Vladimir Nabokov | Origin of Street Names

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899 – 1977) was an American writer of Russian origin, translator, chess player, lepidopterist, and one of the most famous "White" Russians in the world - a member of the large Russian emigration that flooded Europe and the United States after the October Revolution.

He was born in the imperial capital, Petrograd, into a respected aristocratic family where he received a high-quality home education, while also developing a penchant for languages, art, science, and sports.

As an opponent of the Bolshevik Revolution, like most Russian intellectuals of the time, Nabokov's family was forced to leave Petrograd in 1917, and two years later, they left Russia itself, probably without realizing it would be forever.

Vladimir Nabokov's emigrant life began in London, where he studied Russian and French literature. The life of a displaced person then took him to Berlin, the center of Russian emigration at the time, where he lived for 16 years, earning a living by giving English lessons and creating chess combinations for local newspapers. However, with the rise of Nazism, he decided to leave the German capital with his established family and spent several pre-war years in Paris. He lived in the "City of Light" until 1940 when he finally moved to the United States, to Boston, with the significant help of the renowned Russian pianist and fellow emigrant, Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Leaving his homeland at a very young age, Vladimir Nabokov's literary work is entirely connected to his life in emigration. As an official opponent of the Soviet regime, his works were banned. He originally wrote novels in English and Russian, and poetry exclusively in Russian. According to critics, his body of work represents a synthesis of classical Russian and modern European literature, characterized by an authentic way of opposing traditional and emerging values.

In Vladimir Nabokov's extensive bibliography, which includes 16 novels and numerous short stories and poems, his novel "Lolita" (1955) stands out with its scandalous and socially unacceptable themes, provocative audience reaction, and relentless public criticism. This novel, focused on the obsessive love of a middle-aged man for an underage girl, was adapted into the famous film by Stanley Kubrick (1962) and remade 35 years later.

A curiosity is that despite all the adversities and forced changes of residence and occupation, Vladimir Nabokov nurtured a continuous and unusually great love for butterflies. His interest in this type of insect reached scientific dimensions, and Nabokov is the author of several scholarly papers on these colorful creatures. Furthermore, his private collection of over 4,300 butterfly species now adorns the showcases of the zoological museum at Harvard University, and out of reverence for the passionate lepidopterist, one butterfly species is named after him.

Vladimir Nabokov completed his emigrant journey around the world in Switzerland, where he died and was buried.

The name of the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov is now also given to a street in Belgrade, in Mali Mokri Lug.