ADA, OR ARDOR

　　Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, inSt. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their highculture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov wasan outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of theopposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevikrevolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he wasshot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying toshield the speaker from right-wing assassins.　　The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov wasalready reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine,Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainmentsof Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, hestudied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge,taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years helived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian underthe pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations,lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crosswordpuzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom hehad one child, a son, Dmitri.　　Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugeeonce more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for theUnited States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell.He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction inEnglish. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My privatetragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern,is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich,and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand ofEnglish, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror,the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations andtraditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, canmagically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317]Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguablyhis greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin(1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of hisearlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook Englishtranslations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote severalbooks of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland,in 1977.