ABSTRACT
Fortunately for those interested in Nabokov's life Brian Boyd has published two definitive volumes: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). These impressive and balanced books describe the childhood and youth in St. Petersburg and in the country at Vyra; the potential career as a major, even preeminent Russian poet, a career that was, along with so much else in Russia, first derailed by the Bolshevik Revolution and then effectively terminated by the Nazi Anschluss into France; the new life in the United States (and later, after the success of Lolita, in Switzerland), where he wrote the novels in English that resulted in an unprecedented renewal of the language, and where he began an ambitious project as a lepidopterist (completed by others decades after his death), in which he identified and classified a new genus of blue butterfly (informally known as Mr. Nabokov's Blues), 25 species of which have since been named after characters in his novels.
