This year marks the 40th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s death, the trilingual writer best known for his controversial work Lolita. A substantial anniversary as such is a fitting occasion to remember the man whose legacy will perhaps forever be inseparable from the image of a red lollipop and heart-shaped glasses. But with Nabokov, the question of an afterlife takes on an additional significance. Art as a vessel for spiritual transcendence was arguably Nabokovs principal preoccupation, the foundations to his literary temple. Many of his fictional characters take on this pursuit, to varying degrees of success, while his own nuanced literary structures play with patterns and shapes that speak to this central theme.

According to Vera Nabokov — the writer’s wife, muse, editor, typist — the essence of both her husband’s life and art was, “an intuition about a transcendent realm of being”. In light of this, remembering Nabokov 40 years on is not merely a ceremonial act of respect for a literary great, but a continuation of the very question he set out to answer, namely: does the artist continue to exist beyond the work of art itself? Here are just some of the wonderful and peculiar idiosyncrasies to the man, his opinions and his works.

The Man

He was a self-confessed sufferer (or beneficiary) of grapheme-colour synaesthesia

In other words he had the ability to see letters in colours, adding a further nuance to his already highly perspicuous, artistic eye. For example, in his autobiography Speak, Memory he writes: “The long ‘a’ of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French ‘a’ evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard ‘g’ (vulcanised rubber) and ‘r’ (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal ‘n’, noodle-limp ‘l’, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of an ‘o’ take care of the whites.” His alphabet of colours is implicitly felt throughout his works, with imagery of the utmost specificity.

We’ve all been mispronouncing his name

Nabokov’s name is not as simple to pronounce as its trisyllabic form might suggest: “Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘Knickerbocker’.”

He didn’t care much for sleep

In his autobiography, Nabokov reveals his disgust with the basic human, involuntary necessity for sleep: “Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing… I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”

He was a passionate butterfly enthusiast

His favourite was the Red Admiral but it is his literary treatment of moths that is worthy of closer attention. In both Invitation to a Beheading and his short story Christmas, moths appear in the final scenes of the works, signifying a character’s bodily death and spiritual rebirth. In both instances, the moths boast beautiful eyespots on their wings, symbolising windows into a transcendental realm.

He wasn’t a confident talker

In the foreword to Strong Opinions, Nabokov’s personal archive of interviews over the course of his career, he states: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.” Forever afraid of exposing his (supposedly) childish speech, Nabokov never gave impromptu professional interviews, requiring all questions and answers to be pre-prepared and written down.

The critic

He was a firm believer that novels are meant to be reread

“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Nabokov’s philosophy on reading is not only a plea to revisit texts in general, but another strategic clue for the reader, suggesting there is more to find in his own works, more to be unravelled. Ever playful with literary structure, Nabokov’s texts themselves encourage the reader to revisit what they have just read. By revealing their nuanced structure towards the end, the reader feels compelled to begin once again, and connect the dots that were left isolated, with this new knowledge. The circular structure of Nabokov’s novel The Gift, is perhaps the best example of this, as the protagonist states he will go on to write a novel of the same name in the final chapter, creating a curiously satisfying mise en abyme.

He was fascinated by the number three

Nabokov believed the number three to be of special artistic value: “The trinity, the triplet, the triad, the triptych are obvious art forms such as, say, three pictures of youth, ripe years, and old age, or any other threefold triplex subject.” In light of this, it is unsurprising that he splits his own artistic life into three sections, akin to a Hegelian dialectic: “A coloured spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The 20 years I spent in my native Russia (1899-1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany and France (1919-1940) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940-1960) forms a synthesis — and a new thesis.”

He didn’t think much of psychoanalysis

Nabokov was known for his public dismissal of Freudian theory, despite frequent attempts by critics to draw links between the two individuals, who cannot help but read works such as Lolita through a psychoanalytic lens. When asked in an interview whether he’d been subjected to psychoanalytical examination before, Nabokov exclaimed “Why, good God?”. Nonetheless, the Russian writer was an individual with a profound connection to his childhood, so much so that he never went on to own a property, in fear of failing to achieve the perfection of his childhood home. Despite his refusal to engage in psychoanalytic conversation, his life and works are rich with fascinating material about mourning and memory.

The works

It took two years to get Lolita published