The Short Story Archives - Page 3 of 31

21 – Lips to Lips

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Lips to Lips’ (1932) is a story which contains within itself a critique of the creative process. Rather like Nabokov’s other works which are autobiographically based, it is somewhat weaker than his more obviously inventive fictions: but it has its own amusing qualities, and it does cast light on Nabokov’s own practice as a writer.

Ilya Borisovich Tal is a semi-retired businessman with an itch for literary fame but no talent for writing. He completes a trashy romantic novel and is persuaded to submit it to an émigré review. The editors lavish praise on his work and compare him to classic writers, but they regret that publication will not be possible due to lack of funds.

Tal out of vanity gives them money to produce the review, and its next issue contains a measly three page extract from his novel, with a ‘To be Continued’ notice. Swollen with self regard, Tal then discovers that he has been tricked, and that the editors regard his work as vulgar rubbish. He reacts indignantly, but then realises that if he wishes to see the rest of the work in print he must forgive them: ‘He reflected that he was old, lonely, that his joys were few, and that old people must pay for their joys’ (RB,p.63)

The principal interest in the story is what it reveals about Nabokov’s literary credo. Tal is hopelessly untalented because he believes that creating fiction is a matter of emotional outpourings, and he cannot be bothered with the practical concrete matters of creating verisimilitude:

‘His leanings were strictly lyrical, descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility, but on the other hand he had a lot of trouble with routine items such as, for instance, the opening and closing of doors’ (p.48)

The story contains extracts from the novel – ‘Their two hearts were beating as one’ (p.47) – so we know just how effective this ‘facility’ is. And when he boasts to a colleague that he is ‘polishing [his] phrasing’ (p.51) the re-write of his novel takes only one single day. Nabokov is obviously poking fun at Tal’s essentially romantic notion of literary creation, which is in stark contrast to Nabokov’s own belief in the importance of details, of concreteness, and the creation of precise effects.

Nabokov even illustrates the point he is making by offering a practical example which connects the inner and outer fictional worlds of Tal’s novel and Nabokov’s story which ‘contains’ it (and to which he gives the same name). As Tal is writing his novel we learn that the hero Dolinin is escorting a young woman out of a theatre. Tal makes several clumsy attempts to describe the detail of his transactions: ‘Dolinin went up to the cloakroom, and after producing his little ticket (corrected to ‘both little tickets’) – ‘ (p.47). He then creates for him an elegant cane to carry, without thinking ahead to its implications: ‘[he] did not foresee, alas, what claims that valuable article would make … when Dolinin … would be carrying Irina across a vernal rill’ (p.48).

That ‘vernal rill’ creates here perfectly the cliché and romanticism of Tal’s manner; carrying a heroine across raises it to a higher power of banality; and the forgotten cane is a detail which both illustrates Tal’s ineptness and forms a link between the inner and the outer narrative. For at the end of the story Nabokov has Tal himself visit a theatre to do the very thing he could not successfully describe for his hero; ‘Ilya Borisovich relinquished into the hands of an old woman in black his cane, his bowler, and his topcoat’ (p.61)

This is a very typically Nabokovian form of amusing the reader by having one of his fictions echoed by its meta-fiction. But what makes it doubly clever and therefore more acceptable is that he then introduces a variation into his own detail – for on leaving the theatre Dolinin forgets his can and has to go back for it, back to confront the people he has decided to forgive, which is the ostensible ‘point’ of the story.

The two separate fictions are thus united and focused onto a detail which therefore exists on three levels – in Tal’s clumsy invention, in his own life, and for us in Nabokov’s story. And at the same time it serves to act on two other planes, illustrating the theme of what is required to create successful fiction – for Tal’s lack of skill with a small detail is illustrated by Nabokov’s own dazzling variations upon it and his own successful integration of these variations into a cohesive narrative.

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

22 – The Reunion

September 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Andrew Field describes ‘The Reunion’ (1932) as a ‘Chekhovian study in noncommunication’ (LA,p.116) and it is certainly another study in failure – a meeting at which nothing of any significance takes place. But this failure is itself significant – in what it tells us of the two people who meet. The protagonist of the story is Lev, another in the long line of Nabokov’s Gogolian litterateurs. An émigré living in Berlin, he has completed his interrupted university studies in Prague and now lives in abject poverty, writing occasional articles for newspapers. He is just about to celebrate the Russian Christmas with a few friends when he learns that his brother (who has stayed in the USSR) is going to visit him that evening.

