Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in Saint Petersburg in 1899 into a cultured, wealthy Russian family. The Revolution forced them into exile in 1919. He studied at Cambridge, then lived among Russian emigres in Berlin, writing in Russian under the name Sirin. In 1937 he left Germany, and in 1940 he moved to the United States, where he taught literature at Wellesley and Cornell and began writing fiction in English.

He was also a serious student of butterflies and worked as a lepidopterist at Harvard. His novels are admired for their dazzling style, wordplay, puzzles and dark comedy, and for their interest in memory, exile and the limits of knowing another mind. Lolita brought him fame and financial freedom, and he later settled in Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.