The Enchanter was written in Russian in Paris in the autumn of 1939, under the title “Volshebnik”. After Nabokov's arrival in America, the text was thought to have been lost, or indeed destroyed. A few years later the basic idea of the novella was to be transposed to an American setting and it grew “in secret the claws and wings of a novel” (13), to become the much longer and far richer Lolita. However, in 1959 a typescript of the work turned up and Nabokov reread it “with considerably more pleasure than I experienced when recalling it as a dead scrap during my work on Lolita”, suggesting to his publisher that, as “a beautiful piece of Russian prose”, it “could be done into English by the Nabokovs” (16). Probably for

This article in full comprises 1046 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

Published 30 June 2002

Citation: Cornwell, Neil. "The Enchanter (Volshebnik [Russian Edition] 1991)". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 June 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=963, accessed 9 February 2010.]