(1899 – 1977) Nabokov combined formidable literary talent, an incisive intellect and a cosmopolitan familiarity with Western culture to produce some of the most influential fiction of the twentieth century. Born in Russia, he left the country with the rest of his family following the Bolshevik triumph and for the next several decades lived a peripatetic existence, living for periods in England, France and Germany. He arrived in the United States in 1940 and spent the next twenty years there, much of it at Cornell University as a Professor of Literature, where one of his students was a young Thomas Pynchon. While in America, Nabokov wrote what many consider to be his greatest work, Lolita (1955). A fictional account of a cultured, self-absorbed professor who falls in love with and then seduces his twelve-year-old step-daughter, the book’s frank treatment of controversial sexual material caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in the 1950s, and still makes some critics and readers uneasy. Initially the author could not find an American publisher for it. Lolita was finally published by a French press, Olympia.

Encountering Nabokov’s assured, flowing prose is somewhat akin to watching a skilled artist use a scalpel to sketch a scene into soft rock. His writing features a rare conjunction of lyrical gifts and a disciplined commitment to economy of style. In both his fictional writing and his critical essays he displayed a strong aversion to didactic or moralistic messages. While bracing, he can seem almost too hard and unsentimental at points. It is somehow appropriate that the other great love of his life, besides literature, was the collecting of butterflies.