30                               Stephe7i D. Corrsin

was a little-known avant-garde writer in the United States. It was
only in the late 1950s that Nabokov gained wide recognition with
the publication of Lolita in 1955. This book, published first in
France by a soft-core pornography house, Olympia Press, because
no mainstream American publisher was willing to be associated
with its erotic elements, was not published in the United States
until 1958. Nowadays the book, while it remains brilliant, seems
quite tame; but in its day it won the author wide notoriety. He
would sometimes testily complain that, because he had written a
novel about a man obsessed with "nymphets," it was widely as¬
sumed that he himself had the same obsession. Despite the fact that
he wrote several more major novels after Lolita (which he trans¬
lated into Russian in the 1960s), it was Lolita that gained him his
greatest fame, enabled him to retire and live the last twenty years
of his life in comfort, and will probably always be the work
most closely identified with him. It was also his own favorite book
among the many he wrote.

Nabokov became a naturalized American citizen in 1945, and
he took great pride in the latter part of his life in his status as an
American writer and his American citizenship. However, on his
retirement from Cornell he decided to leave Ithaca and move to
Montreux, Switzerland, where he and his wife lived for eighteen
years until his death in 1977. In this last quarter of Iiis life he fin¬
ished some of his most significant works: Pale Fire and Ada, or
Ardor: a Fa7mly Chronicle; his annotated translation of Pushkin's
Euge7ie Onegi7i; and his translations into English of his earlier
Russian-language works of the 1920s and 1930s. He found, in
these years, that fame had its problems as well as its rewards. In
the spring of 1970, for instance. Vera Nabokov mentioned to
Alexis Goldenweiser, a Berlin acquaintance and her lawyer, that
her husband had gone to Sicily both to hunt butterflies and to
avoid the American literary pilgrims who had come to look upon
him as a national treasure and had flocked to Montreux to pay
homage.