Archives for 2009

38 – Tyrants Destroyed

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Tyrants Destroyed’ (June 1938) was a twin to ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ but took quite a different narrative approach to the same theme. In this story, Nabokov returns to the Dostoyevskian form of the quasi-philosophic monologue – the outpouring of rage, frustration, and neurosis which pretends to no particular structure, does away with characterisation and plot, and concentrates on an idea; in this case, the hatefulness of tyrants.

The unnamed narrator is a typical man-from-underground, a schoolteacher who has led ‘a hard, lonely life, always indigent, in shabby lodgings’ (TD,p.6). He has become an insomniac and is totally obsessed with his hatred of his country’s dictator who he knew personally as a youth. This hatred has grown into a neurosis which obliterates everything else from his life.

The narrative takes the form of an analysis of dictators – their mediocrity, vulgarity, shabbiness, cruelty, and their moral degeneracy. Nabokov takes the fairly commonplace view that dictators are petty-bourgeois nonentities seeking revenge on others for their own shortcomings and what they perceive to be the injustices that life has meted out to them.

From a fictional point of view the problem is that this portrait is generalised rather than specific. The dictator is an identikit figure, as Nabokov himself hints: ‘Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin dispute my tyrant’s throne in this story’ (p.2). Narrative interest therefore focuses not so much on the dictator as on the narrator himself and what he will do to overcome his obsession.

Fuelled by his hatred, he decides that the tyrant must die, but cannot bring himself to commit the act on the grounds that murder is a shabby, vulgar act only worthy of the very type he wishes to eliminate. Instead, in typically Dostoyevskian manner, he contemplates suicide: ‘By killing myself I would kill him, as he was totally inside me, fattened on the intensity of my hatred’ (p.33). But on re-reading the notes which constitute his narrative he feels that the mockery and scorn he has poured onto the dictator constitute a sort of triumph over him, and that they will exist to be of help to others in similar need: ‘This is an incantation, an exorcism, so that henceforth any man can exorcise bondage’ (p.36).

This is not an altogether convincing argument, but it is a neat resolution to the problem of the narrative itself. The story is another variation on the theme of Art transcending the vulgarities of human existence, but it is not one of his most convincing.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

39 – The Visit to the Museum

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

By the end of the 1930s, prompted by the threats of the Nazis, Nabokov had moved from Berlin to Paris – the second centre of Russian emigration. From there he was to travel even further westwards to America in 1940. Undoubtedly conscious of this growing exile from his native land, he turned back in 1939, for one of his last short stories to be written in Russian, to the topic he had treated in poems and stories many times before – the return to Russia. And for this occasion he chose to employ the form of the conte fantastique, a tradition in story-telling which goes back to Gautier and E.T.A. Hoffmann.

The narrator of ‘The Visit to the Museum’ (September 1938) has been asked by a friend to locate and purchase a portrait of his Russian grandfather which has found its way into a small provincial museum in France. The narrator is sceptical and reluctant, but when he visits the museum the portrait is there. Suddenly his interest is aroused: ‘It is fun to be present at the coming true of a dream, even if it is not one’s own’ (RB,p.70).

He applies to the curator for permission to purchase, but the curator denies the existence of the painting. The narrator bets him the money he has been given to make the purchase, and when they go to check the curator admits that he was wrong. But when the narrator presses his claim the curator disappears and the narrator becomes lost in a maze of rooms in the fantastically expanding museum.

Gradually he finds himself amongst familiar houses and streets, a light snow is falling, and he realises that he is back in Russia. It is not the Russia of his childhood however, but that of the present day under the Soviets. His dream turns into a nightmare, and he is forced to throw away everything which would identify him as a returned émigré. Then the story ends abruptly with a summary of subsequent events:

‘I shall not recount how I was arrested nor tell of my subsequent ordeals … it cost me incredible patience and effort to get back abroad, and … ever since I have foresworn carrying out commissions’ (p.79)

The formula is traditional enough – a transfer from one plane of reality to another and back again, though the ‘return’ is dealt with in so rapid and summary a fashion it seems that Nabokov is more interested in establishing the shock value of the initial transfer. It is this which gives rise to the principal problem with the story and the reason why it might have to be counted amongst his interesting failures.

