"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written," John Updike once wrote. "That is, ecstatically." In 1959, LIFE Magazine sent photographer Carl Mydans to Ithaca, New York to shoot the Russian-born author, whose magnum opus "Lolita" was breaking sales records across the country. Most of the photos from that series were never published — a handful appeared in LIFE's international edition — but they offer an unique look into the private life of one of the titans of American literature. To mark the recent publication of Nabokov's last, unfinished novel "The Original of Laura," LIFE now presents the unpublished photos from that shoot.