“I forbid you to be miserable,” he tells her in March. “There’s no power in the world that could take away or spoil even an inch of this endless love.”

He was instantly besotted.

Nabokov had just emerged from the heartbreak of his first great love and was still raw with grief over his father’s death.

By the time Lolita appeared, his relationship with Vera had survived not just a serious affair and several dalliances but also a near-adulterous relationship with a teenage girl he was teaching. He had also undertaken extensive research into teenage sexual maturity

He drew up a list of nearly 30 past conquests for Vera in the early days of their courtship

A week after she joined him, Vladimir confessed to Vera that he was in the midst of a delirious love affair with a Paris-based Russian called Irina Yurievna Guadanini. He was still very much in the delicious daze of adultery. He could not shake off his infatuation and thought he would have to leave Vera.

He replied that Vera had forced him to end the affair

Everything about him spoke of another world, a distant realm of Old World sophistication and erudition

"I took a course in Russian and I got sidetracked on a course on Vladimir Nabokov," recalled Katherine Reese Peebles, a junior who interviewed the new professor for the college newspaper in 1943. "He did like young girls. Just not little girls."

Vera was alone in the knowledge that her husband was at work on a "time bomb", a work so inflammatory that he blacked out the research notes - on sexual deviation, on marriage with minors - in his diary

Vera had no such qualms. This did not mean that she was unaware of the dangers of her husband's publishing - and of the public's misreading - the sexually explicit confessions of a middle-aged European's obsessive pursuit of a prepubescent girl. Cursing the public's naive inability to distinguish author from protagonist, she acknowledged that this could result in some "unpleasantness

"My husband has written a novel of extreme originality which - because of straightlaced morality - could not be published here. What possibility is there for publication (in English) in Europe?"

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

He loved his wife deeply, but his love for himself was deeper still.

asked by a literary magazine "What is your view of contemporary literature?" he answered "Very nice, from up here, thank you"

Wellesley college for women (cf. Beardsley College in Lolita), where he flirted with the students, and sometimes more than flirted, though there is no evidence that he conducted real affairs. "He did like young girls," said one of his "crushes", Katherine Reese Peebles - a name that even Nabokov could not have invented - "just not little girls."

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