Born to an aristocratic Russian family in St. Peter-sburg in 1899, Nabokov was raised in an environment of worldly achievement and educated liberal thought. In 1919, following Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, Nabokov's father, a leading democrat, was forced to flee to England, and, after enrolling Vladimir in Cambridge University in 1920, he joined the Russian emigre community in Berlin. In March, 1922, Nabokov's father was killed during an assassination attempt on a Russian political figure, and after taking his diploma in French and Russian literature, Nabokov himself moved to Berlin to work on the Russian-language newspaper his father had helped found. Nabokov married a fellow Rus-sian exile in 1925 but because of his wife's Jewish ancestry was forced to flee Germany in 1937. In 1940 he moved to the United States, became a lecturer at Wellesley College, and was awarded U.S. citizenship in 1945. From 1948 to 1958 Nabokov was a professor of Russian literature at...