Dmitri Nabokov, Son of "Lolita" Author, Dies at 77

"Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov who helped protect and translate his father's work while also pursuing careers as an opera singer and race car driver, has died. He was 77. Dmitri Nabokov, who helped protect and translate his father’s works, also pursued his own careers as a race car driver and opera singer. He also was a mountain climber and a playboy. The younger Nabokov died Wednesday at a hospital in Vevey after a long illness, literary agent Andrew Wylie said Friday. He had been hospitalized in January with a lung infection. Dmitri Nabokov spent much of his life trying to carve a life away from the shadow of his father, whose books Lolita and Pale Fire are regarded as some of the best English prose ever written. The Harvard-educated son was a mountain climber, opera singer, race car driver and playboy. But Dmitri Nabokov always returned to protecting his father's literary legacy, translating and editing his father's plays, poems, stories, the novella The Enchanter and Selected Letters.....'My father is gradually marching - with his two favorite writers, Pushkin and Joyce - arm in arm into the pantheon to join the greatest of all, Shakespeare, who is waiting for them,' Nabokov told The Associated Press in a 2009 interview. 'I like to think that I did my bit to keep things on track.' After the success of Lolita, Dmitri Nabokov translated his father's Invitation to a Beheading from Russian, and after his father's death, he wrote the memoir On Revisiting Father's Room. In 1962, the younger Nabokov began to race cars competitively and until 1982 he maintained an active professional operatic career as a basso profundo. After the death of his mother in 1991, he sold the remainder of the Nabokov archive to the New York Public Library and attended conferences dedicated to his father." [Source]