More than any other twentieth-century writer whose travel agents inadvertently included Lenin and Hitler, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was concerned with discerning thematic designs in his life and encoding across his works “the fantastic recurrence of certain situations” (Pnin, 159 [ch. 6]). Once Lolita made him a celebrity, he used his public prose to direct his readers toward those prescient designs and to suggest that historical exigency was merely a tool for the materialization of his fantasy. His interviews, prefaces, postscripts, letters to various editors, and responses to his critics always strike me as pre-emptive and corrective, at once recapitulative and predictive. They chide, they nudge, they set the story straight, and they do so not by informing but by evoking.