The Enchanter

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