Nabokov – Stories

critical studies of Nabokov’s collected short stories

critical studies of Nabokov's collected short stories

01 – Nabokov’s Stories – Introduction

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

The work of Vladimir Nabokov as a writer of short stories falls into what for the sake of convenience can be called three separate periods. During the first – the 1920s – he was developing his reputation as an émigré author living in Berlin, writing poetry, plays, reviews, film scripts, and novels as well as stories whilst supporting himself by giving lessons in tennis and English.

During the second – the 1930s – having established that reputation with his early novels written in Russian, he produced what are probably his finest stories. Towards the end of the decade however, he was forced to move to Paris and then to America where, feeling that he had lost his audience of the post-1917 Russian emigration, he began writing in English.

During the final period – the 1940s – he produced only a few more stories, and following the establishment of his international reputation as a novelist with the publication of Lolita in 1955, he effectively stopped writing short fictions from that time.

It is the purpose of this study to trace the development of his skill in the creation of short fictions through the whole of his fifty published stories, and in particular to examine his manipulation of traditional narrative modes.

Nabokov offers readers a challenging instance of multi-cultural influences. He was, to quote his own description of himself, “An American writer, born in Russia and educated in England, where [he] studied French literature before spending fifteen years in Germany” (SO,p.26). The fact that he actually lived in all those countries and absorbed their cultures through both daily life and their literary heritage makes the task of fully appreciating his work difficult enough; but when added to this one confronts the fact that he thought, spoke, and wrote in Russian, French, and English (though not, through personal antipathy, German) the task can become even more daunting. As George Steiner has observed:

“this polylinguistic matrix is the determining fact of Nabokov’s life and art … To be specific: the multilingual, cross linguistic situation is both the matter and form of Nabokov’s work” (Steiner,p.18).

A Note on Sources

There are no critical editions of Nabokov’s work. His short stories first appeared in Russian émigré newspapers and magazines published in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Some stories were later collected and published in volume form in Berlin and Paris in the 1930s. Following his emigration to the USA he began to publish stories in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and there was a collection in volume form in 1958 – Nabokov’s Dozen.

However, some of the stories exist in two and sometimes three versions. Quite apart from the fact that the earlier stories were written in Russian and the later ones in English, the process of translating the earlier works has variously involved other people, Nabokov himself, or Nabokov in collaboration with others. And at each stage of translation or re-publication of his work Nabokov was much given to polishing and embellishment of what he had written, which usually resulted in additional layers of linguistic complexity.

It is significant in this respect that there have already been several attempts to establish a bibliographical description of his work. Fortunately for the English speaking reader, Nabokov before his death managed to re-translate (in collaboration with his son, Dimitri) the bulk of his stories. These are now available along with his editorial prefaces and bibliographical notes, in the following English editions:

Nabokov’s Dozen, 1959

A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973

Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories , 1975

Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976

In the Foreword to Details of a Sunset Nabokov offers his own bibliography with the remark “The collection is the last batch of my Russian stories meriting to be Englished” (DS,p.11) which lightly underlines the fact that other untranslated or uncollected stories do exist (some of them are paraphrased both in Andrew Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Art and in Brian Boyd’s biography Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years).

But until the literary archaeological work is done which will bring these stories into general circulation, both scholars and general readers alike have every reason to feel confident that the pieces in these four volumes represent Nabokov’s oeuvre, issued with his authority, as a writer of short stories. It is for this reason that they will be used here as basic sources, and reference made to them by the initials of their titles.

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

02 – A Matter of Chance

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Part I – Apprentice Years: Stories 1924 – 1929

Following the revolution of 1917, Nabokov’s family left Russia and settled in Berlin, which was one of the two principal centres of emigration along with Paris. Nabokov was sent to Trinity College Cambridge in 1919, and after graduation he rejoined his family, supporting himself by giving private English lessons and coaching tennis.

After having written mainly poetry in his youth, his first short stories appeared in the Russian language émigré newspapers printed in Berlin – notably Rul’ (The Rudder) which had been edited by his father. The variety of narrative modes and strategies adopted in the first dozen or so stories suggest that he was casting around to locate the most comfortable approach to this particular literary genre – and he was at the same time of course also writing the first of his novels.

