Nabokov House

About

Vladimir Nabokov is born in 1899 in this house at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Street in St. Petersburg. The building's history reaches back to the 1730s, when Bolshaya and Malaya Morskaya Streets were first laid out; it becomes the Nabokov family home in 1897, brought as dowry when Elena Rukavishnikova marries Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. A third floor is later added, the facade remodeled in early Art Nouveau style, and a rental wing built in the courtyard. The mosaic decorating the facade comes from the workshop of Vladimir Frolov, a leading St. Petersburg mosaicist. On the ground floor, a dining room in Louis XV style and a library in Henri II style survive to this day. Nabokov called the house "the only house in the world," though the family leaves it for good on 15 November 1917. The museum opens in April 1998, run by Saint Petersburg State University, occupying 230 square meters on the ground floor. On display are Nabokov's personal effects — index cards, pencils, eyeglasses, Scrabble tiles — along with butterfly specimens he collected himself and samizdat editions of his books, tracing the threads of his life and work.