BEFORE they went to Switzerland to interview Novelist Vladimir Nabokov for this week's cover, Contributing Editor Ron Sheppard and Reporter Martha Duffy cabled a list of 21 questions, for which the novelist promised to supply written answers when they arrived. He got an early start on his work. The night clerk at his hotel awakened him at one o'clock in the morning with the peremptory announcement: "Le Telex marche encore."

Although he asks for written questions before each interview and composes his answers with care, Nabokov loves to lose himself in talk. Anecdotes, observations, puns, jokes, are offered in an almost endless flow. The visitors from TIME had come forewarned. The New York office contains a surprising number of longtime Nabokov experts. Contributing Editor Mark Vishniak, a member of the magazine's Russian Desk since 1946, knew Nabokov's father in Petrograd. The families fled the country together in 1919. Later, in Paris, Vishniak edited a Russian quarterly that published young Vladimir's early novels. Researcher Vera Kovarsky, who also escaped to France with her family during the Russian Revolution, remembers Nabokov from literary evenings in Paris. Contributing Editor Alwyn Lee met the novelist in 1958, when he wrote TIME'S highly laudatory review of Lolita.

The major contributions to the cover story were made by a team that included Sheppard, Duffy, Researchers Margaret Boeth and Rosamond Draper, and Books Editor Timothy Foote. Reporter Duffy has been a Nabokov admirer since she read Lolita while a student at Radcliffe. Since then she has read everything he has written that has been translated into English, and she is waiting impatiently for more of his poetry to appear. Sheppard, who was managing editor of Book Week before he came to TIME in 1967, is also an ardent Nabokov fan. "Ever since I first read one of his books," says Sheppard, "I have thought of him as a man apart. He makes it easy to tell who the minor writers are."

Foote began reading Nabokov earlier than any of his colleagues. He was in Paris as a TIME-LIFE correspondent in 1955, when Lolita was published in a two-volume edition as part of Maurice Girodias' Travelers Companion Series. From this, and earlier Nabokov writings, he came to admire the author's enormous talent as a novelist. Now, after working on the cover, he is equally impressed by Nabokov's remarkable discipline and courage during a life of exile.

The Cover: Oil painting from life by Gerard de Rose. Background items include the spires of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow; a portrait of Nabokov's mother at 34, painted by Leon Bakst in 1910; tiles from a Russian version of Scrabble; a brown wood nymph butterfly, and on the novelist's shoulder, a small blue Lycaena argiolus.

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