The Short Story Archives - Page 2 of 31

11 – Terror

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘Terror’ (January 1927) Nabokov returns to the theme of the double and explores that aspect of it which deals with the actual process of personality breakdown. A young man (unnamed) who calls himself a poet (but who is engaged on business trips) plunges us straight into his first person account – ‘Here is what sometimes happened to me’ (TD,p.113) – in a manner which is very reminiscent of Gogol’s Madman – ‘Something very peculiar happened today.’

He describes his feelings of dissociation from himself and the anxiety it induces: ‘I…stood considering my own reflection in the glass and failing to recognise it as mine’ (p.113). The more he worries about the phenomenon, the harder he finds it to reconcile the image with an identity he feels no longer belongs to him.

On top of this he has realised the inevitability of his own mortality and falls into soul-choking panics on recognising the inescapability of Death. And yet once he was happy, with a girlfriend, even though he sometimes could not stand the idea of another person in the same room with him. Even she represented Another.

He describes the girl as a ‘naive little maiden’ and mentions how he loved her ‘unassuming prettiness, gaiety, friendliness, the birdlike flutterings of her soul’ (p.116). Here is the Dostoyevskian note of this story writ large. For all his protestations against Dostoyevski, Nabokov often echoes him (particularly when dealing with this theme in works such as The Eye or Despair). The girl is very similar to many of Dostoyevski’s female innocents (one thinks of Notes from Underground) and indeed she is a common figure in classical Russian literature – from the younger Tatiana in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to Maslova in Tolstoy’s Resurrection.

The narrator tells how he panicked on the eve of his last trip abroad. This is followed once he is on his own by his experience of what he calls The Supreme Terror. This is a form of incipient agnosia – a state in which objects become emptied of any significance or meaning, and the words which describe them become detached from their meaning. This state of being induces a feeling of horror in contemplating the thingness of things:

I was tortured by my efforts to recognise what ‘dog’ might mean, and because I had been staring at it hard, it crept up to me trustingly, and I felt so nauseated that I got up from the bench and walked away (p.120).

It was precisely these sorts of object and this tone which Sartre was to adopt in developing the notions of existential angst a dozen or so years later in La Nausée.

‘The Nausea hasn’t left me and I don’t believe it will leave me for quite a while … I was in the municipal park just now. The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things.’

Nabokov reviewed Nausea rather dismissively when it appeared in America (Strong Opinions, p.228) and he does seem quite justified in his claim of having anticipated its ideas. (Tyrants Destroyed, p.112).

But then Nabokov goes on to integrate these metaphysical states of being with the fiction itself. The poet’s mood is interrupted by a message recalling him to his dying girlfriend, and her death ‘saves’ him. For when he appears to her at her bedside he feels his other self disappear: ‘there were two of me standing before her: I myself who she did not see, and my double, who was invisible to me. And then I remained alone: my double died with her’ (p.121).

The problem at this point is that the idea of the double has not been sufficiently well established by what has gone on before. The ‘poet’ has been slipping out of contact with the physical world, even with other people; but no credible notion of a double has actually been established. Nabokov was to do this much more successfully in later works.

But this is not the end of the story. For having recognised that his grief at losing the girl has temporarily filled his mind and distracted it from The Supreme Terror – ‘Her death saved me from insanity’ (p.121) – he then realises that as the memory of her fades he will once again be subject to its power: ‘I know that my brain is doomed…the helpless fear of existing, will sometime overtake me again, and then there will be no salvation’ (p.121).

Herein is revealed the significance of the narrative’s opening – which is couched in the past tense – ‘Here is what sometimes happened to me’. The story describes something which happened in the past, but at the time of relating it the man is waiting, helplessly in his own eyes, for the madness to overtake him again with a terrible finality. In his own terms, he is doomed.

Nabokov rescues the story from its slip over his use of the double by his strong sense of structure, form, and his control of narrative logic. This is another story whose dramatic closure occupies a place projected beyond the end of the narrative itself.

‘Terror’, like many of Nabokov’s other stories (and novels) seems to offer itself fairly plainly for a psychological reading in which the narrative is fictionalising a fear of sexuality and women. It is in bed that the narrator discovers his fear of mortality; although he has a girlfriend, he is occasionally ‘terrified by the very notion of another person’ (p.115); and when he dreams of his girlfriend she is sitting on a bed in a lacy nightgown, laughing. He finds the dream ‘hideous’.

He then feels his existential terror and tries to exorcise it by conjuring up a memory of childhood – but this is one in which his mother appears to him as ‘an incomprehensible face, noseless, with a hussar’s black moustache just below its octopus eyes, and with teeth set in its forehead’ (p.119). This is obviously someone being viewed upside down – but the compressed sexuality of the image certainly suits the ‘fear of woman’ reading.

And the girl’s death certainly does in a sense ‘save’ him. He no longer has to face the challenge that she represents. The ‘other self’ which feared her can die. He describes the memory of her in terms reminiscent of a Poe story: ‘her image within me becomes ever more perfect, ever more lifeless’ (p.121).

The story seems to reach simultaneously back to Gogol (the noseless face) and Dostoyevski (the first person angst) and reach forward, anticipating Sartre. What these connections demonstrate is the firm manner in which Nabokov is embedded within the traditions of European literary culture.

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

12 – The Passenger

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘The Passenger’ (February 1927) Nabokov takes the device of manipulating reader-expectation and elevates it into the very subject of the story itself, whose theme is once again the relationship between Life and Art. ‘Life is more talented than we’ observes an unnamed author: ‘The plots life thinks up now and then! How can we compete…?’ (DS,p.73).

The writer is discussing this relationship with a literary critic, and to illustrate his point recounts an incident in which he was travelling on an overnight express. The story begins with his settling happily into a lower berth couchette and falling asleep. The writer then immediately interrupts his own story to point to a fictional convention. ‘And here let me use a device cropping up with dreary frequency in the sort of story to which mine promises to belong’ (p.74). This ‘promises’ alerts us to the self-consciousness of Nabokov’s narration. To those acquainted with his playfulness, it also suggests that the exact opposite might occur, or at least there may be some variation or expectation-reversal.

