Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov's family fled St Petersburg after the Revolution, and his father, a liberal politician, was assassinated in Berlin shielding a colleague from a bullet meant for someone else. Nabokov wrote nine novels in Russian under the name Sirin before the rise of Hitler pushed him again, first to Paris and then, in 1940, to the United States, where he taught literature for years on a professor's salary.

He was also a serious lepidopterist, cataloguing butterfly genitalia at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology with the same obsessive precision he brought to prose. No American publisher would touch Lolita; it appeared first in 1955 from a Paris press specializing in erotica before its scandal made him rich enough to retire to a hotel suite in Switzerland, where he wrote Pale Fire and died in 1977.