Vladimir Nabokov was one of the leading novelists of the twentieth century. He was born in St Petersburg, Russia in 1899, but spent most of his life abroad after his family was forced to emigrate in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He first composed novels in Russian while living in Berlin and Paris, but switched to English when he moved to the United States in 1940. His novel entitled Lolita (1955) was immensely successful. Although he had been an American citizen since 1945, he came back to Europe in 1961, and lived in Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.