He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne.

Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile.

The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH NABOKOV was born on April 23, 1899, in St.

Nabokov autobiography