The conventional device is that he is woken suddenly in the middle of the night – but then he makes light fun of the convention by revealing that he was disturbed merely by the foot of a fellow traveller who has boarded at some night stop and is clambering into the bunk above. The foot however is a particularly repugnant sight to him: ‘all I could visualise was that conspicuous toenail which showed its bluish mother-of-pearl sheen through a hole in the wool of the sock’ (p.75).

After this semi-comic mundane detail however, the story takes a serious turn as the fellow traveller begins to sob uncontrollably throughout the night, mumbling words which are unintelligible. The scene becomes embarrassing, mystifying, and annoying to the writer (now the ‘narrator’). He cannot understand what could cause such pitiful sobbing – and nor can we.

Early the next morning the train makes an unscheduled stop and police get on board. A criminal has boarded the train in the night: he is a betrayed husband who has shot his wife and her lover. The police make a carriage to carriage search, but when they rouse the mysterious traveller nothing out of the ordinary happens: ‘the detective demanded his passport, distinctly thanked him, then went out’ (p.78).

And that is the end of the anecdote. The narrator’s art had assembled all the ingredients in readiness for a neat resolution. ‘How nice it would have seemed’ the writer comments on his own story, ‘if the evil-footed, weeping passenger had turned out to be a murderer…how nicely that would have fitted…into the frame of a short story’ (p.79). But Art was cheated by a more inventive Life. It is not, however, the end of the story.

The writer asks the critic (and by implication the reader) to confess that he thought the sobbing passenger was the criminal. But no, the critic is used to the writer’s methods, and he replies ‘I am well aware that you like to produce an impression of inexpectancy’ (p.79). He then goes on to argue that even when we are baffled by life (why is the traveller crying?) the author owes it to Literature to be inventive: ‘You, as a writer of fiction, would at least have thought up some brilliant solution’ (p.80). He offers the writer a couple of alternative explanations – that the man has lost his wallet, or has toothache (both of which seem rather feeble).

What Nabokov illustrates here is a rule which for all his experimentation and modernism keeps him firmly allied with the traditional writers of fiction and shows his respect for the conventions of the short story form. The rule is this: a writer is at liberty to play tricks with readers, to divert their attention, mislead them, and give them false expectations – but ultimately the writer must offer a resolution to the story, even if this is only lightly suggested or implied. It is not enough to create mysteries with no solution or to baffle readers leaving them no possibility of redress.

Nabokov went on to generate many inventive strategies for reader manipulation, but he never abandoned adherence to this rule – the reader must be given the opportunity to work out what is going on. For all the trickiness of his literary puzzles, his plot intricacies and unreliable narrators, Nabokov’s readers are always given a fair chance. They are given this chance if they are attentive and are prepared, as Nabokov demands, to ‘notice and fondle details’.

And of course just because readers’ expectations may be disappointed, this does not mean that the story is unsatisfactory in its closure. As Susan Lohafer observes in her comments on how stories end:

A story can lead us into disarray and yet make us feel that we’ve assimilated our information in a satisfactory – though difficult – way. The deferred cognitive closure may be by far the richest part of the experience.

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

13 – The Doorbell

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘The Doorbell’ (April 1927) he deals again with his favourite themes of loss, separation and exile; and at the same time he takes a couple of paces forward in his development of narrative manipulation – that is, teasing the reader’s expectations, laying traps, and offering us the chance to participate in some delicious dramatic irony. The story also offers one of his first severely negative protagonists.

Nikolay Galatov joins the Red Army, then the White, travels in Africa and Italy, joins the Foreign Legion, and ends up in Germany. Nabokov as narrator mockingly comments ‘It was pure Jack London’ (DS,p.103). In this he rather typically takes a swipe at third rate fiction at the same time as appearing to use some of its clichés. From time to time Galatov remembers Olga Kind, the woman he left behind in Petersburg, and eventually after seven years decides that he must find her amongst the other émigrés of Berlin. We have every reason from the conventions of fiction to believe that he is retracing a romantic attachment.

He locates a Dr Weiner who he takes to be his old family dentist, but the man turns out to be only a namesake. Nevertheless Olga Kind is one of his patients – and it is revealed at this point that she is in fact Galatov’s mother. Galatov remembers her (with difficulty): ‘her dark hair with streaks of grey at the temples…the tired, bitter expression of an ageing woman’ (p.106).

But the woman he goes to meet appears different: ‘Her dark hair had been bleached a very light strawlike shade…And her face was made up with excruciating care’ (p.108). She is waiting in semi-darkness for someone’s arrival, and it is quite apparent to the reader (but not to Galatov) that she is nervously anticipating the arrival of a young lover. The table is only set for two, and on it there is a birthday cake with twenty-five candles.

At this point Galatov’s grossness become fully apparent. He observes that she is expecting company but nevertheless invites himself to stay. He even counts the candles on the cake and fails to grasp their implication in a manner which reveals his egoism: ‘Twenty-five! And he himself was already twenty-eight’ (p.111). He asks his mother about her life, but then starts talking about himself instead.

Galatov is one of the first of Nabokov’s gallery of obnoxious, insensitive egoists from whose own point of view a story is told. The reader has been led to accept this point of view as being reasonably neutral or not particularly biased – because Nabokov brings us close to him by interspersing a form of interior monologue into the third person omniscient narrative: ‘he was running out of funds. Oh well, he would get there one way or another’ (p.102 – my emphasis).

Clare Hanson, speaking of Joyce, Woolf, and Mansfield in this respect, observes that they

were amongst the first to develop, initially in their short fiction, the ‘indirect free’ style of narration in which the voice of the narrator is modulated so that it appears to merge with that of a character of the fiction. The author thus avoids direct omniscient commentary and remains more closely within the orbit of particular characters and their experience.

