Vladimir Nabokov, a novelist, poet, playwright, and translator, as well as a collector of butterflies and inventor of chess problems, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899. His idyllic childhood and adolescence were abruptly ended by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which forced his family to flee from Russia to Europe. From 1919 to 1922 Nabokov studied Slavic and Romance Languages at Cambridge University, then moved to Berlin, Germany, where he married his wife, Véra. In Berlin and later in Paris, he supported his family by giving lessons in tennis, boxing, and the English language as well as by publishing original works of literature in Russian. Because Nabokov’s wife and son were Jewish, however, the family eventually had to escape from Europe to the United States to avoid Nazi persecution. Lolita, the third novel that Nabokov wrote after arriving in America, is narrated by a European émigré with a terrible secret: he is attracted to little girls. Nabokov’s protagonist finds that in postwar America he can fulfill his darkest fantasies—with tragic consequences for himself as well as the child.
European immigration.
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