The article considers the crucial genre-forming role of the biographical component in Nabokov’s novels on Russian emigrants. Certainly it is of great importance in his memoirs, but in “The Gift” it also obviously creates the individual artistic explorations of F. Godunov-Cherdyntsev and his individual consciousness, because he is portrayed as the alter-ego of the author. The protagonist Luzhin in “The Defense” with love of chess partly reminds the author, but his real prototype is the chess champion of Russia A. Rubinstein. In American novels on Russian émigré Nabokov creates an unfavorable image of his burlesque double, who ruins the main hero’s life (“Pnin”), or vice versa – his own paranoic double, V.V. MacNab, the author of a biographie romancée, who ascribes to himself all Nabokov’s novels, but grotesquely garbled. Thus a biographical component is the invigorating vital source for creating new curious and remarkable images, marvelous plot and genre collisions, used in Nabokov’s novels on Russian émigré.