Nabokov certainly uses this device a great deal, withholding any comment of his own and thus forcing the reader to do extra work constructing an independent viewpoint from which the character can be judged. And there are other tasks too, for like other modernists Nabokov eliminates a great deal of direct explanation, demanding that readers supply this information for themselves.

When the doorbell rings announcing the arrival of the lover, Galatov offers to answer it; but his mother, anxious with embarrassment at the possible revelation, forbids him to do so. The lover leaves, and Mme Kind collapses in tears: ‘I’ll be fifty in May. Grown up son comes to see his aged mother. And why did you have to come right at this moment’ (p.114). At this Galatov simply puts his overcoat back on and leaves, with no indication that he has understood anything or felt any sympathy for his mother’s plight. The moment he has gone, she dashes to the telephone – presumably to explain to the young man.

Just like the undramatised argument in The Return of Chorb Nabokov is here exploiting the dramatic possibilities of the-meeting-which-does-not-take-place. The reader is allowed to deduce the mother’s touchingly romantic expectations (her make-up, the table setting) and to feel with her that an embarrassing confrontation will take place. But it does not – and the subject changes from her fear to the disappointed realisation that she may be missing one of her last chances of romance.

She may present an image of pathos with her bleached hair and the lights dimmed to conceal her age [rather as Blanche Dubois would do some years later] but this does not ameliorate or excuse the gross behaviour of her self-centred son.

The reader is in fact teased or misled on three counts. We have no reason to believe, for almost half the story, that the woman Galatov seeks is anything other than his own romantic connexion. Her true relation to him is deliberately concealed, and she is even given a different surname (although we do know that she has been married twice). Then Dr Weiner is not the dentist Galatov thinks he is, but (double twist) he does know Olga after all. And finally the visitor does arrive at the wrong moment, and he does ring the bell – but the meeting between the three of them does not take place.

The story is thereby charged both with the most exquisite dramatic ironies and reversals of what we might expect. What Nabokov is doing here (and went on doing for the fifty years which followed) is to devise playful and inventive variations upon the conventions of plot, character, and presentation of information which generations of readers have absorbed from the traditions of European literature.

Following his early stories dealing with topics which later became part of existentialism (anxiety, alienation, the Absurd) it is interesting to note that Nabokov’s next story deals with another aspect of that philosophy – the notion of mauvaise-foi. Bad faith – hiding from the truth behind a screen of conventional attitudes, or refusing to accept responsibility for the freedom to choose – comes close to what Nabokov calls poshlost (philistine vulgarity) and it features in a number of stories written around this time.

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

14 – An Affair of Honour

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘An Affair of Honour’ (September 1927) was originally called ‘Podlets’ (‘The Cur’ or ‘The Scoundrel’) which signals the topic more directly, but without the irony of its present title. For the affair is anything but honourable. The story is in fact a grotesque variation on the subject of duels, which occur so often in Russian literature. Nabokov acknowledges his debt to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and ‘The Shot’, and to Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time by mentioning them in the text, and he cites in his editorial note ‘Chekhov’s magnificent novelle Single Combat‘ as a romantic theme on which his own story is a ‘belated variation’.[RB,p.82]

The setting is yet again Russian émigré Berlin, and the topic which provokes the duel is one to which Nabokov returns over and over again throughout his work – adultery. Anton Petrovich (who with the same forename and initials, is a second nod to Chekhov) returns home unexpectedly early from a business trip to discover that he is being cuckolded by his associate Berg. He immediately challenges him to a duel: ‘He pulled off the glove with a final yank and threw it awkwardly at Berg. The glove slapped against the wall and dropped into the washstand pitcher. “Good shot”, said Berg’ [RB,p.86].

This squalid little scene encapsulates the whole story. For Anton Petrovich is clumsy and cowardly: he is also fat, self-satisfied, and utterly conventional. Berg on the other hand is a big man with broad shoulders, full of insouciance and physical confidence. More importantly he is a former White Army man who has killed more than five hundred Reds.

Anton Petrovich compounds the farce by choosing as seconds Mityushin and Gnushke, two drunken fools who come from the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern school of malevolent funsters – one of many such grotesque duos which crop up in Nabokov’s work: [two similar but more sinister thugs will appear shortly in The Leonardo]. He then goes back home, congratulates himself on his sangfroid – ‘Extraordinary, how this man retains his composure – does not even forget to wind his watch’ (p.92), then vomits all over the carpet with anxiety.

He tries to shed personal responsibility for what has happened – ‘all that talk about duels had started’ (p.93) (which he had started himself) – and he hopes that the seconds will not make the arrangements for the duel. But they do, and Anton Petrovich is seized by the terrible realisation that he may be killed. His mind is in a whirl of fear, half-baked superstition, and idées reçues: ‘when the duel starts, I shall turn up my jacket collar – that’s the custom, I think’ (p.102). He is even worried by such irrelevancies as the fact that his suit may be ruined if he is shot.

Overwhelmed by his own cowardice, he sneaks away from the appointed place and rushes back into the centre of Berlin to hide in a hotel room. Nabokov then uses the technique he employed in Details of a Sunset and takes him back home, where he discovers that Berg has run off too and his ordeal is therefore over: ‘everything is now just dandy. And you come out of it honourably, while [Berg] is disgraced forever’ (p.115).

But of course as even Anton Petrovich himself realises, ‘such things don’t happen in real life’ (p.115). He is in fact still in the hotel room, cowering, not knowing what to do. The story closes with him ‘woolfing gluttonously at a ham sandwich on which he immediately soiled his fingers and chin with the hanging margin of fat’ (p.115).

This is another example of inventive use of traditional material – a variation which presents the duel-which-doesn’t-take-place. The story is open-ended. As in The Return of Chorb we are not told ‘what happens next’ because this is not important. Nabokov’s purpose is to offer a character study of vulgarity, incompetence, and moral cowardice and to ring the changes on a traditional subject.

