Life
Nabokov was born in Tsarskoe Selo, into a wealthy and aristocratic family. His father Dmitry Nabokov (1827–1904) was a Justice Minister in the reign of Alexander II from 1878 to 1885, and his mother Maria von Korff (1842–1926) was a Baroness from a prominent Baltic German family in Courland.
He studied criminal law at the University of St. Petersburg and taught criminology at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence.
V. D. Nabokov married Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova in 1897, with whom he had five children. Their eldest son was the writer and lepidopterist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, who portrayed his father in his memoirs (Speak, Memory, 1967); V. V. Nabokov included in his novel Pale Fire a scene of misdirected assassination evoking the death of his father. Other children were Sergey (1900–1945), Kirill (1911–1964), Elena (1906–2000) and Olga (1903–1978), who was a childhood friend of novelist Ayn Rand.
Read more about this topic: Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov
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