the author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my generation. Among the younger writers produced in exile he turned out to be the only major one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics . . . Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirror-like angles of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to “windows giving upon a contiguous world . . . a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.” Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness. His best works are those in which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls. His first two novels are to my taste mediocre; among the other six or seven the most haunting are Invitation to a Beheading which deals with the incarceration of a rebel in a picture-postcard fortress by the buffoons and bullies of a Communazist state; and Luzhin’s Defense, which is about a champion chess player who goes mad when chess combinations pervade the actual pattern of his existence.