There are simple realistic narratives, prose poems, character sketches, contes, fantasies, and short meta-fictions which bring the conventions of fictional narrative itself into question. Many of the experiments he made, influenced not only by the narrative devices of his favourite Russian authors – Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov – but by immediate predecessors such as Bely, bring him obliquely into line with other modernist writers and conscious prose stylists of the period (James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf) who, similarly, were seeking to intensify the expressive power of prose by bringing to it the devices and tropes of poetry. But at the same time it is interesting to note how skilfully he deploys the traditional devices of narrative prose, ringing the changes upon them to divert and engage the reader.

Nabokov is by now of course celebrated as a writer whose prose is full of puns, word games, and a variety of literary tricks: yet the early stories, for all the glitter and artfulness of his style, deal with themes which are both serious and universal. The three most important and regularly recurring of these are the relationship between life and death; the function of memory and its relation to the passage of time; and the nature of individual personality. To these might be added a fourth which runs throughout the whole of Nabokov’s work until the late baroque inventions – the nature and the materiality of the objective world whose sensual qualities he takes great delight in recording. It sometimes seems as if he is observing such details in fear that they might otherwise be lost forever.

In his earliest published story, ‘A Matter of Chance’ (June 1924), a Russian émigré, Aleksey Luzhin (whose name was later to be given to the chess master of The Defense) is working as a dining car attendant on the Berlin-Paris express. In a state of terminal despair, he dreams of a lost St. Petersburg and a lost wife Lena; he has become a cocaine addict; and meanwhile he plans to commit suicide by putting his head between the buffers of two coupling carriages.

Unknown to him, his wife gets on the train to join him in Paris and meets an elderly princess who is a family friend of her husband. Luzhin just fails to put out the dining car reservation slips (and thus recognise his wife’s name), and he cannot remember who the princess is when he sees her. His wife just fails to enter the dining car and loses her wedding ring instead. When the dining car is disconnected for cleaning Luzhin just fails to discover the ring, descends from the carriage to commit his fatal act, and is run down instead by a passing express.

Here we have the Nabokovian story in esse. The overt subject matter is émigré life, which was to form the substance of so many stories for the following twenty years. And the themes – separation, loss, and death – flow out of this subject: Luzhin is separated from his wife; he has lost his homeland; and he meets death both as a willed plan and the result of an arbitrary whim of fate (the passing train).

The form of the story is traditional – a small but dramatic incident from life, a compact narrative with a very definite resolution; and it is told in a manner similar to that adopted by many writers of short stories after Maupassant and Chekhov – in a spare and understated style, with carefully selected details.

Nabokov’s inventiveness is well illustrated by the manner in which he plays with the conventions of literary suspense to subvert reader-expectation. Almost every one of the story’s details – the wife’s chance appearance, the princess who is a relative, the reservation slips, the loss of the ring – all act as clues suggesting that a meeting between Luzhin and his wife is likely to take place. But the ‘chance’ of it doing so is transformed into an ironic failure of circumstances.

The story is narrated in a traditional third person mode, and sets out to be normally realistic in its depiction of the world: ‘The brick rear walls of houses went gliding past; one of them displayed the printed advertisements of a colossal cigarette stuffed with what looked like golden straw’ (TD,p.146). But even at this early stage in his development there are signs of his drawing attention to the conventions of fiction by his faux-naive variation on traditional story-opening: ‘He had a job as a waiter in the international dining car of a German fast train. His name was Aleksey Lvovich Luzhin’ (p.143).

The cigarette advertisement also illustrates Nabokov’s persistent desire to render as strikingly as possible the nature of the everyday world, particularly its surfaces and textures. And this concern meshes significantly with that of separation and loss in the sense that whilst vigorously trying to recapture his own past Nabokov offers as an antidote to the impossibility of ever doing so a joyous apprehension of the everyday world in Berlin – something which did not make him at first popular with his fellow Russian émigrés, who felt that this attitude was a form of cultural betrayal.

Yet there beneath the surface of German life as seen from the dining car of the schnellzug lies cultural continuity in his allusion to one of the greatest Russian novels (Anna’s death beneath the wheels of a train in Anna Karenina, if not her period of drug addiction) a novel for which Nabokov had profound admiration, rating Tolstoy as ‘the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction.’

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

03 – Details of a Sunset

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Death by vehicular locomotion is also introduced at the crux of ‘Details of a Sunset’ (June 1924), written shortly after Nabokov’s first story. Mark Standfuss, a young sales clerk, is radiantly happy about now being engaged to Klara, who has previously been involved with a dubious and handsome lodger at her mother’s house. Whilst he is en route to visit her, Mark’s happiness makes him more than usually conscious of the world around him:

The houses were as gray as ever; yet the roofs, the mouldings above the upper floors…were now bathed in rich ochre, the sunset’s airy warmth, and thus they seemed unexpected and magical, those upper protrusions, balconies, cornices (DS,p.22).

