tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Revenge was written in the early spring of 1924 and was published in
Russkoye Ekho in April 1924. In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed the story under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, and it was first included in Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1995.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Revenge – critical commentary

This is an early (and rather crude) example of Nabokov’s love of the grotesque, coupled with his penchant for narrative suspense and playfulness, as well as the use of irony and the dramatic twist.

The contents of the professor’s second suitcase are not revealed – but we know that fellow passengers on board the cross Channel ferry think it is something unusual. The professor has previously joked to a student trying to assist him that it is ‘Something everybody needs. Why, you travel with the same kind of thing yourself. Eh? Or perhaps you are a polyp?’

So – we know the professor wishes to murder his wife, but we do not know that the suitcase contains a skeleton. And the suspense generated by these two features of the narrative (and the connection between them) is not resolved until the final words of the story.

The principal irony is that the professor’s young wife actually loves him, even though he is an unattractive bully, and her note to ‘Jack’ is just a girlish piece of romantic nonsense written to an imaginary man who has appeared to her in a dream. But the professor wants her to die in the most excruciating way possible – something he actually fails to achieve, for we are led to believe that she has died of fright.

Nabokov also shows his early love of first person narrators and self-referentiality in fiction – that is, stories that comment upon themselves. In the opening of the narrative a student and his sister are discussing the professor’s appearance and his similarity to a comic actor:

‘He’s really enjoying the sea,’ the girl added sotto voce. Whereupon, I regret to say, she drops out of my story.

Narrators commenting on their own narratives became almost a hallmark of Nabokov’s later works as both a novelist and writer of short stories. It is also worth noting that his narrators sometimes became increasingly unreliable – reaching perhaps what is a highpoint in his novel Pale Fire where Charles Kinbote comments on and interprets another writer’s work – to create a narrative which is an elaborate, gigantic, and very amusing lie.

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

---

Revenge – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

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Revenge – plot summary

Part 1   A middle-aged biology professor is travelling back from a scientific congress in Berlin to his home in England. On the Ostend ferry he has two suitcases – one old and well-travelled, the other new and orange-coloured. He has hired a private detective to spy on his much younger wife and received evidence of a love note she has written to a man called Jack. He has therefore determined to murder his wife. At the customs inspection the contents of the orange suitcase amaze his fellow travellers.

Part 2   His young wife who believes in ghosts has written a note to Jack, a man who has appeared to her in a dream, but in fact she loves her husband the professor even though he is jealous of her and very temperamental.

When he arrives home he makes fun of her beliefs then tells her a macabre story about a woman whose body unravels until she is just a corpse. He then goes to bed and tells her to follow him. She prepares herself then joins him in the dark, snuggling up to him under the covers. But her husband has put into their bed the skeleton of a hunchback, and she dies of shock on making contact with it.

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Revenge – further reading

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

---

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

tutorial, commentary, further reading, plot, and web links

Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster was written in English and first published in The Reporter in 1950. The story then appeared in the single volume collection of Nabokov’s short stories Nabokov’s Dozen (1958).

Vladimir Nabokov

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Critical commentary

The term ‘scenes’ in the title should alert readers to the fact that it is not a short story in the conventional sense, but a sketch or the unfinished germ of an idea. Having set up the conceit of a narrative told from the point of view of a conjoined twin, Nabokov does not seem to have known what to do with it. Not only is there no development or elaboration in the point of view, but the chain of events simply comes to an abrupt halt when the two boys are captured by their uncle. The only sense of closure to the narrative is the grim revelation that the brothers remain captives twenty years later.

It is interesting to note that in contrast to all that is known about the telepathic levels of communication that normally exists between twins, Nabokov completely excludes the second brother Lloyd from the narrative. Indeed Floyd’s consciousness is rigorously individualistic, and he even observed that the two brothers do not speak to each other. He distances himself from Lloyd, observing of their dead parent the ‘bliss’ he feels in calling her ‘my mother’. And he mentions a propos their miserable childhood that Lloyd ‘forgot much when he grew up. I have forgotten nothing’.

The story is a typically Nabokovian mixture of pathos and the grotesque, but the Black Sea setting remains quite unconvincing.

