Vladimir Nabokov composed this puzzle for his wife Véra in 1926. The title, “Crestos lovitxa Sirin,” roughly means “Nabokov’s crossword”: krestlovitska approximates the Russian kreslovitsa, “cross” plus “words”, and Sirin is a pseudonym Nabokov often used, a reference to the creatures of Russian mythology. The upper half of each wing contains the grid, the lower the clues.

Nabokov, a trained entomologist, had published the first crossword in Russian two years earlier. Forty years later, in the Paris Review, he likened writing a novel to creating a crossword: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose.”

(Adrienne Raphel, The Crossword Mentality in Modern Literature and Culture, dissertation, Harvard University, 2018.)