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76-480: The protagonist is the character whose fate is most closely followed by the reader or audience, and who is opposed by the antagonist . The antagonist provides obstacles and complications and creates conflicts that test the protagonist, revealing the strengths and weaknesses of the protagonist's character, and having the protagonist develop as a result. The term protagonist comes from Ancient Greek πρωταγωνιστής ( prōtagōnistḗs )  'actor who plays

152-405: A gulag camp. Leo Tolstoy 's War and Peace depicts fifteen major characters involved in or affected by a war. Though many people equate protagonists with the term hero and possessing heroic qualities, it is not necessary, as even villainous characters can be protagonists. For example Michael Corleone from The Godfather (1972–1990) film series (1978–1983). In some cases, the protagonist

228-420: A hero (masculine) or heroine (feminine) protagonist is typically admired for their achievements and noble qualities. Heroes are lauded for their strength, courage, virtuousness, and honor, and are considered to be the "good guys" of the narrative. Examples include DC Comics' Superman (hero) and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games (heroine). An antihero (sometimes spelled as anti-hero) or antiheroine

304-483: A 'higher' aesthetic enjoyment should be attained, partly by paying great attention to details of style and structure. He detested what he saw as 'general ideas' in novels, and so when teaching Ulysses , for example, he would insist students keep an eye on where the characters were in Dublin (with the aid of a map) rather than teaching the complex Irish history that many critics see as being essential to an understanding of

380-406: A November 1950 letter to Wilson, Nabokov offers a solid, non-comic appraisal: "Conrad knew how to handle readymade English better than I; but I know better the other kind. He never sinks to the depths of my solecisms , but neither does he scale my verbal peaks." Nabokov translated many of his own early works into English, sometimes in collaboration with his son, Dmitri. His trilingual upbringing had

456-598: A Russian-Jewish woman, at a charity ball in Berlin. They married in April 1925. Their only child, Dmitri , was born in 1934. In the course of 1936, Véra lost her job because of the increasingly antisemitic environment; Sergey Taboritsky was appointed deputy head of Germany's Russian-émigré bureau; and Nabokov began seeking a job in the English-speaking world. In 1937, Nabokov left Germany for France, where he had

532-777: A curiously unpleasant country despite her great literature. Unfortunately, Russians today have completely lost their ability to kill tyrants. – Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov was a classical liberal , in the tradition of his father, a liberal statesman who served in the Provisional Government following the February Revolution of 1917 as a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party . In Speak, Memory , Nabokov proudly recounted his father's campaigns against despotism and staunch opposition to capital punishment . Nabokov

608-577: A day, seven days a week, until his eyesight was permanently impaired." Though professional lepidopterists did not take Nabokov's work seriously during his life, new genetic research supports Nabokov's hypothesis that a group of butterfly species, called the Polyommatus blues, came to the New World over the Bering Strait in five waves, eventually reaching Chile. Russia has always been

684-780: A friend's estate and in September 1918 moved to Livadiya , at the time under the separatist Crimean Regional Government , in which Nabokov's father became a minister of justice. After the withdrawal of the German Army in November 1918 and the defeat of the White Army in early 1919, the Nabokovs sought exile in western Europe, along with other Russian refugees. They settled briefly in England, where Nabokov gained admittance to

760-433: A grown man's consuming passion for a 12-year-old girl. This and his other novels, particularly Pale Fire (1962), won him a place among the greatest novelists of the 20th century. His longest novel, which met with a mixed response, is Ada (1969). He devoted more time to the composition of it than to any other. Nabokov's fiction is characterized by linguistic playfulness. For example, his short story " The Vane Sisters "

836-537: A millionaire gold-mine owner. His father was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party , and wrote numerous books and articles about criminal law and politics. His cousins included the composer Nicolas Nabokov . His paternal grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov, was Russia's Justice Minister during the reign of Alexander II . His paternal grandmother was the Baltic German Baroness Maria von Korff. Through his father, he

