discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colors he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle". For some synesthetes, letters are not simply associated with certain colors, they are themselves colored. Nabokov frequently endowed his protagonists with a similar gift. In Bend Sinister, Krug comments on his perception of the word "loyalty" as like a golden fork lying out in the sun. In The Defense, Nabokov briefly mentions that the main character's father, a writer, found he was unable to complete a novel that he planned to write, becoming lost in the fabricated storyline by "starting with colors". Many other subtle references are made in Nabokov's writing that can be traced back to his synesthesia. Many of his characters have a distinct "sensory appetite" reminiscent of synesthesia. Religion Nabokov was a religious agnostic. He was very open about, and received criticism for, his indifference to organized mysticism, to religion, and to any church. Sleep Nabokov was a notorious, lifelong insomniac who admitted unease at the prospect of sleep, once saying, "the night is always a giant". Later in life his insomnia was exacerbated by an enlarged prostate. Nabokov called sleep a "moronic fraternity", "mental torture", and a "nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius". Insomnia's impact on his work has been widely explored, and in 2017 Princeton University Press published a compilation of his dream diary entries, Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov. Chess problems Nabokov spent considerable time during his exile composing chess problems, which he published in Germany's Russian émigré press, Poems and Problems (18 problems) and Speak, Memory (one). He describes the process of composing and constructing in his memoir: "The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one's consciousness". To him, the "originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity" of creating a chess problem was similar to that in any other art. List of works Notes References Further reading Biography Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. (hardback) 1997. (paperback). London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. (hardback) Field, Andrew. VN The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Crown Publishers. 1986. Golla, Robert. Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2017. Parker, Stephen Jan. Understanding Vladimir Nabokov. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.