The Nabokovs are reputed to descend from a fourteenth-century Tartar prince, Nabok Murza.
The family lives most of the year in their stylish rosy-stone house on fashionable Bol’shaya Morskaya and spends the summer on the three adjacent estates of Rozhdestveno, Vyra (both Ivan Rukavishnikov’s) and Batovo (Maria Nabokov’s), on the banks of the Oredezh, forty miles to the south of St. Petersburg. Other Nabokovs also have summer homes in the area
Their mother, as much an Anglophile as their father, reads Nabokov English fairy tales,
Mlle Miauton (“Mlle O” in Speak, Memory) will tutor them in the mornings and in the afternoon read them her favorite French novels, poetry and stories, beginning with Corneille and Hugo. The boys will soon be fluent in French.
Shocked to discover that his sons can read and write in English but not Russian, V.D. Nabokov hires the village schoolmaster, Vasili Zhernosekov, a Socialist Revolutionary, to teach them over summer
He takes a bank job but lasts only three hours.
Commissioned by Gamayun press to translate Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland into Russian (the fee is $5), he completes the job quickly.
To stave off depression after his father's death and the end of his engagement to Svetlana, Nabokov works as an agricultural laborer near Toulon, where he writes verse plays.
He returns to Berlin and seeks out Vera Slonim. They are soon in love. Vera, who had been following Nabokov’s literary career closely for years
January 10: Nabokov’s brother Sergey dies in Neuengamme concentration camp