II.

Life

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, into a prominent and wealthy aristocratic family. His father was politically active in Russia before the family fled to western Europe in 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Nabokov attended school in England and graduated from the University of Cambridge with highest honors in French and Russian literature in 1922. He then moved to Berlin, Germany, where his family was living. That same year his father was shot and killed.

In Berlin, Nabokov wrote for the Russian émigré press under the pseudonym of Vladimir Sirin. He moved to France in 1937 and began to write in English. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he was a professor of English literature at Wellesley College from 1941 to 1948 and a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959. In 1945 he became an American citizen. After the publication and success of Lolita, he eventually retired from teaching and moved to Switzerland to concentrate on writing.