The Enchanter

Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as ‘the first little throb of Lolita’. The plot is similar- a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter.However, The Enchanter has an utterly different atmosphere, as time, place and even names remain a mystery. Nabokov transforms his protagonist’s attempts to lull his twelve-year-old step-daughter into a state of ‘enchantment’ into a graceful, chilling fairytale.