Nabokov called the story “The Magician” “the first little pulsation of Lolita.” This story, the predecessor of the famous novel, was created by Nabokov in 1939 in Russian, but was published much later. The author remembered about it only 20 years later, when he was sorting through the archive: “Now that the connection between me and Lolita is broken, I re-read The Sorcerer with much greater pleasure than what I experienced, remembering it as waste material at the time of writing "Lolita". This is a wonderful example of Russian prose, precise and transparent...” The story was not published during the author’s lifetime. For the first time, readers were able to appreciate this work in 1986: the story was published in English, translated by Dmitry Nabokov. Among a very small number of rediscovered Nabokovians, The Magician is the most striking example of the astonishing original prose that came from the pen of Nabokov-Sirin in his most mature - and final - years as a novelist writing in his native language.