This edition includes two works by Vladimir Nabokov, written in Paris in the late 1930s and early 1940s before the writer's departure for America.
'The Enchanter' is a story whose plot would later develop into the novel 'Lolita.' An elderly man marries an ailing widow in order to gain custody of her twelve-year-old daughter after her death. After a failed seduction and the girl's desperate protests, the protagonist runs out into the street in a rage, where he is struck by a truck. Accounts of the fate of the manuscript of 'The Enchanter' are contradictory: in the afterword to 'Lolita' from 1956, Nabokov writes that he destroyed the manuscript. It later turns out that it was preserved in his papers in a single copy.
The second work included in the edition is 'Solus Rex,' an unfinished novel consisting of two chapters: 'Ultima Thule' and 'Solus Rex.' They were published separately in different magazines, and only in this edition are they released together. These are parallel stories, one set in a realistic world, the other in a semi-fairytale kingdom. The characters and events of the two chapters are reflected in each other, as in a distorted mirror, forming an intricate kaleidoscope into which the reader must peer and unravel its mysteries for themselves.
