St Petersburg

The first expression we turn up in the Russian phrasebook is “Where is Vladimir?”, which seems like an augury, or perhaps a challenge. Vladimir Nabokov made his reputation as the author of a great American novel — except among those who considered Lolita, his story of a middle-aged man’s infatuation with a 12-year-old girl, a wicked novel instead. Yet, although his black comedy is set among the drive-ins and Dairy Queens of 1950s America, he was born in St Petersburg, the son of a Russian aristocrat. His family fled after the revolution, and he refused to return as long as the communists were in power. When he died, in 1977, it was more than a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In search of the man behind the book, which is still controversial half a century after it was first published, I am in St Petersburg with a crew from BBC4. At the airport, we guilelessly do the right thing and enter the red channel with our camera kit, watched in horror by the customs officials. This means they must wearily make an inventory of our stuff. As if to commemorate Nabokov's loathing of Soviet bureaucracy, a carrot-topped inspector — strictly speaking, a son of Putin’s Russia — states that the task will take two hours. The epic resignation born of the steppes, surely? Well, no, it’s the goon’s hard-won prescience, in fact. The director, Emma Boswell, and the researcher, Charlotte Gittins, are required to produce every piece of equipment. While the freckly official writes it all up in heartbreaking longhand, his sidekick, a man with flyaway epaulettes, takes a souvenir snap of every item with a throwback Instamatic. The shade of the master looks on, smiling thinly.

Rozhdestveno, Russia

Spend a happy hour or two, as the teenaged Nabokov used to do, riding through the woods at Rozhdestveno on a pushbike — borrowed from a man who turns out to be the grandson of the Nabokov family chef.

At 17, Nabokov inherited Rozhdestveno, his uncle’s country residence outside St Petersburg, a colonnaded pile that incongruously resembles an antebellum mansion in the American South. It was torched by the retreating German army in the second world war before being painstakingly rebuilt. The accommodating shadows cast by the columns were the scene of trysts between Nabokov and his first love, a local girl of his own age, Valentina Shulgin. Their passionate affair, like everything else in Nabokov’s privileged life, was summarily terminated by the revolution. For the rest of his life, he preserved the Russia of his childhood in his novels and his prodigious memory.

Was Valentina in his mind when he was writing Lolita? Certainly, Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged European obsessed with the adolescent “Lo” in the novel, wistfully recalls a blameless first teenage love. Some critics have speculated that Lolita represents the innocence of the new world, and Humbert, her despoiler, the ruin and degradation of his continent in the 20th century. The theme of a mature man obsessed with a much younger female recurs in Nabokov’s books, including The Enchanter, Laughter in the Dark and his “lost”, unfinished fiction, The Original of Laura, on which he was working at the time of his death. Nabokov left instructions that it should be destroyed, but his family couldn’t bring themselves to do it. The manuscript, scribbled in pencil on index cards in the writer’s habitual working method, has finally been retrieved from the vaults of a Swiss bank by his son, Dmitri. For more than 30 years, the literary world has wondered if the fastidious Nabokov was merely dissatisfied with Laura, or if the novella was even more shocking than Lolita. For his part, the writer haughtily declined to be drawn on such fashionable concerns as the “meaning” of his work, insisting that it spoke for itself — nothing more, nothing less.

It doesn’t require much psychoanalysis to see that Nabokov’s great love of nature, and of butterflies in particular, began here at Rozhdestveno. I pedal through a buggy dell. The snail is on the stalk and the air is white with cabbage butterflies.

Nabokov Museum, St Petersburg

The suffocating heat of the shut-up Nabokov family home, now a museum, in the St Petersburg summer — with the electric lights thrumming and failing, and dust drifting from the cornices at the top of a grand staircase. The storming of the Winter Palace, a few streets away, found the young Nabokov languidly composing verse. But he stirred himself from the chaise longue in time to see his first dead body and — an icy Nabokovian touch — thieves stripping the corpse of its boots. Now his time here is remembered by a butterfly net, among other things. It looks like a windsock, or an extra-large ­prophylactic.

Trinity College, Cambridge

In the quad, bowler-hatted porters bark at unwary tourists who trespass on the grass. Only fellows of the college are allowed to tread the hallowed greensward. Nabokov, who came up to Cambridge in 1919 before joining his family in Berlin in 1922, found such rules as unsupportable as they were inscrutable. Not even the wretched flight of the Nabokovs into exile could dent the young Vladimir’s patrician sense of entitlement. After all, when his family sailed from Sebastopol under a hail of Bolshevik gunfire, he was to be found enjoying a leisurely game of chess with his father. On deck.

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