The Vane Sisters Erythraean Sibyl, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves always formed a word. Sybil Vane is also a character in Oscar Wilde's only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. She is an actress who commits suicide when Dorian rejects her, first causing the portrait to change and Dorian to notice the connection between him and the portrait. The apparent uniqueness of this narrative approach has created fame for this story, and Nabokov himself described this device as something that 'can only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction'. The trick
Wings (Kuzmin novel) to approve same-sex love in print: "Wilde in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890) only hinted that his hero's inner corruption resulted from his suppression of his true nature; Gide did not dare to name the attraction of his hero in "The Immoralist" (1902); Proust felt impelled to engage in all manner of subterfuge, and Forster wrote "Maurice" for the desk drawer." Vladimir Nabokov parodied Kuzmin's novel in his own short novel "The Eye", using "Smurov" as the name of a male protagonist and "Vanya" of a female one. Wings (Kuzmin novel) Wings () was the first Russian novel centred