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912-418: A poet named Thespis introduced the idea of one actor stepping out and engaging in a dialogue with the chorus. This was the invention of tragedy, and occurred about 536 B.C. Then the poet Aeschylus , in his plays, introduced a second actor, inventing the idea of dialogue between two characters. Sophocles then wrote plays that included a third actor. A description of the protagonist's origin cited that during

988-548: A profound influence on his art. Nabokov himself translated into Russian two books he originally wrote in English, Conclusive Evidence and Lolita . The "translation" of Conclusive Evidence was made because Nabokov felt that the English version was imperfect. Writing the book, he noted that he needed to translate his own memories into English and to spend time explaining things that are well known in Russia; he decided to rewrite

1064-473: A recognised poet and writer in Russian within the émigré community; he published under the nom de plume V. Sirin (a reference to the fabulous bird of Russian folklore). To supplement his scant writing income, he taught languages and gave tennis and boxing lessons. Dieter E. Zimmer has written of Nabokov's 15 Berlin years, "he never became fond of Berlin, and at the end intensely disliked it. He lived within

1140-572: A short affair with Irina Guadanini, also a Russian émigrée. His family followed him to France, making en route their last visit to Prague , then spent time in Cannes , Menton , Cap d'Antibes , and Fréjus , finally settling in Paris. This city also had a Russian émigré community. In 1939, in Paris, Nabokov wrote the 55-page novella The Enchanter , his final work of Russian fiction. He later called it "the first little throb of Lolita ." In May 1940,

1216-682: A student at Cornell in the 1950s, Thomas Pynchon attended several of Nabokov's lectures and alluded to Lolita in chapter six of his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), in which Serge, countertenor in the band the Paranoids, sings: Pynchon's prose style was influenced by Nabokov's preference for actualism over realism. Of the authors who came to prominence during Nabokov's life, John Banville , Don DeLillo , Salman Rushdie , and Edmund White were all influenced by him. The novelist John Hawkes took inspiration from Nabokov and considered himself his follower. Nabokov's story "Signs and Symbols"

1292-565: A supporting protagonist appears, the story is told from the perspective of a character who appears to be minor. This character may be more peripheral from the events of the story and are not as involved within the "main action" of the plot. The supporting protagonist may be telling the story while viewing another character as the main influence of the plot. One example is Nick in The Great Gatsby . Euripides ' play Hippolytus may be considered to have two protagonists, though one at

1368-466: A theme that runs from his first book, Mary , to later works such as Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle . While the family was nominally Orthodox , it had little religious fervor. Vladimir was not forced to attend church after he lost interest. In 1916, Nabokov inherited the estate Rozhdestveno , next to Vyra, from his uncle Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov ("Uncle Ruka" in Speak, Memory ). He lost it in

1444-430: A time. Phaedra is the protagonist of the first half, who dies partway through the play. Her stepson, the titular Hippolytus, assumes the dominant role in the second half of the play. In Henrik Ibsen 's play The Master Builder , the protagonist is the architect Halvard Solness. The young woman, Hilda Wangel, whose actions lead to the death of Solness, is the antagonist. In Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet , Romeo

1520-584: A true opponent not only wants to prevent the hero from achieving his desire but is competing with the hero for the same goal. According to John Truby, "It is only by competing for the same goal that the hero and the opponent are forced to come into direct conflict and to do so again and again throughout the story." Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Владимирович Набоков [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr vlɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ nɐˈbokəf] ; 22 April [ O.S. 10 April] 1899  – 2 July 1977), also known by

1596-512: A wealthy and prominent family of the Russian nobility . His family traced its roots to the 14th-century Tatar prince Nabok Murza , who entered into the service of the Tsars, and from whom the family name is derived. His father was Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov , a liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist, and his mother was the heiress Yelena Ivanovna née Rukavishnikova, the granddaughter of

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1672-593: Is a main character in a story who lacks conventional heroic qualities and attributes such as idealism, courage, and morality. Examples include Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye , Scarlett O'Hara from Gone With the Wind , Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby , and Walter White from Breaking Bad . A tragic hero is the protagonist of a tragedy. Examples include Oedipus from Oedipus Rex and Prince Hamlet from Shakespeare's Hamlet . The protagonist