These architectural observations act as realistic details of the material world in which the narrative is set, but at the same time they form a significant element of its later plot development.

Not knowing that the handsome lodger has returned and Klara has in fact broken off the engagement, Mark jumps off a tram, almost gets run over, then goes on to Klara’s where many of his previous observations seem to be mysteriously repeated and transformed: ‘Klara’s green dress floated away, diminished, and turned into the green shade of a lamp…Mark was lying beneath it’ (p.25) – whereupon the reader realises that Mark is not at Klara’s at all but in hospital where he is dying from the injuries sustained when he was run over by the tram.

What Nabokov introduces here for the first time, trying out something he was to use extensively in his later work as a novelist, is one variation on the notion of ‘the double’. It is something he was aware of in Gogol (one of his favourite Russian writers) and Dostoyevski (not one of his favourites, but an influence nevertheless as later stories will show).

He makes clever use of the device by having one ‘version’ of Mark, the happy Mark who wished to live, comment on what he hoped would happen in returning to Klara – though the reader is alerted to the dubious status of the account when Mark is amazed by some of the very details he had noticed earlier: ‘Mark could not understand how he had never noticed before those galleries, those temples suspended on high’ (p.23).

But in fact the narrative had been signalling Mark’s accident almost from the outset by skilfully planted images of extinction and death: ‘Several moving vans stood there like enormous coffins…the heavy skeleton of a double bed’ (p.18). And he also keeps missing his footing – once on arriving home, when moving along the tram, and of course getting off it. These details combine the functions of both poetic leitmotifs within the story and subtle hints concerning its outcome.

Yet at the same time Nabokov teases the reader with ambiguous clues related to what will happen. Just after we have learned that Klara in fact never wants to see Mark again, Nabokov as narrator remarks ‘He had such a young face, had Mark…One would think that fate might have spared him’ (p.22) which someone reading the story for the first time is almost bound to interpret as a comment upon his romantic disappointment, but which is actually related more fatefully to his death.

But as Nabokov himself suggests ‘one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.’ That is, only on second, third, or subsequent readings of a text can the reader appreciate all the subtleties and the artistry of its composition.

Nabokov also deals rather cleverly with the difficult moment of Mark’s fatal slip from the tram. The reader is given a fair chance: all the impressionistic details of an accident are offered: ‘the shining asphalt swept upward like the seat of a swing; a roaring mass hit Mark from behind’ (p.23). But then comes the literary sleight of hand – ‘and then nothing. He was standing alone on the glossy asphalt’ (p.23). We are given every reason to think that Mark has survived the fall, especially when he says to himself ‘That was stupid. Almost got run over’ (p.23).

These are the first essays in narrative manipulation and the use of unreliable narrators which Nabokov was later to develop into cases such as the self-deceiving Smurov of The Eye and the paranoid liar Charles Kimbote of Pale Fire. But Nabokov always stays within the unwritten conventions of what is permissible in misleading the reader this way. The attentive reader is given just sufficient clues to avoid being taken in. For this reason Nabokov was surely right to change the original title of the story (‘Katastrofa’) which gave away too much at the outset.

Although Nabokov had not yet followed the practice of other modernist short story writers in eliminating any sense of plot or dramatic incident from his work (as Woolf and Mansfield had done by this time) he had, like them, realised that the careful organisation of detail – the harmonisation of motifs, the use of parallelism and poetic repetition as well as relating individual images to the theme – would have the effect of increasing what might be called the aesthetic density of the short story.

Here for instance the colour black is used to describe a number of everyday details (shadows, a fence, a wet roof, figures in the street) linking them to Mark’s imminent death; and the descriptive details of Klara at the outset ‘the red blaze of her hair’ (p.17) are echoed in Mark’s death-fantasy as ‘The russet tufts of her armpits’ (p.24).

It is also interesting to note, in connection with Mansfield and Woolf, that Nabokov was interested at this early phase in what they called ‘Moments of Being’ – those specially charged passages of experience in which the participant’s senses seem unusually heightened in such a way as to create a sense of spiritual euphoria.

Nabokov went on to develop these notions – especially the frisson of the largely aesthetic moment – but here in slightly comic form Mark’s ill-fated joy takes the form of a rapturous identification with the everyday objects around him:

Mark felt a sort of delicious pity for the frankfurters, the moon, the blue spark [of a tram] that receded along the wire, and, as he tensed his body against a friendly fence, he was overcome by laughter, and, bending, exhaled into a little round hole in the boards the words ‘Klara, Klara, oh my darling’ (p.18).

