Vladimir Nabokov.

His grandfather served as Justice Minister to Czar Alexander II, and his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal political leader and editor who counted Sergei Diaghilev among his friends. The wealthy aristocratic family of St. Petersburg welcomed Vladimir Nabokov in 1899, the eldest of five children. The family was trilingual, and young Nabokov read Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, and Russian masters like Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. From age seven, he developed a passion for lepidoptery, spending summers collecting butterflies at the family estate of Vyra. He graduated from the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg before the Russian Revolution of 1917 upended his world.

Nabokov’s first novel after fleeing the Russian Revolution was The Luzhin Defence 1930, which reflected his experience of emigration. He struggled with the switch from Russian to English, taking six years to complete Lolita 1955, the story of a pedophile’s obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel was banned in the United States and United Kingdom until 1958. It became a bestseller, and he later wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation. In 1964, he published a four-volume translation of Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin, a decade-long project. He taught literature at Cornell University and worked as an entomologist at Harvard University, becoming a noted lepidopterist.

In 1925, Nabokov married Vera Evseevna Slonim, from a Russian-Jewish family. Their son Dmitri was born in 1934. After fleeing Europe for the United States in 1940 crossing on the Champlain with money from composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945. In 1960, he moved to Switzerland, living at the Montreux Palace Hotel, where he rarely used a telephone and never learned to drive. Vera drove him everywhere. He had synaesthesia, a condition shared with composers like Alexander Scriabin, and composed chess problems in his spare time.

Lolita remains a landmark of 20th-century literature. His butterfly collections are preserved at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and the Zoology Museum in Lausanne. His butterfly collections are still studied. The family mansion in St. Petersburg is now a Nabokov Museum. His translations and scholarly works on Nikolay Gogol, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka still influence writers and academics. He is remembered as a master stylist and a dedicated lepidopterist.