1748-484: Is disdained and frequently mocked in his works. Nabokov's creative processes involved writing sections of text on hundreds of index cards , which he expanded into paragraphs and chapters and rearranged to form the structure of his novels, a process that many screenwriters later adopted. Nabokov published under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin in the 1920s to 1940s, occasionally to mask his identity from critics. He also makes cameo appearances in some of his novels, such as

1824-409: Is famous in part for its acrostic final paragraph, in which the first letters of each word spell out a message from beyond the grave. Another of his short stories, " Signs and Symbols ", features a character suffering from an imaginary illness called "Referential Mania", in which the affected perceives a world of environmental objects exchanging coded messages. Nabokov's stature as a literary critic

1900-420: Is founded largely on his four-volume translation of and commentary on Alexander Pushkin 's Eugene Onegin published in 1964. The commentary ends with an appendix titled Notes on Prosody , which has developed a reputation of its own. It stemmed from his observation that while Pushkin's iambic tetrameters had been a part of Russian literature for a fairly short two centuries, they were clearly understood by

1976-494: Is his own antagonist). Sometimes, a work will have a false protagonist , who may seem to be the protagonist, but then may disappear unexpectedly. The character Marion in Alfred Hitchcock 's film Psycho (1960) is an example. A novel may contain a number of narratives, each with its own protagonist. Alexander Solzhenitsyn 's The First Circle , for example, depicts a variety of characters imprisoned and living in

2052-479: Is not a human: in Richard Adams ' novel Watership Down , a group of anthropomorphised rabbits, led by the protagonist Hazel, escape their warren after seeing a vision of its destruction, starting a perilous journey to find a new home. Antagonist An antagonist is a character in a story who is presented as the main enemy or rival of the protagonist . The English word antagonist comes from

2128-480: Is not always conventionally good. Contrasting the hero protagonist, a villain protagonist is a protagonist who is a villain , driving the story forward regardless of the evil qualities the main character has. These traits can include being cruel, malicious, and wicked. Examples include Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Richard III in the eponymous play by William Shakespeare . When

2204-539: Is remembered as the founder of Wellesley's Russian department. The Nabokovs resided in Wellesley, Massachusetts , during the 1941–42 academic year. In September 1942, they moved to nearby Cambridge , where they lived until June 1948. Following a lecture tour through the United States, Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944–45 academic year as a lecturer in Russian. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of

2280-487: Is reversed can be seen in the character Macduff from Macbeth , who is arguably morally correct in his desire to fight the tyrant Macbeth , the protagonist. Examples from television include J.R. Ewing ( Larry Hagman ) from Dallas and Alexis Colby ( Joan Collins ) from Dynasty . Both became breakout characters used as a device to increase their shows' ratings. Characters may be antagonists without being evil – they may simply be injudicious and unlikeable for

2356-418: Is the protagonist. He is actively in pursuit of his relationship with Juliet, and the audience is invested in that story. Tybalt, as an antagonist, opposes Romeo and attempts to thwart the relationship. In Shakespeare's play Hamlet , Prince Hamlet, who seeks revenge for the murder of his father, is the protagonist. The antagonist is the character who most opposes Hamlet, Claudius (though, in many ways, Hamlet

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2432-465: Is used as a plot device, to set up conflicts, obstacles, or challenges for the protagonist. Though not every story requires an antagonist, it often is used in plays to increase the level of drama. In tragedies, antagonists are often the cause of the protagonist's main problem, or lead a group of characters against the protagonist; in comedies, they are usually responsible for involving the protagonist in comedic situations. Author John Truby argues that

2508-522: Is with pitfalls, could lend itself to hideous mistranslation. In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or blunders. So I decided to translate it myself." Nabokov was a proponent of individualism , and rejected concepts and ideologies that curtailed individual freedom and expression, such as totalitarianism in its various forms, as well as Sigmund Freud 's psychoanalysis . Poshlost , or as he transcribed it, poshlust ,

