The Enchanter

On a Book Entitled The Enchanter ^{by Dmitri Nabokov}

THE TITLE FOR THE FOLLOWING brief notes, which may interest the reader and perhaps answer a few questions, was chosen with the half-serious thought that a small echo of Father’s postface to Lolita may amuse his shade wherever it may be.

In both translation and commentary I have tried hard to stick to the Nabokov rules: precision, artistic fidelity, no padding, no ascribing. Any conjecture beyond what I have ventured would violate those rules.

The translation itself reflects my intent to be faithful to VN in both the general and the specific, textual, senses. Many years of translating for and with Father instilled in me those categorical requirements of his. The only cases where he considered departures admissable were untranslatable expressions and revisions of the text itself, in the translated version, by the original author. It is possible that VN, were he alive, might have exercised his authorial license to change certain details of The Enchanter; I believe, though, that he would have chosen to leave intact this model of conciseness and multilevel meaning. The rare instances where I have taken the liberty of making minor adjustments occur precisely where the technique—as in the telescoped Little Red Riding Hood wordplays (this page; this page) or the high-speed imagery of the finale—would have made a totally literal rendering meaningless in English. Elsewhere, on occasion, the English may seem simply a bit unorthodox. But so, in such cases, is the Russian.

Other possible translations of the Russian word volshebnik are “magician” or “conjuror,” but I have respected Nabokov’s express intention that, in this case, it be rendered as “enchanter.” Volshebnik was written during October and November of 1939. It was signed “V. Sirin,” a pseudonym that VN used for his Russian writings from his early youth on so that they would not be confused with those of his father, who had the same given name. Sirin in Russian is both a species of owl and a bird of ancient fable, but most probably has no connection, as some have suggested, with the word siren.

The original text was dictated to and typed by Father’s first reader, Vera Nabokov. According to Nabokov’s letters, he showed it shortly thereafter to four other people, literary friends of his (see Author’s Note One).

At some point, apparently, a typescript was also shown to the émigré critic Vladimir Weidle, in Paris. It could not have been later than May 1940, when we sailed for New York. Andrew Field, who, it seems, read an article written nearly forty years after the fact by a very old Weidle not long before his death, claims[11] the piece shown to Weidle differed in several respects from The Enchanter (of which Field has a very sketchy idea at best, having seen only two pages and one or perhaps both of Nabokov’s references presented at the beginning of this volume).

Presumably that version was called “The Satyr,” the girl “was no more than ten,” and the concluding scene was set not on the French Riviera but “in a remote little hotel in Switzerland.” Field also attributes the name Arthur to the protagonist. It is unclear whether he got that from Weidle too, but more likely he simply gleaned it from Father’s recollection in his postface to Lolita. I have suggested that Nabokov had thought of his protagonist as “Arthur,” or perhaps even used that name in a preliminary draft. It is highly unlikely, however, that the name appeared in a manuscript “already marked with instructions for the printer,” as Field has Weidle affirm.

As for the three differences Field cites, if his paraphrase of the Weidle article is accurate, then Weidle’s memory of that distant event must have been a bit hazy (Field does admit, in fact, that Weidle “could not remember whether the girl is named in the story”). The fact is that there never was a version called “The Satyr”; indeed, such a title would seem most implausible to anyone with a sensitive ear for Nabokov’s use of language. And I would attribute the same degree of credibility to the rest of Weidle’s assertions.

I was five when The Enchanter was being written and was, if anything, a disruptive influence in our Paris apartment and our Riviera pensions. I recall that, between generous periods of play with me, Father would sometimes withdraw into the bathroom of our meager quarters to work in peace, although not, as John Shade does for shaving purposes in Pale Fire, on a board placed across the tub. While I was already aware that my father was a “writer,” I had no idea of what was being written, and my parents certainly made no attempt to familiarize me with the story of Volshebnik (I think the only work of Father’s I knew at the time was his Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland and the little tales and ditties he would improvise for me). It is possible that, when Father was writing Volshebnik, I had already been bundled off to Deauville with a cousin of Mother’s, since it was feared that the rumble of Hitler’s bombs might reach Paris. (It did, but only after our departure for America, and I think one of the few bombs actually dropped on the city did hit our building as we were crossing on the Champlain. The vessel, too, was destined to be destroyed after having safely delivered us with no more than the spout of an occasional whale to alarm a couple of trigger-happy gunners; on its next voyage, for which we had originally held passage, it was sunk with all aboard by a German submarine.)

