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Nabokov famously never had a home. In the United States he and his wife, Vera, always rented. At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he taught for a decade, they occupied homes vacated by professors on sabbatical. The Nabokovs ended their days in a small suite of rooms at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland. When asked to explain his peripatetic life of exile, Nabokov said, “Nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me.” His hero Pushkin was a wanderer, too, exiled from St. Petersburg by the czar for years at a time. Like Nabokov, “To the end of his life he remained deeply attached to what he considered his real home, the Lyceum, and to his former fellow students.
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Alex Beam (The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship)