Nabokov is unapproachable, never ordinary. He is a master and is fundamentally enjoyable to read. This short short novel is elegant in the extreme.
Nab describes the desire to write Lolita as a throb plaguing him much of his life. It produces a corollary in this work. An offshoot, the proto-Lolita. But be not fooled. This is a polished, pristine, powerful publication.
The same set-up as his great work with all the inbuilt tension. Contemplates the nature of carnality, lechery, love and lust, social strictures, and passion, all in versatile, angelic prose, inducing literary bliss. It is a refined sustained, lucid dream of a novella, another ode to nympholepsy. Vladikov exhibits extreme variation in word choice, as he seeks to express the justification of the guilts of his tortured characters, the sophisticated warring, internal conflicts, the sensuous nature of their artistic souls. His writing is dense with observations, pithy, imagistic, suggestive ethereality, and barbed phrases, a honeydewed style perfectly suited to the descriptions of obsession, psychological clarity versus intense moral confusion, and yearning, amid the empty substitutes provided by propriety, always seeking after ideal beauty, running from mortality, and appreciating the finest cadences of the English language. It is a magnificent evocation of vigorous emotion, blossoming effortlessly in its contained structure, radiant, fraught with complex caricatures, and utterly riveting. He is fond of chess metaphors, and he is a keen player in this game of language. His approach betrays a keen insight into the motives of deception, the vain art of seduction. Somehow it is more daring than Lolita, and just as enchanting.
L. S. Popovich 