Nabokov's family was forced to leave Russia because of the revolution in 1917, traveling first to Eastern Europe and then to England. He got a degree in literature from Cambridge University and moved to Berlin, where he earned money by giving English and tennis lessons; He also began writing novels in Russian. He was a lifelong insomniac who wrote mostly at night. He wrote all of his novels on index cards so he could compose passages in whatever order he preferred, before rearranging them into the final puzzle.
As World War II began, he moved with his wife and kids first to Paris and then to America, where he worked at the Museum of Natural History in New York, classifying butterflies. He was one of the greatest novelists and one of the greatest lepidopterists of his time, and spent just as much energy writing as he did collecting butterflies.
A year after he moved to America, Nabokov began a series of teaching positions at universities across the country, eventually ending up at Cornell. He wrote Pnin (1957); Pale Fire (1962); and his best-known novel, Lolita.
~The Writer's Almanac
LOLITA(1955), was about a middle-aged man's obsession with a thirteen year-old girl. The sexually precocious Lolita inflames a college professor. Together they run away, from motel to motel, in a series of comic adventures across the breadth of the United States, with every scene offering readers a devastating picture of American manners, mores, morals and glitz.
It was rejected by all of the American publishers he contacted, each of which recognized its literary merit but denounced its vulgar subject matter. The book became a bestseller, spawned a Stanley Kubrick movie, and allowed Nabokov to retire from teaching and move to Montreux, Switzerland, where he spent the last sixteen years of his life
To me, the desperate truth of Lolita's story is NOT the rape of a 13-year old by a dirty old man, but the confiscation of one individual's life by another. Humbert had tried to turn Lolita into his fantasy, into his dead love and in the process he destroyed her. We don't know what Lolita might have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, as well as beautiful and a wonderful read.
