Nabokov – Stories

critical studies of Nabokov’s collected short stories

critical studies of Nabokov's collected short stories

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

48 – The Vane Sisters

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘The Vane Sisters’ (March 1951) is almost Nabokov’s farewell to the short story as a literary form. He created a specially difficult task for this last major experiment. It is the problem of having a first person narrator transmit to the reader information of whose existence he is himself unaware. As Wayne Booth commented shortly after the story was published

‘The Vane Sisters’ carries the pleasure of secret communication [between author and reader] about as far as it can go in the direction of what might be called mere cryptography (Booth,p.301)

The principal device used to achieve this effect is the deployment of yet another unreliable narrator. He is an unnamed Frenchman teaching literature at a girl’s college in America. One of the eponymous sisters, Sybil, is having an affair with another member of the college’s staff – D. The other sister, Cynthia, recruits the help of the narrator to stop the affair – but it is too late: Sybil commits suicide.

The narrator subsequently gets to know Cynthia better as she tries to enlist him in a circle of believers in the occult. He remains sceptical, she spurns him, and they drift apart. Some years later his colleague D reveals that Cynthia too has just died, and the narrator goes home at night full of presentiments that Cynthia might haunt him in some way.

He wakes up next day disappointed that she has failed to manifest herself, and in recounting this fact reveals as an acrostic hidden in his last words a message from her which concerns not just one but both sisters.

The trick is very neatly done, and is one which, as Nabokov himself suggests ‘can only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction’ (TD,p.218). And it is not just a cheap cryptogram or a revelation of identity: the message has a significance which connects it to two other aspects of the story.

The first of these is Cynthia’s beliefs in manifestations from the afterlife. She believes that these will take the form of short moments in a person’s life which are influenced by another person’s spirit:

‘a string of minute incidents just sufficiently clear to stand out in relief against one’s usual day then shading off into vaguer trivia as the aura gradually faded’ (p.228)

It is these beliefs about which the narrator is sceptical, yet the story opens with his sudden feeling of elation at watching icicles melting in the sunlight: ‘it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade’ (p.220). Following this he spots ‘The lean ghost, the elongated umbra cast by a parking meter upon some damp snow’ (p.220).

We also learn, in the course of his narrative, that his favourite painting (of Cynthia’s) is ‘Seen through a Windshield’…a windshield partly covered with rime, with a brilliant trickle (from an imaginary car roof) across its transparent part (p.226).

This elation of the narrator’s is precisely the sort of manifestation Cynthia’s theory has postulated, and this is confirmed by the acrostic of which he is unaware which reads, when extracted by the reader from his narrative “Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me. Sybil.” (p.238).

The acrostic is also linked to the important feature of the narrator’s unreliability and lack of self-awareness. We are given two or three hints about him. The first two the reader is able to check as indicators of his lack of acuteness. Nabokov plants, partly as a joke from author to reader, his lack of consciousness regarding his own narrative:

‘I wish I could recollect that novel or short story (by some contemporary writer, I believe) in which, unknown to its author, the first letters of the words in its last paragraph formed…a message’ (p.230)

Of course, this is the very story he is telling, but it does not occur to him to check his own last paragraph for messages. He is also unable to understand a very simply coded description of a chess set: ‘What seemed to be some Russian type of architectural woodwork (‘figures on boards – man, horse, cock, man, horse, cock’) all of which was…hard to understand’ (p.232).

The other hint is more difficult to disentangle from Nabokov’s own authorial control. For the narrator (as are many of Nabokov’s male protagonists) turns out to be something of a misogynist. He spends a whole page describing Cynthia in a very unflattering manner (thick eyebrows, coarse skin, hairy legs) and the widowed lady who is his neighbour he describes as ‘resembling a mummified guinea pig’ (p.235).

But there is another set of data within the account to suggest that Nabokov is deliberately planting information to cast doubt on his narrator’s reliability. For Cynthia accuses him of being ‘a prig and a snob…[who] only saw the gestures and disguises of people’ (p.234) – the implication being that she sees a lot more.

