Known for his dark themes including mistaken assassination, imaginary illness, and murder, multilingual writer Vladimir Nabokov achieved lasting literary fame for his controversial English novel, Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov was born to a Russian aristocratic family in Saint Petersburg in 1899. Nabokov began his work as a writer experimenting with poetry, and he published two collections, Poems (1916) and Two Paths (1918), as a young adult. Due to unrest resulting from the Bolshevik Revolution, his family left Russia for England in 1919, where Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1922, after relocating his family to Berlin, Nabokov’s father was murdered, while attempting to shield another man, an event which deeply affected Nabokov.

In Berlin, Nabokov continued to write poetry in both English and Russian, publishing two collections of Russian poetry, The Cluster and The Empyrean Path, in 1923. He then began to experiment with drama, writing a five act play, Tragediya gospodina Morna (The Tragedy of Mr. Morn), which was published posthumously in 1997. By 1926, Nabokov shifted his attention to prose, publishing his first novel Mashenka (Mary), which was largely based on elements of his own life, including details of his first romantic experiences. In 1928, he published King, Queen, Knave, which established Nabokov’s highly stylized literary voice. Over the next five years, Nabokov published four additional novels, as well as a novella, with Despair and Invitation to a Beheading seeing lasting popularity.

Nabokov, accompanied by his wife and son, eventually left Berlin for France in 1937, fleeing from the growing Nazi Party. In 1940, the family made their way to the United States, where he became a professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell, and began writing novels exclusively in English. Though Nabokov published several novels in both English and Russian, none earned more than several hundred dollars, until he completed Lolita in 1955.

Much of Nabokov’s work is concerned with the effect of the immovable current historical moment, as well as the influence of the material world upon the creation of art, and Lolita is no exception to this pattern. However, its focus on a man who experiences extreme desire for young girls has marked Lolita as a highly controversial novel since its initial publication. Though Nabokov is no stranger to darker themes, Lolita is particularly disquieting in that it leads its readers to experience empathy for a pedophile, causing its audience to feel complicit in protagonist Humbert Humbert’s crimes. Following Nabokov’s interest in allegory throughout his body of previous work, this odious romantic relationship acts as an allegory of the examination of love through the lens of lust.

Despite his Russian heritage, Nabokov’s work was not published in Russia until 1986. However, his reputation in the United States and Europe grew consistently beginning in 1940. By the 1970s he was considered a venerated literary figure. In 1967, he published his autobiography Speak On, which focused on his time living in Europe, shedding light on his early life and work. Nabokov was in the midst of writing another novel at the time of his death in 1977. Despite his instructions to burn his work — which like many of his previous projects was written on notecards kept in shoeboxes — his wife and son preserved it, allowing The Original of Laura to be released in 2008, a novel which illustrates Nabokov’s final thoughts on the topic of morality. Véra Nabokov’s role in the publication of his last novel is unsurprising given the recent discovery of Véra’s long-time role as Nabokov’s editor, famously saving drafts of Lolita when Nabokov wanted to burn them. Additionally, a collection of Nabokov’s letters to his wife were published posthumously in 2015, shedding light on their intimate romantic relationship, as well as their working literary partnership.