The problem is the lack of relation between the first and the second part of the story. A realistic setting is established and the museum visit is perfectly credible, all in keeping with Nabokov’s normal manner of controlling narratives. Then along with the entrance of the curator, one or two mysteries are introduced: he resembles a Russian wolfhound, throws letters he has just written into a wastepaper basket, and does not know his own collection.

But none of these mysteries has any apparent connection with the portrait or the narrator’s subsequent experience in the museum where he wanders from rooms full of steam engines, railroad stations, and The Section of Fountains and Brooks, back into the reconstruction of the Soviet Union. The only element which unites the request, the portrait, narrator, curator, and the fantasy world is that they are all Russian. And these elements cohere only under the canopy of a ‘What if …?’ – the impossibility of recovering the Russian past.

In fictions of the conte fantastique variety we are usually offered some tantalising evidence of the fantasy world when the protagonist returns to the ‘real’ one. In Gautier’s ‘La Cafetiere’ as a typical instance, the narrator awakes from his reverie of dancing with the figures from paintings – but he has a fragment of the coffee pot from this other world beside him. No such evidence connects the two worlds of ‘The Visit to the Museum’.

Of course the story is not offered in a state of high seriousness, but it recalls The Thunderstorm in failing to make a convincing connection between realism and fantasy. It is as if Nabokov was not comfortable with this mode. He seems to operate at his best when straining against but staying within the bounds of literary realism.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

40 – Lik

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Perhaps in keeping with the mood of the decade’s end, ‘Lik’ (November 1938) is one of the most sombre and unremittingly serious of Nabokov’s stories. In it he sticks to a plain third person narrative mode and does not bring into play any of his customary literary amusements. The setting might be the French Riviera, but the subject matter is pain, exile, and death.

Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn, whose initials give the story its title and him his nickname, is a frail and hypersensitive émigré who is scratching a living as an actor in a theatrical company. They are currently touring ‘L’Abime’, a French melodrama in which he plays the (badly-written) part of a stage Russian. He feels himself to be one of life’s permanent outsiders, and he also has a weak heart. Whilst resting between performances he meets a distant relative Koldunov who bullied him as a schoolboy but has now sunk into a pitiful state of dejection and poverty. Koldunov tries to borrow money from him and oppresses him with boorish behaviour.

Just before Lik’s last performance they meet again. Koldunov takes him back to his squalid lodgings, tries to get him drunk, delivers a tirade which catalogues the injustices he has suffered, and demands to know why fate treats the two of them so differently. Lik escapes from this moral harassment, feeling that he is about to have a heart attack. But then he has to turn back because he has left behind a recently purchased pair of shoes. When he arrives at the room however Koldunov has shot himself – after putting on the shoes.

If there is any authorial sleight of hand here, it occurs in two incidents which are both related to the story’s themes. The first is in the opening of the story where Nabokov offers a sort of false beginning by describing the plot of ‘L’Abime’ in a way which leads the reader to expect that this will be the subject of the story: ‘the young man of the play threatens to be somewhat colourless, and it is in a vain attempt to touch him up a little that the author has made him a Russian’ (TD,p.72).

The play is a melodrama, and it is gently mocked for dealing in the stereotypes of what the public supposes to be ‘the Russian character’. But ‘Lik’ as a story is itself melodramatic on the surface, so the play parallels the story, whose own ‘young man’ is Russian – though the play is a paler parodic version of the story. For ‘Lik’ is Russian in a manner which goes straight back to Dostoyevski, who is even acknowledged in the text.

The other instance of Nabokov misleading the reader occurs at the end of the story when Lik has escaped from the importunate demands of Koldunov. He is agitated, ill, and he senses an attack coming on: ‘everything began to spin; his heart was reflected as a terrifying globe on the dark inner side of his eyelids. It continued to swell agonisingly’ (p.97). The reader is given every reason to believe that Lik will die. But he does not: Koldunov dies instead. The justification for the sleight of hand in this instance is that the two men are in fact alternative versions of each other – doubles in a very subtle manner.