Our confidence in accepting this view is confirmed by the events of the narrative itself (Cynthia and Sybil are able to send their ‘message’) and we are offered extra assurance by such delicately and finely applied details as the fact that Cynthia makes her accusation ‘through pear-shaped drops of sparse rain’ (p.234) which echo the icicle drops of the signal between them.

One might argue that the trickery involved outweighs the importance of the subject, but the story is masterfully constructed nevertheless. What is the test for acceptability in such a case? Sean O’Faolain’s case against what he calls the ‘whip-crack ending’ is that there is less reason to re-read the story if everything in it depends upon some surprise revelation in its last lines (O’Faolain,p.159). But in the case of ‘The Vane Sisters’ we would re-read for the pleasure of seeing how subtly Nabokov has planted information in his narrator’s account, giving us the satisfaction of being able to work out what is going on behind the narrator’s back as it were.

It is in this sense that Nabokov is amongst the most successful of manipulators of narrative conventions: he forces his readers to pay especially close attention to what is being told and lays any number of traps to mislead their expectations – but always plants sufficient evidence within the text to enable them to work out the truth of the matter. In terms of the construction of its narrative if not the seriousness of its subject matter, ‘The Vane Sisters’ is amongst the greatest of Nabokov’s achievements as a writer of short stories, along with The Eye, Lik, Spring in Fialta, and The Return of Chorb.

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

49 – Lance

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

A year later, for what was to be his last short story, he attempted another difficult subject – interplanetary space travel. ‘Lance’ (October 1951) takes as its central issue the idea that the experiences of the first people to travel in space (and time) might possibly be quite overwhelming. The story is presented in five distinct sections by Nabokov in one of his most self-conscious personae as narrator.

Part one sweeps away all the clichés of Sci-Fi and space travel stories in a manner which draws the subject of these fictional conventions into the story itself: ‘Another thing I have not the slightest use for is the special equipment business – the air-tight suit, the oxygen apparatus’ (ND,p.205). He pushes even further than before the tongue-in-cheek lecture-room loftiness of his address to the reader: ‘This seems to complete the elimination – unless anyone wants to discuss the question of time?’ (p.207)

Section two introduces Lance the young astronaut and his ageing parents, the Bokes. This is done in a manner which plays jokingly with the fictionality of the account itself – Nabokov pretending in mock-humility that he does not have all the information he might have about his own creations: ‘I am somewhat disappointed that I cannot make out [Mr Boke’s] features’ (p.209). The parents are worried about their son as he departs for his voyage.

Part three describes their anxiety as they watch the stars whilst he is absent – but this description is relayed by Nabokov keeping extremely close hold of the narrative and toying with the extended metaphor comparing the exploration of space with that of mountaineering:

‘Ah, there he is again! Crossing through a notch between two stars; then, very slowly attempting a traverse on a cliff face so sheer, and with such delicate holds that the mere evocation of those groping fingertips and scraping boots fills one with acrophobic nausea’ (p.214)

This is very typical of Nabokov’s later narrative style: the subject is almost hidden beneath word-play, allusions, the rapid switching of subjects and points of view, and even excursions into speculative fancy.

In a short passage near the end of this section he is still describing Lance’s exploration, then switches point of view to wonder how news of his return would be made, quickly sketches in the outline of such a scene, bringing a very minor character to life in doing so, and then cancels it to return to the narrative:

‘There is some routine rock work ahead, and then the summit. The ridge is won. Our losses are heavy. How is one notified? By wire? By registered letter? And who is the executioner – a special messenger or the regular plodding, florid-nosed postman, always a little high (he has troubles of his own)? Sign here. Big thumb. Small cross. Weak pencil. Its dull-violet wood. Return it. The illegible signature of teetering disaster.

But nothing comes. A month passes’ (p.215)

Part four then switches to discuss what Lance’s view of the earth might be from amongst the stars, and since he is full of intelligent imaginative capacity, will his mind survive the shock?

