“Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.”

Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist

Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. He wrote under his own name and also used the pen name Vladimir Sirin. He is known for fiction that moves between Russian and English, along with poetry and translation. His interests also reached into entomology, which sat alongside his literary work and shaped the range of his public life.