Look at the Harlequins! (1974) was Nabokov's last completed novel, and it may be fitting in a number of ways that it has to be seen as his last fictional bow. G. M. Hyde adjudges that whereas ‘Transparent Things had the air of an epilogue, this novel is a kind of fictionalized index to Nabokov's work’; furthermore, he states, this ‘positively last performance’ (although, as he was writing, Hyde expected that ‘[d]espite the gestures of finality in the last two novels there will surely be others’) ‘shows beyond doubt that all Nabokov's works are really one work’. This point of view is hard to dispute, in that Nabokov's last published novel is surely the last Nabokov novel that any would-be reader of Nabokov should read first.

‘Look at the harlequins!’, an instruction issued in the early pages of the novel, assumes the quality of a maxim not only for this work as a whole, but for Nabokov's œuvre in totality; it is reduced to the acronym ‘LATH’ in the text itself, and this is the shorthand title adopted in subsequent criticism. Evenmore than Nabokov's previous novels, if that may be thought possible, LATH combines and confuses fiction with biography, biography with autobiography, one world of fictional reality with another, and invention (or delusion) with memory. Auto-intertextuality, at a variety of levels, is certainly the name of one of the principal games. Allusions are made, and names, motifs, or details appropriated (often in disguised or skewed form), in particular from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Ada, The Gift, and Glory; and, more fleetingly, from many another work. Of special importance, lurking in the background as declared autobiography, is Speak, Memory, as well as details – tacit or otherwise – from Nabokov's personal biography. The ensuing gamut of elements – of pastiche, metafiction, the blurring of boundaries, and confusions of identity – should make LATH, as David Rampton suggests, ‘the ideal Nabokov novel for the postmodernist critic’ (providing always that [s]he knows all, or enough, of the previous works!); yet the resulting prominence of the author will give pause to some, who may prefer to cling to the ‘death of the author ’ as a credo. Conversely, any purely Formalist-structuralist analysis would certainly be problematic.