There are also some finely developed examples of Nabokov’s skill in organising structural details to hold together the story. When Anton Petrovich visits Mityushin he declares “I want you to be my second” (p.89) and when he sneaks off from the duel at the other end of the story he does so by pretending to go to the lavatory: “Excuse me a second” (p.109). These are the sort of echoes, poetic repetitions, and ironic counterpoints (even when used for comic effect, as here) which were being used by writers such as Mansfield, Woolf, and Nabokov (all of whom were admirers of Chekhov, one notes) to develop the short story as a more condensed and tightly organised literary form.

When Anton Petrovich escapes back to the city centre he meets an old colleague Leontiev – something of a polite bore, and also a fellow cuckold. Leontiev dogs his steps for a while in a manner which increases the suspense as we wonder if the escapee will be caught. But we eventually realise that he wishes to ask Anton Petrovich’s advice and talk something over with him – and when he mentions his wife’s name we realise that we have encountered her very briefly earlier in the story – lying in a drunken stupor in Mityushin’s apartment.

We perhaps view Leontiev in a more sympathetic light (the fellow cuckold seeking help) but more importantly we see two minor characters connected symmetrically across the pages of the story to reinforce two of its themes – adultery and moral squalor. Both Leontiev and his wife appear to be superfluous to the story until their significance is brought into focus by this one deft touch.

What ‘An Affair of Honour’ illustrates is Nabokov’s ability to take a subject deep from the stockpile of Russian cultural history and to ring inventive changes upon it. He first ironically inverts it: the duel is initiated by an abject coward. Then he subverts it: the duel does not take place. And then instead of the conventional ending to duel stories (somebody being shot, or as in the case of Pushkin’s ‘The Shot’, demonstrating the skill they could have used and thus illustrating a point of honour) he produces an open-ended narrative with the protagonist in mid-flight from his rival and his own cowardice.

We have no idea what will happen to him afterwards, and this is anyway not important. As closure to the story Nabokov offers Anton Platonov’s negative epiphany as he slides hopelessly into his spiritual abyss – rather in the same manner as the narrator of ‘Terror’.

Thus, as a substitute for the traditional requirement of plot resolution we are presented with character revelation. As the short story writer Eudora Welty observes, this is what often distinguishes the modern from the traditional short story: ‘the plot of a short story in many instances is quite openly a projection of character’.

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

15 – The Potato Elf

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘The Potato Elf’ (1929) brings together the themes of adultery and death in a story which hovers a little uncertainly between fantasy and realism. The Elf – ‘Actually his name was Frederick Dobson’ (RB,p.221) – is a circus dwarf who feels somewhat humiliated by his job and his lack of sexual fulfillment. He becomes assistant to a magician, Shock, and is taken home by him to be adopted, since Shock’s marriage is childless.

Shock’s wife Nora seduces the Elf next day as a deliberately vindictive act against her husband, even though she thinks the Elf is ‘a nasty little worm’ (p.237). But Fred is transformed with happiness by the incident and imagining that she reciprocates his enthusiasm for her, he immediately gives up his circus job and tries to confess what has happened to Shock – without apparent success.

When Shock returns home, Nora is eager to triumph over her husband with the secret, but Shock reveals that he already knows of her betrayal and takes poison in front of her. As he is dying she blurts out her hatred of him in a rage of frustration – whereupon Shock reveals that the poison was a trick.

Disappointed by Nora’s rejection of him, the dwarf retires into provincial obscurity and lives as a recluse, getting older and developing a heart complaint. Eight years later Nora visits him to reveal that she had a son by him. Fred is radiantly happy at this news and fails to see that she is in mourning, which suggests to the reader that the child has died. When she leaves, Fred chases after her but dies of a heart attack at her feet, whilst she disowns any knowledge of him to onlookers.

Andrew Field considers this Nabokov’s greatest story on the basis of its ‘compressed action’, and Brian Boyd ‘One of [his] poorer stories’. The story is essentially in three parts. Part one tells of the dwarf’s history and how he comes to be taken home by the magician. Part two – and this is where the action certainly is compressed – deals with the events of one day: Nora’s seduction of the dwarf; his confession to Shock; and Shock’s confrontation with Nora. Part three deals with the subsequent eight years and Nora’s visit to the dwarf.

In this sense – of a balanced triad – the story is harmoniously structured. But there are problems with the eight year gap. First of all it destroys the fine unity of time strongly generated in the centre of the story (into which the first part could easily have been incorporated). And the other problem arises from a question of either credibility or consistency of motivation.

Quite apart from the semi-arbitrary gap of eight years (which could just as easily have been two, or twenty) and our doubts concerning the dwarf’s source of income in all that time, the principal problem is centred in the character of Nora. If she dislikes the dwarf so much, why has she sought him out after all this time? The obvious answer is to tell him about their child.

She does restrain the announcement of its death out of sympathy for the dwarf’s ‘tender and joyful radiance’ (p.248) at the news. But then why does she repudiate him publicly when he dies at her feet in the street? Nabokov’s extreme hostility towards Nora throughout the story (consistent with his attitude to other adulteresses) sits uneasily with her actions in this ending.

Andrew Field is on stronger ground when he points to the structural and thematic strengths of the work:

The affair with Nora began with Fred sitting at her feet, and it is there where he dies…the form of the story precisely matches his life, which in essence has only two moments, and it is at both these moments that he feels he is no longer a dwarf.26

The story is set (rather unusually for Nabokov) in an England which he knew well enough from his years as a student at Cambridge, but it comes across as a rather improbable mixture of Toytown and comic book stereotypes which sit rather uneasily with the realistic manner in which the dwarf’s emotional experiences are depicted. Nabokov is never at his best when moving uneasily between fantasy and realism, and moreover this is a story which despite (or maybe even because of its strongly cinematic elements is moving away from the restraints of the short story proper and becoming more a tale.

