Volume 34, Number 4 · March 12, 1987
The Magician's Trick
By V.S. Pritchett
The Enchanter
by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov
Putnam's, 127 pp., $16.95
When Vladimir Nabokov was questioned in America about the impulse that had led him to write his sensational novel Lolita, he half-evaded the question. He said he had felt an early 'throb' of interest in the subject of nymphets when he was a refugee in Paris in 1939 and was working on a short novel called The Enchanter. Like a great many distinguished Russian writers he had fled to Berlin after the Russian Revolution and, in 1939, was faced by the threat of the Nazi invasion of France. His liberal father, an important advisory political figure under the czar, had already been assassinated by a right-wing group. The novelist packed his papers and the manuscript of the novel in the family luggage and fled to the United States. There The Enchanter lay unpublished until 1986, well after his death. He had revised it and his son Dmitri has now done a very fine translation with a commentary.
Review, 1509 words
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