Other than what already is or will now become publicly available, neither Mother nor I can reconstruct much about the birth of the idea in VN’s mind, but can only alert the reader to some of the inane hypotheses that have been propounded, especially of late. As for the link with Lolita, the theme had probably lain dormant (as Nabokov suggests in “On a Book Entitled Lolita”) until the new novel began germinating, somewhat as in the case of the interrupted Solus Rex and the later, very different, but nonetheless related Pale Fire.

It is clear from Nabokov’s postface to Lolita, originally written in 1956, that, at the time, he believed whatever copies had existed of the Volshebnik typescript had been destroyed, and his recollection of the novella was somewhat blurred, partly by the passing of time, but mainly by his rejection of it as “a dead scrap,” superseded by Lolita. The surviving text probably turned up not long before he proposed it, with reborn enthusiasm, to G. P. Putnam’s Sons (see Author’s Note Two).

I became aware of the work’s existence quite late and in rather a vague way, and had occasion to read it only in the early eighties, when our voluminous archives were finally organized by Brian Boyd (the author of a proper literary biography of VN, to be published in 1988). It was then that Volshebnik, which had been consulted by Father in the sixties before it submerged anew among the jumble of belongings that had been shipped to Switzerland from an Ithaca warehouse, resurfaced.

I completed a more or less final draft of the translation in September of 1985.

For the initial impetus to attack what was not an easy job I must give heartfelt thanks to Matthew Bruccoli, who had envisioned a very limited edition of the work, as Nabokov had originally suggested to Walter Minton, then president of Putnam.

The timing of this public debut of The Enchanter is not without an amusing and instructive coincidental sidelight. In 1985, in Paris, there began an energetic one-man campaign to attribute to Vladimir Nabokov a pseudonymous, quite un-Nabokovian book from the mid-thirties entitled Novel with Cocaine.

Falling as it does within the very limited realm of rediscovered Nabokoviana, The Enchanter is a most appropriate example of the strikingly original prose Nabokov-Sirin produced in his most mature—and final—years as a novelist in his mother tongue (not long before writing The Enchanter in 1939, in fact, he had completed his first major English work, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and 1940 was to be the year of our transplantation to the United States).

For anyone who may harbor lingering doubts about the authorship of the other book, a quick comparison of its substance and style with those of The Enchanter should suffice to put the final round of shot into this moribund canard.

A brief account of the bizarre affair is, nevertheless, perhaps in order. Early in 1985, in the Paris-based Messenger of the Russian Christian Movement, Professor Nikita Struve of the Sorbonne affirmed with great conviction that Novel with Cocaine, by one “M. Agheyev,” written in the early thirties in Istanbul and published soon thereafter in the Paris émigré review Numbers, was in fact the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

To support this thesis, Struve adduced sentences from Novel with Cocaine that, according to him, are “typical of Nabokov.” Struve’s assertions were taken up in a letter to the (London) Times Literary Supplement, 9 August 1985, from Julian Graffy of the University of London, who referred to Struve’s “detailed analysis of the secondary themes, structural devices, semantic fields [whatever those may be] and metaphors of N with C, all of which are found, on the basis of repeated quotation and comparison… to be quintessentially Nabokovian.”

There have since been other echoes of Struve’s theory in several publications in Europe and in the United States.

