The story “The Wizard” Nabokov called “the first small pulsation of Lolita” This story - the predecessor of the famous novel - was created by Nabokov in 1939. in Russian, but saw the light much later. The author recalled it only 20 years later, when he was disassembling the archive: “Now that the connection between me and Lolita is broken, I re-read the “Magician” with much more pleasure than I experienced, recalling it as spent material during the writing of “Lolita” .. This is an excellent example of Russian prose, accurate and transparent .... In the author's lifetime, the story was not published. For the first time, readers were able to evaluate this work in 1986 .. : the story was published in English in the translation of Dmitry Nabokov . Entering a very small number of newly discovered Nabokovians, The Wizard is the most striking example of that striking original prose that came out of Nabokov-Sirin's pen in his most mature — and final — years as a novelist writing in his native language.