The reputation of Vladimir Nabokov, in terms of his achievement in establishing himself as a major writer in two literatures, is an extremely rare one in western culture. Joseph Conrad, who may spring to mind as a comparable figure, wrote only in an English which was, in effect, his third language. A closer analogue, in English and French, would be the bilingual Samuel Beckett.
Nabokov is the author of seventeen novels and some sixty-five stories, many of which exist in double versions – Russian-English, or English-Russian: if not originally authored in both languages, then authorised (and definitively polished) by him through collaborative translation (mostly with his son Dmitri). He began writing as a poet in Tsarist …
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