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Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg on 22 April 1899, and his family left Russia for good in 1919, after the defeat of the White Army. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, then spent about fifteen years in Berlin writing novels in Russian under the name V. Sirin; in March 1922 his father was shot dead there while shielding the politician Pavel Milyukov from an assassin. In May 1940 Nabokov reached New York. He taught at Wellesley, worked on butterflies at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and from 1948 to 1959 taught literature at Cornell, where by 1953 Lolita was an all but finished typescript. It was published in 1955, and its success let him stop teaching; from 1961 he lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he died on 2 July 1977. Readers come to him for prose that is exact, sensuous and often very funny, for novels built like puzzles — Pale Fire is a 999-line poem buried under a mad editor's commentary — and for narrators whose eloquence is the trap. The writers below share at least one of those: the style, the game, or the voice you should not trust.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Style and unreliable narrators · The literary puzzle · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
If you love Vladimir Nabokov, start with Nikolai Gogol, the Russian he wrote a whole book about, and James Joyce, whose Ulysses he ranked first among the century's prose. For the puzzles of Pale Fire, read Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. For a narrator who talks you into it, as Humbert Humbert does, try John Banville's The Book of Evidence and Martin Amis's Money.
10 authors like Vladimir Nabokov
Where to start if you loved Vladimir Nabokov
If you want Lolita's voice, read John Banville.
The Book of Evidence: a murderer with exquisite taste, making his case.
If you want Pale Fire's games, read Jorge Luis Borges.
Ficciones, where the footnote becomes the story.
If you want the Russian roots, read Nikolai Gogol.
“The Overcoat” first, then Dead Souls.
If you want the comedy, read Martin Amis.
Money: a narrator you would never trust and cannot put down.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Vladimir Nabokov
Who should I read if I love Vladimir Nabokov?
Start with Nikolai Gogol, the Russian writer Nabokov wrote a book about in 1944, and James Joyce, whose Ulysses he ranked first among twentieth-century prose. For the puzzle novels, read Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. For the seductive, unreliable narrator, read John Banville's The Book of Evidence, Martin Amis's Money and Ian McEwan's Atonement. Thomas Pynchon, John Updike and W.G. Sebald each carry on a different part of his work.
What books are like Lolita?
John Banville's The Book of Evidence (1989) is the closest in voice: a cultivated killer narrating his own case. Martin Amis's Money (1984) has the same repellent, irresistible first person, played for comedy, and Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) shares its question about who gets to tell the story. For a book-by-book list, see Books Like Lolita.
Is Lolita a love story?
No. It is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a man in his late thirties who abducts and abuses a twelve-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, and tells the story in language designed to make the reader sympathise with him. The novel lets the truth show through his eloquence. Humbert himself mentions the real 1948 kidnapping of eleven-year-old Sally Horner, which Sarah Weinman investigated in The Real Lolita (2018).
What should I read after Pale Fire?
Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones, for stories disguised as essays and footnotes, and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, a novel about the reader trying to read it. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 has the same uncertainty about whether a pattern is real.
Did Nabokov admire Dostoevsky?
Mostly not. In the lectures published as Lectures on Russian Literature (1981) he criticised Dostoevsky's lack of taste and his sentimentality, and was harsh about Crime and Punishment, though he praised the early novella The Double. The Russian writers he admired most were Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov.
Which books did Nabokov think were the greatest?
In a 1965 interview he named Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Andrei Bely's Petersburg and the first half of Proust's In Search of Lost Time as the greatest prose works of the twentieth century.
Did Nabokov teach Thomas Pynchon?
Pynchon studied at Cornell in the 1950s while Nabokov taught there, and he is often said to have attended Nabokov's lectures, though how far that can be documented is still discussed by scholars. Critics have long compared Pynchon's early novel V. with Nabokov's work.
Footnotes
- Vladimir Nabokov — Wikipedia
- Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell — Cornell University Library
- Nabokov's 1965 interview with Robert Hughes — NABOKV-L
- Ghosts (review of The Emigrants) — The New York Review of Books
- John Banville — British Council Literature
- Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov's work (2009)
- Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon at Cornell University — Western Sydney University
- Lectures on Literature — MIT Press Bookstore
List last reviewed 15 October 2026.
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Every Vladimir Nabokov Book
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