Lolita
by Vladimir Nabakov
List Price: $12.00
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0679723161
Publisher: Vintage
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.
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