Worried by the potential embarrassment, he cancels the celebration and wonders what he can possibly talk about with someone he has not seen for ten years. The brother Serafim arrives and Lev’s worst fears are justified. They exchange painfully dull small-talk, fail to make the slightest connection with each other, and Serafim leaves after a short while, leaving Lev to wonder if he can still celebrate with his friends.

Once again, closure to the story is not offered by any dramatic outcome to the meeting, which is an embarrassing non-event for the two participants. Instead, we are presented with the more delicate and subtle epiphany which Lev experiences, emphasising his more sensitive consciousness and his sense of cultural continuity. By this device the reader is also offered two contrasting views of Russian character under the pressure of twentieth century events.

The significance of this failed ‘reunion’ lies in what we are invited to see as a contrast between the two brothers who stand for two different responses to the Russian revolution. Lev has become an émigré, but he has preserved his links with Russian culture, studying ‘Slavophile influences on Russian literature’ (DS,p.128) and keeping its traditional festivals. Towards the end of the meeting they are both trying to recall the name of a dog which featured in their childhood: Serafim gives up, but Lev pursues the issue and eventually remembers the name. He is keeping the memory of pre-revolutionary Russia alive in this small act of reverence for the past.

Serafim is completely unlike him: large and overweight where Lev is thin; insensitive and boorish where Lev is considerate to others; and almost aggressively philistine: ‘I don’t do much reading … Never have enough time’ (p.133). Despite this statement he goes on to give Lev a tedious precis of a trashy novel he has picked up on a train, and he then delivers a lecture on magnetic fields. Serafim is a product of the new Soviet Russia as Nabokov perceived it – unimaginative, vulgar, and time-serving. In one of Serafim’s speeches Nabokov catches the empty jargon of the apparatchik:

‘inasmuch as the fundamental prerequisite of industrialisation … is the consolidation of socialist elements in our economic system generally, radical progress in the village emerges as one of the particularly essential and immediate current tasks’ (p.128)

Serafim is a rare instance of a Soviet Russian straying into Nabokov’s work, but the inferences to be drawn from this character sketch are unmistakable.

In terms of narrative mode there is further evidence of the experiments Nabokov was making to develop what was to become the hallmark of his literary style – a conversational, self-conscious narrative voice which draws attention both to itself and to the realm of fiction in which it operates. The opening of ‘The Reunion’ illustrates well his ability to shift subtly from third person omniscient mode, into interior monologue, back out again, and then cheekily pop up to speak directly to the reader in the first person, drawing attention to his own fiction:

‘Lev had a brother, Serafim, who was older and fatter than he, although it was entirely possible that during the past nine years – no, wait … God, it was ten, more than ten – he had got thinner, who knows. In a few minutes we shall find out’ (p.127)

This ‘we’ might be Lev thinking of his brother’s impending arrival, but there is more than a hint of Nabokov-as-narrator peering over his shoulder. This foregrounding of the narrator is pushed a stage further in the stories which followed.

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

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

23 – Orache

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Orache’ (1932) the story with which ‘A Bad Day’ is twinned, seems more successful partly because the characterisation of Peter is less sentimental, because there is less straining for the evocation of atmosphere, and because the story is more concentrated in its purpose.

Peter learns at school that his father is to be involved in a duel, and he finds it difficult to control his emotions until classes finish. Since his mother and sister are on holiday he is isolated with this anxiety when he goes home, and everything seems to remind him of the danger in which his father is placed. At dinner his father shares jokes with a friend whilst Peter wonders why nobody is talking about the duel. Next day at school however, he learns that the duel has in fact already taken place: the opponent fired first and missed, and his father fired his own shot into the air. Peter breaks down in tears with relief.

The story is more tightly structured thanA Bad Day, held together by the tension between Peter’s emotional upset and a recurrent image of duelling. Peter sees his father at fencing practice each morning; he himself ‘duels’ in a fight at school; he sees a picture of two men duelling in a magazine; reference is made to the duel in Eugene Onegin – ‘Onegin shed his cloak, Lenski plopped down on the boards like a black sack’ (DS, p.53); and the newspaper he sees at school gives an account of his father’s duel.

The story is also more convincingly related from the child’s point of view:

‘His father was busy in a place known as the parliament … there was also something called the Kadet Party, which had nothing to do with parties or cadets’ (p.46)

and there is a more developed blending of third person narrative and interior monologue: ‘never before had he known such tears, do not tell anyone, please, I am simply not well … and again a tumult of sobs’ (p.55).