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Study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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Plot summary

The story is narrated in the first person by Floyd, one of conjoined twin brothers who are born as a result of their mother being raped. Following her death in childbirth, they grow up on a remote farm somewhere near the Black Sea which is owned by their villainous grandfather.

As children, local villagers are allowed to regard them as a circus-like curiosities, and the grandfather quickly realises he can make money from exhibiting them as such. Floyd naively wonders (exclusively on his own behalf) if normal ‘single’ children have any advantages in life, whilst he and his twin Lloyd are forced into humiliating proximity with each other

The twins grow to the age of twelve, at which point their wellbeing is threatened by another relative – a newly arrived uncle. Floyd dreams of being separated from his brother and escaping to freedom, and when the uncle threatens to tour them as a freak show spectacle, they escape from the farm and head to the nearby seashore. However, the uncle is waiting for them when they arrive. He abducts them, and for the next twenty years they are in his power. It is from this point, at the age of thirty-two, that the story is related.

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Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

---

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Solus Rex is the second chapter of an unfinished novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote around 1939/40. (The first chapter was Ultima Thule.) The chapter was first published in Paris as Sovremennyya Zapiski in 1940, then in the collection A Russian Beauty and Other Stories in 1973. It represents a brief transition phase in Nabokov’s writing. When he arrived in Paris to begin the second phase of his exile (the first having been in Berlin) he had toyed initially with the idea of writing and publishing in French. But he quickly switched to his third language and from 1940/41 onwards wrote in English when he emigrated to America to begin the third phase of his exile.

In this story, as with its counterpart, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that Nabokov embellished the prose style of the text whilst engaged in the process of translation. The piece has many of the features of his late, Rococo mannerism – the persistent use of alliteration, a straining for obscure vocabulary, and a wilful, almost irritating wordplay. There is certainly a case to be made for a scholarly comparison of the original 1940 Russian text with its revised counterpart of thirty years later. That would make an interesting research project for someone in comparative literary studies.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Solus Rex – critical commentary

There are some very faint traces of a connection between Solus Rex and its companion piece in the abandoned novel, the ‘story’ Ultima Thule. It is just possible that the events of Solus Rex, which take place in a country called Ultima Thule, are the story which Gosopin Sineusov, the protagonist of the first chapter, has been asked to illustrate. He is mentioned in the second chapter of the novel – although he is given a different Christian name and patronymic.

These connections are also pre-echoes of later fiction by Nabokov – particularly Pale Fire (1962), which also features the relationship between one level of fictionality and another, plus a similar fantasy-land called Zembla (‘a distant northern land’). The difference between them however is that Zembla is the invention of a madman, the novel’s narrator, Charles Kinbote. There is no comparable distancing device in the case of Ultima Thule.

It also has to be said that whereas Pale Fire is inventive and amusing, Solus Rex is amazingly below par by Nabokov’s usual standards. The literary style is annoyingly mannered, cluttered with over-long sentences stuffed with chained clauses, unnecessary parentheses, and contorted syntax. The events of the narrative are unfocussed, at a schoolboy level of invention, and not the slightest bit funny.

As in the case of Ultima Thule, Nabokov left behind his comments on the unfinished status of the ‘story’, and confirmation that the narrative had not been planned in detail before it was written.

Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S.P. Diaghilev (1872-1929), remains one of my favourite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises. I do not remember the details of poor Adulf’s death, except that he was despatched, in some horrible, clumsy manner, by Sien and his companions, exactly five years before the inauguration of the Egel bridge.

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Solus Rex – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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Solus Rex – plot summary

Ultima Thule is a fairy tale island in the far north where it rains for 306 days in every year. It is ruled by a king called K who has taken over after the thirty-seven year reign of his predecessor and uncle, King Gafon. The narrative is a retrospective account of K’s earlier life centred on a bizarre power struggle between K and Prince Adulf (the heir apparent).

K has greasy hair, doesn’t wash, and wears foppish clothes. In his student days he meets Prince Adulf (also known derisively as Prince Fig) who is King Gafon’s degenerate son. Adulf believes that the history and traditions of this Nordic realm are founded on a hidden system of magic and sorcery. K agrees with him, but does not know why.