Lik is a twofold outsider – an émigré, and a man alone. He is described in a manner which echoes many characters from Russian nineteenth century fiction: ‘he had…the feeling of being superfluous, of having usurped somebody else’s place’ (p.75). He lives on his own, has no friends, and feels a painful sense of separation from his fellow men – even his fellow actors – which borders on paranoia.

This cocktails of problems, in addition to his illness, makes him hypersensitive. He realises that if he had not lost both parents and been forced into the life of an émigré he could have been more stable and enjoyed a normal life. As it is, he feels death calling him, and that even this might at least give his life some meaning: ‘If death did not present him with an exit into true reality, he would simply never come to know life’ (p.80).

He also has an artistic sensibility which he applies to this problem, reflecting on the possibility of moving his existence from the real world into that of art:

‘Lik might hope, one vague and lonely night, in the midst of the usual performance, to tread…on a quicksandy spot: something would give, and he would sink forever into a newborn element…developing the play’s threadbare themes in a way altogether new’ (p.77)

Using Lik’s hypersensitivity as a justification, Nabokov is here toying with the metaphysical notion of an ‘existence’ which can slip between one level of reality and another.

Koldunov at first sight appears to be quite unlike Lik. He is vulgar, clumsy, ‘an idler, a drunkard and a boor’ (p.89). But he is related by family to Lik, and Nabokov provides a series of subtle hints, parallels and twinnings which invite us to view him as Lik’s double – the other development of Lik’s possible life chances. Even Lik himself is vaguely aware of this: ‘With Koldunov’s resurrection, he had to admit the possibility of two parallel lines crossing after all’ (p.82)

Koldunov like him is in exile, is poor, and he too feels that his life has become so desperate that it must be near its end. He torments Lik, hinting at suicide: ‘the other day I was thinking that all was lost. Do you understand what I am saying’ (p.88). His life has gone onto a downward trajectory, but in a way which is not altogether unlike Lik’s: ‘heavy cycles of ignoble idleness and ignoble toil’ (p.92).

This plunge into the lower depths prompts him, in a clearly Dostoyevskian manner, to pose philosophic questions about it, and in doing so he uses a theatrical metaphor which echoes the ‘part’ Lik is employed to play: ‘Why have I been assigned the part of some kind of miserable scoundrel who is spat on by everybody, gypped, bullied, thrown into jail?’ (p.94).

We take it from his vulgar behaviour, the quarrels he picks, and his insensitivity, that some of this misfortune is probably of his own making, but there is a sense in which he has every right to pose these questions. Lik himself is poor enough, but Koldunov is even poorer: why does the world treat him this way? Just because he is shabby and vulgar, this is no justification. He goes back as a literary conception to the downtrodden little men of nineteenth century fiction. To ‘poor Yevgeni’ of Pushkin’s ‘The Bronze Horseman’:

But my poor, poor
Yevgeni! … Alas! his confused mind could not endure
The shocks he had suffered …
… He grew
A stranger to the world”

Or to Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich whose overcoat is stolen and who can find no justice in life:

‘A human being whom no one ever thought of protecting, who was dear to no one, in whom no one was the least interested, not even the naturalist who cannot resist sticking a pin into a common fly and examining it under the microscope’ (Gogol,p.102)

And of course to so many of Dostoyevski’s furious individuals who rant against the injustices of life.

The double theme is woven into the story by a number of hints, repetitions, and events which echo each other. Koldunov is mentioned to Lik for instance by

‘a loquacious old Russian (who had managed on two occasions already to recount to Lik the story of his life, first in one direction, from the present to the past, and then in the other, against the grain, resulting in two different lives, one successful, the other not)’ (p.81)

This of course describes in a way the lives of Lik and Koldunov as presented by the story, and the link between the two of them is firmly underscored at the end by the fact that Koldunov has put on Lik’s shoes before shooting himself.

