Vladimir
Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, into, as he put it,
the "great classless intelligentsia" of St. Petersburg. His father,
Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (V.D. Nabokov), a titled aristocrat, was a
leader among liberal politicians and advocated democratic principles as a
statesman and journalist. His mother, Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikov, was
a cultured and intellectual heiress. Educated at home by tutors and
governesses, young Nabokov was fluent in Russian, English and French by
the age of 7. When he entered school at 11, he had already read all of
Shakespeare in English, all of Tolstoy in Russian and all of Flaubert in
French.
His early youth was divided between St. Petersburg,
European coastal resorts (mainly the Riviera and Biarritz) and Vyra, his
beloved summer haunt on his parents' country estate, which he lovingly
preserved in several of his novels and in Speak, Memory, the
autobiography he published in three versions over the course of 15
years. In all these locales he engaged in the pursuits that permeate his
fiction and memoirs: hunting butterflies, falling in love and writing
poems.
Early writings
By
the time he was 15, Nabokov was writing poetry prolifically. His first
publication, documented only by his recollection of it, was a single
poem he prepared for distribution to friends and family in 1914. In 1916
he inherited his own fortune (roughly $2 million today) and the
grandest of several manors on the family estate. He then paid for the
publication of Stikhi (Poems), a collection of 68 love poems.
Over the next several years he averaged nearly one poem every other day.
The earliest wave was preserved by his mother in marbled notebooks;
later, Nabokov kept his own composition journals. His first major
collections, Grozd' (The cluster) and Gorniy Put' (The empyrean path), both published in 1923, were culled from these sources.
 |
| NYPL, Berg Collection |
 This
metrical schema, one of Nabokov's earliest attempts to diagram a poem
using Andrey Bely's method of tracking the counterpoint he discovered in
Russian poetry, is preserved in a notebook he kept in the summer of
1918. |
V.D. Nabokov, fearing that his two
oldest sons--Vladimir, 18, and Sergei, 17--would be drafted into the
Red Army, sent them from St. Petersburg to the Crimea just after the
Bolshevik coup in the fall of 1917. They were soon joined at Gaspra, on
the estate of Countess Sofia Panin, by the rest of the family. Despite
his father's lifelong political activism and his new role as minister of
justice in the Crimean provisional regional government, Vladimir showed
no interest in politics, instead continuing to indulge in butterfly
hunts, love affairs and poetry composition.
Between June 1916 and
February 1918, he completed 334 poems, of which he planned to publish
two-thirds before leaving the Crimea. That proposed volume was never
produced, but a selection was printed in 1918 in the Crimea in Dva puti (Two paths), a collection he assembled with a schoolmate.
The beginnings of émigré life
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| Thinking Point | |
| Although Nabokov left his homeland in 1919, his early childhood and youthful experiences would always haunt his life and, of course, his writings, especially in his evocative memoir Speak, Memory (1967). What other writers are particularly celebrated for their evocation of childhood and adolescence in their work? | |
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When
the Crimea was evacuated in the spring of 1919, the Nabokovs took a
circuitous route to London; in the fall, Vladimir and Sergei left for
their first term at Cambridge University. A notebook from those months
in London contains a chess problem for nearly every poem, revealing the
foundation of what would become another of Nabokov's lifelong passions.
At
Trinity College, Cambridge, Nabokov began his studies in zoology.
Though he continued his lepidopterological pursuits unofficially and
published his first entomological paper there--on Crimean
lepidoptera--he soon switched his official field of concentration to
modern and medieval languages. He focused his studies on Russian and
French, presumably to allow himself more time to pursue his own writing.
To that end he bought Vladimir Dahl's formidable four-volume Interpretative Dictionary of the Living Russian Language, and committed himself to reading 10 pages a day.
 |
| NYPL, Berg Collection |
| Vladimir Nabokov's mother, Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, kept this album of her son's poems from various newspapers, 1923-4. |
In
August 1920, the Nabokov family moved to Berlin, where Vladimir would
compose all eight of his Russian novels. London had proved much too
expensive, and the Berlin economy was attracting Russian émigré's by the
tens of thousands. V.D. Nabokov helped to negotiate the birth of a
formidable émigré publishing house, Slovo, with the assistance of
Ullstein, one of Berlin's largest German presses. He also co-edited Rul',
a popular Russian-language daily with a worldwide circulation. From
Cambridge, Vladimir began to publish poems, chess problems and even
crossword puzzles in Rul', usually under the pen name "Sirin," to
distinguish his work from his father's. By the fall of 1921, the
Nabokov home had become a cultural center, hosting evening gatherings
frequented by well-known émigré artists, writers and musicians.
By 1920, when he completed his first year at Cambridge, Nabokov had been translating into and out of Russian for years: when he was 11, he reincarnated Mayne Reid's The Headless Horseman as French poetry; at 17, he brought Alfred de Musset's La Nuit de
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| Discussion | |
| For the Indian-born American novelist Bharati Mukherjee, the expatriate writer is the "ultimate self-made artist," one who even chooses "a language in which to operate." What 20th-century political, historical or cultural forces compelled writers such as Nabokov, Joseph Conrad and Milan Kundera to refashion themselves in new cultures and in new languages? | |
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décembre
into Russian; and at Cambridge, translations among his languages of
choice were required. When, in June 1920, he and his father discussed
the challenges that Romain Rolland's novel Colas Breugnon would pose for a translator, he took up the gauntlet himself; Nikolka Persic (Nikolka the Peach) was published by Slovo in November 1922. The same service for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, published four months later as Ania v strane chudes, required substantially less effort, and the result is still considered one of the best versions extant in any language.
Though
V.D. Nabokov read parts of the Rolland translation, he did not live to
see it published. He was shot and killed on March 28, 1922, while
shielding Paul Miliukov, the target of a right-wing assassin.
On
May 8, 1923, Nabokov met Véra Evseevna Slonim at a masquerade ball in
Berlin. Working in her father's small publishing concern, with literary
aspirations of her own, Véra was already familiar with some of Nabokov's
writing. He spent that summer on a farm in the south of France, in an
attempt to work through his grief at the loss of both his father and his
fiancée (he had written many poems to Svetlana Siewert, and her parents
had broken off the young couple's engagement that January). That summer
Véra read "The Encounter," a poem Nabokov composed about their meeting
and submitted to Rul' from France. When he returned to Berlin in the fall, he began to court Véra.
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| Thinking Point | |
| Nabokov said of his years as an émigré writer in Germany and France that he led "an odd but by no means unpleasant existence," a life of "material indigence and mental luxury." For a writer like Nabokov, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being both "inside" and "outside" a culture, the split consciousness of an émigré's life? | |
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Inflation
in Berlin had begun to drive the émigré community to other centers of
activity, primarily Paris, and that fall Nabokov's mother moved to
Prague with his favorite sister, Elena. He visited them twice during the
following year, which he spent writing--stories, scenarios and
sketches--although this did not prove lucrative enough to allow him to
support himself, his mother and sister, and his new wife-to-be. On April
15, 1925, he married Véra, and the need for money became even more
pressing and persistent. Nabokov managed to spare enough time from his
writing to make a living as a tutor--in French, English, Russian,
prosody, tennis and boxing--and regularly published reviews in Rul', while Véra did secretarial work.
Nabokov
remained an émigré writer, living and publishing in Europe and the
United States. By 1925, he had laid the groundwork for his future
careers as a writer, a teacher and a translator. The passions he
developed early on would drive his literature, and his talent for
languages would sustain him financially as well as bring him critical
acclaim.
Rodney Phillips, Sarah Funke
