Tags: Vladimir Nabokov , Culture, Russian literature, Russia, Commentary, World

Babich Dmitry

24.02.2012, 23:14

The death in Switzerland of Dmitry Nabokov, 77, the only son of great Russian-American fiction writer Vladimir Nabokov, marks the end of a poignant family saga.

The death in Switzerland of Dmitry Nabokov, 77, the only son of great Russian-American fiction writer Vladimir Nabokov, marks the end of a poignant family saga. The fate of Dmitry Nabokov is interesting from two points of view: he was both the most authoritative translator of his father’s works and simply the only son of a father who happened to be one of the most symbolic exile figures of the twentieth century. Dmitry, born in 1934 in Nazi Germany, where his father and mother lived a difficult life of pre-war Russian émigrés, was from his birth a victim of two dictatorships. First, his father, a son of a well-known liberal Russian politician, had to flee Soviet Russia, where liberals were no longer welcome. Then it turned out that his mother, who had been born as Vera Slonim into a wealthy Jewish family in pre-revolutionary Russia, was not particularly welcome in Germany after Adolph Hitler’s rise to power there in 1933. The Nabokovs left Europe via France in 1940 for a new life in the United States, just before Nazi troops quickly subjugated the independent French state.