Part five answers this question – but with the sort of understatement and open-endedness which was used in Signs and Symbols. The Bokes are summoned to the hospital where Lance is recuperating. He has changed, says he is going back, and is not allowed to tell his parents what he has seen. The implication is that his mind has not survived the shock, and his parents leave the hospital more quickly than they need to, possibly having realised the truth.

Many might wish to argue that the mode Nabokov adopts here – repeatedly drawing attention to his own existence as narrator and to the fictionality of his construct – a form of mannerism which has become tediously over-used in the fictions and meta-fictions of the last twenty years or more – is not suitable for the purposes of the short story and the demands it makes for impersonal presentation, restraint, and economy. But the tone he adopts is perfectly consistent, his theme is kept in view throughout the story, the dramatic element in the narrative is understated, and the reader is kept amused or busy by the consistently high level of Nabokov’s imaginative ‘digressions’:

‘Terrestrial space loves concealment. The most it yields to the eye is a panoramic view. The horizon closes upon the receding traveller like a trap door in slow motion. For those who remain, any town a day’s journey from here is invisible, whereas you can easily see such transcendencies as, say, a lunar amphitheatre and the shadow cast by its circular ridge’ (p.211)

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

50 – Conclusion

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

No matter how far geographically, culturally, and linguistically Nabokov moved from his native Russia, there is reflected at a very deep level in his work firm links with its literary traditions. His characters and their concerns echo those of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoyevski. The precision of his descriptions of the material world show powers of observation similar to those of Tolstoy, who he admired so much. His concern with literary style, his playfulness and sense of the absurd are deeply influenced by Gogol, whose ‘The Overcoat’ he describes, emphasising his enthusiasm for sheer literary aesthetics, as

‘mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the Chaos from which they had all derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature…appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships’ (LRL,p.60)

His stories, like his novels, show a consistent development in the ornamentation and the florid nature of his literary style. They also reveal his successful experiments with mixed narrative modes. Even with the added flourishes of his later translations and revisions, the earlier stories are written in a fairly plain manner. His consistency of tone and the focus of attention required in the modern short story are exemplary.

Edith Wharton claimed that the successful writer of short stories must produce ‘what musicians call “the attack”…If his first stroke be vivid and telling the reader’s attention will be immediately won’ (Wharton,p.51). But as the long succession of beautifully executed stories went on he not only struck the right note; he elaborated it, maintaining the note but also adding his own rhetorical decorations whilst at the same time moving fluently from one narrative mode to another.

It is not common for Nabokov to be considered alongside fellow modernists such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf; but in fact he was writing at the same time as they were, and was interested in the same forms of experimentation – notably that of moving from (for example) third person narrative mode, into unarticulated first person thought, and back out again without any formal indication to the reader. He also employs the same sorts of abrupt transitions, elisions, poetic repetitions, and prose rhythms which characterised their respective styles.

But it perhaps in his deployment of the first person conversational mode that his florid style is most evident. This is more easily discernable in his novels of course, but even in the short stories there is a marked tendency towards self-conscious and artful forms of address amongst his narrators.

His early narrators tell their tales with interesting or amusing asides, but in the later stories they address the reader directly, address their own characters, think aloud, pose questions, answer them, and muse reflectively in a manner which forces the reader to work hard keeping track of an often kaleidoscopic train of thought.

The artful first person narrator is also connected with another prominent feature of Nabokov’s work – his obvious joy in constructing unstable narratives and unreliable narrators. More than most other modern writers he seems to have explored the possibilities and subtleties of communicating to and posing problems for the reader behind the backs of his narrators.

Many other writers have used these devices since and taken them to such extremes that common and even professional readers have decided that the effort demanded of them is not amply compensated by the aesthetic reward; but Nabokov’s special skill is in having created this narrative complexity without moving outside the traditional notions of what is acceptable and accessible to the normal intelligent and attentive reader.

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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