^1. The titles of several book-length studies point to the trend pursued by many of Nabokov's loyal defenders; see, for instance, Page Stegner's Escape into Aesthetics (New York: Morrow, 1966) or Julia Bader's Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972). In Tony Tanner's City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), an influential chapter entitled “On Lexical Playfields” goes so far as to promote the heroic aesthetic self-liberations achieved in the Active games of Nabokov and Borges. It is precisely this coldly intellectual play of devices and artifices that has elicited the strongest negative criticism; see especially William H. Gass's “Mirror, Mirror” in Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1972).

^2. The phrase has again been placed in critical currency by John Gardner's remarkably intemperate tract against “aesthetic game-players,” On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Fortunately, there have been of late some exceptionally well-argued philosophical and ethical appreciations of Nabokov's visible artifices; I think especially of Elizabeth W. Bruss's chapter on Nabokov in her Autobiographical Acts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 127–62, and Ellen Pifer, “On Human Freedom and Inhuman Art: Nabokov,” in Slavic and East European Journal, 22 (1978), 52–63. Also, Dabney Stuart's Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978) rightly emphasizes the serious playfulness that explodes with ridicule certain received modes of literary perception.

^3. Gleb Struve, Russkaya Literatura v izgnanii (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1956), pp. 285–87. To be exact, Struve's comment refers to the characters of Nabokov's appropriate nom de plume, Sirin, the name of a mythical, magical bird.

^4. Frank Kermode, “Aesthetic Bliss,” Encounter, June 1960, pp. 81–86.

^5. Murdoch, “Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch,” Encounter, Jan. 1961, pp. 16–20.

^6. On the book's gestation, see Alfred Appel, Jr., “An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov,” in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 8 (Spring 1967), 127–52; for an analysis of its metamorphosis into English, see Jane Grayson, Nabokov Translated (New York: Oxford, 1977), pp. 119–24.

^7. Georgii Adamovich, Odinochestvo i Svoboda (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1955), p. 217. (All translations are mine.)

^8. Khodasevich's essay of 1937, “On Sirin,” was translated in TriQuarterly, 17 (Winter 1970), 96–101; before then, R. H. W. Dillard's influential “Not Text, but Texture: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov,” in The Hollins Critic, 3 (June 1966), 1–12, had established the expectation that Nabokov wrote about artist figures. Despite this trend, the same issue of TriQuarterly contains Robert Alter's pioneering, multileveled discussion of political and artistic fable making in “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics,” pp. 4159.

^9. Vladimir Nabokov, “Foreword,” Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), p. 6. Hereafter references to this work will be cited parenthetically within the text from this edition.

^10. Literally, in Russian, Invitation to an Execution; the novel was first published as Priglashenie na Kazn' (Paris: Dom Knigi, 1938).

^11. Priglashenie, p. 14. Like Nabokov, I have allowed myself a deliberately loose auditory transcription and free translation, the better to convey the extraordinary word weaving that blends sonorities and semantic units into new chains of association.

^12. The reference is, of course, to Baudelaire's “L'Invitation au voyage” (1855), which calls for a dream transport back “there” to a once glimpsed world of invulnerable harmonies—“Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté” ‘There, naught but grace and measure, / Luxuriance, calm and pleasure.‘ Alter confirms this association (p. 45).

^13. Priglashenie, p. 83. The Russian makes an ingenious auditory pun on tũt (“ici”) and on the Old Slavonic name for the letter t, which also means, in modern Russian, “firmly”; the howling horror is the ū sound held in by the firm t's. In an early review in the Parisian Russian journal Sovremennye Zapiski, 68 (1939), 474–77, P. Bitsilli discusses the device of the pun as a mode of “rehabilitating” hidden dimensions of meaning covered over by dull dictionary definitions of reality. See D. Barton Johnson's translation and commentary in A Book of Things about Nabokov, ed. Carl R. Proffer (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1974), pp. 65–69, hereafter cited as Book of Things.

^14. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 100–01.

^15. Invitation includes a parody of encyclopedic “realism” in the form of Quercus, a thousand-page biography of an oak and the history it has seen; Cincinnatus borrows it from the prison library and notes, “It seemed as though the author were sitting with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the Quercus, spying out and catching his prey” (p. 123).

^16. By this reading, Invitation is what Mircea Eliade would define as a classic example of Gnostic literature:

[These texts] stress, on the one hand, the soul's fall into Matter (Life) and the mortal “sleep” that ensues, and, on the other hand, the soul's extraterrestrial origin…. Since they are Spiritual Beings of extraterrestrial origin, the Gnostics do not admit that their home is “here,” in this world…. Once waked from his mortal sleep, the Gnostic understands that … he has no real relation with Life, the World, and History.

… The sufferings that constitute every human life vanish at the moment of waking. Waking, which is at the same time an anamnesis, finds expression in an indifference to History.

See Eliade's Myth and Reality (New York: Harper, 1963), pp. 132–34. For a reading of Cincinnatus as a Gnostic hero-buffoon who will not collaborate with a vulgar orthodoxy, see Julian Moynahan, “A Russian Preface for Nabokov's Beheading,” Novel, 1 (1967), 12–18.

^17. The visible servitude of so many Nabokov characters is, as William Carroll rightly argues, a transparent reminder that they are intermediaries at the mercy of the author's and the reader's need to compose a finite end: “Nabokov's characters are ‘galley slaves’ in that they know themselves subject to inhuman and autocratic powers; and we (and a few of them) know that the ‘galley’ is both man's physical situation and the printer's proof taken from composed type” (“Nabokov's Signs and Symbols,” in Book of Things, pp. 203–17).

^18. See Gardner, p. 69: “To people who care about events and ideas … linguistic opacity suggests indifference to the needs and wishes of the reader and to whatever ideas might be buried under all that brush. And since one reason we read fiction is our hope that we will be moved by it, finding characters we can enjoy and sympathize with, an academic striving for opacity suggests, if not misanthropy, a perversity or shallowness. …”

^19. Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirine, “Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, 48 (1937), 362–78. My translation is of excerpts from pp. 367, 369, 377.

^20. Wallace Stevens, Letter to William Stanley Braithwaite, 5 Dec. 1921, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1972), p. 223.