In VN's novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Other Books by the Narrator include A Kingdom by the Sea (1962), Vadim's novel that corresponds to VN's Lolita (1955). At the Orly airport on his way back from Leningrad Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in LATH) finds a copy of his novel:
I had to wait some time for my jet to New York, and being a little tight and rather pleased with my plucky journey (Bel, after all was not too gravely ill and not too unhappily married; Rosabel sat reading, no doubt, a magazine in the living room, checking in it the Hollywood measurements of her leg, ankle 8 1/2 inches, calf 12 1/2, creamy thigh 19 1/2, and Louise was in Florence or Florida). With a hovering grin, I noticed and picked up a paperback somebody had left on a seat next to mine in the transit lounge of the Orly airport. I was the mouse of fate on that pleasant June afternoon between a shop of wines and a shop of perfumes. I held in my hands a copy of a Formosan (!) paperback reproduced from the American edition of A Kingdom by the Sea. I had not seen it yet--and preferred not to inspect the pox of misprints that, no doubt, disfigured the pirated text. On the cover a publicity picture of the child actress who had played my Virginia in the recent film did better justice to pretty Lola Sloan and her lollypop than to the significance of my novel. Although slovenly worded by a hack with no inkling of the book's art, the blurb on the back of the limp little volume rendered faithfully enough the factual plot of my Kingdom.
Bertram, an unbalanced youth, doomed to die shortly in an asylum for the criminal insane, sells for ten dollars his ten-year-old sister Ginny to the middle-aged bachelor Al Garden, a wealthy poet who travels with the beautiful child from resort to resort through America and other countries. A state of affairs that looks at first blush--and "blush" is the right word--like a case of irresponsible perversion (described in brilliant detail never attempted before) develops by the grees [misprint] into a genuine dialogue of tender love. Garden's feelings are reciprocated by Ginny, the initial "victim" who at eighteen, a normal nymph, marries him in a warmly described religious ceremony. All seems to end honky-donky [sic!] in foreverlasting bliss of a sort fit to meet the sexual demands of the most rigid, or frigid, humanitarian, had there not been running its chaotic course, in a sheef [sheaf?] of parallel lives beyond our happy couple's ken, the tragic tiny [destiny?] of Virginia Garden's inconsolable parents, Oliver and [?], whom the clever author by every means in his power, prevents from tracking their daughter Dawn [sic!!]. A Book-of-the-Decade choice. (5.3)
The name of the hero of Vadim's novel A Kingdom by the Sea, Al Garden, seems to hint at the title of J. L. Borges's story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941). Its Russian title is Sad raskhodyshchikhsya tropok. Vadim Vadimovich visits Leningrad in an attempt to find his daughter Bel. A line from Bel's poem, "i umnitsa tropka (and the intelligent trail)," serves as a code between Vadim and his daughter:
In the late Sixties I learned that Bel was now definitely married to Vetrov but that he had been sent to some remote place of unspecified work. Then came a letter.
It was forwarded to me by an old respectable businessman (I shall call him A.B.) with a note saying that he was "in textiles" though by education "an engineer"; that he represented "a Soviet firm in the U.S. and vice versa"; that the letter he was enclosing came from a lady working in his Leningrad office (I shall call her Dora) and concerned my daughter "whom he did not have the honor to know but who, he believed, needed my assistance." He added that he would be flying back to Leningrad in a month's time and would be glad if I "contacted him." The letter from Dora was in Russian.
Much-respected Vadim Vadimovich!
You probably receive many letters from people in our country who manage to obtain your books--not an easy enterprise! The present letter, however, is not from an admirer but simply from a friend of Isabella Vadimovna Vetrov with whom she has been sharing a room for more than a year now.
She is ill, she has no news from her husband, and she is without a kopek.
Please, get in touch with the bearer of this note. He is my employer, and also a distant relative, and has agreed to bring a few lines from you, Vadim Vadimovich, and a little money, if possible, but the main thing, the main thing (glavnoe, glavnoe) is to come in person (lichno). Let him know if you can come and if yes, when and where we could meet to discuss the situation. Everything in life is urgent (speshno, "pressing," "not to be postponed") but some things are dreadfully urgent and this is one of them.
In order to convince you that she is here, with me, telling me to write you and unable to write herself, I am appending a little clue or token that only you and she can decode: "...and the intelligent trail (i umnitsa tropka)." (5.1)
On Demonia (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) VN's Lolita is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg (anagram of Borges). Other Books by the Narrator in LATH include Vadim's novel Ardis (1970).