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

04 – The Thunderstorm

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘The Thunderstorm’ (July 1924), Nabokov took as his central idea the Russian folk belief that the Old Testament prophet Elijah rode his chariot in the sky during thunderstorms. He pushed the element of narrative ambiguity to a point which makes it difficult for the reader to understand exactly what has happened in any realistic sense. This particular type of ambiguity, and the fact that the story involves a character from the Bible, are features which Nabokov did not repeat in any of his subsequent stories.

A first person narrator called Elisha, speaking to an unnamed ‘you’, describes a gathering storm one night in west Berlin. The wind, which he personifies as ‘a blind phantom, covering his face with his sleeves’ (DS,p.119) develops into a full blown storm – ‘a white-haired giant with a furious beard’ (p.120).

But then this giant, the prophet Elijah, loses a wheel of his chariot and on falling to earth asks Elisha to help him find it. Elisha locates a rusty pram wheel amongst a pile of rubbish in the courtyard, whereupon Elijah re-ascends into the heavens and Elisha rushes off into the dawn to tell his story to the unknown ‘you’.

Obviously we are being invited to read the whole incident as a product of Elisha’s excited mind. The reader has every reason to think that this is an imaginary episode. Immediately before the incident Elisha falls asleep, and just before the prophet departs Elisha closes his eyes, reopening them to find the courtyard empty.

This is a conventional device for suggesting that the events in between have taken place in the narrator’s imagination whilst asleep. But if this is the case the fabrication rests at the level of mere fantasy: it is not shown in relationship to anything else, and it does not tell us anything about the narrator.

There is a curious correspondence between the two figures which might lead us to expect a further variation on the theme of the double. Quite apart from the similarity of their names, they are dressed in the same clothes. Elijah wears a ‘drenched robe and sandals’ (p.122), and Elisha has ‘soaked bedslippers and a worn dressing gown’ (p.123). But we are given no further information to make sense of these clues.

What the story seems to be is an early, not so successful exercise in the incorporation of Gogolian influence. For certain elements of Gogol are strongly present. A dreamy Elisha runs into the street in his ‘bedslippers and worn dressing gown’ (p.123) so much like one of the petty clerks of Gogol’s tales. The story is an ‘as if’ fantasy, built upon the sort of unrealities which characterise ‘The Nose’.

And Elijah in ‘his fiery chariot, restraining with tensed arms his jet-black steeds…[which] tossed their blazing manes and rushed on ever more violently, down, down along the clouds’ (p.120) recalls vividly the poor clerk invoking an imaginary troika at the desperate close of Diary of a Madman: ‘Give me a troika with horses swift as the whirlwind! Climb up, driver, and let the bells ring! Soar away, horses, and carry me from this world!’

We might also note here, en passant, two of Gogols stylistic devices much used by Nabokov: the narrator addressing his own fictional creations (the coachman, the horses) and his use of semantic parallelism (“Drive on…Soar upward”).

It is not a particularly convincing blend of realism and fantasy, but viewed in the context of the other stories he was writing at this time (to say nothing of the poetry, plays, and theatre sketches) it seems quite clear that Nabokov was casting round and experimenting until he found that approach to narrative which suited him best. As Brian Boyd observes, a propos of Nabokov’s interest in different levels of reality, he was ‘still searching for ways to fit a world beyond into the world of the human, but he had not found his own way yet.’

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

05 – Bachmann

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Bachmann’ (October 1924) marks an enormous step forward in Nabokov’s mastery of narrative – particularly his exploitation of the combination and subtleties of third and first person mode. The story combines two of his favourite topics – Art and Death – in a subject which he treats many times throughout both his stories and novels – the artist-figure as a tormented eccentric, and a representative of the almost sacred belief Nabokov had in the value of individual human personality.

In many of his interviews and essays Nabokov expresses his horror of the general and the mass, and on the contrary his concern for the particular and the unique. It is an attitude which translated into artistic terms strongly reinforces his creation of a concrete and memorable world populated by credible and individualised characters.