The two cousins go horse-riding, where the Prince seems to be planning something with K in mind. A few days later he invites K to a gathering of his reputedly self-indulgent friends. The company seems strangely heterogeneous but harmless enough. But when Adulf publicly performs a sex act on a pretty young man, K leaves in disgust.

When K reports the incident, his guardian the Count excuses the incident as ‘hygienic’ and passes K on to an economist called Gumm. In the two years that follow K learns that old King Gafon has excused the behaviour of his licentious son Adulf. K wonders why there isn’t public resentment, but the lower classes actually enjoy the spectacle of Adulf’s behaviour, which is widely reported in the press.

However, there is criticism and opposition to Prince Fig amongst the intelligentsia, but they are afraid to act because of a fear of the possible consequences. Eventually, a philosopher Dr Onze volunteers to spearhead a prosecution of Prince Fig. A trial reveals all sorts of pornographic iniquities committed by Fig, the details of which fill the newspapers and further enhance his reputation as a popular royal ‘rogue’. When the trial ends, the jury finds the prosecutor Dr Onze guilty and sentences him to eleven years hard labour. But then King Gafon pardons him.

Two years later K is still studying and is invited to a meeting of the opposition to the royal family. When he gets there he realises from the silences and the signals in the room that they are plotting to assassinate Fig. He feels uncomfortable and asks to leave.

---

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

---

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

---

tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Fight first appeared in September 1925 in the Russian emigré newspaper Rul’ published in Berlin. The paper had been established by Vladimir Nabokov’s father in 1921. Its first publication in English translation was in The New Yorker for February 1985.

In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed The Fight under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, but it was included in the Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1995. It also seems to me no less worthy than many of the other shorter and lighter pieces from the early period of his output as a writer.

Vladimir Nabokov

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The Fight – critical commentary

This is one of a number of stories set in Berlin which combines detailed observations of everyday life with a curious sense of emotional detachment. Nabokov had spent the years 1919 to 1923 as a student at Trinity College Cambridge and then settled in Berlin as the first major centre of Russian emigration. He earned a precarious living teaching English, giving tennis lessons, and working as a walk-on extra in the film industry.

It’s almost as if he was reassuring himself that the appreciation of aesthetic phenomena was a bulwark against the existential despair which engulfed so many of his uprooted fellow countrymen. But the story is also an early example of two literary features which Nabokov returned to again and again throughout his career – reflections on aesthetic pleasure and self-referentiality in fiction.

The narrator first of all quits the scene of the conflict before it is ended:

I neither know nor wish to know who was wrong and who was right in this affair. The story could have been given a different twist, and made to depict compassionately how a girl’s happiness had been mortified for the sake of a copper coin

So – after a conventional account of events, Nabokov suddenly breaks the unspoken contract with his readers and has his narrator reveal himself as conscious of creating a fictional narrative. This is fiction reflecting upon itself – but he goes on to offer an alternative subject matter in the form of the specific and momentary effects available in the details of everyday life:

Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all, but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way.

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The Fight – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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The Fight – plot summary

An un-named narrator is living in Berlin. In the heat of summer he goes each day to bathe in a nearby lake. There he sees an elderly German man who is also a daily visitor. When he goes for a drink in the evening, the man turns out to be Krause, the keeper of a tavern who works there with his daughter Emma.

The narrator becomes a regular visitor to the tavern and realises that one of the other customers is Emma’s lover. When the lover helps himself to a drink at the bar and tries to leave without paying, Krause follows him into the street and a fight breaks out. The narrator watches the two men brawling for a while, then goes back into the tavern to retrieve his hat, comforts Emma, then leaves without knowing the outcome of the conflict. Instead he reflects on a number of different number of ways the story might have ended.

---

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

---

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

---

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Razor first appeared in September 1926 in the Russian emigré newspaper Rul’ published in Berlin. The paper had been established by Vladimir Nabokov’s father in 1921.

