is a fictional autobiography narrated by Vadim Vadimovich N. (VV), a Russian-American writer with uncanny biographical likenesses to the novel's author, Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Nabokov.

The marriage fails; and, after Annette's death, VV takes care of the pubescent Isabel, now known as Bel.

To counter ugly rumors, VV marries Louise Adamson while Bel elopes with an American to Soviet Russia.

After the third marriage fails, VV marries again, a Bel lookalike (same birthdate, too), referred to as "you", his final love.

When making a full turn while walking—mentally, that is—and tracing his steps back, he is unable to execute the reversion of the surrounding vista in his imagination.

Literary criticism has weighed in on both sides of this debate, some even claiming that Vadim is both a parody and a double or Doppelgänger of Nabokov.

is afflicted by feelings of being the double of another Nabokovian persona, this is because he bears in fact significant resemblances to the main character of the novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight from 1941.

Nabokov “had already perfected the role of his own biographer—in a series of mock biographies that began with a game he invented in adolescence, and that continued in his memoir Speak, Memory (1966) and his fiction.