The early letters are the richest, the most lyrical. Nabokov comes on strong, with the earnest tendresse of the poet in love (not to mention the menagerie of preposterous pet-names: “Goosikins”, “Pussykins”, “Monkeykins”). But he is also discovering himself as a prose writer, and you can see him testing things out on this new reader who sees the world as he sees it. In the first letters from his summer in the south of France, he delights in their compatibility: “you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought – and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”