In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed The Razor under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, but it seems to me no less worthy than many of the other shorter and lighter pieces from the early period of his output as a writer. His first novel, Mary was published the same year.

Vladimir Nabokov

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The Razor – critical commentary

This is a short and relatively lightweight story – but it pursues its central conceit with admirable restraint and brevity. Every element in the dramatic situation raises the expectation that Ivanov will exact revenge. He has his adversary completely at his mercy. He is on his own, unobserved in the shop. The customer has put him through an ‘interrogation’ which he must have expected to lead to Ivanov’s death.

The artistic success of the tale lies not in the generation of tension – ‘don’t move please, or I might cut you prematurely’ – but in the fact that the customer never speaks. We can only imagine his terror. Even the details of the ‘interrogation’ are not dramatised – so we are spared any gruesome details, but by default encouraged to guess what they might be.

And in the end Ivanov does nothing, but simply dismisses his former tormentor. He triumphs over any desire for revenge. Technically, this is an anti-climax in the narrative, but in fact it is a very satisfying resolution.

Moreover, although the dramatic tension might seem rather artificial, the situation in the story is perfectly realistic. Berlin was the ‘first centre’ of emigration for Russians of both colours – Red and White – fleeing from the consequences of the 1917-1918 revolutions. Former aristocrats (like Nabokov himself) were forced to earn a living by doing menial jobs.

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The Razor – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of phtographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

---

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

---

The Razor – plot summary

Ivanov is a White Russian emigré working in a barber shop in Berlin. His nickname as a military Captain had been ‘Razor’ because of his sharp features.

One quiet summer morning whilst the other staff are absent, a man comes into the shop for a shave. Ivanov recognises him as someone who has previously interrogated and (by implication) tortured him.

He shaves the man and menaces him by reminding him that a single slip of his razor would produce a lot of blood. He then proceeds to recount the events of his interrogation, all the while shaving his victim.

Ivanov reminds the man that both corpses and people sentenced to death are shaved, and asks him if he can guess what is going to happen next.

The man is clearly terrified, He keeps his eyes tightly shut and doesn’t utter a word. But Ivanov finally whisks the cloth from around his neck and bundles him out of the shop.

---

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

---

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Ultima Thule was written in 1939/40 as the first chapter of a novel which was never finished – the second chapter being Solus Rex. It was one of the last pieces Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Russian before switching to write in English, which he continued to do for the next twenty years during his stay in America. It was first published in the emigré journal Novyy Zhornal in New York in 1942, and then appeared in English translation (by Dmitri and Vladimir Nabokov) in the New Yorker in 1973. It was then collected in the volume of stories A Russian Beauty and Other Stories published later the same year.

It is difficult to escape the suspicion that Nabokov embellished the story whilst engaged in the process of translation for the 1973 publication. The style of the piece has many of the features of his late, Rococo mannerism – the persistent use of alliteration, a straining for obscure vocabulary, and a wilful, almost irritating wordplay. There is certainly a case to be made for a scholarly comparison of the original 1942 Russian text with its revised counterpart of thirty years later.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Ultima Thule – critical commentary

Nabokov published a number of ‘stories’ which were in fact chapters from longer works – such as his novels or his memoir Speak, Memory. This was common publishing practice at the time, and Nabokov was living a financially precarious life as an exile in an almost hand-to-mouth manner.

Ultima Thule is primarily a character study – and a protracted philosophic argument somewhat reminiscent of The Magic Mountain (a comparison which Nabokov would intensely dislike). It also contains fictional elements which are not developed – such as Sineusov’s relationship with his wife, a complex time sequence, and the ambiguous nature of Falter himself, who could be a charlatan or a gifted visionary.

These elements might have been taken up in later parts of the projected novel, and Nabokov comments on them in the introductory notes to A Russian Beauty and Other Stories in which the story appeared:

Perhaps, had I finished my book, readers would not have been left wondering about a few things: was Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom the narrator’s dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a phrase which her husband did or did not recognise?

