By the middle of the 1930s, Nabokov, writing since 1920 under the pen name “V. Sirin,” had achieved an enviable reputation as the leading Russian émigré writer of prose fiction. Publication of Dar (The Gift, written 1933-1938) and Priglashenie na kazn (Invitation to a Beheading, 1935-1936) was to put this beyond question. However, by late 1939, the Nabokovs were preparing for an imminent new life in the English-speaking world. In May 1940, as famously described at the close of Speak, Memory, they left Europe for New York, on what was to be the penultimate voyage of the liner Champlain - just before the fall of Paris. One meteoric career, that of the exiled Russian writer Sirin, was effectively over. A second and, in world terms, rather more explosive career, that of the American-English writer “Vladimir Nabokov,” was about to be launched.