Vladimir Nabokov: The Enchanter

Lolita: A Screenplay , 978-0-679-77255-2

Mary , 978-0-679-72620-3

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov , 978-0-679-72997-6

Strong Opinions , 978-0-679-72609-8

Transparent Things , 978-0-679-72541-1

First Vintage International Edition, July 1991

Copyright © 1986 by Dmitri Nabokov

Author’s Note One copyright © 1957 by Vladimir Nabokov

Author’s Note Two copyright © 1986 by Article 3C Trust under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1986.

The Enchanter is translated from Vladimir Nabokov’s unpublished work entitled Volshebnik . Copyrights in Volshebnik are held by Dmitri Nabokov as trustee of Article 3C Trust under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov. This edition published by arrangement with the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977.

[Volshebnik. English]

The enchanter / Vladimir Nabokov ; translated by Dmitri Nabokov.

p. cm. —(Vintage international)

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Putnam, c1986.

Translation of: Volshebnik.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78730-9

I. Title.

PG3476.N3V5513 1991

891.73′42—dc20 90-55704

Cover art by Megan Wilson and Duncan Hannah

Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

v3.1

1. Excerpt from “On a Book Entitled Lolita ” originally published in French in L’Affaire Lolita , Paris, Olympia, 1957, and subsequently appended to the novel.

2. It has been established from the manuscript of The Enchanter that the year was 1939.

3. Father had not seen the story for years, and his recollection had telescoped its length somewhat.

4. This has since been remedied.

5. This was true until July 1986, when the Soviet literary establishment apparently realized at last that Socialist Realism and artistic reality do not necessarily coincide, and an organ of that establishment took a sharply angled turn with the announcement that “it is high time to return V. Nabokov to our readers.”

6. As an air-raid precaution.

7. Vladimir Zenzinov and Ilya Fondaminsky.

8. Madame Kogan-Bernstein.

1. Excerpt from a letter of 6 February 1959, in which Nabokov proposed The Enchanter to Walter Minton, then president of G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Minton’s reply expressed keen interest, but apparently the manuscript was never sent. Father was engrossed at the time in Eugene Onegin, Ada , the Lolita screenplay, and checking my translation of Invitation to a Beheading . He probably decided there was no room in his schedule for an additional project.

1. Thought by some to have been the true identity of the Biblical apple—D.N.

1. In VN: The Art and Life of Vladimir Nabokov , New York, Crown, 1986. An odd concoction of rancor, adulation, innuendo, and outright factual error, which I had occasion to read in page proof.

2. In his story “The Rotten People” originally published (after the novel) under the offensive title “Zhid ” (“The Yid”), which, incidentally, Nabokov would not have used in a million years.

3. In The Defense , tr. Michael Scammell, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964.

4. In the short story “Bachmann,” in Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories , tr. Dmitri and Vladimir Nabokov, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1975.

5. In A Russian Beauty and Other Stories , tr. Dmitri Nabokov and Simon Karlinsky, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1973.

6. In “Scenes From the Life of a Double Monster,” in Nabokov’s Dozen , Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1958.

7. In The New Yorker , tr. Dmitri Nabokov, 18 February 1985.

8. In Details of a Sunset and Other Stories , tr. Dmitri and Vladimir Nabokov, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1976.

9. See Author’s Note One.

10. For a name Nabokov subsequently attributed to the protagonist, see Author’s Note One and this page.

11. In A Russian Beauty and Other Stories , tr. Dmitri Nabokov and Simon Karlinsky, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1973.

12. I am indebted, for certain details and citations, to Edwin McDowell’s report in The New York Times of 15 March 1985, regarding the publication by Grove Press of The Confessions of Victor X .