One can cite numerous deficiencies in Agheyev’s style—blatantly incorrect forms, for instance, like “zachifynul” (for “sneezed”) or “ispol ’zovyvat’ ” (for “to use”)—that are obvious to anyone with a knowledge of Russian. It is amazing that a Sorbonne specialist in Russian language and literature like Struve, or a London University professor of Slavonic studies like Graffy could have confused the incompletely educated Agheyev’s often vulgar or incorrect locutions with Nabokov’s precise and subtle style. As Dmitri Savitzky notes in an article refuting Struve’s theory in Russian Thought (Paris, 8 November 1985), Nabokov’s Russian possesses the impeccable rhythm of classical poetry, while Agheyev’s is “contrived, jolting, uneven.” One look at Agheyev’s style precludes the need to rebut the rest of Struve’s arguments.

In his 1986 book Field ventilates the hypothesis that Novel with Cocaine might have been a deliberate mystification by Nabokov or by someone else. He ends by affirming, nonetheless, that “it can be said with absolute certainty… that there is some link between the work of Agheyev and Sirin,” because there happens to be a partial assonance between the names of Agheyev’s character Sinat[12] and Nabokov’s Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading.

The Sinat-Cincinnatus connection falls into the same category of scholarship as, say, Field’s overblown claptrap about an extramarital affair, the total tripe about secret heavy drinking, the nonsensical conjectures about Father’s death, or the contention that Nabokov, in his letters to his mother, addressed her as “Lolita” (whereon Field constructs a typical house of marked cards). In the latter case his reasoning goes as follows: Father, with the natural reserve of a gentleman, had preferred to omit the term of endearment with which he habitually addressed his mother, whose name was Hélène, from the copies of the letters he showed to Field before Field revealed his true colors. Field, after having consumed, I suppose, many magnifying glasses, gleaned the trace of the “tail or hat” of a Cyrillic t at the edge of the blank space where the salutation had been excised (incidentally, the handwritten lowercase Cyrillic t generally resembles a small Roman m, and is, therefore, tailless and hatless). For that reason, and because the missing word was “about seven letters long,” and also because Father had told him that “Lyolya” was a perfectly normal Russian diminutive for “Hélène,” and God knows for what other reasons, Field concludes (not without a trace of personal outrage), that it was “Lolita, surely,” and, characteristically, proceeds to refer to this absurdity as an established fact further on in his book.

Not only does “Lolita” have only six letters; not only would the Latin derivation have been unthinkable within the parameters of Russian etymology, where Spanish cognates did not enjoy the same favor as French or English ones; but the word deleted out of a sense of privacy and out of respect for the memory of a beloved mother was the Russian “radost’” (“joy,” “dearest”). It was Nabokov’s habitual salutation to his mother, and, of course, we have the original letters to prove it. And “Lolita Haze” was “Juanita Dark” in Father’s drafts of the novel until very late in the game. So much for “Lolita, surely.”

But let us leave Field among his ruins and revisit another corner of the scrap heap briefly to bury the Agheyev matter, whose relevance here is the dramatic dissimilarity between that author’s work and The Enchanter.

Research by Frank Williams, who originally reviewed the English version of the Agheyev book in the TLS on 5 July 1985; by the French literary journalist Alain Garric who went all the way to Istanbul while preparing a lengthy article on the subject for Libération; and by others, has confirmed the following sequence of events.

After Novel with Cocaine originally appeared in Numbers and aroused a certain curiosity in émigré circles, a Russian lady in Paris named Lydia Chervinskaya was asked to track down “Agheyev” with the help of her parents, who happened to live in Istanbul, whence the manuscript had originally been sent. Chervinskaya found him there, confined to a mental institution because of tremors and convulsions. After being rescued by the lady’s father, Agheyev became a friend of the family and grew close to Chervinskaya, to whom he confided his real name—Mark Levi—and his complex and motley history, which included the killing of a Russian officer, flight to Turkey, and obsession with drugs.

Levi-Agheyev went with Chervinskaya to Paris but, after a sojourn there, returned to Istanbul, where he died, presumably from the consequences of cocaine abuse, in 1936.

