Dmitri Nabokov

The title of this article is ambiguous. For further meanings, see Dmitri Nabokov .

Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov (born May 10, 1934 in Berlin , † February 23, 2012 in Vevey ) was an American opera singer (bass) and translator. He was the only child from the marriage between the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov , one of the most important storytellers of the 20th century, and his wife Véra Nabokov , who was also from Russia and who accompanied her husband's literary work from the beginning of the marriage. In the last years of his life, Dmitri Nabokov was also the administrator of his father's literary estate.

Life

Family background and childhood

Dmitri Nabokov was born in Berlin on May 10, 1934. His father Vladimir Nabokov was the descendant of a wealthy Russian aristocratic family, whose grandfather had been the Russian Minister of Justice and whose father, Vladimir Dmitriyevich Nabokov, had been a politician in the republican provisional government after the overthrow of the tsar in 1917 , which then put an end to the October Revolution . His mother Véra Nabokov, whose maiden name was Véra Slonim, came from a wealthy Jewish family. Her father, who had studied law, was unable to work as a lawyer due to the anti-Semitic legislation of Tsarist Russia. However, he successfully built up a trade in wood and roof tiles. Like her future husband, she had enjoyed a careful multilingual upbringing in which literature played a major role.

Both parents of Dmitri Nabokov went into exile after the October Revolution in 1917 and after several stops abroad settled in Berlin. In the first few years after the end of the First World War, Berlin was the center of Russian exiles. In the first few years, 86 Russian publishers were founded in Berlin. 150 different Russian-language newspapers and magazines appeared there. In 1923, Berlin surpassed Petersburg and Moscow in its importance as a place for Russian-language literature publications. Véra Slonim's father was a co-founder of a publishing house called Orbis, in which Véra Slonim worked.

Memorial plaque on Nestorstrasse 22 in Berlin-Halensee , where the Nabokov family temporarily lived.

Vladimir Nabokov was one of the better-known authors within the Russian émigré communities and published poems, plays and chess problems in a Russian-language literary newspaper , for which Véra Slonim occasionally translated English-language authors into Russian. The two married on April 15, 1925. At this point in time, due to hyperinflation , Berlin was no longer the center of the Russian exiles; many Russians who emigrated from Russia had moved to France. However, the Nabokov couple decided to stay in Berlin. Véra Nabokov made a significant contribution to the family's livelihood through her work as a secretary and translator, as well as by teaching languages.

The question of emigration from Germany had preoccupied the Nabokovs since the handover of power to the National Socialists in March 1933. It initially failed because the Nabokov couple, although they did not feel at home in Germany, did not see any country as a suitable center of life. Their cramped financial situation made emigration even more difficult. The Nabokov couple had visas for France as early as March 1933, but Véra Nabokov's pregnancy contributed to their postponing emigration. One reason for the delayed emigration was that Véra Nabokov, who had a Russian passport, still found work as a translator and language teacher in Berlin. It was not until 1937 that the family emigrated, first to France and then to the United States in 1940. Dmitri Nabokov spent part of his childhood in the Boston area, where his father taught at Wellesley College . After his father got a professorship at Cornell University , the family moved to Ithaca .

In 1951, Nabokov began studying history and literature at Harvard College . Although he was admitted to Harvard Law School , he decided not to go on this path because he was looking for something he would be passionate about. After graduating from college, he took singing lessons at the Longy School of Music for two years . He then joined the US Army, where he taught Russian and served as an assistant to an army chaplain.

Professional career

The success that Vladimir Nabokov had with his thirteenth novel Lolita , first published in France in 1955 , changed the situation of the Nabokov family after 1958 - when the novel was finally published in the United States and became an international bestseller. Thanks to the royalty payments, the Nabokov couple were able to lead a financially carefree life for the first time since their youth. The fame of his father, heightened by controversial debates about the literary quality of Lolita , ensured that Vladimir Nabokov's previous works were published in numerous countries. Dmitri Nabokov translated several of his father's works, including novels, short stories, plays, poems, lectures, and letters, into multiple languages. One of his first translations was the novel Invitation to the Beheading, which Dmitri Nabokov, accompanied by his father, translated from Russian into English. After his father's death in 1986, Dmitri published one of his father's early short stories. The Wizard was a 30-page short story that Nabokov published in Russian in Paris. As in Lolita, the theme is a pedophile adult man's relationship with a prepubertal girl. Nabokov wrote in the afterword to Lolita in 1959 that he had destroyed this story soon after he moved to the United States in 1940. Nabokov was wrong about that. The story was found in February 1959 under different papers. The short story is sometimes referred to as the Ur-Lolita, a term that Dmitri Nabokov always rejected.

