SOURCE: “Nabokov, or Nostalgia,” in Partisan Review, translated by Ralph Manheim, Vol. LXII, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 378-82.

In the following essay, originally published in 1986, Kiš pays tribute to Nabokov for writing novels dedicated to literary play rather than social commentary.

Until the scandalous Lolita and its scandalously wretched film version, Nabokov was virtually unknown outside Russian émigré circles and a narrow set of devotees. In that period of great upheavals, neither critics nor readers expected much from this magnificent talánt (in Russian, accent on the second syllable), while mediocre writers, floodlit against the literary sky, their political allegories blown up into short stories or thinned out into novels, achieved enormous popularity.

At that time, Nabokov remained a solitary aristocrat (in the Baudelarian sense of the word, an aristocrat of the spirit), remote not only from world events but also from the traditional political struggles into which so...