After spending years in the U.S. teaching, Nina Krushcheva has returned to her native Russia and was happy to discover that Vladimir Nabokov, “who stoically accepted (or at least claimed such) that he would have very few readers in his socialist homeland — indeed, he imagined his audience in Russia as a ‘room filled with people, wearing his own mask’ — would have been extremely delighted at his reception in his homeland today: The whole country is wearing his mask.” On the eve of what would have been either his 105th or 106th birthday (depending on how you read the Russian calendar), Krushcheva explains in a commentary for The Moscow Times that, “The contemporary Russian reader reads Nabokov into everything. In response to a carved bust or a chocolate statue of Putin, some liberal-minded Russians quoted Nabokov: ‘Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size.’ Those Russians who stubbornly disregard material comfort recall his phrase about the ‘nuisance of ownership.’ Those who insist on individualistic values follow him in being ‘an indivisible monist.’ Nabokov is translated, retranslated and republished. There is even a ‘Nabokov Reader,’ a guidebook for schoolteachers on how and why to read Nabokov.”