Vladimir Nabokov

Born on April 22, 1899, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, into an aristocratic family of immense wealth and liberal convictions , his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a prominent jurist and statesman , Nabokov grew up trilingual in Russian, English, and French, in a household with a library of ten thousand volumes and a staff of fifty servants. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 swept it all away. The family fled to Crimea, then to London, where Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. After his father was assassinated by a Russian monarchist in Berlin in 1922, Nabokov remained in the city for fifteen years, writing nine novels in Russian under the pen name Vladimir Sirin, including The Defense (1930) and The Gift (1938), that established him as the foremost Russian prose stylist of his generation. He married Véra Slonim in 1925; she became his lifelong editor, translator, and protector. Fleeing the Nazis, they emigrated to America in 1940, where Nabokov taught at Wellesley and then Cornell, pursued his passion for lepidoptery at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and began writing in English. Lolita (1955), rejected by four American publishers before being issued by the Olympia Press in Paris, became both a scandal and a sensation, its tale of Humbert Humbert’s criminal obsession rendered in prose of such iridescent beauty that it permanently redefined the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and moral horror. Pale Fire (1962) , a novel disguised as a 999-line poem with commentary by a deranged editor , is among the most formally inventive works in English. The royalties from Lolita allowed the Nabokovs to move to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland in 1961, where he lived and wrote until his death on July 2, 1977.

At Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Nabokov spent whole nights bent over a microscope, dissecting the genitalia of blue butterflies. In 1945 he proposed they had crossed from Asia into the New World over the Bering land bridge, in five waves. Lepidopterists dismissed a novelist's theory. He never lived to see himself proven right.