Ian Reid makes this distinction between the short story and the tale or yarn, pointing to the loser structure and the lack of traditional unities (time, place, and action): ‘The term ‘tale’…usually…designates a fairly straightforward, loose-knit account of strange happenings’.

There is also some doubt about the date of this story. Some sources locate it as his earliest (1923 or 1924) – which would be consistent with Nabokov’s other early experiments with quasi-fantasy. And even if its true date is 1929 (as given by Nabokov himself) it might be something he brought out of the bottom drawer for publication around the later date. After all, he was becoming a professional writer, trying to make a living in a hostile economic environment.

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

16 – The Eye

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Part II – The European Master: Stories 1930 – 1939

There was a gap in Nabokov’s production of short stories during the years 1927-1930 occasioned by his growing success as a novelist: he published both King, Queen, Knave and The Defense during this period. And it is perhaps significant that in his next story, ‘The Eye’ (February 1930) he expanded the possibilities of the short story form to a point just short of it becoming a novella.

In fact Nabokov himself called it a ‘little novel’ – and he may well be right. But arguments of categorisation apart, it has many of the features of his short stories and it is a work in which he made several leaps forward in his manipulation of narrative conventions at the same time as combining a number of his favourite themes. The story has a protagonist straight from the pages of Gogol or Dostoyevski – a psychologically tortured petty-bourgeois who is seeking but failing to make his mark on those people of a higher class amongst whom he mixes. It also has elements of pre-Sartrean existentialism, a variation on the double theme, and one of the most daring feats of narration since Melville’s Benito Cereno or James’s The Turn of the Screw.

At the outset of the story the first person narrator is a private tutor to the sons of a Russian émigré family in Berlin – a job he finds quite humiliating. He is having an affair with a married woman, Matilda, but is bored with her. Indeed, from the description he gives – ‘this plump, uninhibited, cow-eyed lady with a large mouth’ (E,p.14) – it is quite clear that either he feels ashamed of her or does not like her. In addition, he feels lonely, is full of self-pity, and is neurotically self-obsessed:

I was always exposed, always wide-eyed; even in sleep I did not cease to watch over myself, understanding nothing of my existence, growing crazy at the thought of not being able to stop being aware of myself (p.17).

Here Nabokov is harking back to Dostoyevski’s underground man:

Compared to them [the successful] I was a fly, a nasty obscene fly – cleverer, better educated, nobler than any of them, that goes without saying – but a fly … humiliated and slighted by everybody.

and he is in a sense anticipating by almost a decade (just as he did in ‘Terror’) Sartre’s Roquentin:

I exist by what I think … and I can’t prevent myself from thinking. At this very moment – this is terrible – if I exist it is because I hate everything.

When Matilda’s husband uncovers the affair he thrashes the narrator in front of his pupils. Feeling that this is his most complete humiliation, the narrator decides to commit suicide.

There is, even at first reading, something slightly peculiar about this narrator. What Nabokov is doing is to exploit the attractiveness and the immediacy of the first person narrative mode. He is also exploiting the fact that readers have a conditioned tendency to believe what a first person narrator says. As Somerset Maugham observes, in admitting his own penchant for this strategy in telling stories:

Its object is of course to achieve credibility, for when someone tells you what he states happened to himself you are more likely to believe that he is telling the truth … it has beside the merit … that he need only tell you what he knows for a fact, and can leave to your imagination what he doesn’t or couldn’t know.

But Nabokov’s objective (more experimental and more modernist than Maugham’s) is to present the reader with the challenge of discriminating between different types of ‘truths’ offered by a rather unreliable narrator. At least three types are identifiable: statements he makes which are true because they can be ratified by other evidence he gives us in the narrative; statements he makes which are intended to deceive or mislead us; and statements from which we draw conclusions different to his own.

For instance, the narrator is setting out to give a good impression of himself, but he keeps doing the opposite. In describing his embarrassment at smoking in front of his two pupils for instance, he reveals his own gaucheness:

I kept spilling ashes in my lap, and then their clear gaze would pass attentively from my hand to the pale-grey pollen gradually rubbed into the wool (p.13).

We notice that he fails to recognise the voice of Matilda’s husband over the telephone, even though he has met him several times. Then when confronted by him, he behaves in a cringing and cowardly manner, trying to hide physically behind his own pupils. He also hides behind his own lies – ‘Enough, I have a weak heart'(p.24) – and behind what to the reader is an ugly but amusing form of mauvaise-foi: ‘I personally could never bring myself to hit anyone…especially if that fellow were angry and strong.’ (p.23)

What we have is certainly an unreliable narrator, but also a comic-grotesque form of the Dostoyevskian neurotic who brings about his own humiliation: ‘A wretched, shivering, vulgar little man in a bowler hat … This is the glimpse I caught of myself in the mirror’ (p.26).

But how is a first person narrator going to commit suicide a quarter the way through his own narrative? He does so by arranging to fail: ‘I drew away my awkwardly bent arm a little, so that the steel would not touch my naked chest’ (p.28) and after recovering from the gunshot wound he speaks of himself as if he had lived beyond death, and is now observing himself from the outside. This begins a variation on the Double theme. He speaks of himself as if he were someone else: ‘In respect to myself I was now an onlooker’ (p.35).

He then begins to mix with a family who live above him, where his attention is focused on two people. The first is a woman who has been given a boy’s name, Vanya, who he describes as looking like a bulldog, with thick black eyebrows and big hands with large pink knuckles. The second is Smurov, an enigmatic young man who he describes in a very flattering manner: ‘everything he said was intelligent and appropriate’ (p.40).

Smurov makes such a good impression that the narrator feels Vanya is bound to fall in love with him. Yet when Smurov begins to speak he makes a complete fool of himself, and in giving an account of how he narrowly escaped death fleeing from Russia, he is discovered in a blatant lie.

