Nabokov himself described this as "a kind of pre-Lolita novella", which he wrote in 1939 in Paris, but later seems virtually to have suppressed. However, he allowed it to be reprinted before his death, when Lolita was already a modern classic and the sexual climate had changed a good deal. Less than seventy pages of large print, it is beautifully written, surprisingly moving and also psychologically acute, in spite of its off-putting paedophile subject matter. There is a lengthy addendum by Nabokov's writer-son Dmitri.