2584-548: The East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux , Switzerland. From 1948 to 1959, Nabokov was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University . His 1955 novel Lolita ranked fourth on Modern Library 's list of the 100 best 20th-century novels in 2007 and is considered one of the greatest works of 20th-century literature. Nabokov's Pale Fire , published in 1962, ranked 53rd on

2660-534: The Greek ἀνταγωνιστής – antagonistēs , "opponent, competitor, villain, enemy, rival," which is derived from anti- ("against") and agonizesthai ("to contend for a prize"). The antagonist is commonly positioned against the protagonist and their world order. While narratives often portray the protagonist as a hero and the antagonist as a villain , like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter ,

2736-586: The October Revolution one year later; this was the only house he ever owned. Nabokov's adolescence was the period in which he made his first serious literary endeavors. In 1916, he published his first book, Stikhi ( Poems ), a collection of 68 Russian poems. At the time he was attending Tenishev school in Saint Petersburg, where his literature teacher Vladimir Vasilievich Gippius had criticized his literary accomplishments. Some time after

2812-545: The University of Cambridge , one of the world's most prestigious universities, where he attended Trinity College and studied zoology and later Slavic and Romance languages . His examination results on the first part of the Tripos exam, taken at the end of his second year, were a starred first . He took the second part of the exam in his fourth year just after his father's death, and feared he might fail it. But his exam

2888-570: The pen name Vladimir Sirin ( Владимир Сирин ), was a Russian-American novelist , poet, translator, and entomologist . Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin , where he met his wife . He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on

2964-477: The "books that, I thought, changed my life when I read them", and has said, "Nabokov's English combines aching lyricism with dispassionate precision in a way that seems to render every human emotion in all its intensity but never with an ounce of schmaltz or soggy language". T. Coraghessan Boyle has said that "Nabokov's playfulness and the ravishing beauty of his prose are ongoing influences" on his writing. Bilingual author and critic Maxim D. Shrayer , who came to

3040-838: The Nabokovs fled the advancing German troops, reaching the United States via the SS Champlain . Nabokov's brother Sergei did not leave France, and he died at the Neuengamme concentration camp on 9 January 1945. The Nabokovs settled in Manhattan , and Vladimir began volunteer work as an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History . Nabokov joined the staff of Wellesley College in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative literature . The position, created specifically for him, provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his lepidoptery . Nabokov

3116-489: The Russian prosodists. On the other hand, he viewed the much older English iambic tetrameters as muddled and poorly documented. In his own words: I have been forced to invent a simple little terminology of my own, explain its application to English verse forms, and indulge in certain rather copious details of classification before even tackling the limited object of these notes to my translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , an object that boils down to very little—in comparison to

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3192-481: The U.S. as a refugee from the USSR, described reading Nabokov in 1987 as "my culture shock": "I was reading Nabokov and waiting for America." Boston Globe book critic David Mehegan wrote that Shrayer's Waiting for America "is one of those memoirs, like Nabokov's Speak, Memory , that is more about feeling than narrative." More recently, in connection with the publication of Shrayer's literary memoir Immigrant Baggage ,

3268-589: The United States. He served through the 1947–48 term as Wellesley's one-man Russian department, offering courses in Russian language and literature. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian. At the same time he was the de facto curator of lepidoptery at Harvard University 's Museum of Comparative Zoology . After being encouraged by Morris Bishop , Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948 to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell University , where he taught until 1959. Among his students at Cornell

3344-493: The antagonist does not always appear as the villain. In some narratives, like Light Yagami and L in Death Note , the protagonist is a villain and the antagonist is an opposing hero. Antagonists are conventionally presented as making moral choices less savory than those of protagonists. This condition is often used by an author to create conflict within a story. This is merely a convention, however. An example in which this