V. S. Yanovsky, who was associated with Numbers when the manuscript was first received in Paris, and who now lives in a suburb of New York City, confirmed in an interview reported in The New York Times (8 October 1985) that, when the manuscript arrived for publication in Russian, it bore the unequivocally Jewish signature “Levi,” and that, somewhere along the line, it was decided to substitute “a more Russian-sounding name.” Finally, inquiries by the translator of the French version of the novel that appeared in 1982, cited by Williams, reveal that “a Mark Abramovich Levi was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Istanbul in February 1936.”

While no literary adventurer would have a leg to stand on if he were to question the authorship of The Enchanter, Professor Struve appears determined to persist in his benighted and quixotic campaign to ascribe the Agheyev work, as well, to VN, who, except for a brief contribution on a very different subject to its first issue, submitted no material to Numbers, which had rudely attacked him shortly thereafter; had never visited Moscow, where the novel is set, with a considerable amount of local detail; never used cocaine or other drugs; and wrote, unlike Agheyev, in pure, correct St. Petersburg Russian. Furthermore, if indeed there had been any connection between Nabokov and Novel with Cocaine, someone among his literary acquaintances would have had an inkling of it, and, if not, then his wife, first reader, and typist Vera Nabokov would surely have known.

The stucco parapet of the Florida terrace where I am writing at this moment—the kind with white paint covering a deliberately uneven surface—is full of random patterns. It takes only a pencil stroke here and there to complete an excellent hippopotamus, a stern Flemish profile, a busty showgirl, or any number of friendly or disconcerting little free-form monsters.

This is what Nabokov, who early in life had seriously considered becoming a painter, could do so well with an ornate lampshade, for example, or some repetitively flowered wallpaper. Comical faces, nonexistent but plausible butterflies, and grotesque little creatures of his own invention gradually came to inhabit hospitable designs of the quarters at the Montreux-Palace Hotel, where he lived and worked, and some of them happily survive to this day, preserved either on our express instructions or by the limited capacity for observation of the cleaning teams that storm, like a defensive football line, through those rooms every afternoon. A few particularly good ones have, alas, long since been deterged from the tiles adjacent to the bathtub that, to Field’s apparent consternation, Father used every day.

Such enhancement and recombination of chance patterns are, in a larger sense, an essential part of Nabokov’s creative synthesis. The fortuitous observation, the reported or imagined psychological anomaly, elaborated by the artist’s fantasy, assumed a harmonious growth of their own as the infant work was gradually weaned from the image, the news item, or the reverie that had jolted its cells into the process of multiplication.

Like certain of Nabokov’s other works, The Enchanter is the study of madness seen through the madman’s mind. Aberrations in general, both physical and psychological, were among the diverse sources of raw material that nurtured Nabokov’s artistic fantasy. The criminal pedophilia of the protagonist—like that of the later Humbert in a new work and a different setting; like the murderous delusion of Hermann in Despair; like the sexual anomalies that are but one element of Pale Fire and other works; like the madness of the chess master Luzhin[13] and the musician Bachmann;[14] like the deformations of the Potato Elf,[15] and of the Siamese twins in “The Double Monster”[16] —was one among many themes Nabokov selected for the creative process of fictional recombination.

writes Nabokov in the concluding sentence of his 1925 short story “The Fight.”[17] This early expression, forthright yet undogmatic, of what was to remain an enduring aspect of his aesthetic approach, is, I suspect, destined to be quoted often, and not always in context.

“Perhaps,” the word with which Nabokov introduced the thought, is an important qualifier. As a creative writer rather than a journalist, social commentator, or psychoanalyst, Nabokov chose to examine the phenomena of his surroundings through the refractive lens of artistry; at the same time his codex for literary creation is no less precise than the scientific purity of his lepidopterological investigations. But even if his emphasis is on the “combinational delights” in which an artist is privileged to indulge, by no means does it follow that Nabokov was indifferent to the horrors of tyranny, murder, and child molestation; to the tragedy of social or personal injustice; or to the plight of those who have somehow been shortchanged by Fate.

