Free The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov

match, but in any event it was all over; heads emerged from every direction, a bell was clanging somewhere, behind a door a melodious voice seemed to befinishing a nursery tale (Mr. White-Tooth in the bed, the hoodlum brothers with their little red rifles), the old womanconquered the key, he gave her a quick swat on the cheek, and, with his whole body ringing, went running down the sticky steps. Toward him briskly clambered a dark-haired fellow with a goatee, clad only in underpants; after him wriggled a puny harlot. He rushed past them. Farther down came a specter in tan shoes, farther still the old man climbed bow-legged, followed by the avid gendarme. Past them. Leaving behind a multitude of synchronized arms extended over the banister in a splashlike gesture of invitation, he pirouetted into the street, for all was over, and it was imperative, by any stratagem, by any spasm, to get rid of the no-longer-needed, already-looked-at, idiotic world, on whose final page stood a lonely streetlamp with a shaded-out cat at its base. Already interpreting his sensation of barefootedness as a plunge into another element, he rushed off along the ashen sidewalk, pursued by the pounding footfalls of his already outdistanced heart. His desperate need for a torrent, a precipice, a railroad track—no matter what, but instantly—made him appeal for the very last time to the topography of his past. And when, in front of him, a grinding whine came from behind the hump of the side street, swelling to full growth when it had overcome the grade, distending the night, already illuminating the descent with two ovals of yellowish light, about to hurtle downward—then, as if it were a dance, as if the ripple of that dance had carried him to stage center, under this growing, grinning, megathunderingmass, his partner in a crashing cracovienne, this thundering iron thing, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment—that’s it, drag me under, tear at my frailty—I’m traveling flattened, on my smacked-down face—hey, you’re spinning me, don’t rip me to pieces—you’re shredding me, I’ve had enough.… Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectrogram of a thunderbolt’s split seconds—and the film of life had burst.

On a Book Entitled
The Enchanter
by Dmitri Nabokov

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1889. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including Lolita —into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
    Dmitri Nabokov was born in 1934 in Berlin and came to the United States as a small child with his parents. He graduated from Harvard, served in the U.S. Army, and then began the vocal studies that led him to become an opera and concert performer—a basso—around the world. He has translated most of his father’s Russian short stories and plays and many of his novels into English.



BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV

    ADA, OR ARDOR
    Ada, or Ardor tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic