Looking for Lolita

In search of the man behind the book, which is still controversial half a century after it was first published, I am in St Petersburg with a crew from BBC4. At the airport, we guilelessly do the right thing and enter the red channel with our camera kit, watched in horror by the customs officials. This means they must wearily make an inventory of our stuff. As if to commemorate Nabokov's loathing of Soviet bureaucracy, a carrot-topped inspector - strictly speaking, a son of Putin's Russia - states that the task will take two hours. The epic resignation born of the steppes, surely? Well, no, it's the goon's hard-won prescience, in fact. The director, Emma Boswell, and the researcher, Charlotte Gittins, are required to produce every piece of equipment. While the freckly official writes it all up in heartbreaking longhand, his sidekick, a man with flyaway epaulettes, takes a souvenir snap of every item with a throwback Instamatic. The shade of the master looks on, smiling thinly.

Rozhdestveno, Russia

Spend a happy hour or two, as the teenaged Nabokov used to do, riding through the woods at Rozhdestveno on a pushbike - borrowed from a man who turns out to be the grandson of the Nabokov family chef.

At 17, Nabokov inherited Rozhdestveno, his uncle's country residence outside St Petersburg, a colonnaded pile that incongruously resembles an antebellum mansion in the American South. It was torched by the retreating German army in the second world war before being painstakingly rebuilt. The accommodating shadows cast by the columns were the scene of trysts between Nabokov and his first love, a local girl of his own age, Valentina Shulgin. Their passionate affair, like everything else in Nabokov's privileged life, was summarily terminated by the revolution. For the rest of his life, he preserved the Russia of his childhood in his novels and his prodigious memory.

Was Valentina in his mind when he was writing Lolita? Certainly, Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged European obsessed with the adolescent "Lo" in the novel, wistfully recalls a blameless first teenage love. Some critics have speculated that Lolita represents the innocence of the new world, and Humbert, her despoiler, the ruin and degradation of his continent in the 20th century. The theme of a mature man obsessed with a much younger female recurs in Nabokov's books, including The Enchanter, Laughter in the Dark and his "lost", unfinished fiction, The Original of Laura, on which he was working at the time of his death. Nabokov left instructions that it should be destroyed, but his family couldn't bring themselves to do it. The manuscript, scribbled in pencil on index cards in the writer's habitual working method, has finally been retrieved from the vaults of a Swiss bank by his son, Dmitri. For more than 30 years, the literary world has wondered if the fastidious Nabokov was merely dissatisfied with Laura, or if the novella was even more shocking than Lolita. For his part, the writer haughtily declined to be drawn on such fashionable concerns as the "meaning" of his work, insisting that it spoke for itself - nothing more, nothing less.

It doesn't require much psychoanalysis to see that Nabokov's great love of nature, and of butterflies in particular, began here at Rozhdestveno. I pedal through a buggy dell. The snail is on the stalk and the air is white with cabbage butterflies.

Nabokov Museum, St Petersburg

The suffocating heat of the shut-up Nabokov family home, now a museum, in the St Petersburg summer - with the electric lights thrumming and failing, and dust drifting from the cornices at the top of a grand staircase. The storming of the Winter Palace, a few streets away, found the young Nabokov languidly composing verse. But he stirred himself from the chaise longue in time to see his first dead body and - an icy Nabokovian touch - thieves stripping the corpse of its boots. Now his time here is remembered by a butterfly net, among other things. It looks like a windsock, or an extra-large ­prophylactic.

Trinity College, Cambridge

In the quad, bowler-hatted porters bark at unwary tourists who trespass on the grass. Only fellows of the college are allowed to tread the hallowed greensward. Nabokov, who came up to Cambridge in 1919 before joining his family in Berlin in 1922, found such rules as unsupportable as they were inscrutable. Not even the wretched flight of the Nabokovs into exile could dent the young Vladimir's patrician sense of entitlement. After all, when his family sailed from Sebastopol under a hail of Bolshevik gunfire, he was to be found enjoying a leisurely game of chess with his father. On deck.

Nabokov liked to escape the confines of Trinity, to punt on the Cam and keep goal for his undergraduate football XI. I take a spell between the sticks in a park kickabout. How could such an individualist reconcile himself to the demands of a team game, I wonder. In the penalty area, all becomes clear. The goalkeeper is a law unto himself - the only player who is allowed to handle the ball - and wears the number one on his jersey.

In a taxi, I ask the driver what he thinks of Lolita. He hasn't read the book, but he once saw the film starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert. There's a nice moment when I ask him his name. "Kevin." And his surname? "Kevin Kevin," the driver says slipperily.

