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
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“And he thought to himself...., ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 12:17-20.
“[Man’s] life consists in a relation with all things: stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures, sun, rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final relation is with the sun.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.”
—Augusto Roa Bastos (b. 1917)