Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis
Translated by A. L. Lloyd
New York: Vanguard Press, 1946
Nabokov's copy, with his holograph annotations and retranslations
Berg Collection, The New York Public Library

In his lecture copy of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Nabokov notes with characteristic detail, that Gregor Samsa was a beetle, and not a cockroach, as many commentators had maintained. "Curiously enough," he told his students, "Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know they have wings.)"