We know from both Nabokov and Field that the events of ‘Orache’, like ‘A Bad Day’, are largely autobiographical. Unlike its twin however, there are fewer traces of that provenance evident. Certainly the absence of lengthy descriptions or scene-setting for its own sake helps to focus the purpose of the story.

The overt purpose is to present yet another variation on the ‘Russian subject’ of duelling. In this case it is the duel which has already taken place, and the duel which has more effect on a spectator than on the participants. And in terms of the central issue, the father’s honourable action of course illustrates the exact opposite of poshlost.

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

24 – Music

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘Music’ (1932) Nabokov brings his own regretted atonality into play as the background to another variation on the topic of adultery, and he uses as his narrative strategy yet another version of ‘the expected meeting which does not take place’.

The protagonist Victor arrives late at a piano recital being given in someone’s home. He is more or less tone deaf as far as the performance is concerned: ‘any music he did not know … could be likened to the patter of a conversation in a strange tongue’ (TD,p.62). Feeling bored, he glances round the room and sees his former wife in the audience. Throughout the remainder of the recital he relives his short but painful relationship with her.

It is evident that he was besotted with her, but she lacked sensitivity and eventually cuckolded him. He has spent the last two years struggling to forget her, and now feels that he will have to start all over again. But eventually, as his memories and surging emotions are reflected by the music being played, he feels that he can pardon her: ‘I’ll forgive you everything because some day we must all die’ (p.67). When the recital ends she leaves the room and he converts what has been painful into a positive experience: ‘Victor realised that the music, which before had seemed a narrow dungeon … had actually been incredible bliss, a magic glass dome that had embraced and imprisoned him and her’ (p.68).

The suspicion that this is Nabokov’s variation on one of Tolstoy’s most famous stories is confirmed when another guest (who knows even less about music than Victor) tells him that the piece just played could have been ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. Beethoven’s composition is actually for violin and piano, but we have no way of knowing if the mistake is the guest’s or Nabokov’s own – though the latter seems unlikely.

The narrative moves skilfully between the fictional present and past in a manner which he was to bring to its highest stage of development in ‘Spring in Fialta’ a few years later. Apart from ‘How long ago it all seemed!’ (p.64) the transitions are barely perceptible, and into them are woven Victor’s hesitant responses to the music, which he likens to his feelings about the woman and the sexual history of their relationship:

The music must be drawing to a close. When they come, those stormy, gasping chords, it usually signifies that the end is near. Another intriguing word, end … Rend impend … Thunder rending the sky, dust clouds of impending doom. With the coming of spring she became strangely unresponsive’ (p.66).

In a sense one might argue that the account of the non-meeting is a Chekhovian outer narrative – there is a nod to him within the text: ‘a pince-nez on a Chekhovian ribbon’ (p.63) – containing the more dramatically passionate Tolstoyan inner account of the relationship. Certainly Field’s biography gives details of Nabokov’s participation in mock trials of Tolstoy’s story which would give credence to such a reading.

Once again, Nabokov subverts the obvious plot device (the meeting which the reader anticipates does not take place) and offers as closure to the story the more subtle resolution of Victor’s epiphany as he digests his unexpected experience. His doing so unites the two major elements of the story content – the music and his previous love. Art and imagination are brought to bear as antidotes to the sadness and the transience of life.

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

25 – A Dashing Fellow

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘A Dashing Fellow’ (early 1930s) Nabokov uses a similar character to the vulgar Smurov of The Eye, but he employs a different narrative approach by depicting him using the form of the Russian Skaz which had been popularised by Leskov in the nineteenth century. Skaz is a form of narrative one part of which ‘creates the possibility of characterising the fictitious narrator through speech peculiarities [and] the use of sub-standard expressions’ (DRL, p.360).

However, a vulgar narrator will think in a vulgar manner, and the risk in such an approach is that the author imprisons his story in that vulgarity. After all, vulgar minds do not create graceful works of art. Nabokov surmounts this problem by having his narrative shifting very subtly between first and third person modes, and by oscillating between omniscient narrator and interior monologue – along with some delicately shaded transitional statements which could be either.

The story begins in a type of mock-intimate first person plural mode: ‘We are alone in a third-class compartment – alone and therefore bored’ (DS, p.131). This simultaneously implies a proximity between author and character (‘we’) whilst the implied criticism in the semantic content does just the opposite, creating an ironically generated distance.