It is not indispensable to have known Father personally in order to understand this; it is enough to have read his books with reasonable care. For the poet in Nabokov the vehicle of choice was the concrete artistic experience rather than the abstract declaration. However, if one is in quest of quotable bits of credo, the miniature Socratic dialogue of the 1927 story “The Passenger”[18] concedes another rare peek into the essence of his ethos. “Life is more talented than we,” says the first character, the writer. “How can we compete with that goddess? Her works are untranslatable, indescribable.” Hence,

At the story’s end, his interlocutor the wise critic replies:

But the writer’s concluding thought expresses two further distinct, if undivorceable, considerations—artistic curiosity and human compassion:

One suspects, early on in The Enchanter, that things will not end well, that the cynical, contemptible protagonist will get his due, and, if an obvious moral is needed, this premonition is it. However, besides being part horror story, this is also part mystery thriller: Fate toys with the madman, now thwarting, now abetting, now providing a hair-raising close call; as events unfold we do not yet know from which direction disaster will strike, but we sense increasingly that it is imminent.

The man is a dreamer like others, although in this case a very rotten dreamer. Distasteful as he may be, though, one of the most poignant levels of this story is that of his—occasionally objective—introspection. One might even go so far as to say that the story resides in the introspection; and through this introspection on the basically evil protagonist’s part Nabokov succeeds in transmitting compassion not only for the victims but, to a degree, for the villain himself. A yearning for decency gleams now and then through the man’s single-minded cynicism, and prompts pathetic attempts at self-justification; although the borderlines dissolve under the impetus of his compulsion, he cannot escape the fleeting realization that he is a monster. And while the woman he marries may be a repellent means to a criminal end, and the girl an instrument for his gratification, other nuances emerge. The viewpoint of the text—like many other aspects of the story—may sometimes be deliberately ambiguous, but the madman himself cannot avoid perceiving, in stunned moments of lucidity, the pathetic side of both mother and daughter. His pity for the former transpires, with a kind of reverse Russian, through the very revulsion on which he harps; and there is a moving instant of compassion when we see her, through his eyes, as pregnant “with her own death.” As for the girl, there exists a fragile, decent sliver of his soul that would like to feel a genuinely paternal love for her.

The Enchanter, evil conjuror though he may be, lives partially in an enchanted world. And, common madman or not, he perceives himself on a special, poetic plane as a mad king (for he knows that he is, in any case, mad)—a king who is fleetingly reminiscent of other, thematically related, lone Nabokovian monarchs and is, at the same time, a kind of lecherous Lear living in fairy-tale seclusion by the sea with his “little Cordelia,” whom, for a flicker of an instant, he imagines as an innocent, innocently loved daughter. But, as always, the paternal shades rapidly into the infernal, and the beast within him plunges into a pedophilic fantasy so intense that its consequences cause a female fellow-passenger to change compartments.

In agonizing moments of introspection he recognizes the beast and tries to will it away. Ingeniously appropriate images recur in bestial counterpoint—hyenas in every hygiene; onanistic tentacles; the lupine leer in place of the intended smile; the licking of chops at the thought of his defenseless, sleeping prey; the whole leitmotif of the Wolf about to devour his Red Riding Hood, complete with its eerie final echo. This dark beast within him, this bête noire of his, must always be construed as the protagonist’s implicit self-perception, and, in his rational moments, it is what the Enchanter fears most; thus, catching himself in an absentminded smile, he posits, with pathetic, flimsy hope, that “only humans are capable of absentmindedness” and that therefore he too might after all be human.

The stratification of the story is most striking in its double- and triple-bottomed imagery. It is true, in a sense, that some delicate passages are more explicit than elsewhere in Nabokov. But at other moments the sexual undercurrent is no more than the glinting facet of a simile or the momentary derailment of a train of thought headed for a quite different destination. Multiple levels and senses, as is known, occur often in Nabokov. Yet the line he treads here is razor thin, and the virtuosity consists in a deliberate vagueness of verbal and visual elements whose sum is a complex, otherwise undefinable, but totally precise unit of communication.