‘Lik’ stands alongside Spring in Fialta and The Return of Chorb as one of Nabokov’s major achievements in the short story form, and it illustrates in both theme and treatment the continuing strength of his links with the Russian literary tradition at a time when he was about to begin his third stage of exile from his native country and about to start writing in a language which was ‘foreign’ to him.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

41 – Vasiliy Shishkov

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Vasiliy Shishkov’ (August 1939) need not detain us long. It is a story which would hardly make any sense at all without its biographical note. The émigré poet George Adamovich had been a consistent critic of Nabokov’s work, and Nabokov had tricked him by writing a poem under the eponymous pseudonym which Adamovich had praised. To capitalise on this by revealing the joke, Nabokov published the story in question in the newspaper to which Adamov contributed a weekly column. This is a very typical piece of Nabokov’s literary mischief.

The first person narrator, who turns out to be called Gospodin Nabokov, is approached by an eager young man: ‘My name is Vasiliy Shishkov. I am a poet’ (TD,p.207). He wants Nabokov to give him a sincere judgement of his work. When he produces the poems they turn out to be worthless trash, and Nabokov tells him so, whereupon he reveals that he has deliberately made them so to test the rigour of Nabokov’s honesty.

He then produces his real work, which is very good. In addition he confesses to suffering an acute form of Weltschmerz and even plans to publish a magazine called ‘A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity’. When this project falls through he decides to simply disappear, leaving his work behind. The joke concludes with the narrator’s observation ‘in a wildly literal sense … he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse’ (p.215).

It is only in this sense, as a case study of what Nabokov (Vladimir Nabokov, that is) calls ‘one poet dissolving in another’ (p.206) that the story has any independent meaning, and even then the fiction quickly bites its own tail because there is not an extant body of work by the imaginary poet, only that written by Nabokov under his name. But what the story does show is the manner in which Nabokov was keen to exploit the interfaces between art and life as the sources for his fiction.

So the story is autobiographical in two senses. Its origins lie in the historical rivalry between Adamovich and Nabokov; and Nabokov’s own life as an exile in 1939 is obviously being paralleled in the concerns of a poet who feels under threat from the world and who hopes that his work will survive him.

Although ‘Vasiliy Shishkov’ might be a slight piece of work, Nabokov went on later the same year to produce one of his most serious and accomplished longer stories – and one which deals with precisely the desperate extremes of émigré life. It even reflects the geographic relocations of emigration at that time. For as the Nazis moved westwards there was only one direction to go for those émigrés trapped in Paris, and that was southwards towards the Riviera.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

42 – The Assistant Producer

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

PART III Stories 1941 – 1959

Following Nabokov’s emigration to the United States in 1940, he was faced with three major difficulties as far as being a writer was concerned. He was forced to earn his living as a teacher; he had lost the small audience and reputation he had established in the émigré circles of Paris and Berlin; and he had already realised that he would have to abandon his mother tongue and start writing in another language. He chose English – having briefly toyed with the idea of French.

It is also obvious, looking at his publications record for the 1930s, that he had come to regard himself principally primarily as a novelist. His relationship with the short story in the next two phases of his life therefore is understandably more tenuous. Whilst living in America between 1940 and 1960 he wrote only ten more stories, and following his return to Europe until his death in 1977 he appears to have written none at all. The last two decades of his life were devoted to writing his later novels and to translating into English the bulk of his earlier work produced between 1924 and 1940 which had been written in Russian.

It is interesting to note that for his first story in English, Nabokov did not invent a fiction, but re-told a well known incident from émigré life in Europe – but in doing so presented it as a cheap B-movie scenario, reflecting his long-term interest in the cinema and his acquaintance with émigrés who had earned their livings as film extras in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s.

‘The Assistant Producer’ (January 1943) is both a character sketch of the Russian singer Plevitskaya (La Slavska) and an account of an incident in 1938 amongst the émigré Whites in which she was involved. The first part of the story gives details of her career and how she came to be kidnapped by then married to General Golubkov, an officer in the White Army. All this is done in a manner which mockingly imitates cinematic cliches:

‘A White soldier’s dead hand is still clutching a medallion with his mother’s face. A Red soldier near by has on his shattered breast a letter from home with the same old woman blinking through the dissolving lines’ (ND,p.74)

During the period of emigration, Golubkov becomes a triple agent, and La Slavska keeps patriotic feelings alive with recitals of tasteless songs. The latter part of the story recounts the details of Golubkov’s plot to kidnap in Paris the leader of the Whites-in-exile and his own subsequent disappearance when exposed. The story ends with La Slavska in jail, dying during the German occupation.