Staten Island Ferry, New York

There's no thrill like arriving somewhere by water, as Nabokov did with his wife and son when they came to New York in 1940. After war and austerity in Europe, the high-rises of Manhattan that materialised over the handrail must have looked like a showroom of luxury white goods. During the Nabokov family's exile, Vladimir's father had been shot dead on a political platform in Berlin, killed by a bullet meant for the man standing next to him. Nabokov himself, having escaped the communists in Germany, moved to France in 1937, but was now on the run from the Nazis - his wife, Vera, was Jewish. Rachmaninov gave him the money for the passage across the Atlantic.

Nabokov's brother, Sergei, was not so fortunate. He perished in a concentration camp, condemned for his homosexuality. Nabokov has been criticised for a certain pitilessness - Martin Amis called him the "laureate of cruelty" - but what's just as striking is a total absence of self-pity. In fact, he had an iron-clad self-sufficiency, easy to mistake for aloofness.

Highway 79, upstate New York

As the sun burns off the morning mist, I see from the open cockpit of our Mustang convertible a vision of Nabokov's America: clapboard houses, picket fences, stooping Dutch barns. Lolita is a kind of shooting script for an extraordinary road movie. Nabokov was particularly fond of, and good on, diners. Observing a sugar caster at one eaterie, Humbert Humbert remarks on the "horribly experienced flies" that frequent it. I'm mesmerised by the gruesome fixture of live-bait machines. These chum dispensers, located on the forecourts of filling stations, offer anglers tubs of squirming maggots at $3 each. How Nabokov would have relished them. Grubs on demand are calculated to appeal to the bug-fancier in him, the man who patiently deduced from Kafka's Metamorphosis that when Gregor Samsa turns into an insect, he doesn't become a cockroach, as Kafka believed, but a beetle. In other words, Samsa could simply have flown away from his adversaries.

Cornell University, New York State

"People come here from all over the world. They walk into this room and burst into tears." It's Ken McClane, the professor who has inherited Nabokov's office in the English faculty at Cornell. His unremarkable work station has become a place of pilgrimage for Nabokov's devoted readers. To make ends meet while he was writing Lolita, the author taught a typically idiosyncratic list of great books: not only Dickens and Jane Austen, but also Robert Louis Stevenson, writer of Nabokov's favourite, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His lectures are vividly remembered half a century later. For Nabokov, it wasn't enough to guide his students through the pages of Joyce's Ulysses. He insisted on chalking up a street plan of Leopold Bloom's Dublin as well. Mike Abrams, now in his nineties, was one of Nabokov's colleagues. "Those lectures were a real performance. Vera, who assisted him, would go around in a white coat, like a lab technician. After what happened to Vladimir's father, she always carried a gun in her pocket, just to be on the safe side."

At the offices of Playboy in New York, I meet Amy Grace Loyd, the literary editor of Hugh Hefner's magazine. Nabokov contributed stories to Playboy, and it has paid an undisclosed sum to publish an extract of The Original of Laura. "It's just so remarkably important to us, because he was one of the writers that shaped us," Loyd says.

"Did Hef himself okay the deal?"

"Of course," she says. At that moment, her BlackBerry throbs.

"If it's Hef, can I speak to him?" It is.

Alas, the great man sends his regrets that he cannot enjoy the pleasure of my conversation at this time. He's tied up.

Montreux, Switzerland

The barman at the Palace Hotel remembers Nabokov. "He would play tennis, or chase butterflies, and come and see me for a Campari. I think it must have been Mrs Vera who wrote all the books!" Flush with the success of Lolita, Nabokov withdrew at last to St Petersburg - or, rather, to the next best thing, the old Europe of Switzerland and the grand style of the Palace Hotel. He lived here with Vera for the last 16 years of his life, the liveried staff reminding him of the days when the Nabokovs were attended by a retinue of 50 servants. The Palace keeps his cherrywood desk in his former suite. Other relics include 4,000 or more Alpine butterflies, which have found their way into the attic of a museum further round Lake Geneva at Lausanne. Many of Nabokov's trophies still await removal from their brown paper envelopes, to be spread and mounted.

You can pick Nabokov apart as much as you want, but in the end it's like pulling the wings off a butterfly in the hope of seeing how it flies. Nabokov himself said: "The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style." Written by a little-known author, in a tangy American-English he had taught himself, then mastered, Lolita remains a brilliant, dazzling specimen. It seems to bear out the proposition that a butterfly flapping its wings in one corner of the world can unleash a hurricane elsewhere.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lolita?, written and presented by Stephen Smith, will be broadcast in BBC4's Russian Season next month. The Original of Laura is published by Penguin on November 17