The narrative then moves into the indirectly reported thought of the character, who is speculating on amorous adventures: ‘Even more delicious, however, might be the elegancies of a chance encounter’ (p.131). From this it then switches directly into conversations he imagines himself having with a girl he picks up: ‘your profile reminded me of the girl for whose sake years ago…’ (p.131). Following this there are brief passages of normal third person omniscient mode – ‘Ten minutes later he was deep in conversation with the passenger in the opposite window seat’ (p.133) – after which the narrative moves fluently between all of these modes.

The story concerns one of his most nauseating characters, Konstantin, a commercial traveller who is obsessed with thoughts of seduction and picks up a somewhat disreputable woman on the train.He trots out cliches – ‘Yes, we Russians … can love with the passion of a Rasputin’ (p.137) – to which she responds by showing him some holiday photographs. He breaks his journey to stay overnight with here, and on arrival it is debatable which of them behaves worse: ‘What’s that on your lip’ she asks. ‘Just a cold sore. Hurry up.’ he replies (p.139).

Whilst she is out buying something for them to eat, a neighbour calls to say that the woman’s father is dying, but when she returns Konstantin withholds the information so as to make the sexual connection with her as quickly as possible. This is done, but in a completely ineffectual manner, whereupon he immediately goes out himself on the pretence of buying a cigar, gets back onto the train, and sits back wondering how much the encounter has cost him. He feels out of sorts, but comforts himself: ‘When we have fed and slept, life will regain its looks’ (p.143) – and the story ends with a stunning last line – ‘And then, sometime later, we die’ (p.143).

Andrew Field assumes that this “nonchalant” use of the first person plural automatically means that Konstantin is himself the narrator (LA, p.334) – and it must be said that Field was reading these stories in their earlier, unrevised versions. Nevertheless, he quotes this ending to suggest that it is Konstantin’s point of view. But the opening of the story has Nabokov’s critical point of view hiding behind the plural pronoun. Konstantin would not say of himself ‘We breathe hard through our nose as we try to solve a crossword puzzle’ (p.131). The startling last sentence therefore clearly carries Nabokov’s dismissive suggestion – ‘Such is the sum total of this creature’s life’.

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

26 – Perfection

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Perfection’ (1932) re-uses the material of the 1924 story Details of a Sunset – the sudden arrival of death into an otherwise happy existence. In this instance it is that of Ivanov, a poor geography graduate who is forced to give private lessons to survive. Once again we have the down-at-heel but this time sympathetically portrayed petty bourgeois struggling to maintain appearances: ‘Some sort of flannel entrails were trying to escape from his necktie, and he was forced to trim off parts of them’ (TD, p.188).

His pupil is a young boy, David, for whom he feels a tender affection. At one point he even imagines him as the son he once lost when a lover suffered a miscarriage and died. Ivanov maintains an inner dignity, and the reader is invited to admire his poetic sensibility and delicacy of feeling. Despite the embarrassment of having socks ‘so full of holes that they resembled lace mittens’ (p.198) he persists in taking delight in his perceptions of the world around him.

When a young boy makes fun of him by imitating his odd gait in the street, Ivanov thinks that something is being pointed out to him overhead and looks up to see

‘three lovely cloudlets, holding each other by the hand … the third one fell slowly behind, and its outline, and the outline of the friendly hand still stretched out to it, slowly lost their graceful significance’ (p.189)

He is in fact a dreamer, but he posits this attitude as an imaginative insurance against the possibility of worse things to come and against the decay of Time: ‘Ivanov foresaw he would often appear in David’s dreams, thirty or forty years hence’ (p.187). We are back amongst those elements of which Nabokov composed so many of his stories – elements which are philosophic universals and of course all closely related to each other: individual consciousness, memory, the passage of time, and death.

He is asked by his employers to take David to the seaside and there suffers further humiliations at the exposure of his poor clothes and his city-dweller’s lack of ease on the seashore. He also has a weak heart, and when David shouts for help whilst swimming Ivanov is forced to overcome his loathing of the cold sea to save the boy.

At this point Nabokov brings off a very skillful twist in the narrative, which up until then has been consistently from Ivanov’s point of view. First of all Ivanov realises that he has failed to save David and he begins to feel sympathy for the bereaved mother. But then he senses that something is wrong about such thoughts and understands that ‘if David was not with him, David was not dead’ (p.201).

