Although it was then unusual for a Russian aristocrat to marry into a Jewish family, Nabokov had no issue with it. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a prominent opponent of anti-semitism in Tsarist Russia and wrote articles deploring the Kishinev pogrom. Vladimir Dmitrievich was killed in 1922 in Berlin, during an assassination attempt on the life of politician Pavel Milyukov.