THE AUTHOR

He was at Trinity College, Cambridge when his first prose work appeared in the Russian paper, Rul, edited by his father.

Not exactly nepotism: most of his future Berlin output (164 poems, several plays, verse dramas) appeared in Rul long after his father was killed saving a politician from assassination in 1922.

Among the penniless Russian emigres of Berlin, Nabokov survived with translations and teaching English, tennis and chess. His first novel, Mary, appeared a year after his 1925 marriage to Vera Evseena Slonim. Their only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934.