3420-483: The audience. In some stories, such as The Catcher in the Rye , almost every character other than the protagonist may be an antagonist. Another example of this occurring is through Javert in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables , in which Javert displays no malicious intent, but instead represents the rigid and inflexible application of the law, even when it leads to moral and ethical dilemmas. An aspect or trait of

3496-600: The author stored his collection of male blue butterfly genitalia. "Nabokov was a serious taxonomist," says museum staff writer Nancy Pick, author of The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History . "He actually did quite a good job at distinguishing species that you would not think were different—by looking at their genitalia under a microscope six hours

3572-458: The best-humored woman he had ever known. In June 1953, Nabokov and his family went to Ashland, Oregon . There he finished Lolita and began writing the novel Pnin . He roamed the nearby mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem called Lines Written in Oregon . On 1 October 1953, he and his family returned to Ithaca, where he later taught the young writer Thomas Pynchon . After

3648-401: The book in his native language before making the final version, Speak, Memory (Nabokov first wanted to name it "Speak, Mnemosyne "). Of translating Lolita , Nabokov writes, "I imagined that in some distant future somebody might produce a Russian version of Lolita . I trained my inner telescope upon that particular point in the distant future and I saw that every paragraph, pock-marked as it

3724-624: The character Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov"), who appears in both Lolita and Ada, or Ardor , and the character Blavdak Vinomori (another anagram of Nabokov's name) in King, Queen, Knave . Sirin is referenced as a different émigré author in his memoir and is also referenced in Pnin . Nabokov is noted for his complex plots, clever word play , daring metaphors, and prose style capable of both parody and intense lyricism. He gained both fame and notoriety with Lolita (1955), which recounts

3800-563: The chief or first part', combined of πρῶτος ( prôtos , 'first') and ἀγωνιστής ( agōnistḗs , 'actor, competitor'), which stems from ἀγών ( agṓn , 'contest') via ἀγωνίζομαι ( agōnízomai , 'I contend for a prize'). The earliest known examples of a protagonist are found in Ancient Greece . At first, dramatic performances involved merely dancing and recitation by the chorus. Then in Poetics , Aristotle describes how

3876-528: The critic and Stanley Kubrick biographer David Mikics wrote, "Shrayer writes like Nabokov's long lost cousin." Nabokov appears in W. G. Sebald 's 1993 novel The Emigrants . A crater on the planet Mercury was named after Nabokov in 2012. The song cycle "Sing, Poetry" on the 2011 contemporary classical album Troika comprises settings of Russian and English versions of three of Nabokov's poems by such composers as Jay Greenberg , Michael Schelle and Lev Zhurbin . Nabokov's interest in entomology

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3952-464: The early period of Greek drama, the protagonist served as the author, the director, and the actor and that these roles were only separated and allocated to different individuals later. There is also a claim that the poet did not assign or create the protagonist as well as other terms for actors such as deuteragonist and tritagonist primarily because he only gave actors their appropriate part. However, these actors were assigned their specific areas at

4028-406: The first English book his mother read to him was Misunderstood , by Florence Montgomery . Much to his patriotic father's disappointment, Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian. In his memoir Speak, Memory , Nabokov recalls numerous details of his privileged childhood. His ability to recall his past in vivid detail was a boon to him during his permanent exile, providing

4104-833: The first lectures that he had little interest in fraternizing with students, who would be known not by their name but by their seat number. The Russian literary critic Yuly Aykhenvald was an early admirer of Nabokov, citing in particular his ability to imbue objects with life: "he saturates trivial things with life, sense and psychology and gives a mind to objects; his refined senses notice colorations and nuances, smells and sounds, and everything acquires an unexpected meaning and truth under his gaze and through his words." The critic James Wood argues that Nabokov's use of descriptive detail proved an "overpowering, and not always very fruitful, influence on two or three generations after him", including authors such as Martin Amis and John Updike . While

4180-502: The forced preliminaries—namely, to a few things that the non-Russian student of Russian literature must know in regard to Russian prosody in general and to Eugene Onegin in particular. Nabokov's lectures at Cornell University , as collected in Lectures on Literature , reveal his controversial ideas concerning art. He firmly believed that novels should not aim to teach and that readers should not merely empathize with characters but that

