Vladimir Nabokov, father of Gonzo
Mathew da Silva
Saturday, 1 June 2013
While it's important to get the dates right in any history I'll have to fudge that of this photo of novelist Vladimir Nabokov and just say that it's from his youth. Some people might be familiar with photos of an older Nabokov - that heavyset geezer dressed in shorts and carrying a butterfly net, perhaps - that date from the time of his eventual commercial success, a time that was suddenly full of photographers and journalists looking for topical content, but I imagine that this photo shows what the man looked like when he studied at Cambridge in the years immediately following the Russian Revolution, an important event in the life of a boy born into the minor nobility in Russia in 1899.
