The Enchanter

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

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

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4. This has since been remedied.

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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.”

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6. As an air-raid precaution.

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7. Vladimir Zenzinov and Ilya Fondaminsky.

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8. Madame Kogan-Bernstein.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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