Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita — the novel everyone read and no one wanted to admit to. A pedophile tells his own story beautifully, persuasively — and that made the book unbearable and necessary at once.
He was born in St Petersburg in 1899, into an aristocratic family. His father, a liberal politician, was killed in Berlin in 1922. Nabokov studied at Cambridge, lived in Berlin and Paris, and wrote in Russian. In 1940 he fled the Nazis to America — and switched to English.
The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, The Luzhin Defense belong to the Russian period; Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962) to the English. He taught literature at Cornell and hunted butterflies across Europe. On principle he gave no interviews about the meaning of his books.
His last years were spent in Montreux, Switzerland. He died in 1977.