4256-674: The great financial success of Lolita , Nabokov returned to Europe and devoted himself to writing. In 1961, he and Véra moved to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux , Switzerland, where he remained until the end of his life. From his sixth-floor quarters, he conducted his business and took tours to the Alps, Corsica, and Sicily to hunt butterflies. Nabokov died of bronchitis on 2 July 1977 in Montreux. His remains were cremated and buried at Clarens cemetery in Montreux. At

4332-495: The lively Russian community of Berlin that was more or less self-sufficient, staying on after it had disintegrated because he had nowhere else to go to. He knew little German. He knew few Germans except for landladies, shopkeepers, and immigration officials at the police headquarters." In 1922, Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert, but she broke the engagement off early in 1923 when her parents worried whether he could provide for her. In May 1923, he met Véra Evseyevna Slonim ,

4408-514: The novel. In 2010, Kitsch magazine, a student publication at Cornell, published a piece that focused on student reflections on his lectures and also explored Nabokov's long relationship with Playboy . Nabokov also wanted his students to describe the details of the novels rather than a narrative of the story and was very strict when it came to grading. As Edward Jay Epstein described his experience in Nabokov's classes, Nabokov made it clear from

4484-508: The novels he wrote in English. As a trilingual (also writing in French, see Mademoiselle O ) master, he has been compared to Joseph Conrad , but Nabokov disliked both the comparison and Conrad's work. He lamented to the critic Edmund Wilson , "I am too old to change Conradically"—which John Updike later called "itself a jest of genius". This lament came in 1941, when Nabokov had been an apprentice American for less than one year. Later, in

4560-466: The protagonist may be considered an antagonist, such as morality or indecisiveness. An antagonist is not always a person or people. In some cases, an antagonist may be a force, such as a tidal wave that destroys a city; a storm that causes havoc; or even a certain area's conditions that are the root cause of a problem. An antagonist may or may not create obstacles for the protagonist. Societal norms or other rules may also be antagonists. An antagonist

4636-614: The publication of Stikhi , Zinaida Gippius , renowned poet and first cousin of his teacher, told Nabokov's father at a social event, "Please tell your son that he will never be a writer." After the 1917 February Revolution , Nabokov's father became a secretary of the Russian Provisional Government in Saint Petersburg . After the October Revolution , the family fled the city for Crimea, at first not expecting to be away for very long. They lived at

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4712-538: The rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru . It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all." The Harvard Museum of Natural History , which now contains the Museum of Comparative Zoology , still possesses Nabokov's "genitalia cabinet", where

4788-589: The recent loss of his country. It was in this city, in his moments of solitude, accompanied by King Lear , Le Morte d'Arthur , The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Ulysses , that Nabokov made the firm decision to become a Russian writer." In 1920, Nabokov's family moved to Berlin, where his father set up the émigré newspaper Rul' ("Rudder"). Nabokov followed them to Berlin two years later, after completing his studies at Cambridge. In March 1922, Russian monarchists Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky shot and killed Nabokov's father in Berlin as he

4864-594: The relatively unspectacular tribe Polyommatini of the family Lycaenidae , has left this facet of his life little explored by most admirers of his literary works. He described the Karner blue . The genus Nabokovia was named after him in honor of this work, as were a number of butterfly and moth species (e.g., many species in the genera Madeleinea and Pseudolucia bear epithets alluding to Nabokov or names from his novels). In 1967, Nabokov commented: "The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside

4940-511: The same list. His memoir, Speak, Memory , published in 1951, is considered among the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th century, placing eighth on Random House 's ranking of 20th-century works. Nabokov was a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction . He also was an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems . Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 (10 April 1899 Old Style ) in Saint Petersburg to

