Happy birthday, Mr. Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 on this day. The author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada was a perennial exile, first in Berlin where he wrote novels and poetry in Russian, then in America, where he refashioned himself as an English-prose writer, translator, college professor, and lepidopterist, and finally in Montreaux, Switzerland. One recalls the fantastic word play, the formal experimentation, the convoluted plots of his novels, if not the sheer notoriety of just one of them. He affirmed the generative power of his exile. A "hypertrophied sense of lost childhood," it was a yearning for a home to which he could no longer return, but also a condition for seeking. In his art, Nabokov showed that this sense of exile is common to us all, but that it need not be debilitating. Turning one's estrangement into a mode of perception, a manner of seeing the all too familiar with a new, ever startled gaze, is to deepen the mystery of one's life. And the beauty of it. Happy birthday, Mr. Nabokov.