An analogous kind of ambiguity, whose purpose and synthesis are again the exact expression of a complex concept, is at times employed to convey the concurrent—and conflicting—thoughts racing through the protagonist’s brain. As a limpid instance of what I mean, let me cite one such passage, whose paradoxes, at first sight, challenge reader and translator alike, but, when approached without selectively closing the switch on tracks of thought parallel to what at first seems the main line, again reward one with a crystalline whole that is greater than the sum of its parts; the openness of receptivity required here, which would perhaps represent overkill in dealing with more conventional writing, is akin to that which a sensitive ear will apply to the counterpoint of Bach or the thematic texture of Wagner, or which a stubborn eye will force upon a recalcitrant brain when their possessor perceives that the same elements of a tricky design can simultaneously yield, say, an ape peering wistfully out of its cage and a beach ball bobbing, hopelessly out of reach, amid the reflections of a sunset on the repetitious ripples of an azure sea.

The protagonist, rather than face his odious nuptial obligations, has gone roaming in the night. He has considered various alternatives of disposing of his newly acquired, already superfluous spouse, who is promisingly ill, but every moment of whose existence keeps him from the girl he craves. He has pondered poison, presumably entered a pharmacy, perhaps made a purchase. On his return he sees a strip of light under the door of the “dear departed” and says to himself “Charlatans… We’ll have to stick to the original version.” The concurrent ideas here can be listed thus:

1. He is disappointed that she has not gone to sleep.

2. He had half-consciously been equating sleep with death.

3. Our seeing her, through his eyes, as the “dear departed” connotes his sarcastic reaction to her being

a. awake

b. alive.

4. Or the term “dear departed” signifies that, in his mind, she is already dead or as good as dead.

5. He must now either satisfy his unappetizing bride or find a plausible excuse to say good night and go to bed (the “original version”).

6. His access to the girl remains as problematic as ever.

7. The “charlatans” are

a. the pharmacists whose potion he did not buy;

b. the pharmacists whose potion he did buy but did not use;

c. the pharmacists whose potion his obsessed imagination has meanwhile administered, expecting to find the woman dead, equating, as we have seen, wakefulness with life (for “pharmacists” read the whole establishment of forensic medicine that has somehow let him down);

d. the pangs of conscience and/or fear that have made him discard the idea of poison and/or murder in general; or

e. the hope against hope that he has succeeded in simply willing her demise.

8. All of the above merge in the kaleidoscope of a mad mind.

Did the man actually enter the pharmacy? Here, as elsewhere, my translatorial ethics would prohibit adding to Father’s text to make things more explicit in English than they are in Russian. The text’s multilevel, pleasingly elliptical form is an integral part of its character. If VN had wanted to be more specific here, he would have done so in the original.

Time and place are purposely left imprecise in the story, which is essentially timeless and placeless. One might presume that the 1930s are nearly over, and, as Nabokov later confirmed,[19] that we are in Paris, and then en route to the south of France. There is also a brief detour to a small city not very far from the capital. The only character mentioned by name in the text[20] is the least important one: the female servant, in that provincial city, who helps the ill-fated child pack and shoos away the chicks as the car, containing protagonist and prey united at last, speeds away.

I shall leave to the studious—among whom exist some superbly sensitive readers of Nabokov—the detailed identification and the documentation of themes and levels (straight narrative, tricky metaphor, romantic poetry, sexuality, fairy-tale sublimation, mathematics, conscience, compassion, fear of being strung up by the heels), as well as the search for hidden parallels with The Song of Igor’s Campaign or Moby Dick. Father would have put Freudians on guard against rejoicing at the ephemeral mention of a sister, the girl’s curious regression into infancy at the end, or the elaborate walking stick (which is unabashedly and entertainingly phallic but, on a totally distinct plane, visually evocative as well of the appetizing, “valuable” objects—another example is the rare, blank-faced watch—with which Nabokov sometimes liked to endow his characters).