This is another good example illustrating the difference between a tale and a short story. As Ian Reid observes in his definition of the differences, the tale abandons the compactness of the short story proper and offers instead ‘a fairly straightforward, loose-knit account of strange happenings’ (Reid,p.32).

There is far too much heterogeneous material in ‘The Assistant Producer’ for the demands of tonal and thematic consistency made by the story. The subject hovers uncertainly between character sketches of the two principals and the plot in which they are both involved.

There is also too much historical and political information given on the Whites for the demands of restraint and understatement made by the genre in its modern form. This information may be necessary to explain the plot. Indeed Nabokov is conscious of the fact – ‘I want your attention now, for it would be a pity to miss the subtleties of the situation’ (p.77) – but the background details are further excrescences inhibiting the unity of the piece.

There is also a sense in which the story seems to have been written as a memoir of the place and period – Nabokov putting on record the double-dealings of this doomed right-wing group in Paris of the late 1930s, dealings which as he mentions in the story itself had been largely misunderstood or ignored at the time:

‘The French police displayed a queer listlessness in dealing with possible clues as if it assumed that the disappearance of Russian generals was a kind of curious local custom, an Oriental phenomenon, a dissolving process which perhaps ought not to occur but which could not be prevented’ (p.90)

This sort of explanatory note brings the story closer to journalism than to fiction. But in terms of Nabokov’s development as a writer the principal point of interest here is that the story shows a point of transition between his Russian and his English periods.

He switched over to writing in English with a confidence and a flourish which rivals Conrad’s similar feat made sixty years earlier, though there are one or two small uncertainties – ‘a central-heated Hall’ (p.72) ‘her magic appearance’ (p.73) – which indicate that he was still not completely at ease with his adopted language.

What the story does show is the further advances he had made in the chatty virtuosity of his first person narrative mode. These are the fluent switches between story and addresses to the reader or character, the ellipses and changes of topic, which are like a word-conjurer constructing his narrative from a number of juggled modes. The story after its title begins with an immediate interrogative:

‘Meaning? Well, because life is merely that – an Assistant Producer. Tonight we shall go to the movies. Back to the Thirties, and down the Twenties, and round the corner to the old Europe Picture Palace. She was a celebrated singer’ (p.71)

The first sentence he imputes as a query on the reader’s part. The second, with its conversational ‘Well’, offers an authorial response and explanation. The third speaks directly to the reader and offers an accompanying hand in the first person ‘we’. The fourth speaks from the New World (USA) and points back to the old (Europe) and its culture. And the fifth, with no warning or transition, abruptly switches to the principal character of the story.

This is the sort of narrative mode of rapidly switching forms of address and points of view which Nabokov would work on until it reached the amusing heights of Humbert Humbert in Lolita – ‘You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style’ (L,p.1) – and ended in the rococo self-indulgence of Ada.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

43 – That in Aleppo Once …

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘That in Aleppo Once…’ (May 1943) he returns to the same themes as ‘Spring in Fialta’ – recapturing the past, a woman, or a country that has been lost – and he gives the material a new twist by providing an outer frame to the narrative which technically ‘sets’ the story in the USA. It takes the form of a letter written by a Russian émigré in Central Park to his fellow countryman ‘V’, relating the incidents of his emigration and inviting him to make a story out of it.

His tale combines two elements – the narrator’s flight from Paris to the south of France, and his brief marriage to a woman who has made him so unhappy that he now wishes to doubt her existence. She is much younger than him, and in recording this fact he draws parallels with Pushkin and Othello, both of whom were jealously possessive of their young wives.

