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What was it, you will ask, about Nabokov's preface to Invitation to a Beheading that so intrigued me? The first paragraph of the preface (bear in mind that the preface is to the translation of the book, which his son Dmitri did with his input) is as follows:

The Russian original of this novel is entitled Priglashenie na kazn'. Notwithstanding the unpleasant duplication of the suffix, I would have suggested rendering it as Invitation to an Execution; but, on the other hand, Priglashenie na otsechenie golovï ("Invitation to a Decapitation") was what I really would have said in my mother tongue, had I not been stopped by a similar stutter.

I tend to find questions of translation interesting; here Nabokov is in effect asserting that the English translation of the title is truer to his original intentions than the Russian original -- and that the reason for this is inherent to the two languages. (That is to say, in Russian he could not render his concept mellifluously; in English what he actually meant sounds better than does the less satisfactory alternative he used in Russian.) I'm hooked! Also, Nabokov's beautiful turn of phrase is immediately recognizable here. I'm not sure what to expect of the author's voice in the text itself; it was written about twenty years earlier than the Nabokov I'm familiar with, and in another language. I'm looking forward to finding out!