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Other authors named Vladimir:
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Vote: | A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. |
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Vote: | Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets." |
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Vote: | I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. |
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Vote: | Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. |
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Vote: | It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. |
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Vote: | Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. |
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Vote: | Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one. |
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Vote: | My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. |
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Vote: | The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. |
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Vote: | The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. |
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Vote: | The tiny madman in his padded cell. |
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Vote: | There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. |
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Vote: | You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. |
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Biography
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Владимирович Набоков; pronounced: vlah-DEE-meer nah-BAWK-awf) (April 10 O.S. April 22/23 N.S., 1899 - July 2, 1977) was a Russian-American author. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterful prose stylist for the novels he composed in English.
Nabokov's best-known work in English is undoubtedly Lolita (1955), frequently cited as one of the most important novels of the 20th century, probably followed by the singularly structured Pale Fire (1962). Both of these works exhibit Nabokov's love of wordplay and descriptive detail.
He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery and created a number of chess problems.
Biography
The eldest son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife Elena, née Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, he was born to a prominent and aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, where he also spent his childhood and youth. The family habitually spoke a mix of Russian, English and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age.
The Nabokov family left Russia in the wake of the 1917 February Revolution for a friend's estate in the Crimea, where they remained for 18 months. Following the defeat of the White Army in Crimea, they left Russia for exile in western Europe. After emigrating from Russia in 1919, the family settled briefly in England, where Vladimir enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied Slavic and romance languages. In 1923, he graduated from Cambridge and relocated to Berlin, where he gained some reputation within the colony of Russian émigrés as a novelist and poet, writing under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin. He married Véra Slonim in Berlin in 1925. Their son, Dmitri, was born in 1934.
Nabokov left Germany with his family in 1937 for Paris and in 1940 fled from the advancing German troops to the United States. It was here that he met Edmund Wilson, who introduced Nabokov's work to American editors, eventually leading to his international recognition. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
After the success of Lolita, Nabokov was able to move to Europe. From 1960 to the end of his life he lived in a hotel room in Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.
Note on Nabokov's date of birth
His date of birth was April 10, 1899, by the Julian calendar. The Gregorian equivalent was then April 22, but it changed to April 23 in 1900, while Russia did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918. Accordingly, his date of birth may correctly be considered as April 22, as some sources show, but April 23 is the birthday that he actually observed.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Vladimir Nabokov".
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