 Brilliant's audio presents the unabridged recording of The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov, performed by Christopher Lane, Tuvera, authors note one. The first little throb of Lolita went through me late in 1939 or early in 1940 in Paris, at a time when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin de Plain, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal. This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. The impulse I record had no textual connection with the ensuing train of thought, which resulted, however, in a prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long. I wrote it in Russian, the language in which I had been writing novels since 1924. The best of these are not translated into English and are all prohibited for political reasons in Russia. The man was a Central European, the anonymous nimfet was French, and the loci were Paris and Provence. I read the story one blue-papered wartime night to a group of friends, Mark Aldonov, two social revolutionaries and a woman doctor. But I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it some time after moving to America in 1940. Around 1949 in Ithaca, upstate New York, the throbbing, which had never quite ceased, began to plague me again. Combination joined inspiration with fresh zest and involved me in a new treatment of the theme, this time in English, the language of my first governess in St. Petersburg, circa 1903, a Miss Rachel Holme. The nimfet, now with a dash of Irish blood, was really much the same lass, and the basic marrying her mother idea also subsisted. But otherwise the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel. Vladimir Nabokov, 1956 As I explained in my essay appended to Lolita, I had written a kind of pre-Lolita novella in the autumn of 1939 in Paris. I was sure I had destroyed it long ago, but today, as Vera and I were collecting some additional material to give to the Library of Congress, a single copy of the story turned up. My first movement was to... Sample complete. Ready to continue?