How long does it take to read Volshebnik?
Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov
Volshebnik by Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov takes about 2 hours 20 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 20 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1986. 127 pages, about 34,925 words.
5 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 3 hours 53 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 20 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 27 minutes |
The page count is the median across 19 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as 'the first little throb of Lolita'. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter. However, The Enchanter has an utterly different atmosphere, as time, place and even names remain a mystery. Nabokov transforms his protagonist's attempts to lull his twelve-year-old step-daughter into a state of 'enchantment' into a graceful, chilling fairytale.
Subjects: Russian fiction, Deviant behavior, Fiction, Stepfathers
