The Enchanter is a novella written by Vladimir Nabokov in Paris in 1939. As Волшебник it was his last work of fiction written in Russian. Nabokov never published it during his lifetime. After his death, his son Dmitri translated the novella into English in 1986 and it was published the following year. Its original Russian version became available in 1991. The story deals with the ephebophilia of the protagonist and thus is linked to and presages the Lolita theme. Nabokov showed it to just a few people, and then lost the manuscript in the... process of coming to America and believed that he had destroyed it. However, he recovered it later in Ithaca in 1959, at a time he had already published "Lolita". He reread The Enchanter, and termed it “precise and lucid”, but left it alone suggesting that eventually "the Nabokovs" could translate it. Dmitri Nabokov judged it to be an important and mature work of his father and translated and published it posthumously. The published work also contains two author’s notes , and a postscript essay by DN titled On a Book Entitled the Enchanter. The story is essentially timeless, placeless, and nameless.
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