Although I know it will never end, I will not stop painting the second painting. My experiment has failed, and there is no better proof of this defeat, failure, or impotence than the paper on which I began to write: until the day comes, sooner or later, when I move from the first painting to the second. Then I will return to this text, or shorten the stage between them, or interrupt a word to get closer with my brush to the canvas that S commissioned me to paint, or to the other, parallel canvas that he will never see. “In this book—That Other World: Nabokov and the Riddle of Exile—I set out to explore the development of these thematic plans in depth: exile, reality versus dream, cruelty and pain, art and love (or love and art): these are the building blocks with which Nabokov constructed his narrative world. This book, “That Other World,” is less the result of a conscious decision than of a fascination with Nabokov’s themes and the awakening they stir in me as a reader. I see Nabokov’s spiral glowing in my mind, igniting from the depths of absolute darkness, its coiling radiating with color.