By now the attentive reader has enough information to realise two things. First that the narrator and Smurov are the same person. He is speaking about himself in the third person mode. Second that he is not only very unreliable but an outright liar. Nabokov’s skill in manipulating this mode is in making Smurov principally unreliable to himself, but giving us enough information via his narrative to work out the truth. We realise for instance that he is in love with Vanya, and the remainder of the story is built around his clumsy and embarrassing attempts to pay court to her and to discover if she reciprocates his feelings.

To do this he snoops in his neighbour’s rooms and reads other people’s mail. Everything he finds out confirms our belief that Vanya is engaged to somebody else, and that the whole group of people with whom Smurov is mixing actually dislike him. Even his pretence of standing outside himself begins to slip when he recounts his own rapture for Vanya: ‘She was so enchanting … Her downy face, near-sighted eyes…her short bright dresses: her big knees’ (p.73). The unlovely nature of his two love objects Vanya and Matilda is linked to a secondary theme running as an additional mystery throughout the story – the exact nature of Smurov’s sexual psychology.

Right from the start we are given hints that Smurov is sub-consciously homosexual. His descriptions of women are grotesque, whereas even the memory of an old male university friend leaves him with a ‘knowing, faintly dreamy expression’ (p.20). When he intercepts somebody’s letter it describes him as a homosexual who chooses to admire women he hardly knows, confident that ‘he will not be compelled to perform that which he is neither capable nor desirous of performing with any lady, even if she were Cleopatra herself’ (p.86). Everything we read in the letter confirms what we already suspect about Smurov. He makes one last clumsy assault on Vanya, is repulsed, and takes himself off, completely humiliated.

The story ends with two brief episodes. In the first Matilda’s husband turns up again, begs his forgiveness, and offers him a well paid job. In the second Smurov tells us how happy he is – and in doing so reveals that he is not: ‘What more can I do to prove it, how to proclaim that I am happy? Oh, to shout it so that all of you believe me at last, you cruel, smug people’ (p.103).

Both passages are further lies on Smurov’s part: the first is a fantasy of wish-fulfilment which confirms any suspicions regarding Smurov’s sexual orientation. When the husband accosts him Smurov ‘feels an odd weakness’ (p.100) and hides girlishly behind a bunch of flowers he is carrying, pretending to be angry. ‘I pouted a little while longer. All along I had to restrain a desire to say something nice’ (p.101).

His final statement has all the characteristics of the Gogolian or the Dostoyevskian tale – a first person narrator who is at the borders of sanity, disorientation, and self-deception. ‘I am invulnerable … what do I care if she marries another?’ (p.103). This is a close echo of Gogol’s diary-keeping madman – ‘Didn’t go to the office today. To hell with them! No my friends, you won’t tempt me now’ – or of Dostoyevski’s underground man – ‘The swine! It isn’t as if I can spare seven roubles. Perhaps they’ll think … Oh hell! I don’t grudge seven roubles! I’ll leave this minute! But of course I stayed.’

This is a dazzlingly clever manipulation of the first and third person narrative modes. Even when, early on in the story, the reader has guessed that Smurov is himself the narrator, Nabokov plays amusingly with the device by posing an artificial difficulty to himself as author. At one point of Smurov’s narrative a secondary character arrives at a gathering and asks to be introduced to everyone. This would seem certain to expose the identity of the narrator. But Nabokov cleverly solves the problem he has set himself- and does so with a literary double somersault by having the character recognise just Smurov, greet him ‘palpating Smurov’s arms and shoulders’ (p.70) and then pass on to the others. This allows Smurov to stay within his fictional ‘cover’ and Nabokov to maintain the narrative logic.

Smurov all along claims that he is a complex personality, a mystery to others, a multiplicity of masks. But the truth, which we can extract from his own account, is that he is a seedy, shabby individual, a small-minded petty thief who is grossly insensitive and terminally self-absorbed. What Nabokov has done is devise strategies for having a first person narrator condemn himself by his own account whilst giving the reader the pleasure of slowly making this discovery – what Wayne Booth call ‘Secret communion of the author and reader behind the narrator’s back.’ And no matter how early in the story the discovery is made, we enjoy the amusement of the grotesquely embarrassing situations the narrator creates for himself.

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

17 – The Aurelian

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In “The Aurelian” (1931) Nabokov returns to his theme of the unexpected arrival of death, and he indulges himself slightly by giving the principal character his own interest in lepidoptery (for which ‘aurelia’ is a now old-fashioned term).

Pilgram is a pathetic old German who has inherited a not very successful shop from his father. He sells butterflies, but most of his meagre earnings come from the odd bits of stationery he sells to schoolboys. He has developed a reputation for his entomology without ever having travelled beyond Berlin, but for years he has nurtured a secret desire to go on a collecting expedition so as to actually see some of his prey in their natural and (to him) exotic surroundings.

When an old lady asks him to sell a collection on her behalf, he cheats her and decides to make his wish come true as quickly as possible. He leaves his wife a curt note saying he has gone to Spain, but when she returns from a wedding later that day she finds him in the shop, dead from a stroke.

Pilgram is one of a number of Nabokov’s characters who meet death unexpectedly – either at a point of happiness (Mark Standfuss in Details of a Sunset) or as a grotesque surprise (Quilty in Lolita). The problem with Pilgram’s case as far as the reader is concerned is the somewhat ambiguous manner in which he is portrayed.

His scientific idealism and his desire to travel are rather utopian, but we are nevertheless invited to sympathise with the dreams in which “he … visited the islands of the Blessed, where in the hot ravines that cut the lower slopes of the chestnut- and laurel-clad mountains there occurs a weird local race of the cabbage white” (ND, p.103). But he is a rather unpleasant character, and is offensively rude to his wife, to the point that when she annoys him by crying he “toy[s] with the idea of taking an axe and splitting her pale-haired head” (p.106). He cheats the old lady, and he prepares to leave knowing the family will have debts and unpaid taxes.

