... thinking along these lines in prep for reading with Aleksandr Skidan next week, & also just finished Nabokov's 30s novel, Glory, in English, & trying to read along in it in Russian, now...

- typical Nabokovian elliptic puzzle-writing (sometimes so annoying - his precise description like a snobbish effete 19th-cent. botanist-dilettante, noting everything he sees through his magnifier-monocle - but then Nabokov turns weakness into strength, as all the quaint details & byways cluster around some plot-labyrinth of tragicomic pathos - sparkling vision) - about a dreamy very young "untalented" Russian emigre fellow, star-crossed in love, at loose ends after college, & venturing incognito across the border into Soviet territory (to his doom) - what he & his would-be girlfriend call "Zoorland"... (ie. Rusland, turned upside-down by the Bolsheviks)