Vladimir Nabokov

A propos de l'auteur : Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg in 1899. He was the eldest son of a rich, highly cultivated and strongly liberal family. When the Bolsheviks seized power the family left Russia and moved first to London and then to Berlin, where Nabokov rejoined them in 1922 after having completed his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. Between 1973 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems and translations in the Russian language and established himself as one of the most outstanding Russian émigré writers. In 1940 he and his wife and son moved to America, where he was a lecturer at Wellesley College from 1941 to 1948. He was then Professor of Russian Literature at Cornell University until he retired from teaching in 1959.

Nabokov published his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in 1941. His books include Ada; Laughter in the Dark; Despair; Pnin; Nabokov's Dozen; Invitation to a Beheading; Mary; Bend Sinister; Glory; Pale Fire; Transparent Things; A Russian Beauty and Other Stories; The Gift; King, Queen, Knave; The Eye; Strong Opinions; Poems and Problems; The Waltz Invention; Look at the Harlequins!; Tyrants Destroyed; Details of a Sunset; The Luzbin Defense and, of course, his best known novel, Lolita, which brought him worldwide fame and was made into a film. Many of his books are published by Penguin. He also published translations of Pushkin and Lermontov and a study of Gogol. In 1973 he was awarded the American National Medal for Literature. Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977 in Montreux, Switzerland.

In the words of one critic Nabokov is 'one of the most strikingly original novelists to emerge since Proust and Joyce ... Not only did he gain a magnificent command of his second language, English and develop an extraordinary narrative and descriptive skill, but he brought to his task a visionary insight, a romantic verve and a grasp of human character that seem peculiarly his own.'