Crimea and Cambridge Fearing that his two oldest sons - Vladimir, age eighteen, and Sergei, seventeen - would be drafted into the Red Army, V. D. Nabokov sent them from St. Petersburg to the Crimea just after the Bolshevik coup in the fall of 1917. They were soon joined at Gaspra, on the estate of Countess Sofia Panin, by the rest of the family. Despite his father's lifelong political activism and new role as Minister of Justice in the Crimean Provisional Regional Government, Vladimir showed no interest in politics, instead continuing to indulge in butterfly hunts, love affairs, and poetry composition. Between June 1916 and February 1918, he completed 334 poems, of which he planned to publish two-thirds before leaving the Crimea. That proposed volume was never produced, but a selection was printed in 1918 in the Crimea in Dva puti [Two Paths], a collection he assembled with a schoolmate. When the Crimea was evacuated in the spring of 1919, the Nabokovs took a circuitous route to London; in the fall, Vladimir and Sergei left for their first term at Cambridge University. A notebook from those months in London contains a chess problem for nearly every poem, revealing the foundation of what would become another of Nabokov's lifelong passions. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Nabokov began in Zoology. Though he continued his lepidopterological pursuits unofficially and published his first entomological paper there - on Crimean Lepidoptera - he soon switched his official field of concentration to Modern and Medieval Languages. He focused his studies on Russian and French, presumably to allow himself more time to pursue his own writing. To that end he bought Vladimir Dahl's formidable four-volume Interpretative Dictionary of the Living Russian Language, and committed himself to reading ten pages a day.
Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Pol' Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov's British Identity Book Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov's parents at Vyra, 1900 A Nabokov family gathering, August 1908 The five Nabokov children, Yalta, November 1918 |
Russia
1899-1919 | Europe 1919-1939
| U.S. 1940-1960 | Switzerland
1960-1977
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