Born in Stockholm in 1833 of Swedish parents, Alfred Nobel moved with his family to St. Petersburg, then the capital of Russia, at the age of
nine. There his energetic and inventive father soon acquired a strong and respected position as an inventor and industrialist. Nobel
subsequently lived in several countries and ultimately came to regard himself as a citizen of the world. Even so, he never gave up his Swedish
citizenship.
By virtue of the education he received in many countries, Nobel read, spoke and wrote fluently in five European languages: Swedish, Russian,
English, French and German. His numerous handwritten letters demonstrate his remarkable proficiency in all of them. He perfected his French
when sent to Paris by his father in his late teens to study chemistry. His letters in French are particularly elegant. Those in English sometimes
bear traces of the early nineteenth-century style generally associated with Byron and Shelley (his two favourite poets) and are remarkably free
of grammatical and idiomatic errors. To his mother he always wrote in Swedish, which is also the language of the will he composed in Paris. …
