e essentially lonely condition of the artist made exile the only choice for him. He made the surprising decision, following graduation from University College to take up medical studies in Paris in 1902. But in 1903 he was called back to Dublin by the fatal illness of his mother. In Ireland Joyce met his future wife Nora Barnacle and determined once again to make his escape to the Continent. He left Ireland again in 1904 for what became permanent exile on the continent, living at Trieste, Zurich, Rome, and, principally, Paris.
Nabokov, on the other hand, led an ideal life as a brilliant young man of aristocratic descent and immense wealth in St. Petersburg and on his family's nearby estate. His father was an eminent liberal politician, his mother was an aristocrat, and Nabokov received the finest possible education. At an early age he had become more fluent in English and French than in Russian--a condition his father had to remedy by hiring special Russian tutors. But in 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution drove his family into exile, eventually leading them to England. There Nabokov studied at Cambridge but, after taking his degree, he chose to move to Berlin where the Russian refugee population of over 40,000 (and the persistent hope of some of them that they could return to the old Russia) seemed to promise him a career as a writer in Russian. Fleeing the Nazis the Nabokovs eventually reached the United States where Nabokov, as an eminent writer of Russian novels, a scholar in Russian literature, and an accomplished lepidopterist, obtained various teaching and research posts at American universities.
The conditions of Nabokov's exile are vaguely reflected in those of Humbert, the child-rapist murderer whose narrative of his life and crimes makes up Lolita. Humbert is a seedier, less accomplished version of the author with his obscure academic publications, his wanderings, and his idealized childhood. But the precise natu...