Vladimir Nabokov

 

Born: 23 April 1899; St Petersburg, Russia

Father holds post in post-Revolution provisional govt - 1917

London - 1919

Cambridge (studies French, German) - 1920-22

Father assassinated in Berlin - 1922

Germany - 1922-37

Translates Alice in Wonderland to Russian - 1923

Marries Véra Slonim - 1925

1st novel, Mary - 1925

Birth of son, Dimitry - 1934

Paris, meets James Joyce - 1937

United States - 1940

Lepidopteral studies at Mus of Nat Hist, NY - 1940

Meets Edmund Wilson - 1940

Book on Gogol - 1944

Teaches at Cornell - 1948-58

U S citizen - 1945

Translates A Hero of Our Time - 1958

Switzerland - 1959

Translates Eugene Onegin - 1964

Dies: 2 July 1977; Montreux, Switzerland 

Nabokov plays with his readers by sabotaging their conventional expectations. Thus characters like Luzhin and Krug appear at times to be the sort of figures of whom we would normally approve; but at other times they seem repugnant. Also the obsession with patterning, the observation of detail, and the self-consciousness of language, are all ways of shifting attention from the humdrum contingencies of the outside world, and directing the reader inwards to the magical artifice that is the novel.

- Mark Lilly

 

He could swear he did not look back, could not - by any optical chance, or in any prism - have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture - which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never - consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past.

Ada