Every time I read Nabokov's Lolita I always must first read his novella, The Enchanter. Although this work was published after Lolita Nabokov had written it long before he ever imagined Lolita. It was only with his sons discovery of the manuscript that the public was able to read this masterpiece.
What intrigues me is that this work is so similar to Lolita is so many ways. we are never given any names of the characters involved but if you read Lolita we know them all already. This tale takes place in a bigger city, and the protagonist becomes infatuated with a particular girl in the park and weasels his way into her mother's and her life. But the scenes in the park with the nymphets playing around him are just like Humbert. The mother dies just like Charlotte and he takes the girl away to the Enchanted Hunters Hotel. Nabokov must have had these ideas drifting through his head for many years.
The main difference though is what makes this work so memorable. He is caught and dies in the end before anything really happens. She is asleep and as he looms above her she wakes up and begins to scream. The people in the room next to them hear and they chase him out into the streets where he is hit by a car. I must say that it is one of the most beautifully written death scenes ever, and here it is!
"He rushed past them. Farther down came a specter in tan shoes, farther still the old man climbed bow-legged, followed by the avid gendarme. Past them. Leaving behind a multitude of synchronized arms extended over the banister in a splashlike gesture of invitation, he pirouetted into the street, for all was over, and it was imperative, by any stratagem, by any spasm, to get rid of the no-longer needed, already-looked-at, idiotic world, on whose final page stood a lonely streetlamp with a shaded out cat at its base. already interpreting his sensation of barefootedness as a plunge into another element, he rushed off along the ashen sidewalk, pursued by the pounding footfalls of his already outdistanced heart. His desperate need for a torrent, a precipice, a railroad track-no matter what, but instantly-made him appeal for the very last time to the topography of his past. And when, in front of him, a grinding whine came from behind the hump of the side street, swelling to full growth when it had overcome the grade, distending the night, already illuminating the descent with two ovals of yellowish light, about to hurtle downward-then, as if it were a dance, as if the ripple of that dance had carried him to stage center, under this growing, grinning, megathundering mass, his partner in a crashing cracovienne, this thundering iron thing, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment-that's it, drag me under, tear at my frailty-I'm traveling flattened, on my smacked-down face-hey, you're spinning me, don't rip me to pieces-you're shredding me, I've had enough...Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectrogram of a thunderbolt's split seconds-and the film of life had burst."
It is a wonderful short work by Nabokov and if I have interested you in the least be sure to read this masterpiece.
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