These authorial observations are doubly significant. First, from the point of view of the story itself, they reinforce the idea that Falter is a deliberately ambiguous figure. Sineusov describes his former tutor as if he were some sort of preternatural genius – but Falter is a shabby, down at heel character who works in the wine trade and stays in seedy hotels. Following his ‘vision’ he claims to have some transcendental insight into the human condition, but chops logic with Sineusov and gives specious arguments for not revealing the nature of this Universal Truth.

But the remarks also reveal something interesting about Nabokov’s methods and practice as a writer. He is at great pains to claim elsewhere that he composed all his works completely, in his head, then on his famous index cards, before he started writing them.

Following the posthumous publication of The Original of Laura, we now know that this claim is not to be taken at face value. The index cards which were published along with that last unfinished novel reveal that he was making up the story as he went along. And these retrospective observations on Ultima Thule demonstrate the same thing. If Nabokov did not know the answers to those questions his readers might ask, then the story was not complete in his mind when he came to write it.

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Ultima Thule – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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Ultima Thule – plot summary

The narrator, an artist Gospodin Sineusov is grief-stricken following the death of his wife. He addresses her as if she were alive and recounts their meeting with his former tutor Adam Falter.

Sineusov thinks that Falter is gifted with ‘volitional substance’ and claims that he is an exceptional individual. But some time later Sineusov hears that Falter has had a violent seizure in a hotel on the Riviera, then gone slightly mad. Falter is treated by an Italian psychologist Dr Bonomini, who questions him about the seizure. Falter claims that he revealed to Bonomini the solution to ‘the riddle of the universe’ – but the shock of this revelation killed him (though actually, it was a heart attack).

Whilst his wife is in hospital, Sineusov is commissioned to produce illustrations for a Nordic epic called Ultima Thule. When the epic’s author disappears and his wife dies, Sineusov nevertheless continues to work on the series of drawings as a distraction from his grief. He decides to return to Paris.

Before leaving he asks Falter to reveal what he told the Italian doctor. Falter refuses, and instead they have a cat and mouse philosophic debate about ‘essences’ and ‘being’. Falter insists that he has had a gigantic Truth revealed to him, and Sineusov enters into a guessing game, but Falter eludes all attempts to extract the secret from him.

Sineusov poses questions such as ‘Does God exist?’ and ‘Is there an afterlife?’ But Falter argues that the questions are falsely predicated and evades answering them. He then reflects on human beings and their fear of death – and finally leaves.

Sineusov later receives a bill for 100 francs for the consultation, and is left feeling that he must remain alive so as to preserve the memory of his dead wife.

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

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Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

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More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

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a critical study of Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories

In 1995 Dmitri Nabokov (the novelist’s son and translator) was preparing a collection of his father’s complete short stories for publication by Alfred A.Knopf in New York. He was able to include a number of early works which had not been available previously in English translation. Vladimir Nabokov had considered the idea of issuing his earlier unpublished or uncollected stories during his own lifetime, and he left behind a list of seven tales to which he gave the tongue-in-cheek title Bottom of the Barrel. His son eventually added some items that had been forgotten or lost. In the end, twelve additional stories were prepared for addition to those already available. The additional stories are listed below.

The earliest of these stories were written whilst Nabokov was still a student at Cambridge University, where he completed his education whilst the rest of the Nabokov family went to live in Germany. Many of these tales were published in the Russian émigré newspaper Rul’ (The Rudder) which his father had established in 1919 in Berlin – the ‘first’ centre of Russian emigration (Paris being the second).

I have not tried to insert these extra stories chronologically into the fifty stories already analysed in this online collection, so as not to disrupt their sequence and the continuity of argument in what was written some years ago. Instead, they will appear on this page with links, and on their main home page in alphabetical order.

