Dmitri Nabokov, novelist's son, dies

VEVEY, Switzerland -- 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.

He died Wednesday in a hospital in Vevey after a long illness, literary agent Andrew Wylie said. He had been hospitalized in January with a lung infection.

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. Yet he always returned to protecting his father's literary legacy, translating and editing his father's plays, poems and stories.

After the success of "Lolita," 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, he began to race cars competitively and until 1982 he maintained an active professional operatic career as a basso profundo. After his mother died in 1991, he sold the remainder of the Nabokov archive to the New York Public Library.

In 2009, the son decided controversially to publish his father's final, fragmentary novel "The Original of Laura," which was written on index cards in 1975-77, the last years of his life. He said that was an act against his father's wishes. The author had asked that it be burned.

Said Dmitri Nabokov: "He was a father like any other loving father. He didn't sacrifice games with his son for his work. . . . I think I was one of the few children who had formal grammar lessons." -- AP