Nicolas Nabokov

In 1918, after his family fled the Bolshevik Revolution to the Crimea, he began his musical education with Vladimir Rebikov.

[4] His close friends included the philosopher and fellow émigré Isaiah Berlin and composer Igor Stravinsky.

Back in the US, he taught at the Peabody Conservatory from the fall of 1944 until the spring of 1945, then, in 1950–1951, served as music director at the American Academy in Rome.

In 1949, Nabokov attended a New York press conference of the visiting Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and publicly humiliated him by showing he was not a free agent and had to represent the positions of Stalin's government, by asking him if he approved the Soviet censorship over Stravinsky's music, to which Shostakovich had no option but to reply that he did.

With the effective dissolution of the CCF in 1967, Nabokov found a series of teaching jobs at American universities, and in 1970, became resident composer at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, where he remained until 1973.