Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899–1977) was born into the Russian liberal aristocracy — his father, V.D. Nabokov, was a prominent jurist, journalist, and member of the first Russian Duma — in St. Petersburg. The family’s wealth, culture, and multilingualism (Vladimir grew up speaking Russian, English, and French with equal facility) were destroyed by the Bolshevik Revolution. The Nabokovs fled Russia in 1919; V.D. Nabokov was assassinated by a Russian monarchist in Berlin in 1922, an event that haunted his son for the rest of his life.

Life and Career

Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge (1919–1922), then settled in Berlin, where the Russian émigré community was large and literary. Under the pen name V. Sirin, he published nine Russian-language novels between 1926 and 1938 — Mashenka (Mary), Korol’, dama, valet (King, Queen, Knave), Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense), Podvig (Glory), Kamera obskura (Laughter in the Dark), Otchayanie (Despair), Priglashenie na kazn’ (Invitation to a Beheading), Dar (The Gift), and Sogladatai (The Eye) — which established him as the foremost Russian prose writer of the emigration, a reputation acknowledged even by rivals like Ivan Bunin.

In 1940, with the German occupation of France imminent, Nabokov and his wife Véra (née Slonim, his lifelong companion, typist, driver, and intellectual partner) and their son Dmitri emigrated to the United States. The American years (1940–1960) produced a second career in a second language — an achievement of literary bilingualism without precedent. He taught Russian and European literature at Wellesley and then at Cornell (1948–1959), where he was a demanding, eccentric, and beloved professor; his lectures, published posthumously as Lectures on Literature (1980) and Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), are classics of close reading.

The American novels followed: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), his first English-language novel; Bend Sinister (1947); Lolita (written 1948–1953, published by Olympia Press in Paris in 1955 after five American publishers rejected it, and by Putnam in New York in 1958); Pnin (1957); Pale Fire (1962); Ada, or Ardor (1969). Lolita’s American publication made Nabokov wealthy and famous overnight; he resigned from Cornell in 1959 and moved to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he lived for the remaining eighteen years of his life, writing, revising translations of his Russian novels, and pursuing his lifelong passion for lepidoptery.

He died on 2 July 1977 in Lausanne. His final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, was published in 2009 in a facsimile edition of his index cards, despite his instruction that it be destroyed — a Kafka-and-Brod situation replayed.

Major Works and Themes

Nabokov’s fiction is characterised by verbal brilliance, structural ingenuity, and an unsparing attention to the relationship between art and deception. His themes include memory and exile; the cruelty of desire; the unreliability of narrators; the interplay of imagination and reality; and the nature of artistic creation itself. He despised ideological fiction and insisted that novels existed primarily as aesthetic objects — “the sensuous side of art” was his touchstone.

Lolita (1955) is his most famous and most controversial novel. Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European intellectual, narrates his obsession with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze. The novel’s brilliance lies in the tension between Humbert’s seductive prose — among the finest in the language — and the horror of what he is describing. It is simultaneously a love story, a murder story, a parody of the American road novel, and a meditation on the relationship between beauty and cruelty. No twentieth-century novel has generated more critical argument.

Pale Fire (1962) is his most formally audacious work: a 999-line poem by the fictional John Shade, followed by a commentary by Charles Kinbote, a delusional exile who reads the poem as a coded account of the revolution in his homeland, Zembla. The novel can be read as Kinbote’s madness, as Shade’s creation, as a detective story, or as a puzzle whose solution is perpetually deferred.

Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966) is his autobiography — and one of the finest memoirs of the twentieth century. Its reconstruction of his Russian childhood through the lens of exile is prose of extraordinary sensory precision.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Nabokov’s reputation has been secure since the 1960s, when Lolita and Pale Fire established him alongside Joyce and Proust in the highest tier of modernist fiction. He has been claimed by the postmodernists (for his metafictional games and unreliable narrators) and by the aesthetes (for his prose style), and he belongs fully to both camps.

His influence is pervasive: Martin Amis, John Updike, Don DeLillo, W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Zadie Smith have all cited him as a formative influence. The Nabokov industry — biographies, concordances, annotations, scholarly journals — is vast. His Russian novels, long overshadowed by the English works, have been increasingly appreciated, and The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading are now regarded as masterpieces in their own right.

Key Works

• Mashenka / Mary (1926) — in Russian
• Zashchita Luzhina / The Defense (1930) — in Russian
• Dar / The Gift (1937–1938) — in Russian
• The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941)
• Bend Sinister (1947)
• Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966)
• Lolita (1955 Paris; 1958 New York)
• Pnin (1957)
• Pale Fire (1962)
• Ada, or Ardor (1969)
• Transparent Things (1972)
• Look at the Harlequins! (1974)

Collecting Nabokov

Nabokov is among the most desirable authors to collect across two languages and two continents. The market divides naturally into the Russian-language first editions (Berlin, 1920s–1930s, extremely rare) and the English-language novels (American and British, 1940s–1970s, ranging from rare to accessible).

Lolita (1955, Olympia Press, Paris) is the cornerstone. The true first edition was published in two volumes with the distinctive green wrappers of the Traveller’s Companion Series. The first printing is identified by the price of 900 francs on the rear wrapper. Fine copies with unworn wrappers and intact spines are genuinely rare — the cheap Olympia Press bindings deteriorate badly — and can command $20,000–$60,000. The American first edition (Putnam, 1958) in its olive-green jacket is the secondary target and trades between $5,000 and $15,000 in fine condition.

Pale Fire (1962, Putnam, New York) is increasingly recognised as Nabokov’s greatest achievement, and fine copies in the Putnam jacket are sought after at $2,000–$6,000. Speak, Memory (1951, Gollancz, London, as Conclusive Evidence; 1966, Putnam, revised edition) is collected in both versions; the revised Putnam edition is generally preferred by Nabokov specialists.

The Russian-language first editions — published by Slovo (Berlin), Petropolis, and other émigré houses in tiny runs — are museum-grade rarities. Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense, 1930), Otchayanie (Despair, 1936), and Priglashenie na kazn’ (Invitation to a Beheading, 1938) in their original wrappers are among the rarest books in twentieth-century literature and, when they surface, command prices in the tens of thousands.

Signed Nabokov material is available but not common. He was a cooperative signer — visitors to Montreux sometimes obtained signatures and brief inscriptions — and signed copies of the major English-language novels appear at auction periodically. Signed copies of Lolita (Putnam) bring $10,000–$25,000; inscribed copies command more. His correspondence — much of it conducted through Véra — is collected, with typed letters signed available in the $2,000–$5,000 range. Holograph letters, particularly those discussing literary matters or his lepidoptery, are significantly more valuable.