Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977)

Vladimir Nabokov, rusko-američki pisac, rođen je u Sant Petersburgu. Emigrirao je u Englesku nakon Oktobarske revolucije 1917. godine i diplomirao na Cambridgeu 1922. godine. Prešao je u SAD 1940, a od 1948. do 1959. bio je profesor ruske književnosti na Cornel Univerzitetu, potom prelazi u Švicarsku.Jedan od slavnih proznih pisaca 20. stoljeća, neobično snažne mašte, često je ekpserimentisao formom romana. Unatoč tome, njegovi radovi su često opskurni i zagonetni, krcati grotesknim epizodama, gramatičkim manipulacijama, i književnim aluzijama; uvijek eruditivni, duhoviti i intrigantni. Do 1940. pisao je na ruskom pod pseudonimom V. Sirin. Pored njegovih ranijih romana, Mary (1926., prev. 1970.), Poziv na pogubljenje (1938., prev. 1959.), njegova prva knjiga na engleskom je Stvarni život Sebastiana Knighta (1938.)Najpoznatiji Nabokovljev roman je nesumnjivo Lolita (1958.), priča o srednjovječnom evropskom intelektualcu, i njegovoj slijepoj zaljubljenosti u 12-godišnju Amerikanku, nevjerovatno privlačnu Lolitu, koja je prihvaćena kao skandal kada je prvi put objavljenja.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977)

Vladimir Nabokov, 18991977, Russian-American author, b. St. Petersburg, Russia. He emigrated to England after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and graduated from Cambridge in 1922. He moved to the United States in 1940. From 1948 to 1959 he was professor of Russian literature at Cornell Univ. He moved to Switzerland in 1959.One of the great novelists of the 20th cent., Nabokov was an extraordinarily imaginative writer, often experimenting with the form of the novel. Although his works are frequently obscure and puzzling‹filled with grotesque incidents, word games, and literary allusions‹they are always erudite, witty, and intriguing. Before 1940, Nabokov wrote in Russian under the name V. Sirin. Among his early novels are Mary (1926, tr. 1970) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938, tr. 1959). His first book in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1938).    Nabokov’s most widely known work is undoubtedly Lolita (1958). The story of a middle-aged European intellectual¹s infatuation with a 12-year-old American ³nymphet,² Lolita was considered scandalous when it was first published. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is a philosophical novel that is both the chronicle of a long incestuous love affair and a probe into the nature of time. Among Nabokov¹s other novels are Bend Sinister (1947), Pnin (1957), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974).    Nabokov¹s volumes of poetry include Poems and Problems (1970). Among collections of his short stories are Nine Stories (1947), Nabokov¹s Dozen (1958), and A Russian Beauty (1973); many of them are gathered in The Stories of Vladimir Nobokov (1995). Among his other works are a critical study of Gogol (1944); translations from the Russian, notably a four-volume version of Pushkin¹s Eugene Onegin (1964); and several autobiographical volumes, most notably Speak, Memory (1966). His college lectures, posthumously published, include Lectures on Literature: British, French, and German Writers (1980) and Lectures on Russian Literature (1981). He also achieved an international reputation as a lepidopterist.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.

The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditionsÑwhich the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism.

Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.