AUTHOR’S NOTE TWO1
As I EXPLAINED in my essay appended to Lolita, I had written a kind of pre-Lolita novella in the autumn of 1939 in Paris. I was sure I had destroyed it long ago but today, as Vera and I were collecting some additional material to give to the Library of Congress, a single copy of the story turned up. My first movement was to deposit it (and a batch of index cards with unused Lolita material) at the L. of C., but then something else occurred to me.
The thing is a story of fifty-five typewritten pages in Russian, entitled Volshebnik (“The Enchanter”). Now that my creative connection with Lolita is broken, I have reread Volshebnik with considerably more pleasure than I experienced when recalling it as a dead scrap during my work on Lolita. It is a beautiful piece of Russian prose, precise and lucid, and with a little care could be done into English by the Nabokovs.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
1959
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.