Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia to an upper-class family. As a child, he and his brother enjoyed long walks at Vyra, his grandfather's estate, as well as the attention of private tutors. He learned to read English and French before Russian. All of the passions that marked Nabokov's adulthood (languages, literature, chess, lepidoptera—which is the study of insects such as butterflies and moths) were born in his happy childhood, which he describes in his 1951 memoir, Speak, Memory.

Nabokov's father was a lecturer on criminal law and the editor of a liberal law journal. After becoming a member of the St. Petersburg City Duma (council) and urging the adoption of such reforms as a written constitution and the guarantee of civil rights, his father was forced to resign from teaching. He served a three-month jail sentence in 1908 for signing...