when Nabokov attempted to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita, Véra stopped him

He also makes cameo appearances in some of his novels, such as the character Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov"), who appears in both Lolita and Ada

As an adult, Nabokov had more luck. He named multiple species, most famously the Karner blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis), which he came across in upstate New York, in 1944.

Eventually, though, his attention shifted to genitalia, which evolve more slowly, and in a more linear way, than wing patterns. He produced hundreds, perhaps thousands, of illustrations of these intricate, baffling structures.

The rest is literary history. Four years after sending Lolita to his disdainful friends, Nabokov published his nymphet’s tale in the United States. G.P. Putnam’s sold 100,000 copies in three weeks. Hurricane Lolita (from Nabokov’s Pale Fire, ll. 679–680; “It was a year of tempests, Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine”) swept across America, Europe and the world, changing the Nabokovs’ lives forever. Overnight, they were rich, and promptly abandoned Cornell and Ithaca to live in the Montreux Palace Hotel overlooking Lake Geneva

The Nabokovs were members of imperial Russia's most exclusive social circles, and the children grew up in a glamorous whirl of country estates, liveried servants, balls, boating parties and annual vacations in Biarritz, France, and on the Riviera. The family was extraordinarily wealthy; their lineage included princes and generals and government ministers, and even their faithful dog, Box II, was descended from a pair that belonged to Anton Chekhov. Nabokov once told an interviewer, "I probably had the happiest childhood imaginable."

Vladimir, by contrast, was almost pathologically insensitive to music, which he once described as "an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds."

When he was 15 and Vladimir 16, Vladimir found Sergei's diary open on his desk and read it. He showed it to their tutor, who showed it to the children's father. In retelling the incident Nabokov writes, with uncharacteristic dryness, that Sergei's journal "abruptly provided a retroactive clarification of certain oddities of behavior on his part."

Nabokov simply didn't like homosexuals. Even after Sergei's death, Nabokov used homophobic slurs that make the modern reader cringe. In one letter he describes Taos, N.M., where he spent a summer, as "a dismal hole full of third-rate painters and faded pansies." And he referred to gay Russian critic Georgy Adamovich as "Sodomovich." According to Andrew Field, his first biographer, Nabokov considered homosexuality to be a hereditary illness. Nabokov's homophobia is in fact one of the dirty little secrets of 20th century literature, on a par with T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism. "I believe Nabokov was quite homophobic," says Galya Diment, vice president of the Nabokov Society and a professor in the Slavic department at the University of Washington. "It behooves his fans and admirers to admit it -- and also to regret it."

"When I was eight or nine," Nabokov writes in "Speak, Memory," "he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and (while two young footmen were clearing the table in the empty dining room) fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments." In his biography of Nabokov, Boyd notes "Humbert's first feignedly nonchalant fumbles with Lolita," and suggests that "the adult Nabokov's disapproval of homosexuals and his solicitude for childhood innocence may all have their origins here."