Vladimir Nabokov

Zimmer, Dieter E.

Dieter E. Zimmer (1934-2020) first wrote on Nabokov in 1959, and soon after became his most frequent translator into German. His 1963 bibliography of Nabokov, based on Véra Nabokov's material, became the basis for all subsequent Nabokov primary bibliography. He interviewed Nabokov more than once for German media. He was a journalist for Die Zeit, becoming editor of its feuilleton, and one of the leading postwar essayists in  German, focusing especially on the subjects of language, science, and technology. In 1989 he initiated and became the editor of the Complete Works of Vladimir Nabokov in German, the most comprehensive edition in any language.  He has published more than twenty-two books, including ones on Nabokov's Berlin, Nabokovs Berlin (2001), on Nabokov's imagined travels in Central Asia (in chapter 2 of The Gift), Nabokov reist im Traum in das Innere Asiens (2006), and on the Lolita sensation, Wirbelsturm Lolita (2008). He maintained an extensive web site, much of it in English, which offers among his other interests a wealth of his Nabokov-related writings and scholarship, including a detailed chronology of the events in Lolita, a travelogue of Lolita, a fully cross-referenced version of his landmark compendium A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths (Web Edition 2012), a comprehensive genealogy of the Nabokov family, and much more. [SB, BB]

See the obituaries by Brian Boyd (here), Stephen Blackwell (here), Olga Voronina (here), Maurice Couturier (here), Tatiana Ponomareva (here) and Gerard de Vries (here).