Vladimir Nabokov (in; ) is a novelist, poet and critical literary American of Russian origin born with Saint-Pétersbourg on April 11th of the Calendrier Julien/April 23rd 1899, died with Montreux the July 2nd 1977.

Biography

A Russian childhood

Resulting from an aristocratic family Russian, the Nabokov young person receives a solid education; as of seven years, he speaks the English and the French, helped by his controlling foreign and “the vicinity of a library of one hundred thousand works”.

Nabokov saw a happy childhood. His/her father is a liberal politician, elected official with the Russian first Douma then Minister for the government Kerensky after the fall of the tsar.

The exile: Berlin, Paris, London

The Russian Révolution pushes the Nabokov family to be exiled with Berlin, where an important exiled Russian community saw. The Vladimir young person publishes there his first texts in the emigrated newspaper Roul . The assassination of his/her father by Russian monarchists, then the rise of the Nazism, push Nabokov (which married Véra Slonim, itself Jewish, and which gives him a son, Dimitri) to leave Germany in 1936 to settle with Paris then with London.

The young man begins there studies of letters and its first novel, Machenka , is worth a beginning of celebrity to him among the Russian emigrants of England. Its notoriety increases in 1928 with King, lady, servant . The first works of Nabokov all are written in Russian. With Defense Loujine , Nabokov hardly graduate became a writer Russian speaker of reputation.

The Russian writer becomes anglophone

When the the USSR proposes to the young writer to return to settle in its country, he refuses and prefers to teach the literature in the large universities of the the United States of America. Since 1941, in London, Nabokov writes a novel who marks the greatest turning of his career of writer: true life of Sebastian Knight . For the first time, Nabokov writes a novel in English and not in his native Russian. Its style becomes completely succeeded and itself delivers it can be presented like a proclamation of its work.

It then leaves to live in the USA where it will teach at the Cornell University. In 1945 Nabokov is naturalized American. The publication of Other Shores , an account of its memories of childhood is worth to him the literary recognition awaited so much in the United States. The dedication comes then with success from Lolita in 1955. The novel makes scandal, but the critic recognizes there already a masterpiece. The book is adapted to the cinema by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, then again by Adrian Lyne in 1995. This history tells the love impassioned and carnal of an European, named Humbert Humbert, for an American young person “Nymphette” twelve years. It publishes then pale Feu (1961), whose construction around three overlapping stories constitutes phenomenal a Mise in abyme.

Nabokov is characterized by dexterity, ingeniousness of its style and by its position of intermediate author between the literatures Russian and American. Moreover, a wild imagination, the use of the parody, the Satire, as of the word games in various languages contribute to its dedication.

In 1959, it settles in Suisse, in a hotel of Montreux, for the remainder of its life. It then adapts its first Russian novels in english language versions, often with the support of his Dimitri son. He will also work of long years with Ada or the heat , his last novel. Monumental work, its longest book, it is that “for which I would like that one remembers me”. In vain: several decades after its death in 1977, the author of forty novels is primarily known for Lolita .

Nabokov lepidopterologist

Vladimir Nabokov one is also distinguished lepidopterologist. In the years 1940, it was charged with the organization of the collection of butterflies of the Museum off Comparative Zoology of the Université Harvard. Its writings in this field are very pointed and one owes him the creation of many S. As it moreover was specialized in the spectacular not very subfamily Polyommatinae of the Lycaenidae , this aspect of its work and of its life was studied little.

The paleontologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould evoked, in one of its tests (joined together in volume I Cuts Landed ), the butterflies of Nabokov. It notes there that this one was on the occasion a scientist stick-in-tea-mud (limited, who wants nothing to know); in particular, it forever accepted only the Genetic or the number of chromosomes are criteria making it possible to distinguish the species from insects. Gould also notes that many supporters of Nabokov tried to allot a literary value to its scientific writings. Contrary, others claim that its scientific work enriches its literary work. Gould, defends a third way to him and shows the two preceding ones of Sophisme. Instead of considering that one of the two facets of the work of Nabokov because or stimulated the other, it advances that the two facets are born from the love of Nabokov for the detail, symmetry and contemplation.

Anecdotes

• Collaborator of Kubrick during the adaptation of Lolita to the screen, Nabokov found nevertheless film very different from its original work. With the passing, the Lolita of Kubrick is not so far away from the text. The principal difference is that the character of Clare Quilty, placed in filigree in the novel, is treated with the foreground by Kubrick (Quilty was played by Peter Sellers, whose Kubrick was a large admiror), which changes perception completely it.

• Vladimir Nabokov was synesthète, just like its mother and her son, and will play on several occasions of this gift in its works.

• He was a large player of failures, like much of its characters (Humbert Humbert, John Shade, and obviously Loujine). In its youth, it decorated its incomes while composing of the problems of failures for newspapers.

Texts published in French

(certain titles were published under various titles, we tried to indicate it)

• Machenka

• Defense Loujine , 1930
• King, lady, servant , 1933
• the true life of Sebastian Knight
• Other Shores , 1951
• Lolita , 1955
• pale Fire , 1962
• Ada or the heat , 1969
• obscure Room or Laughter in the night or Camera will obscura
• the race insane or defense Loujine
• the aguet or the guettor
• the mistake
• Nicolas Gogol
• Invitation with the torment
• Pnine
• the gift
• the extermination of the tyrants
• Looks at, looks at the harlequins
• the transparency of the things
• a Russian beauty
• the exploit
• Miss O
• Literature 1-2 & 3
• Details of a sunset (news)
• Intransigences or Left taken
• the enchanter
• the man the USSR and other parts
• Nabokov-Wilson Correspondence 1940-1971
• the Venetian one, a blow of wing and other news
• selected Letters 1940-1977
• Poems and problems

External bonds

1. Zembla
2. Nabokov Library

Be-X-old: УладзімерНабокаў Simple: Vladimir Nabokov

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