Bachmann is a brilliantly gifted concert pianist and composer, but he is also eccentric and an alcoholic. Madame Perov, one of his admirers, follows him around Europe, sitting in the front row at every one of his concerts. They appear to become lovers, though Bachmann treats her badly. Yet on an occasion when Madame Perov falls ill he notices her absence, refuses to play, and absconds. She is summoned to the concert hall, wanders around all night in the rain looking for him, and eventually finds him in a hotel where they spend the happiest night of her life together, finding ‘words the greatest poets never dreamed of’ (TD,p.182). She dies the next day, and Bachmann subsequently goes to pieces.

The artist as comic Bohemian is a conventional enough literary figure. Bachmann has ‘short legs in baggy black trousers’ and whilst reading a newspaper at a party given in his honour ‘without taking his eyes off the paper he absent-mindedly checked the fly of his trousers with one finger’ (p.173). The relationship between talent (or genius) and eccentricity is something which many writers have treated, and Nabokov himself was to do so more extensively in his later novel The Defense where his chess master Luzhin is finally driven to suicide.

What is of prime interest here is the manner in which the story is told; for considering the fact that he was so young and had only been working in the short story form for less than two years, Nabokov took an enormous step forward in developing the complexity of his narrative.

The events are related in the first person by an unnamed narrator, and he is passing on an account of the incidents given to him by Bachmann’s manager, the impresario Sack. This oblique narrative method is somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, another Anglicised polyglot and Slav, on whom Nabokov lectured to his colleagues in the Russian émigré literary circle around the time of the story’s composition. The method enables Nabokov to do two things which were to fascinate him more and more as his work progressed – tease the reader and ring changes on the deliberate creation of unstable narratives.

When Madame Perov is invited to meet Bachmann at a friend’s house for instance, her attention is immediately drawn to the dominant figure at a piano entertaining some ladies grouped around him:

The tails of his dress coat had a substantial-looking, particularly thick silk lining, and, as he talked, he kept tossing back his dark, glossy hair, at the same time inflating the wings of his nose, which was very white and had a rather elegant hump. There was something about his entire figure benevolent, brilliant, and disagreeable (p.172).

Both Madame Perov and the first time reader can be forgiven for assuming that this is a sketch of Bachmann (complete with the Gogolian details of coat and nose). Nabokov is playing with the attractions of stereotypes – the conditioned expectations of both the Madame Perovs of this world going to meet piano-playing celebrities, and our expectations as the readers of fictions about them.

In fact this character is not Bachmann at all but the impresario Sack, and we then gradually learn from the account of events he gives and which is relayed to us by the outer narrator, just what an unsavoury person he is.

Sack is greedy and shallow, and he completely fails to understand both Bachmann and Madame Perov. Bachmann he calls an ‘absolutely abnormal individual’ merely because he is ‘cranky, capricious, grubby’ (p.174). That is, he does not conform to Sack’s own mediocre and conventional views of what is proper. And in describing Madame Perov he falls back on cliché, describing her after only their first meeting as ‘an extraordinarily “temperamental” as he put it, extraordinarily high-strung woman’ (p.174) even though she has done nothing whatever to warrant this description.

Even when Bachmann goes on alcoholic binges, Sack only bothers to search for him when it is necessary to get him in shape for a concert. And he cannot understand why Madame Perov could ever love the man whose talent he is exploiting: ‘The mystery of the female heart’ (p.177) he exclaims, speaking like something out of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues.

Not only does he summon Madame Perov from her sickbed to search for Bachmann when he goes missing, but he is abusive to her when she arrives; he misdirects her into the slummy bar district; and then he abandons her. Finally, some years later, when he sees a shabby and unhappy Bachmann on a railway platform he ignores him because ‘I was with a lady, and there were people around…It would have been awkward’ (p.183).

What is of interest here is the fact that the outer narrator makes no comment at all on Sack: he merely relates what Sack tells him. Thus we are presented with a character who, whilst setting out to justify his actions, does exactly the opposite and reveals himself if we read closely enough as a shabby egoist. We are given Sack’s view of things, but in the presentation he releases information which does not correspond with that view, and Nabokov offers us enough information to make an objective judgement.

Viewed another way, the reader is given the opportunity to make a gradual ‘construction’ of Sack’s character as a moral vulgarian, enjoying what Wayne Booth calls ‘The pleasure of collaboration’ between reader and author. Of course such a complex strategy of delivering the story to us has its own problems. How can the outer narrator know what Madame Perov did or felt when nobody was with her?

