Early Life and Poems Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, into the "great classless intelligentsia" of old St. Petersburg. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (V. D. Nabokov), a titled aristocrat, was a leader among liberal politicians and advocated democratic principles as a statesman and journalist. His mother, Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikov, was a cultured and intellectual heiress. Educated at home by tutors and governesses, Nabokov was fluent in Russian, English, and French by the age of seven. When he entered school at eleven, he had already read all of Shakespeare in English, all of Tolstoy in Russian, and all of Flaubert in French. His early youth was divided between St. Petersburg, European coastal resorts (mainly the Riviera and Biarritz), and Vyra, his beloved summer haunt on his parents' country estate, which he lovingly preserved in several of his novels and in Speak, Memory, the autobiography he published in three versions over the course of fifteen years. In all these locales he engaged in the pursuits that permeate his fiction and memoirs: hunting butterflies, falling in love, and writing poems. By the time he was fifteen, Nabokov was writing poetry prolifically. His first publication, documented only by his recollection of it, was a single poem he prepared for distribution to friends and family in 1914. In 1916 he inherited his own fortune (roughly $2 million today) and the grandest of several manors on the family estate. He then paid for the publication of Stikhi [Poems], a collection of sixty-eight love poems. Over the next several years he averaged nearly one poem every other day. The earliest wave was preserved by his mother in marbled notebooks; later, Nabokov kept his own composition journals. His first major collections, Grozd' [The Cluster] and Gorniy Put' [The Empyrean Path], both published in 1923, were culled from these sources.
Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov V[ladimir] V. Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov, St. Petersburg, 1915 Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov |
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