Our Anonymous Shadows

Vladimir Nabokov was one of the few Russian émigré intellectuals who made it off the continent when the Nazis invaded France in May 1940. Soon after he relocated to the United States, his first American story, “The Assistant Producer,” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. It begins in a darkened auditorium: “Tonight we shall go to the movies. Back to the Thirties, and down the Twenties, and round the corner to the old Europe Picture Palace.” In the story that follows, the cinema becomes a device for revisiting and fictionalizing interwar Europe as a space of exile.