Nabokov, Vladimir

Nabokov, Vladimir ( Vladimirovich Nabokov) (1899–1977), Russian novelist, poet, and literary scholar. After studying French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge (1919–23), Nabokov lived in Berlin (1923–37) and Paris (1937–40), writing mainly in Russian under the pseudonym ‘Sirin’. In 1940 he moved to the USA, and became professor of Russian literature at Cornell University (1948–59). From then on all his novels were written in English. From 1959 he lived in Montreux, in Switzerland, where he died.

Nabokov's reputation as one of the major, most original prose writers of the 20th cent., a stylist with extraordinary narrative and descriptive skill and a wonderful linguistic inventiveness in two languages, is based on his achievement in the novels Mary (1926), King, Queen, Knave (1928), The Eye (1930), The Defence (1930), Glory (1932), Laughter in the Dark (1932), Despair (1936), Invitation to a Beheading (1938), The Gift (1938), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Puin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), Ada (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974), and on several volumes of short stories. Nabokov's admiration for Dickens, R. L. Stevenson, and Joyce, among English writers and his unease with J. Austen, can be seen in his Lectures on Literature (1980).