Together with his father, he also worked on an English translation of Mikhail Jurjewitsch Lermontov's novel A Hero of Our Time , which was published in 1958. In 1961 he made his debut as an opera singer. In Italy he won an opera competition in the bass category in the role of Colline from La Bohème in Italy . Luciano Pavarotti also made his debut in this production, winning the singing competition in the tenor category. Among the highlights of his career as an opera singer are appearances with the soprano Montserrat Caballé and the tenor Giacomo Aragall .

Tomb of Vladimir, Vera and Dimitri Nabokov in Montreux-Clarens

In 1980 Dmitri Nabokov, who also drove semi-professional car races, had a serious accident in a car. Among other things, he suffered severe burns. The accident put an end to his career as an opera singer. Together with his mother, he managed the estate of his father, who died in 1977. For more than 30 years he grappled with the question of whether his father's last fragment of a novel should be published. It finally appeared in 2009.

On the occasion of Vladimir Nabokov's 100th birthday, Dmitri appeared as his father in Terry Quinn's Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya , a dramatized reading based on the exchange of letters between Vladimir Nabokov and his friend, literary critic and writer Edmund Wilson . The piece has been performed in New York, Paris, Mainz and Ithaca, among others. Most recently, with his participation, the film by filmmaker Harald Bergmann The Butterfly Hunter - 37 index cards on Nabokov (D / CH 2012) on texts by Vladimir Nabokov from his autobiography Memory, i.e. and excerpts from the chapter Texture of Time from Nabokov's novel Ada or The Desire .

Despite several relationships, Dmitri Nabokov ultimately remained unmarried and had no children. In the last years of his life he lived in Palm Beach, Florida and Montreux, Switzerland. He died on February 23, 2012 in Vevey , Switzerland.

Web links

• Dmitri Nabokov in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• The whisper of that long-lost song . Kai Rickert on "Collected Poems" by Vladimir Nabokov , translated from Russian into English by Dmitri Nabokov. ReLÜ , Review Journal , No. 14, 2013

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dmitri Nabokov, Steward of Father's Literary Legacy, Dies at 77
2. ↑ Dmitri Nabokov, dernier gardien des secrets de son père, est mort
3. ↑ Stacy Schiff: Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) . Pan Books Ltd. 1999, ISBN 0-330-37674-8 . German translation: Véra: a life with Vladimir Nabokov , Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-462-02842-1 . Chapter 1
4. ↑ Stacy Schiff: Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) . Pan Books Ltd. 1999, ISBN 0-330-37674-8 . German translation: Véra: a life with Vladimir Nabokov , Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-462-02842-1 . Chapter 2.
5. ^ "I Will Sing When You're All Dead," The Morning News, November 8, 2008. Link to Article
6. ^ "Nabokov Carries on Father's Legacy," The Harvard Crimson, August 6, 2005. Link to Article
7. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov: About a book with the title "Lolita". In: Same: Lolita. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1959, p. 330.
8. ↑ Dmitri Nabokov: "On a Book Entitled The Enchanter ". The Enchanter 1986: p. 85, p. 107, p. 109.
9. ↑ Mikhail Lermontov: A Hero of Our Time. Translated by Vladimir Nabokov, in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov , 1958th edition, Anchor Books, 1841.
10. ↑ La Bohème Discography. OperaGlass. 08 Dec 2003. 20 Aug 2006 Link to Article ( Memento from 20 August 2006 on WebCite )
11. ↑ "Dmitri Nabokov Interview with JOYCE ." NABOKV-L. November 10, 2003. Link to Article ( Memento from August 17, 2006 on WebCite )
12. ↑ Obituary on NRC.nl
13. ↑ Been there - Obituaries (Harvard Class of 1955) ( Memento of the original from September 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.