Interesting that you are sepaking about Nabokov and Lolita... I came across this site while helping my daughter with her paper about Sikorsky..
http://englishrussia.com/?p=3141
6 Russian People Who Changed the USA
Vladimir Nabokov (22 April, 1899 – 2 July, 1977) was the great Russian novelist. He emigrated from Russia to England (1919), then to Germany (1922), and then to the USA (1940), where he settled down in Manhattan. He never wrote in Russian after he came to the USA, though translated his works in English into Russian.

Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) is considered to be one of the most prominent novels in literature. How much influence this word caused on the human minds we all can only guess now. He also was interested in entomology and chess problems.