In a 1916 dream, the seventeen-year-old Nabokov saw his uncle, who had died very shortly before leaving him a large fortune (swept away a year later in the revolutionary maelstrom). In a matter-of-fact mutter, Uncle Basil said what sounded like typically lucid somnolent nonsense: "I shall come back to you as Harry and Kuvyrkin."'

Forty years thereafter that dormant image gave off a flash of perfect sense when Harris and Kubrick Pictures approached Nabokov with an attractive offer of a handsome sum to buy the film rights to Lolita, at once restoring much of his lost fortune half a century later, half a world away...

Not only does this dream display an exceedingly rare triple convergence (the overall meaning and the similar shape of both pairs of names), not only does kuvyrok mean somersault in Russian, but it has an additional linguistic twist: the "Kuvyrkin to Kubrik" transformation proceeds with the correct sound shift from the Slavonic to the Latin [the Latin bilabial beta stands for the Byzantine, and thus Slavonic, labiodental "v" (as in Barbara-Varvara, Basil-Vasily etc.]

SOURCE: Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov (2018), compiled, edited & with commentaries by Gennady Barabtarlo; pp.25-26.

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