Germans are not generally portrayed very sympathetically in Nabokov’s work, but Pilgram is particularly unappealing. It seems that it is not his death we are being invited to contemplate so much as its ironic timing – just as ‘the dream of his life was about to break at last from its old crinkly cocoon’ (p.106).

The neat structural division of the story into four distinct sections certainly reinforces this impression. The first describes the pathetically humdrum nature of Pilgram’s daily life; the second his enthusiasm for lepidoptery and his yearning to travel; the third his double-dealing and his preparations for the trip; and the fourth his wife’s return from the wedding.

This last section presents a switch in viewpoint which allows the revelation to be concealed until the last lines of the story – although it has been hinted at in signals beforehand. Earlier in the story Pilgram has felt the first [to us premonitory] tremor ‘like a mountain falling upon him from behind just as he had bent towards his shoestrings’ (p.96).

‘The Aurelian’ illustrates a point made over and again by Nabokov in his critical writings – that it is not the overt subject matter which constitutes the beauty in a work of art so much as the manner in which the details of its composition are arranged.

Paul Pilgram is a nasty old man with unrealistic dreams, but Nabokov does not arrange the story to engineer sympathy for his death so much as to invite our admiration for the manner in which it is told. One small and typically Nabokovian detail demonstrates this point. When an irritating visitor to the shop has been looking at some butterfly specimens

‘It might happen … that some open box, having been brushed by the elbow of the visitor, would stealthily begin to slide off the counter – to be stopped just in the nick of time by Pilgram, who would then calmly go on lighting his pipe; only much later, when busy elsewhere, he would suddenly produce a moan of retrospective anguish’ (p.102)

The threatened accident which doesn’t quite occur: this is a device Nabokov uses regularly in his work (one thinks of Pnin’s dropping nutcrackers onto a glass bowl – which doesn’t break). The reader breathes a sigh of relief with Pilgram. But later when he returns to the counter to grab petty cash for his escape: ‘Pilgram perceived something almost appalling in the richness of the huge happiness which was leaning towards him like a mountain” (p.109). This of course is his final stroke, approaching in the repeated simile of the mountain, and then –

‘catching sight of the hazy money pot … [he] reached quickly for it. The pot slipped from his moist grasp and broke onto the floor with a dizzy spinning of twinkling coins; and Pilgram bent low to pick them up’ (p.109)

So something does fall from the counter after all, and Pilgram bends down just as he did at his first stroke. But this time he does not get up, and that is how his wife finds him: ‘his back to the counter, among scattered coins, his livid face knocked out of shape by death’ (p.111).

These are the sorts of carefully orchestrated details which Nabokov so frequently commended in the work of other writers: ‘This capacity to wonder at trifles … these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest form of consciousness’ (LL,p.374) They are probably the reason why he called his own critical approach ‘a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures’ (LL,p.1).

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

18 – A Bad Day

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘A Bad Day’ (1931) is one of a pair of stories (the other is ‘Orache’) which for Nabokov are unusual in two senses. First, they have the same young boy, Peter Shishkov, as protagonist, and second they are set in pre-revolutionary Russia ‘around 1910’ (DS, p.44). The impulse behind the stories is quite clearly a combination of evoking the past and making a biographical record of a lost age. This is understandable given the prominence of personal loss in Nabokov’s life, but strangely enough the stories seem to suffer because of it.

In ‘A Bad Day’ Peter is taken to name-day celebrations at a neighbouring estate, although he would prefer to be at home, playing alone. He tries to be co-operative with the adults he encounters, but in general he feels cut off from his surroundings. Obliged to joint other children, he is both ignored and rebuffed by them, and whilst playing hide and seek they abandon the game without telling him. He eventually rejoins them, only to be rebuffed again.

The reader is given every reason to sympathise with Peter throughout his boredom and his humiliation. As a character sketch it is a perfectly credible portrait of a sensitive young adolescent. He ‘did not want to hurt people’ (p.29); he behaves co-operatively even though he feels bored; he has a crush on a young girl and admires his slightly older cousin, Vasily. The children are hurtful by saying that they will not speak to him any more and accusing him of being a poseur. It is precisely for these reasons that Andrew Field sees the story as ‘a universal experience shared by all children’ (LA, p.50) and he is surely right to say that this is ‘one of the comparatively small number of Nabokov’s works which seek directly to engage the reader’s strong sympathy’ (LA,p.50).

But this is not all one might say of Peter Shishkov – for when he thinks the other children have gone on a picnic without him he plans to fake his own suicide. He

‘thought that somewhere near … there must be a lily pond and that he might leave on its bank his monogrammed handkerchief and his silver whistle on its white cord while he himself would go, unnoticed, all the way home’ (p.41).

We may not judge him severely for such self indulgence, but there is perhaps some justification for his peers calling him ‘the poseur’.

But as a composition the story has two important weaknesses. There are far too many named characters who make no contribution or have no special significance in the story. Secondly, by far the greatest amount of attention is given simply to an atmospheric and sensory evocation of what we know to be Nabokov’s own past. The journey merely to arrive at the estate occupies a quarter of the story, and almost all Peter’s actions are used as a vehicle for the sort of linguistically baroque ornamentation for which Nabokov is so well known:

‘between turns some of the players sought the bilberry jungle under the trees of the park. The berries were big, with the bloom dimming their blue, which revealed a bright violet luster if touched by beslavered fingers’ (p.35)

This degree of wordplay and alliterative ingenuity may be poetically impressive, but it seems excessive given the demands for strict significance and compression demanded by the short story as a literary form. Perhaps it belongs more properly with the chapters of biographical reminiscence which go to make up Speak, Memory.

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

19 – A Busy Man

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘A Busy Man’ (1931) is a typically post-Chekhovian story in that it concerns the gradual revelation of character rather than any series of dramatic events arranged to reach a climax. And it is a further variation on Nabokov’s favourite theme – death – featuring yet another of his Gogolian petty-bourgeois small men.

