"For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind..." Signs and Symbols is a short story centering on the severe mental debility of a young man and on the struggle of his elderly parents to cope with it. It was first published in the May 15, 1948, issue of The New Yorker magazine. Before publishing the story, the editors of the magazine changed the title to "Symbols and Signs." After the story appeared, Nabokov changed the title back to its original wording. Vladimir Nabokov, also known as Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery (The study and collection of moths & butterflies), and had a big interest in chess problems. Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterized all his works.