Vladimir Nabokov's reputation, in terms of his achievement in establishing himself as a major writer in two literatures, is all but unique in western culture. Joseph Conrad – a novelist of whom Nabokov thought little – springs to some minds as a comparable figure, but he wrote only in an English that was, to all intents and purposes, his third language. A closer analogue – and a figure of whom Nabokov thought rather more – is Samuel Beckett. In any case, being dismissed by Nabokov – who was notorious for his ‘strong’ and idiosyncratic opinions (see the collection he called Strong Opinions) on literature, as on much else – was no guarantee against having had a certain impact on him.

Nabokov (1899–1977) is the author of seventeen novels and sixty-five stories, many of which exist in double versions – Russian–English, or English–Russian: if not originally authored in both languages, then authorized by him through collaborative translation (mostly with his son Dmitri). He began writing as a poet in Tsarist Russia, but progressed to prose fiction in emigration, under the name of Sirin, switching languages (to both English and French) even before his wartime flight to the United States. He subsequently liked to consider himself, however, as first and foremost an American novelist, even – or especially – after moving residence back to Europe. He was the author too of autobiography, plays, a not insubstantial body of criticism, a number of translations, chess problems, and learned studies in lepidoptery.

Nabokov, who always claimed ‘I think in images’ (SO 14), prided himself on his mastery of prose style in two of the world's foremost literary languages and his oeuvre remains, as one consequence, the happiest of hunting grounds for narrative theorists, exponents of intertextuality, and sleuths of the hidden patterning, the signs and symbols behind the surface plots. These vary in emphasis from the trauma through transference of exile, to the intellectualized thriller, to the dissection of obsession, to the exploration of alternative worlds. The recreation of lost love and the magic of childhood is a prominent concern; problems of memory and knowledge are a constant; style and story are the dominant: ‘the good writer is first of all an enchanter ’, he wrote to Edmund Wilson (N–W 177).