It’s the birthday of Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), who was born in Russia but considered himself ultimately to be an American writer and who said, “. . . America is the only country where I feel mentally and emotionally at home.” Nabokov is best known for Lolita (1955); just a few of his other notable works include Pale Fire (1962), Invitation to a Beheading (1936 in Russian), and the memoir Speak, Memory (1967).

Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a wealthy family: nannies and all that. He learned English before Russian; he was smart, athletic, played chess, and collected butterflies. At 20, he inherited a couple million dollars from an uncle but had to leave most of his wealth behind when the family fled the Bolsheviks. They went to Germany, then England, where Nabokov studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. He continued to be brilliant and sporty (soccer, tennis) and made a living teaching everything from boxing to languages, doing his writing at night: novels, plays, and stories written in Russian.

In 1939, Nabokov moved to the U.S. and stayed for 20 years. He taught Slavic languages at Stanford, then literature at Wellesley, and at the same time discovered butterflies for Harvard, including Nabokov’s wood nymph. (You know how when you want to maybe supplement your income or branch out in your career, and then you remember that you have been a respected lepidopterist from youth, so you just do that on the side? Like that.) And he started writing novels in English. Lolita, first published in Paris fin 1955, came out in the U.S. in 1958. The story of middle-aged Humbert Humbert salivating (and worse) after the child Dolores Haze was “a metaphor for the eternal quest for innocence that is resolved in satiric terms,” but a lot of folks just thought it was porn, including the New York Times. Discuss.

NB: Nabokov coined the term “nymphet,” which makes you look at that butterfly differently, doesn’t it?

Lolita made Nabokov’s fortune, which was maybe nice for Mrs. Nabokov, or Véra, the great love and companion to whom he was absolutely devoted his entire life except for that one unsavory affair with Irina Guadanini. The Nabokovs eventually moved to a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland and stayed out of “sheer laziness” and a desire to be near their only child, Dmitri, who was an opera singer in Italy. Nabokov died there at 78 of a virus infection.

Have a beautiful spring Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.