If we agree, and we do, that every piece of writing is in essence a testament (Derrida), then readers, present at its reading, willingly compete in discovering what the writer bestows on each of them. This becomes more conspicuous in the many transnational appropriations of those writers that entered the collective unconscious. The three Romanian appropriations of Nabokov we propose to discuss in the present paper (Catalina Buzoianu’s stage adaptation “Lolita”, 2002; Mihai Zamfir’s novel Fetita/ The Little Girl, 2003; Mircea Cartarescu’s stort-story “Nabokov in Brasov”, 2005) are just such examples of the ways in which a great writer’s works shuttle between cultural and aesthetic positions. Our general claim is that these appropriations are benign inasmuch as they double-code our understanding of the present in the way they make aesthetics meet ethics through history and politics. The Romanian Nabokov, not unlike the original one, addresses unsettling questions relating to temporal and historical change, cultural globalization, fluidity, ambivalence, and undecidability.