"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."--Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. He was born into a rich and well cultured family. He published his first book of poems when he was 17 in 1916, then left St. Petersburg with his family the following year--at the start of the Bolshevik Revolution and the following civil war. By 1919, the family is in exile. Nabokov studies in Cambridge for three years from 1919-1922. At the end of his stay in Cambridge, at the end of March in 1922, his father is assassinated in Berlin. Nabokov is married at the age of 26 and moves to Berlin. He is able to support his wife and and son by giving Russian, French, tennis, and boxing lessons.
His first novel, Mashenka, is published at the age of 27. He and his family move to and live in Paris for a couple of years at the end of the 1930's, but by 1940, at the fall of Paris during World War II, he and his family emigrate to New York. He teaches at Wellesley and writes his first novel in English (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight).
He writes Lolita in 1955. By 1959 he is made financially independent due to the success of Lolita. He moves to Switzerland where he dies eighteen years later in Montreux on the second of July.
Resources: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Published by Alfred A. Knopf 1955; Bibliography and Chronology found in the book
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