Certain other compressed images and locutions should, possibly, be explained, since it would be a pity if they were wasted. Here are a few “special” examples, given, unlike those singled out above, in proper order.

The “black salad devouring a green rabbit” (this page; one of a number (see below) of visual aberrations that, on one level, give the story a surreal, enchanted aura while, on another, describing with utmost economy and directness how a character’s perception of reality is momentarily distorted by a state of being (in this case, the protagonist’s overpowering, thwarted, barely concealed excitement).

The “little Japanese steps” (this page): many if not all readers must have seen, on the big screen or the little one, or at the opera, or perhaps in the real Orient, the geisha-style walk—short, mincing steps on high platform sandals—to which Nabokov likens the girl’s progress on skates whose wheels refuse to roll on the gravel.

A potentially more cryptic passage is that of the “strange, nailless finger” scrawled on the fence (this page). Here, again, deliberate ambiguity, concurrent images and ideas, and multiple levels of interpretation are at play. To spell this one out: The “definite goal” that emerges from a substratum of the man’s brain is access to the girl via marriage to the mother. The imagined graffito on the fence is a hybrid of the forefinger pointing the way on old-fashioned signs and of some joker’s phallic doodle that the digit’s stylized, nailless shape simultaneously suggests to a mind bent, basically, on depravity, but not devoid of self-reproaching flashes of objectivity. This ambiguous finger simultaneously indicates, in the fleeting image, the path of courtship (of the mother), the secret parts of the yearned-for girl, and the protagonist’s own vulgarity that no amount of rationalization can explain away.

“Cuff” (this page) as in “cufflinks.” It is clearly implied that the poor woman is still playing hard to get. The wordplay, with an oblique echo of the work’s Russian title, whose most direct meaning is “magician,” refers to a card up the conjuror’s sleeve—the superficial trappings of marriage—plus the actual, live, presumably loving husband, “the live ace of hearts.” There is also a parallel, introspective nuance here: the cynical trick that this travesty of a marriage represents to the protagonist. He shares this underlying joke with the perceptive reader, though not, of course, with his bride-to-be. We have the same kind of multiple compression here as in the graffito image.

“Compass rose” (this page): The early Italian nautical compass card, more stylized than today’s, and indicating, as compass roses still do, the principal and subsidiary compass points (which also identified the directions from which winds blew) was called rosa dei venti, “rose of the winds,” because of its flowerlike appearance and because wind directions were of paramount concern to navigators; the Italian term survives to this day. A nice fillip is gained in translation (for a minority of readers perhaps—those who navigate and those who know Italian), since the image refers to drafts coming from various directions through windows opened by the charwoman.

“The 32nd” (this page): another beautifully concentrated image that it is almost a pity to deaden by bookish explication. His violent emotions—anticipation of finally encountering the girl alone, the infuriating surprise and disappointment of finding the bustling char—have simply imparted a moist blur to his vision and made him see an absurd date. The month is immaterial. A Nabokovian irony is there, but a bit of compassion for the monster seeps through as well.

A “doubling cat” (this page) is a cat seen by a child so tired that she has difficulty keeping her eyes focused. It is, optically, akin to “32nd” and the “green rabbit.”

It would of course have been possible to give a minute explanation of every challenging passage, but that would have produced a scholarly apparatus longer than the text itself. These little puzzles, which, without exception, have an artistic purpose, should also be fun. The approximate reader, drowsy from the airliner’s unhealthy air and the complimentary drinks he has downed, always has the lamentable option of skipping, as he often did with the best-selling Lolita.

