Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 10, 1899, into a wealthy liberal Russian family in St. Petersburg. His father was a prominent lawyer and liberal politician. Nabokov's childhood was spent in a cosmopolitan environment, where he learned English and French before Russian. The Russian Revolution of 1917 forced the family to flee, and Nabokov would never return to his homeland. He studied Slavic and Romance philology at Cambridge University, where he published his first poems in Russian.
Nabokov lived in Berlin for many years, where he established himself as a Russian-language writer under the pseudonym 'Sirius.' It was during this period that he met and married Véra Slonim, who would become his most devoted collaborator and muse. With the rise of Nazism, the Nabokovs fled to Paris and, in 1940, emigrated to the United States. In the US, Nabokov taught Russian and comparative literature at several universities, including Wellesley and Cornell. It was in the United States that he began writing in English, achieving international fame with the controversial novel 'Lolita' (1955). The book, about a middle-aged man's obsession with a teenage girl, shocked many but was also praised for its stylistic mastery and psychological complexity.
Other notable English-language works include 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight' (1941), 'Bend Sinister' (1947), 'Pnin' (1957), and 'Pale Fire' (1962). He also translated Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' into English, with extensive notes revealing his profound knowledge of Russian literature. After the death of his wife Véra in 1978, Nabokov returned to Switzerland, where he spent the final years of his life. He died in Montreux in 1977, leaving a legacy as one of the great stylists of 20th-century literature, known for his sharp wit, humor, and profound exploration of memory, art, and the nature of reality.
Poems List
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
3
But what do I care whether or not I receive attention during my lifetime, if I am not certain that the world will remember me until its last darkest winter, marveling like Ronsard’s old woman?
3
Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
3
The compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
4
Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
3
For a long time he had wanted to express somehow that it was in his feet that he had the feeling of Russia, that he could touch and recognize all of her with his soles, as a blind man feels with his palms. And it was a pity when he reached the end of that stretch of rich brown earth and once again had to step along the resonant sidewalk.
3
Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra—these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known.
4
It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age—strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
3
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