S. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English.

Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as one of the most important novels of the 20th century . Both of these works exhibit Nabokov's love of wordplay and descriptive detail.

Biography

The eldest son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife Elena, née Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, he was born to a prominent and aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, where he also spent his childhood and youth. The family spoke Russian, English and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age.

The Nabokov family left Russia in the wake of the 1917 February Revolution for a friend's estate in Crimea, where they remained for 18 months. Following the defeat of the White Army in Crimea, the Nabokovs left Russia for exile in western Europe. In 1923, he graduated from Cambridge and relocated to Berlin, where he gained some reputation within the colony of Russian émigrés as a novelist and poet, writing under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin.

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.

Nabokov was a synesthete and described aspects of synesthesia in several of his works.

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 international recognition.

Nabokov came to Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature. 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 Wellesley. 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. After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University.

Also in 1945, Nabokov's homosexual brother, Sergei, who had lived most of his adult life in Paris and Austria, died in a Nazi concentration camp at Neuengamme, Germany.

Nabokov wrote his novel Lolita while traveling in the Western United States.

After the success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to move to Europe and devote himself to writing.

Note on Nabokov's date of birth

His date of birth was April 10, 1899 according to the Julian calendar in use in Russia at that time. In Speak, Memory Nabokov explains the cause of the error and confirms the correct date of 22 April.

Work

Nabokov's first writings were in Russian, but he came to his greatest distinction in the English language. (Nabokov himself disdained the comparison for aesthetic reasons, declaring, "I differ from Joseph Conradically.") Nabokov translated many of his own early works into English, sometimes in cooperation with his son Dmitri.

Nabokov is noted for his complex plots, clever word play, and use of alliteration. Nabokov's fiction is characterized by its linguistic playfulness. Nabokov's short story "The Vane Sisters" is famous in part for its acrostical final paragraph, in which the first letters of each word spell out a ghostly message from beyond the grave.

Nabokov's stature as a literary critic is founded largely on his four-volume translation of and commentary on Aleksandr Pushkin's Russian soul epic Eugene Onegin. 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. In his own words:

I have been forced to invent a simple little terminology of my own, explain its application to English verse forms, and indulge in certain rather copious details of classification before even tackling the limited object of these notes to my translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, an object that boils down to very little—in comparison to the forced preliminaries — namely, to a few things that the non-Russian student of Russian literature must know in regard to Russian prosody in general and to Eugene Onegin in particular.

Nabokov's translation was the focus of a bitter polemic with Edmund Wilson and others;

Nabokov's Lectures on Literature also reveals his controversial ideas concerning art.

Nabokov's detractors fault him for being an aesthete and for his overattention to language and detail rather than character development. In his essay "Nabokov, or Nostalgia," Danilo Kiš wrote that Nabokov's is "a magnificent, complex, and sterile art." the numerous anagrammatic pseudonyms that appear in his work (Vivian Darkbloom, Adam von Librikov, Baron Klim Avidov, Blavdak Vinomori) Butterflies Coincidence and fate Fatidic dates, especially 1899 (his birth year), 1922 (the year his father was assassinated), 1934 (the year his son, Dmitri was born) Games, chess, anagrams Meta-literature: books within books, stories about writing Metaphysics Mirrors, reflections, masks, doppelgängers, impersonations, issues of identity Mock-Biography, mock-autobiography, mock-memoir "Reality" [quotes from author]

Nabokov's Synesthesia

Vladimir Nabokov's case of synesthesia can be described in more detail than merely the association of colors with particular letters. Nabokov frequently endowed his protagonists with a similar gift. 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." Many other subtle references are made in Nabokov's writing that can be traced back to his synesthesia. Whether Nabokov intended his characters to be this way or he was merely writing what he knew is debatable.

Lepidoptery

His career as a lepidopterist was equally distinguished.

The paleontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould discussed Nabokov's lepidoptery in an essay reprinted in his book I Have Landed. Gould notes that Nabokov was occasionally a scientific "stick-in-the-mud"; for example, Nabokov never accepted that genetics or the counting of chromosomes could be a valid way to distinguish species of insects, and relied on the traditional (for lepidopterists) microscopic comparison of their genitalia. 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. , "Nabokov was a serious taxonomist," according to museum staff writer Nancy Pick, author of The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Many of Nabokov's fans have tried to ascribe literary value to his scientific papers, Gould notes. 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.

List of works

Fiction

Novels and novellas

Novels and novellas written in Russian

(1926) Mashen'ka (Машенька); English translation: The Luzhin Defense or The Defense (1964) (also adapted to film, The Luzhin Defence, in 2001) (1930) Sogliadatai (Соглядатай (Eavesdropper)), novella; English translation: The Eye (1965) (1932) Podvig (Подвиг (Deed)); English translation: The Gift (1963) (Unpublished novella, written in 1939) Volshebnik (Волшебник); English translation: The Enchanter (1985)

Novels written in English

(1941) The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1947) Bend Sinister (1955) Lolita, self-translated into Russian, (1965) (1957) Pnin (1962) Pale Fire (1969) Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1972) Transparent Things (1974) Look at the Harlequins! (1977) The Original of Laura (Unfinished/Unpublished)

Short story collections

(1929) Vozvrashchenie Chorba ("The Return of Chorb"). Fifteen short stories and twenty-four poems, in Russian, by "V. reprinted as The Portable Nabokov (1971) (1973) A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (1975) Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (1976) Details of a Sunset and Other Stories (1995) The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (alternative title The Collected Stories) -- complete collection of all short stories (2005) Cloud, Castle, Lake

Drama

(1938) Izobretenie Val'sa (The Waltz Invention); English translation The Waltz Invention: A Play in Three Acts (1966) (1974) Lolita: A Screenplay (Despite the credits given in the earlier film version, this was not used.) (1984) The Man from the USSR and Other Plays

Poetry

(1916) Stikhi ("Poems"). Twelve poems by Nabokov and eight by Andrei Balashov, in Russian. Fifteen short stories and twenty-four poems, in Russian, by "V.

Translations

From French into Russian

(1922) Nikolka Persik Translation of Romain Rolland's novel Colas Breugnon.

From English into Russian

(1923) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Алиса в стране чудес)

From Russian into English

(1945) Three Russian Poets: Selections from Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev. Facsimiles of Nabokov's notes. (1981) Lectures on Russian Literature (1983) Lectures on Don Quixote

Autobiographical and other

(1951) Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir - first version of Nabokov's autobiography. (1979) The Nabokov–Wilson Letters Letters between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson (1984) Perepiska s Sestroi (Переписка с Сестрой (Correspondence with the Sister)) Correspondence between Nabokov and Helene Sikorski; A revised and augmented edition of The Nabokov–Wilson Letters.

Lepidoptery

(2000) Nabokov's Butterflies, collected works on butterflies. ISBN 0-8070-8540-5

Works about Nabokov

Biography

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-7011-3700-2 (hardback) Boyd, Brian, Vladimir Nabokov: The American years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Vladimir Nabokov: A pictorial biography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1991.

Bibliography

Fictional works

Peter Medak's short television film, Nabokov on Kafka, is a dramatization of Nabokov's lectures on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The part of Nabokov is played by Christopher Plummer. A guide to Nabokov's butterflies and moths. Privately published, 2001.