The Wizard

This edition includes two works by Nabokov, written in the early 1940s before his departure from Europe to the USA. “The Wizard” is a novella in which Nabokov first explores the theme of “Lolita.” The plot concept was described by Nabokov in the afterword to “Lolita” in 1956: “He [the main character] married the sick mother of the girl, soon became a widower, and after an unsuccessful attempt to caress the orphan in a hotel room, threw himself under a truck.” “Solus Rex” is an unfinished work, a “ghost novel,” as Nabokov himself referred to it. It consists of two chapters: the first is a letter from an artist to his recently deceased wife, and the second is a story about the ruler of a distant semi-fairytale kingdom. These works, unlike most of Nabokov's works, were published only once in Russian and went almost unnoticed by the Russian reader.