Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita

by Robert Roper,
The San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 2015

In 1940, after living for two decades in Germany and France, Vladimir Nabokov, the scion of an eminent anti-Bolshevist Russian family, and Vera Evseevna, his Jewish wife, fled the Nazis with their young son, Dmitri, and emigrated to the United States. Already an accomplished novelist, Vladimir was struck by many characteristics of America, which he explored in 200,000 miles of cross-country automobile trips, undertaken in part to indulge his passion for collecting butterflies.