The things I love about the story are, among others, the suspense (how will reality betray the dream?) and the corollary of a surprise on every page; the eerie humor (the grotesque wedding night; the suspicious chauffeur who vaguely foreshadows Clare Quilty; the Shakespearean clown of a night porter; the protagonist’s desperate search for the misplaced room—will he emerge, as in “A Visit to the Museum,”[21] into a totally different town or will the old porter, whom he comes upon at last, react as if seeing him for the first time in his life?); the descriptions (the forest hopping from hill to hill only to trip over the highway, and much else); the preliminary glimpses of people and things with a parallel life of their own that will, incidentally or crucially, recur; the trucks ominously thundering in the night; the splendidly innovative use of Russian in the original; the cinematic imagery of the surreal conclusion and the frenzied pace, a kind of stretta finale, that accelerates toward the crashing climax.

The English title chosen by Father has, of course, a not-so-secret echo in The Enchanted Hunters of Lolita. I shall leave to others the search for additional Easter eggs of this kind. One should be wary, however, of exaggerating the significance of superficial similarities. Nabokov considered The Enchanter a totally distinct work, only distantly connected to Lolita. It may have contained, as he put it, “the first little throb” of the later novel—and even that thesis might be questioned if one attentively examines certain earlier works of his—but we must also not forget that the arts in general pulsate with first throbs that foreshadow future, larger works; various literary compositions come to mind, such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Or, conversely, there may be a subsequent mini-version, a final distillation such as Massenet’s Portrait of Manon. In any case, Volshebnik is certainly not a Portrait of Lolita: the differences between the two are clearly greater than the similarities. Whether or not the later novel is a love affair between the author and the English language, a love affair between Europe and America, a jaundiced view of the motel scene and the surrounding landscape, a modern-day “free translation of Onegin” (these and a multitude of other hypotheses have been advanced, eagerly but with varying degrees of seriousness and credibility), Lolita is unquestionably the product of very new and different artistic stimuli.

On the premise that it is preferable to be angelic than foolish in approaching the genesis of a complex artistic work, I shall not venture to assess the importance to Lolita of Nabokov’s study of Lewis Carroll; of his observations in Palo Alto in 1941; or of Havelock Ellis’s transcription, circa 1912, of a Ukrainian pedophile’s confessions, which have been translated from the original French by Donald Rayfield (who, despite a haunting echo of the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in Lolita, is a very real British scholar). Rayfield theorizes, amid certain less convincing assertions, that the pseudonymous Victor, via Ellis, deserves credit “for his contribution to the theme and plot of Lolita and the strange sensuous and intellectual character of Humbert Humbert, the hero of Nabokov’s finest English-language novel.” And, while acknowledging the previous composition of The Enchanter (whose title he translates literally as “The Magician”), he further conjectures that the unfortunate Ukrainian’s account provided the final impetus for the emergence of “Lolita’s central theme.”[22] This hypothesis might merit consideration, were it not for certain chronological facts that I must nevertheless point out: It was not until 1948 that Edmund Wilson sent the Ellis transcription to Nabokov, who had had no previous acquaintance with it—while Volshebnik, which does contain what might be called the “central theme” (if little else) of Lolita, was completed in 1939.

As for The Enchanter’s contribution, occasional ideas and images from it are indeed echoed in Lolita. But, as I—and many others—have noted in the past, themes and details of various kinds often recur in Nabokov’s novels, stories, poems, and plays. In this case, the echoes are distant and the dissimilarities substantial: setting (geographically but, above all, artistically remote); characters (reflected on occasion, but dimly at best); development and dénouement (totally different).

Perhaps a girl in a European park, fleetingly recalled by Humbert on an early page of Lolita, is Nabokov’s way of acknowledging the little heroine of The Enchanter, but also of relegating her forever to the category of very distant relative.

Dolores Haze may, as Nabokov says, be “very much the same lass” as the Enchanter’s victim, but only in an inspirational, conceptual sense. In other ways the earlier child is very different—perverse only in the madman’s eyes; innocently incapable of anything like the Quilty intrigue; sexually unawakened and physically immature, which is perhaps why Weidle recalled her as a ten-year-old.

It would be a serious mistake to roll away, on that protonymphet’s skates, into a garden of parallel primrose paths.