Essay By Dmitri Nabokov
Echoing Nabokov's On a Book Entitled Lolita, his son added his postscript On a Book Entitled The Enchanter to the translation. Dmitri Nabokov pointed out that his father specifically wanted "Volshebnik" translated as "enchanter" rather than "magician" or "conjuror". The younger Nabokov debunks the book Novel with Cocaine as a fraud which appeared at the same time in the mid-eighties and was supposed to be a posthumously published work of Nabokov. He comments on the complex imagery of The Enchanter: "… the line he (VN) treads is razor thin, and the virtuosity consists in a deliberate vagueness of verbal and visual elements whose sum is a complex… but totally precise unit of communication." He presents a few "special" examples of VN’s unique images, his “eerie humor” (the wedding night, the chauffeur foreshadowing Clare Quilty, the Shakespearean night porter, the misplaced room). DM points out that in VN’s work themes may be echoed in later works, but the dissimilarities are substantial.
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