On their honeymoon and escape journey to Marseilles he is separated from her when their train pulls off from a brief stop, leaving him on the platform. When he locates her some days later in Nice she tells him she met a man and spent some time with him in Montpellier. This sends the narrator into paroxysms of jealousy, after which she admits that her story was a lie – told perhaps to test him. But when they eventually obtain exit visas she disappears again, for good. The narrator goes on to New York alone, wants to forget her, and is very unhappy.

In terms of meta-fiction there is an interesting twist to the story in that it ends by the narrator imploring his friend V not to take up the Othello references in the story: ‘It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V: you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you took that for your title’ (ND,p.157).

Since the story does have part of the famous quotation as its title, the implication is that V is publishing the letter and that therefore the narrator has committed suicide like Othello. Certainly from various hints in his narrative we are led to suspect that he is not psychologically stable.

His jealousy leads him to incessant questioning of his wife: ‘It went on like that for aeons, she breaking down every now and then…answering my unprintable questions’ (p.151) and possibly to a physical ill treatment of her: ‘I could imagine the accursed recurrent scene…with the dim limbs of my wife as she shook and rattled and dissolved in my violent grasp’ (p.151).

This appears to be confirmed when, searching for his wife after she has finally left him, a third party in whom she has confided accuses him of being a ‘bully and a cad’ (p.154). But his wife has also told this woman that the narrator hanged their pet dog before leaving Paris, and we know that there is no dog: it is one of her fabrications. And since we have her own evidence that she is capable of sustaining a lie, we are therefore in a dilemma. Whose testimony do we accept, knowing that it is all being presented to us by the narrator?

There does not seem to be any answer to this problem: we are forced to accept the general account given to us by the narrator – of an older, jealous man married to a capricious young woman. That we may do so with some confidence is suggested by the fact that it is a subject about which Nabokov writes over and over again throughout his writing life. There is a whole study to be made of Nabokov’s persistent interest in adultery in general and cuckoldry in particular. ‘That in Aleppo Once…’ is a successfully short variation on one of his favourite themes.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

44 – A Forgotten Poet

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘A Forgotten Poet’ (May 1944) is possibly the weakest of all Nabokov’s short stories – partly because it is a ‘tale’, partly because of a certain improbability in what purports to be a realistic text, and partly because it appears to have no special focus or point. What it does not lack however is good structure.

The first part of the story presents the little that is known of the life and work of an early nineteenth century poet, Perov. Part two is an account of an evening celebrating his memory held at the turn of the century. To the embarrassment of the organisers an old man appears claiming to be Perov. He asks to be given the takings from a collection, and renounces some of the attitudes for which his early work is being celebrated. The organisers have him taken away by the police. Part three is set following the revolution: a small museum to Perov’s memory is tended by the old man himself, but following his death the museum closes and public interest in him fades away.

It is Nabokov’s speaking as narrator at the end of the story which gives the only clue to the meaning he intended: ‘Somehow or other, in the next twenty years or so, Russia lost all contact with Perov’s poetry. Young Soviet citizens know as little about his works as they do about mine’ (ND,p.47). The story therefore appears to be a plea for retaining cultural consciousness and traditions – as well as offering an amused view of the differences between public perceptions of an artist and the person himself.

Nabokov was well aware from his own experience and that of others, of the damage done to a nation’s cultural heritage by the suppressions, ruptures, and losses sustained during periods of political unrest and tyranny. It is also a critique of those who would use a poet’s work just to support their own views – for the organisers of the disrupted event wish to read into Perov’s works revolutionary sentiments which are not there.

The story also points to the fact that an artist cannot be held even to his own past if he wishes to change. Perov is compared to Rimbaud, who also rejected the role of the poet. He derides his youthful work – ‘a score of frivolous poems’ (p.42) – and since writing it he has been working as a farmer.