Grafitski is a writer of topical poems for newspapers. He is friendless, shabby, and he leads a completely empty life – ‘a life that [makes] little sense – the meagre, vapid existence of a third-rate Russian émigré’ (DS, p.168). He is also neurotically self-obsessed, but cultivates his sensibility in a manner which Nabokov renders quite positively. However, he is haunted by a presentiment that he will die at the age of thirty-three, and this idea eventually obliterates everything else from his puny life.

He meditates on Death and how it could be avoided or prepared for. When he reaches what he believes will be his fatal year he sinks into ‘transcendental cowardice’ (p.176) but survives to celebrate his thirty-fourth birthday. The story ends with his feeling relieved, but vaguely aware that there was something he had not understood or thought through properly.

This ‘something’ is of course the fact that he has wasted his life waiting for an event which has not taken place; that it was only this arbitrary notion which gave his life any meaning; that he has not learned from his own stupidity; and that Death still awaits him anyway at some unspecified time in the future. The story is Nabokov’s version of the subject Henry James made famous in The Beast in the Jungle.

It is one of Nabokov’s slighter pieces. He seems at his best when he is handling more energetic narratives full of dramatic ironies (The Return of Chorb) or when his static meditations are based upon more complex material (Spring in Fialta). What this story has to commend it however is its development of the subtle narrative voice Nabokov seemed to be working on at this time.

As his style in general became more self-conscious and baroque, Nabokov began to mingle together a variety of narrative modes. In this story we have a third person omniscient narrative mode mingled with a form of first person interlocutor, as well as a frequently indeterminate mode which seems to be something like unspoken thought:

‘the dream he now remembered was but the recollection of a recollection. When was it that dream? Exact date unknown. Grafitski answered, pushing away the little glass pot with smears of yoghurt and leaning his elbow on the table. When? Come on – approximately? A long time ago. Presumably, between the ages of ten and fifteen: during that period he often thought about death – especially at night’ (p.165)

For all his modernity (and his neologisms apart) Nabokov very rarely invents anything new. What he offers is a virtuoso display of change-ringing on existing narrative modes and rhetorical devices. He makes more demands on the reader in doing so of course – but then he also offers more aesthetic rewards to those prepared to do the work.

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

20 – Terra Incognita

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Further twists in the arrangement and manipulation of narrative are made in ‘Terra Incognita’ (1931) and Nabokov also invents an imaginary world and fragments of its language in a manner which prefigures the Zembla and Zoorlandia of his later novels Pale Fire and Ada.

The narrator, Valliere, is an explorer on an entomological expedition in Badonia, a tropical country of forests and swamps. He is accompanied by his friend Gregson and Cook, who is a coward. In its overt subject the story is rather like a parody of Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’. They are deserted by their native bearers; Valliere becomes dangerously ill with fever; and Gregson and Cook quarrel then kill each other, leaving Valliere to die alone.

The atmospheric detail is somewhat predictable, almost as if Nabokov is signalling a self-conscious recognition that his subject harks back to Edwardian models of boys’ adventure stories – but the detail is rendered in a prose style which is rich with emphatic rhythm, alliteration, and exotic vocabulary:

‘The branches of porphyroferous trees intertwined with those of the Black Leafed Limia to form a tunnel, penetrated here and there by a ray of hazy light” (RB, p.120).

We begin to suspect that the contrivance of both plot and detail might be deliberate when we encounter the first hints that Valliere may not be offering us an altogether reliable narrative.

To begin with he tells us that he is very ill with a fever that distorts his perception: ‘I was tormented by strange hallucinations’ (p.121). This is Nabokov’s first twist in the game of unreliable narrator – the man who admits that he may have things wrong. Many of Valliere’s subsequent observations are offered in a manner which supports this supposition: ‘Gregson and Cook seemed to grow transparent’ (p.123).

Then Nabokov adds a second twist. We are led to suspect from hints he drops that Valliere might be imagining the whole story in a European sickbed. He sees window curtains, an armchair, a crystal tumbler and teaspoon, and the rocks on which he is abandoned seem to him ‘as white and soft as a bed’ (p.125). The reader feels reassured that he need not take all this too seriously, or to feel that Valliere is genuinely in danger.

At this point Nabokov poses two difficult problems, for both himself and the reader. Valliere announces that his fever is fatal: he is about to die in a few moments. Problem number one: how do first person narratives reach us if their author is at the point of death? This is solved with a traditional device from the world of fiction. Valliere begins to reach for a notebook, so we presume that the narrative in our possession is what he manages to write down. But problem number two is more dramatically shocking:

‘in these final minutes everything grew completely lucid: I realised that all that was taking place around me was not the trick of an inflamed imagination … I realised that the obtrusive room was fictitious’ (p.127).

So he is dying in the tropics after all. The hints of a European sickroom were Nabokovian false clues laid to tease and deceive the reader. We are kept in a state of almost metaphysical suspense until the very final sentence: ‘I absolutely had to make a note of something; but alas, [the notebook] slipped out of my hand. I groped all along the blanket, but it was no longer there’ (p.128).

There has been no mention of a blanket in the exotic world of Badonia, but such an objects fits perfectly well into the sickroom: hence we conclude that Valliere’s sudden fit of lucidity was another of his illusions and that he is in the sickroom after all. The narrative therefore was recorded in the notebook at some later date, after he had recovered.

We might feel a little cheated by this resolution, but Nabokov, working within the limits of what is logically permissible in fictional narratives, has reasonably managed to sustain the illusion of what Andrew Field calls ‘the simultaneous cofunctioning of two distinct worlds’ (LA, p.76). The atmosphere and detail of the narrative may indeed belong to the boys’ adventure story, but as an example of the subtly unstable narrative it is another step closer to the more daring experiments Nabokov was to make in the next few years.

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

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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