The narrative then takes us back to the shoreline where David is looking out to sea, regretting the trick he has played of pretending to be in trouble – and we realise that it is Ivanov who has drowned. The narrative goes back on an expansive note to describe the beauties of everyday life which he had so much appreciated:

‘and the Baltic Sea sparkled from end to end, and, in the thinned out forest, across a green country road, there lay, still breathing, freshly cut aspens; and a youth, smeared with soot, gradually turned white as he washed under the kitchen tap, and black parakeets flew above the eternal snows of the New Zealand mountains; and a fisherman, squinting in the sun, was solemnly predicting that not until the ninth day would the waves surrender the corpse’ (p.201).

Ivanov’s impending death is signalled all through the story by references to his weak heart, but the resolution to the story is deft nevertheless. As in the case of Mark Standfuss in ‘Details of a Sunset’ we are taken, by adhering to his point of view, close to the boundary between life and death; but then by exploiting the flexibility of the third person mode, we are taken by sleight of hand back into the logical framework of the narrative.

The only weakness in the story is that there is no distinction made between the poetic dreamings attributed to Ivanov and those offered by Nabokov himself as narrator. In this respect therefore he stands between himself and his creation throughout, and a reader could object that he fails to provide convincing evidence of Ivanov’s independent ability to produce the images he does.

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

27 – The Admiralty Spire

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

At the time of writing ‘The Admiralty Spire’, Nabokov read all of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, and although he claimed not to like them, this claim is rather like that of not liking Dostoyevski. He may have felt an artistic antipathy – but he seems to have been influenced nevertheless.

‘The Admiralty Spire’ (May 1933) successfully combines a number of the themes and topics Nabokov had explored in his fiction in the previous decade – keeping the past alive; the relationship between art and life; an unhappy love affair; and fictions about fiction. And he pushes the conversational narrative mode a little further than he had done before by having his narrator ‘speak’ to someone else directly through the medium of a letter.

The narrator is unnamed and he is writing to the author of a cheap novel (The Admiralty Spire) to protest that fictional use has been made of a love affair he has had in his youth. The author of the novel purports to be Serge Solntsev, but the narrator claims that he can detect a female writer behind this nom de plume: ‘Every sentence of yours buttons to the left’ (TD,p.126).

First of all he criticises the authoress for her literary style, then he gives his own account of the love affair, which he had with a girl called Katya. The year was 1917, and against the backdrop of a provisional government (that is, during the summer of that year) he recounts the joy with which they loved each other. He also corrects the authoress for what he considers her novelistic blunders in portraying the couple discussing the political events going on around them. He points out that they were too happy and too absorbed in each other to notice.

But then the affair comes to an end in the autumn and winter of that year (that is, after the October revolution) when he suspects that she is losing interest and may have someone else. Desperately unhappy, he asks to meet her one last time and then they part forever. All this is related in a manner which mixes a lyrical evocation of his lost happiness with some amusing buffoonery:

‘Do you wish to know what happened? Glad to oblige. As you lay massively in your hammock and recklessly allowed your pen to flow like a fountain (a near pun) you, Madam, wrote the story of my first love’ (p.127)

He then reveals that he imagines the authoress to be Katya herself, and he wonders how she could so abuse the memory of their affair by turning it into such cheap fiction: ‘there was no point in rejoicing and suffering … only to find one’s past besmirched in a lady’s novel’ (p.139) – ‘lady’s’ here being pejorative. He appeals to her to stop writing fiction, and just in case he has made a false identification, apologises to the ‘colleague Solntsev’ the purported author (p.139).

He is an amusing enough narrator, but it is possible that he is also unreliable. For we have two differing accounts of the end of the affair from which to choose. In his own account, he walks around St Petersburg with Katya quite silently, kisses her hand, and then leaves her. But in her novel he passionately entreats her not to go and even threatens her with a gun in front of her future husband. Which of these two accounts are we to believe?

Somehow this second version fits more credibly with what we know about him already from his own account:

‘Sobbing and moaning as I walked, I would try to persuade myself that it was I who had stopped loving Katya … for the hundredth time I tried to make her tell me with whom she had spent the previous evening’ (p.136)

It is open to us to believe that she has become irritated by his jealousy and possessiveness (as is the case with so many of Nabokov’s other fictional couples) and that the stoic endurance of his younger self facing disappointment is itself a wish-fulfilment, a re-writing of history.

Against this it might be argued that the narrator’s other observations concerning Russia and its culture are realistic and historically accurate – and that he should therefore be regarded as reliable. But there is no shortage in Nabokov’s work of narrators who are intelligent, cultivated, and well-informed – and yet emotionally unhinged in some way: they range from the neurotic Smurov of The Eye to the university teacher-cum-madman Kimbote of Pale Fire, and of course to the greatest of all his creations, Humbert Humbert of Lolita.