But much as one might be sympathetic to such refreshing sentiments, their power as topics is undermined by the very anecdotal nature of the story. As Sean O’Faolain observes, an anecdote might appear to be an attractive germ for a short story, but it is likely in fact to be too simplistic and crude as the basis for a story in its modern form:

‘There is a primitive appeal in narrative or anecdote…but as we develop we want to go a little deeper. A plain or simple record of incident, however heroic or amusing could never satisfy the temper of our day. We have come to expect from the short story much more than a series of incidents, however interesting they may be in themselves’ (SS,p.154)

A further weakness arises from the fictional status of Perov. Nabokov is trying to do something which is very difficult – persuade the reader to accept the idea that a character can have existence both in the fictional world he inhabits and in the ‘real’ world which we and the author inhabit. He can have meaning in one or the other, but not both. We suspend our disbelief only very lightly for a work which pretends to be a historical record. And with good reason – for we can check the record and discover that no such Perov ever existed.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

45 – Time and Ebb

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Time and Ebb’ (August 1944) reflects Nabokov’s enthusiasm for his newly adopted America in a manner similar to that which his earliest stories of the 1920s showed his enjoyment of the material world of Berlin – his first place of permanent exile. The piece toys with his long term interest in time and memory, but hardly even pretends to be a story: it is not much more than an exercise in his increasingly complex prose style dressed up as a memoir.

In it an unnamed ninety year old narrator thinks back from some time in the twenty-first century to his arrival in America from Europe in the mid 1940s. His topics are soda parlours, trains, aeroplanes, skyscrapers, and anything which presents a novelty to the European. (This positive appreciation of what is new is undoubtedly one of the characteristics which helped Nabokov to survive an entire adult life spent in exile.) But the lack of any narrative impulse is reflected in some of the extreme contortions of syntax and prose rhythm:

‘The trees had their latin binomials displayed upon their trunks, just as the drivers of the squat, gaudy, scaraboid motor-cabs (generically allied in my mind to certain equally gaudy automatic machines upon the musical constipation of which the insertion of a small coin used to act as a miraculous laxative) had their stale photographic pictures affixed to their backs’ (ND,p.163)

This has all the hallmarks of the style which would eventually produce the rococo constructions of Look at the Harlequins! and Ada – the insistent use of alliteration and assonance, the complex syntax, long periods with huge subordinate clauses and parentheses, the rich vocabulary dotted with recondite and semi-technical terms, and the twinning and parallelism. When these devices were held in restraint by the structural and narrational demands of a story-to-be-told, the result could be the creation of masterpieces such as Lolita, but even his warmest supporters would probably concede that at times this mannerism can become inflated and tiresome.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

46 – Conversation Piece

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Nabokov believed that literature should not be made to serve as political propaganda, since in doing so it would become aesthetically damaged. He seems to forget that his own works which speak against tyranny and in favour of liberal humanism (Invitation to a Beheading, ‘Tyrants Destroyed’) are propaganda of a kind – but his belief is justified in the eyes of those who believe that these are amongst his weakest works.

Certainly his last story of this type, ‘Conversation Piece’ (April 1945) falls into this category, since the purpose at its centre is to send out a political warning. It is interesting to note apropos the question of aesthetics being damaged by overt didactics (strong opinions!) that the story features two elements which rate highly amongst Nabokov’s own prejudices – Germans, and women.

The story begins with what looks like a return to the double theme. The narrator informs us that he has an exact namesake – ‘complete from nickname to surname’ (ND,p.125) – with whom he has sometimes been confused. But this strategy is used only as a plot device to get the narrator to a gathering in Boston to which he has been invited by mistake.

There, a group of gullible and elderly American women are being addressed by a German professor, Dr Shoe. In his speech he seeks to reconcile America and Germany immediately after the end of the war by pouring suspicion onto Britain, claiming that Nazi atrocities are just allied propaganda lies, that German soldiers were clean, decent, and honourable, and that people should not be misled by ‘the vivid Semitic imagination which controls the American press’ (p.136).

The narrator complains to the hostess about Dr Shoe and leaves in disgust, but then a week later he receives a letter from his namesake reproaching him for his bad behaviour at the meeting and ending with a demand for money.

The problems here are that the story is little more than a synopsis of Dr Shoe’s reactionary propaganda. None of the characters are developed, and there is almost no connection between the double device and what happens at the meeting – except to underscore the reactionary company the narrator’s double keeps, which we already know at the beginning of the story.