Nabokov side-steps this potential trap with some very neat linguistic footwork. Statements of admitted invention are used as a subtle bridge into an account of what could be known or surmised. ‘I imagine for some reason that when she started pulling on her stockings the silk kept catching on the toenails of her icy feet. She arranged her hair as best she could’ (p.180). The transition here from surmise (‘I imagine’) to statement (‘She arranged’) is hardly noticeable. This is a very skillful manipulation of narrative mode in a twenty-five year old writer just embarking on his literary career.

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

06 – Christmas

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘Christmas’ (December 1925) Nabokov returns to a more traditional narrative mode to record one of the many evocations of his Russian childhood which grace the edges of his fiction. The setting is an accurate picture of the type of aristocratic country estate on which Nabokov had lived as a child (and inherited at the age of seventeen). It is enveloped in midwinter snow, and is presented complete with master (Sleptsov) and servant (Ivan) who might have strayed over from works by Chekhov or Tolstoy.

Sleptsov has returned to his estate to bury his recently deceased teenage son in the family vault of the village church. He is suffering under the burden of an almost insupportable grief and sense of loss. Wandering about his estate, he pictures his son in midsummer, collecting butterflies. He then assembles some of his son’s effects, and on reading fragments of a diary recording the boy’s youthful infatuation for a local girl (of which he was not aware) he feels that he will die from grief by the next day. But just then a chrysalis from the boy’s collection bursts open in the warmth of the room and a large moth emerges, opens its wings, and takes a ‘full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness’ (DS,p.161).

The use of symbols here is conventional, but they are neatly deployed. Rather unusually for Nabokov, but in keeping with the social beliefs of a pre-Revolutionary Russia, they include Christian symbols. The story is set in the deepest part of the winter, at the turning point of the year, as a parallel to the depth of Sleptsov’s grief. Crucifixes appear on the church and on a Christmas tree which Sleptsov wants taken away but which is retained by the faithful servant – holding on to traditions in very much the same manner as a servant in ‘Master and Man’ or Anna Karenina. And the events of the narrative reach their quiet climax on Christmas Eve, with the chrysalis, which was thought to be dead, acting as a symbol of resurrection – the rebirth of life and of Sleptsov’s will to live.

Even though they are conventional, Nabokov shows delicacy and restraint in handling these symbols, just as he cleverly relates them to his theme and brings them into harmony with the structure of the story. At the climax of the story Sleptsov is reading his son’s diary, which forms a living link between them: it turns out to be concerned with butterflies (the symbol of life in the story) and the boy’s own sense of loss and separation from the girl he will never see again, following the end of a youthful romance the ignorance of which has separated his father from him. Artistically too, the chrysalis acts as a symbol of a supposedly dead past being brought back to life in the present.

For that is the sub-text of the story – Nabokov’s attempt to record a past, his own personal experience of life in a pre-Revolutionary Russia to which he knows he can never return. He grieves for the loss of his own country and culture, but he can bring it back to life by an act of memory and artistic creation. It is for this reason that his autobiography bears the title Speak, Memory.

The story uses as some of its material a youthful love affair from Nabokov’s own life, but it is not difficult to see Nabokov fictionalising his adult self as Sleptsov and his youthful self as the butterfly collecting son which he actually was in the years before the revolution. This is one response to the pain of irreversible exile – a meticulous and sensitive recollection of the past – and Nabokov was to make frequent use of this device in that part of his writing which seeks to record elements of his personal biography. But in his fiction he more frequently asserted his enthusiasm for life by a recording of the present, even when it was being experienced in Germany – as his next story shows.

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

07 – A Letter that Never Reached Russia

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

It is possible that ‘A Letter that Never Reached Russia’ (January 1925) was a fragment of a novel, Happiness, which later became Mary, but it is given the coherence of a story by the unity of its themes.

A young man is writing to a young woman he left behind eight years before in St Petersburg. He evokes their past together but then stops himself and declares that it is the present, his life of exile in Berlin, of which he wishes to speak. He then describes his happiness in the perception of the everyday details of life: ‘I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty’ (DS,p.84). These moments of aesthetic pleasure – rather like the Proustian or Woolfian ‘moment’ – are provoked by very ordinary objects and phenomena: the gurgling of water in pipes or the combination of light and texture as a girl with an umbrella walks under a lamp and ‘a single taught, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply’ (p.84).

But then the main themes emerge: how to respond to exile, and the affirmation of the will to happiness in the fight of Life against Death. These are evoked when he mentions a visit to the Russian orthodox cemetery where an old lady has committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. She has collapsed into grief (as Sleptsov threatened to do) whereas the letter writer remains stubbornly happy, and his reaction is a challenge to the forces of obliteration, loss, and death:

centuries will roll by…everything will pass, but…my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp…in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness (p.87).

