Peritext

The main work is not the translation at all, but Nabokov's appropriation of it through his inflated peritext.

Using a narrower focus (the reception of the oeuvre of just two writers, Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov, who wrote as a team), the approach is literary and the perspective unusual, the editional segments at issue are not so much the texts themselves as their accompanying materials, or peritexts.