It is difficult to find a sympathetically portrayed German in the whole of Nabokov’s fiction, and as Andrew Field points out in confronting this phenomenon ‘Were it not for the events of this century, Nabokov’s attitude towards things German might be regarded as whimsically as Dr Johnson’s attitude towards Scotsmen’ (LA,p.206).

But the same might also be said about women – using Dr Johnson as a parallel in this case too. Some of his female characters are idealised love objects, but more often they are adulteresses (Martha in King Queen Knave) tormentors-of-men (Margot in Laughter in the Dark) or dim-witted vulgarians (Lydia in Despair). The problem for the humanist reader is that Nabokov covers his prejudices with very witty presentation:

‘None of the women were pretty; all had reached or over-reached forty-five…All looked cheerfully sterile. Possibly some of them had had children, but how they had produced them was a forgotten mystery; many had found substitutes for creative power in various aesthetic pursuits, such as, for instance, the beautifying of committee rooms’ (p.131)

It is fortunate for admirers of Nabokov’s work that such overt misogyny is rare – and that such wit is ubiquitous.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

47 – Signs and Symbols

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Signs and Symbols’ (1947) is one of the shortest of all Nabokov’s stories. Dealing with the poorer and more desperate side of émigré life in America, it strikes an amazingly similar note to that sounded by Isaac Bashevis Singer in his own stories dealing with the same topics – though of course the two writers also have in common their émigré status, their bi-lingualism, and the fact that they were both from eastern Europe.

The story centres on an elderly émigré couple whose son has become incurably deranged with an acute form of paranoia. On his birthday they try to visit him in hospital, but are dissuaded by the staff from doing so because he has recently attempted to commit suicide. They return home saddened by the harshness of their fate and the hopelessness of the situation. Finally the husband decides that no matter what the circumstances they must bring the boy home to live with them. Whilst they are discussing the details they are interrupted twice by telephone calls – both of which turn out to be wrong numbers. The story ends with the telephone ringing a third time.

Nabokov has a long term interest in various forms of madness – which he puts to grotesque and comic effect in novels such as Despair and Pale Fire. Here, the son’s ‘referential mania’ (ND,p.64) is detailed in a manner which recalls Borges’s ‘Funes, the Memorious’ written six years earlier:

‘Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees’ (p.64)

There is a sense in which this is the second subject in the story, running parallel with the first, which is the harshness of the couple’s life as émigrés. They are poor, living on the support of a relative, and they are getting old. Behind them they have the flight of émigrés – ‘Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin’ (p.66) – and relatives who have perished:

‘Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about’ (p.66)

But the separate subjects are given two links. The first is the most obvious – that to have an incurably mad son is yet another misfortune to add to the rest. The second is the connection offered by the implied ending to the story. As a radical traditionalist, Nabokov is here combining two well-tested and yet apparently contradictory strategies of closure – the open-ended narrative, and the dramatic twist.

The story ends with the two wrongly numbered telephone calls and an upturn to the elderly man’s feelings as he contemplates a birthday present of selected jams he has bought for his son:

‘His clumsy moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab apple, when the telephone rang again’ (p.70)

We are given no further information, but it is impossible to escape the implication that the call is from the hospital with news of another and this time successful suicide attempt. For if it were another wrong number there would be no relation at all between these calls and the remainder of the story.

It is not possible to ‘prove’ that this is the case, but it is quite obvious that Nabokov is inviting the reader to supply the missing explanation.Thus the old man and his wife do have a further blow waiting for them, and the second link between the two subjects is made – in the reader’s mind.

As Sean O’Faolin argues, this is a hallmark of the truly modern short story – courting brevity by leaving the reader to work out what is being suggested or implied:

‘Telling by means of suggestion or implication is one of the most important of all the modern short story’s shorthand conventions. It means that a short story writer does not directly tell us things so much as let us guess or know them by implying them” (O’Faolain,p.138)

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Vladimir Nabokov web links
Vladimir Nabokov greatest works
Vladimir Nabokov criticism
Vladimir Nabokov life and works

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Archives for 2009

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

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