This is a very positive response to the fact of exile and the recognition of death’s inevitability, and the letter is in a sense written as much to Russia itself as to the girl he left behind there. It is one of the many stories Nabokov would write in which Russia and a woman are brought into symbolic parallel with each other – culminating in his masterpiece ‘Spring in Fialta’.

The story was also historically significant at the time in that it struck a blow against the orthodox notion in the Soviet press that life for all exiles was a ‘sterile and bitter purgatory’. Even under the most difficult circumstances Nabokov seems to have had what Brian Boyd calls ‘a genius for personal happiness’, and he transmits this very convincingly in his work.

As far as the development of his literary style is concerned, its significance lies in its being one further exercise in exploiting the possibilities of the first person narrative mode – a strategy he was to develop extensively in the stories and the novels which followed.

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

08 – The Return of Chorb

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

His next story, ‘The Return of Chorb’ (October 1925), was written just after the completion of his first novel Mary, and is therefore possibly influenced by the more complex structures of the novel form. Nabokov turns again to the theme of grief and loss, and he combines it with his ever-recurrent topics of death and recapturing the past. But he also introduces for the first time an element of grotesqueness and dramatic irony which were later to become hallmarks of his mature style.

What makes the story especially interesting is the skillful manner in which the sequence of events is rearranged in order to maximise the dramatic irony of the narrative – only to have the climax towards which all the events are pointing denied us.

The story begins with a German burger Herr Keller and his wife returning from the opera to discover that their son-in-law Chorb, a Russian litterateur of whom they disapprove, has come back from honeymoon with news that their daughter is ill. We then learn in flashback that she has in fact been electrocuted whilst on holiday in the south of France, and that Chorb has retraced their journey consumed by grief in his attempt to keep alive the image of his wife (whose name we never know). We also learn that his love for her was of a tender, almost chaste character, and that she was very happy on their honeymoon – which throws her father’s disapproval of Chorb into a critical light.

Back in the narrative ‘present’, Chorb books into a seedy hotel and we learn that he occupies the same room as that to which he had ‘escaped’ from the Kellers’ oppressive fuss on his wedding night. His intention is to mentally re-live their recent experiences so as to fix the image of his dead wife in his mind forever: ‘All there remained was but a single night to be spent in that first chamber of their marriage, and by tomorrow the test would be passed and her image made perfect’ (DS,p.66). He hires a prostitute just for company and goes to sleep as soon as they return to the room.

Whilst he is sleeping, the prostitute looks out of a window onto the opera house where crowds are emerging from the evening’s performance of Parsifal. This is of course the opera the Kellers have been to see. This is a wonderfully constructed moment which brings together all the dramatic ironies of narrative past and present.

We already know about Keller’s irate response to Chorb’s news. We also know from what he has told the Keller’s maid that he can be traced, and that he has compromised himself, albeit with a pure enough motive. Even some of the minor details of the story reinforce the irony here. Not only has Chorb been in the room before, but so has the prostitute. She like him recognises it from the picture of a pink baigneuse above the bed.

Chorb wakes with a terrible shock in the middle of the night, but realises that his ordeal is over. At that moment the Kellers arrive, to discover the prostitute just leaving. And Nabokov, with a very mature sense of restraint, ends the story at that point. Having created all the conditions for a dramatic finale, he witholds the events of the climax, leaving readers to effect the story’s closure in their own minds.

For the point of the story is not merely to arrange a dramatic confrontation: it is to present contrasting sensibilities – the bourgeois and the aesthetic. The artist figure is misunderstood in the narrative, but Nabokov is inviting readers to empathise outside it.

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

09 – A Guide to Berlin

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘A Guide to Berlin’ (1925) Nabokov returns to the subject of ‘Happiness even in exile’. In form it is not much more than a series of observations of everyday life in the city – sewerpipes, people at work, the zoo, a pub – yet Nabokov issues a warning in his editorial note to it: ‘Despite its simple appearance the Guide is one of my trickiest pieces’ (DS,p.90).

He invents for no immediately obvious reason a first person narrator with one arm, a scar, and a walking stick – a post-war veteran who speaks of his enthusiasm for Berlin life to his ‘friend and usual pot-companion’ (p.91) in the pub. We take it that the friend is some sort of ‘other self’. The descriptions of objects and people are very typical of Nabokov’s desire to record the materiality and the textures of the world in concrete and specific detail.