5016-417: The stage with the protagonist always entering from the middle door or that the dwelling of the deuteragonist (second most important character) should be on the right hand, and the tritagonist (third most important character), the left. In Ancient Greece, the protagonist is distinguished from the term "hero", which was used to refer to a human who became a semi-divine being in the narrative. In literary terms,

5092-400: The time of his death, he was working on a novel titled The Original of Laura . Véra and Dmitri, who were entrusted with Nabokov's literary executorship , ignored Nabokov's request to burn the incomplete manuscript and published it in 2009. Nabokov is known as one of the leading prose stylists of the 20th century; his first writings were in Russian, but he achieved his greatest fame with

5168-553: Was a descendant of the composer Carl Heinrich Graun . Vladimir was the family's eldest and favorite child. He had four younger siblings: Sergey , Olga, Elena, and Kirill. Sergey was killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 after publicly denouncing Hitler's regime. Writer Ayn Rand recalled Olga (her close friend at Stoiunina Gymnasium) as a supporter of constitutional monarchy who first awakened Rand's interest in politics. Elena, who in later years became Vladimir's favorite sibling, published her correspondence with him in 1985. She

5244-648: Was a self-proclaimed " White Russian ", and was, from its inception, a strong opponent of the Soviet government that came to power following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. In a poem he wrote as a teenager in 1917, he described Lenin's Bolsheviks as "grey rag-tag people". Throughout his life, Nabokov would remain committed to the classical liberal political philosophy of his father, and equally opposed Tsarist autocracy , communism , and fascism . Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov,

5320-400: Was an important source for Nabokov's biographers. Nabokov spent his childhood and youth in Saint Petersburg and at the country estate Vyra near Siverskaya , south of the city. His childhood, which he called "perfect" and "cosmopolitan", was remarkable in several ways. The family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. He related that

5396-586: Was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg , who later identified Nabokov as a major influence on her development as a writer. Nabokov wrote Lolita while traveling on the butterfly-collection trips in the western U.S. that he undertook every summer. Véra acted as "secretary, typist, editor, proofreader, translator and bibliographer; his agent, business manager, legal counsel and chauffeur; his research assistant, teaching assistant and professorial understudy"; when Nabokov attempted to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita , Véra stopped him. He called her

5472-553: Was inspired by books by Maria Sibylla Merian he found in the attic of his family's country home in Vyra. Throughout an extensive career of collecting, he never learned to drive a car, and depended on his wife to take him to collecting sites. During the 1940s, as a research fellow in zoology , he was responsible for organizing the butterfly collection of Harvard University 's Museum of Comparative Zoology . His writings in this area were highly technical. This, combined with his specialty in

5548-412: Was marked second-class . His final examination result also ranked second-class, and his BA was conferred in 1922. Nabokov later drew on his Cambridge experiences to write several works, including the novels Glory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight . At Cambridge, one journalist wrote in 2014, "the coats-of-arms on the windows of his room protected him from the cold and from the melancholy over

5624-456: Was on the reading list for Hawkes's writing students at Brown University. "A writer who truly and greatly sustains us is Vladimir Nabokov," Hawkes said in a 1964 interview. Several authors who came to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s have also cited Nabokov's work as a literary influence. Aleksandar Hemon has acknowledged the latter's impact on his writing. Pulitzer Prize -winning novelist Michael Chabon listed Lolita and Pale Fire among

5700-529: Was one of the most outspoken defenders of Jewish rights in the Russian Empire , continuing a family tradition that had been led by his own father, Dmitry Nabokov, who as Tsar Alexander II 's justice minister had blocked the interior minister from passing antisemitic measures. That family strain continued in Vladimir Nabokov, who fiercely denounced antisemitism in his writings; in the 1930s, he

5776-432: Was shielding their target, Pavel Milyukov , a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party -in-exile. Shortly after his father's death, Nabokov's mother and sister moved to Prague. Nabokov drew upon his father's death repeatedly in his fiction. On one interpretation of his novel Pale Fire , an assassin kills the poet John Shade when his target is a fugitive European monarch. Nabokov stayed in Berlin, where he had become

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