A short note on "Skazka", Mr Livry's Russian short story:

I've spotted two Nabokov allusions: 1) there is a book by Kaliban Mirvodov (an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) in a house where protagonist gets robbed of his smuggled emeralds, a wallet full of 1000-dollar banknotes, and a book where he is jotting down his verse; 2) someone in that house also says "Это ложь, что в театре нет лож", which is a sentence stolen from Luzhin's father.
Funny thing: the story is marked "Prison [следственный изолятор, something like detention centre] of the Canton of Basel-Stadt, March 2003". And this after we know the protagonist threw a hand-grenade through a window of the house where he had been robbed.

On the whole Mr Livry's style indeed surpasses Nabokov's in that Mr Livry has appropriated and greatly enhanced VN's flashy side and added a bit of the now modish naturalism.