Quite apart from the fact that they are so sharply observed, these details also serve as springboards from which Nabokov launches flights of inventive and lyrical fancy – as in his meditation upon a snow-covered sewerpipe which reveals hidden connections between the phenomena he observes:

Today someone wrote ‘Otto’ with his finger on the strip of virgin snow and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft o’s flanking the pair of gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe with its two orifices and its tacit tunnel (p.92).

The rest of the story is composed of similar images positively and enthusiastically conveyed. Apart from a brief remark that living is expensive, one would hardly guess that this was the Berlin of post-inflation economic collapse, the city in which Franz Kafka had died following the coal shortage only a few months previously.

But in fact Nabokov’s real centre of interest and what holds together the apparently random observations is revealed during his reflections on the streetcar: ‘The streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn tram has vanished’ (p.92). His real subjects are time, memory, the evanescence of things, and the power of art to transcend them.

His answer to eternal decay is to make just such an exact record of even ordinary everyday trifles in order that the sense of life they represent should be available to those who live on after us: ‘here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times’ (p.94).

To play further with the connections between time, memory, and identity, he goes on to describe the pub in which he and his companion are sitting. He notices the publican’s son who he thinks ‘will remember the billiard table and…my empty right sleeve and scarred face’ which he then designates as ‘somebody’s future recollection’ (p.98) – neatly projecting his own identity and the boy’s memory into an imagined future.

Even though he was wrong about Berlin streetcars and could be wrong about the boy’s future memory, the idea is a very deft encapsulation of Nabokov’s early speculations on time, memory, and evanescence – but most importantly of all it reveals his confidence in the power of literary creation to transcend all three.

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

10 – A Nursery Tale

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In this story Nabokov took what looks, in relation to his work as a whole, like a false move – a backwards step into the realms of fantasy. He himself rated it lowly – ‘A rather artificial affair…with more concern for the tricky plot than for imagery and good taste’ (TD,p.40) – and it was a genre he never used again.

‘A Nursery Tale’ (June 1926) features the devil visiting Berlin in the form of a middle-aged woman. She makes a pact with Erwin, a young office worker who is full of frustrated sexual longings. He can have as many women as he chooses at midnight of the following day – on the one condition that the total is an odd number. Erwin is greedy and selects thirteen by the appointed hour, only to discover that the last girl he chooses is the same girl as the first. He forfeits his chance and goes home depressed.

The story harks back through Gogol to E.T.A.Hoffmann, a source which Nabokov acknowledges by having his devil, Frau Monde, living at number thirteen Hoffmann Street. But despite the skills which Nabokov would later develop at moving credibly between various levels of fictionality, he seems ill at ease here. He fails to make his devil or the fantasy convincing.

Apart from dealing with a topic (frustrated sexuality) he would later make famous for himself, the story lacks any serious thematic concern. And even though the story has been ‘revamped’ (TD,p.40) the thinness of the material leaves exposed some of Nabokov’s potentially irritating mannerisms, such as his tendency towards excessive alliteration: “pedalling with passionate power” (p.53) and “the lustrous leaves of the lindens” (p.47).

The story does however possess one feature which is of interest in tracing the development of Nabokov’s literary style – this is the placing of subtle hints and clues within the narrative which have the ostensible purpose of signals from Frau Monde to let Erwin know that she has recognised his choice – “I shall have a sign given you [sic] every time – a smile…a chance word in the crowd, a sudden patch of colour” (p.46). These are not unlike the clues which Nabokov sprinkles in his own work as signals to his readers.

Given the centrality of Lolita in Nabokov’s work, this story is mainly of interest for the early appearance of a Humbert-like figure who strolls through the later pages with a nymphet at his side: ‘He was a famous poet, a senile swan…[who] strode with a kind of ponderous grace; his hair, the hue of soiled cottonwool, reached over his ears beneath his fedora’ (p.54).

But even more important is the fact that Erwin’s choice of girl turns out to be the precursor of many Lolita-like figures to come in Nabokov’s work. She is described as ‘a child [my emphasis] of fourteen or so in a low-cut party dress … mincing at the old poet’s side … her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly’.

Figures such as these, as well as the whole of his later novella The Enchanter undermine the notion that the inspiration for Lolita was anything like the chimpanzee behind bars in the Jardin des Plantes which Nabokov claimed. Middle-aged pedophilia is alive and well in his work long before that excuse was offered to – and swallowed by – a gullible public.

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

Nabokov – Stories

critical studies of Nabokov's collected short 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

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

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