> The Wood Sprite (1921)

> Russian Spoken Here (1923)

> Sounds (1923)

> Wingstroke (1924)

> Gods (1924)

> The Seaport (1924)

> Revenge (1924)

> Benificence (1924)

> La Veneziana (1924)

> The Dragon (1924)

> The Fight (1925)

> The Razor (1926)

> Solus Rex (1940)

> Ultima Thule (1942)

> Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster (1950)

© Roy Johnson 2012

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Vladimir Nabokov links

Vladimir Nabokov – life and works

Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories – critical analyses

Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Wingstroke was written in October 1923 and was first published in the Russian emigré periodical Russkoye Ekho for January 1924. It is quite possible that the story is unfinished, since Nabokov mentioned in a letter to his mother that he had written a continuation to the tale. The story also has numbered sections, which suggests that it is a fragment of what was planned as a longer work.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Wingstroke – critical commentary

Young men in states of existential anxiety are quite common in Nabokov’s early fiction. One thinks of the 1924 story, A Matter of Chance (1924) – and indeed they persist as late as the novella The Eye (1930) and his novel Despair (1936). This is not counting the inspired madmen who continue through to Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955) and Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire (1962).

The protagonist Kern has a rational source for his state of unease: his wife has betrayed him with another man, then killed herself on discovering her lover was a rogue and a thief. But there are also hints that Kern might be unwell. He is repeatedly beset by pains in his chest and presentiments of death.

In fact there are several pre-echoes of death throughout the story. Isabel explains to Kern her exhilaration at skiing dangerously at night, pre-figuring exactly what does happen to her, only a few pages later:.

“It was extraordinary. I hurtled down the slopes in the dark. I flew off the bumps. Right up into the stars.”
”You might have killed yourself,” said Kern.

Shortly afterwards Kern feels that ‘He had the sensation that he had glanced into death.’ There are far too many symbolic references for a simple short story, and another reason to believe that what exists of Wingstroke is a fragment of what was originally conceived as a longer work.

There is also the problem of what is presumably an unintended suggestion. Whilst Kern is grappling with his desire for Isabel he is picked up by the character Monfiori, who is clearly a homosexual Monfiori warns Kern against Isabel: “She’s a woman. And I, you see, have other tastes.” He is quite open about his intentions, telling Kern:

“I search everywhere for the likes of you – in expensive hotels, on trains, in seaside resorts, at night on the quays of big cities.”

Yet at the conclusion to the story, as the two males return to the hotel following Isabel’s fatal accident on the ski slope, Kern makes a very suggestive invitation to Monfiori:

”I am going upstairs to my room now … Upstairs … If you wish to accompany me”

By all the conventions of fictional development and narrative logic, this can only be interpreted as a suggestion that Kern is accepting Monfiori’s gay advances.

Nabokov has a number of homosexual characters in his fiction, but they only ever feature as figures of derision. It is very unlikely (and it would be unique in his oeuvre) if he were suggesting that Kern is escaping from disappointment over his wife’s death and his fascination regarding Isabel – into the arms of a short man with red hair and ‘pointed ears, packed with canary-coloured dust, with reddish fluff on their tips’. This is simply not Nabokov’s style at all.

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Study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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Wingstroke – plot summary

1   Kern is a thirty-five year old man staying in a Zermatt hotel during the winter skiing season. He is in an emotionally depressed state since his wife of seven years has fallen in love with someone else, then when he turned out to be a thief and a liar, has killed herself by taking poison. Kern is attracted to Isabel, a glamorous English fellow guest in the hotel. He dances with her, then finds it difficult to get to sleep afterwards, because she is in the next room, is playing a guitar, and has a noisy dog.

2   Next day she denies having made any noise. Kern is invited to the bar by the homosexual Monfiori who advises him to forget Isabel. The two men consume lots of cocktails, and Kern tell Monfiori that he is planning to kill himself next day. Monfiori says he wants to watch.

Kern goes up to his room quite drunk, then remembers that Isabel is next door. When he goes to her room she rushes out, and Kern is confronted by what he perceives as a dishevelled Angel who has come in through the window, but is clearly the dog that has followed Isabel to the hotel. He stuffs the dog into a wardrobe, collects Isabel, and goes back to his room where he tries to write an important letter announcing his suicide.

3   Next day he cannot find the letter, but still plans to shoot himself at lunch time. He goes to watch the ski jumping event where Isabel is competing. But on her jump, she falls from mid air and is killed. Kern returns to the hotel and invites Monfiori to join him in his room.

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Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

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Vladimir Nabokov links

Vladimir Nabokov – life and works

Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories – critical analyses

Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life

© Roy Johnson 2017

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