On December 6, 1953, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a note in his diary, at the bottom of a page largely filled with numerical grades for the final assignment of his literature class. “Finished Lolita which was begun exactly 5 years ago.” It was a finish line he’d spent many of those years never expecting to reach. There were classes to teach at Cornell to pay the bills and to fund his summer trips to hunt butterflies. Other projects had also interrupted Nabokov’s progress on Lolita, from translation work (The Song of Igor’s Campaign) to the first version of his autobiography, which was published in
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