Vladimir Nabokovs Natasha

Written around 1924, when Nabokov was in his mid-twenties (five years after his family fled Russia, and two years after his father was assassinated in Berlin), it was discovered in the writer’s archives at the Library of Congress a couple of years ago, and was translated by his son, Dmitri.

A celebration of the power of invention and the writerly imagination, “Natasha” tells the story of a young woman who cares for her ailing father, Khrenov, in their ramshackle one-room apartment in Berlin while he mourns their exile from their Russian motherland.

New Yorker, June 1