But any unreliability in ‘The Admiralty Spire’ does not affect the essential stability of the story, which is principally concerned with a recording of the past and an assertion of the value of memory. Nabokov is using the fictional framework to write another passage (albeit an amusing one) in the sad account of his relationship to Russia, and especially its culture.

When the narrator and Katya are in their happy phase he recounts how they tried to store memories against the possible extinction wreaked by time:

‘we were preparing in advance for certain things, training ourselves to remember, imagining a distant past and practising nostalgia, so that subsequently when that past really existed for us, we would know how to cope with it, and not perish under its burden’ (p.131)

Nabokov packs the story full of literary references drawn from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gumilyov, Mandelshtam, and Blok are all mentioned – and that alongside European writers such as Louis Bouillet and Verlaine as if to show the contiguity of these as a cultural heritage (though the choice of French writers is curious). He also has the narrator explain to Katya the sham of phoney culture in the form of what were popular fads at the time:

‘this was no longer authentic Gypsy art such as that which enchanted Pushkin … but a barely breathing, jaded and doomed muse; everything contributed to her ruin: the gramophone, the war, and various so-called tzigane songs’ (p.130)

On top of this there emerges, reinforced by the descriptions of Petersburg during the period, a picture of Nabokov’s opposition to the revolution and his feeling of sadness and betrayal as well as loss at having this culture swept away. And it is one of many instances in his work in which the loss or betrayal of his country is paralleled with the betrayal of a woman. Katya betrays the narrator, so does Russia: he even calls them ‘two traitresses’ (p.138)

This is the serious thematic core of the story, but it should not obscure the lighthearted fictional construct in which it is contained. ‘The Admiralty Spire’ is a story which itself offers a critique of story writing as did The Passenger. In addition to that, it toys with the philosophic relation between one fiction and the meta-fiction that contains it. The narrator complains about the lady’s novelistic clichés – although we do not have many quoted examples to judge independently the validity of his claim. But he makes more telling jibes concerning her prose style:

‘How dare you write, “The pretty Christmas tree with its chatoyant lights seemed to augur to them joy jubilant”? You have extinguished the whole tree with your breath, for one adjective placed after the noun for the sake of elegance is enough to kill the best of recollections’ (p.119)

And it is because the narrator’s own style is so lively, supple, and amusing that we are persuaded to trust his judgement on this matter.

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

28 – The Leonardo

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

The development of his conversational narrative voice takes a further step forward in ‘The Leonardo’ (July 1933). However, in this instance comes close to becoming irritating because it is coupled to an uncomfortable sense of unreality which pervades the story. Nabokov even begins the piece by rather self-consciously assembling his scenery: ‘Here comes the ovate little poplar, all punctuated with April greenery, and takes its stand where told, namely by the tall brick wall’ (RB,p.11).

The story concerns two German thugs, Gustav and Anton, who menace their neighbour Romantovski because he is independent and an individualist who likes books and reading late at night. He is sensitive and fragile, and this incites their moronic desire to do him harm. Eventually they pick a fight with him then murder him. It is then revealed by the police that he was in fact an ex-criminal and a forger – and the narrator ‘confesses’ that he to is surprised by this information: ‘My poor Romantovski! … I believed, let me confess, that you were a remarkable poet whom poverty obliged to dwell in that sinister district’ (p.23).

This is another variation in ‘surprising reader expectation’ rather in the same manner as the sobbing passenger turns out not to be guilty in The Passenger. However, for an author to conceal information and then pretend to be surprised when he reveals it is rather a cheap trick to pull on his readers. It even undermines to a certain extent the serious intent of the story – which is to expose the vulgarity, mindlessness, and the potential danger lurking in those who are intolerant of individualism. The story was, after all, written in the very year that Hitler seized power in Germany.

The elements of unreality and comic-strip stylisation which Nabokov employs certainly underscore the violent atmosphere of the story. The two thugs are described as

‘Gigantic, imperiously reeking of sweat and beer, with beefy voices and senseless speeches, with faecal matter replacing the human brain, they provoke a tremor of ignoble fear’ (p.16)

This was a manner which he was to deploy in the more extended study of violence An Invitation to a Beheading two years later. But it is an approach which does not fit easily with the demand for regularity of tone in the short story.

Nevertheless, the flexibility of the narrative voice is remarkably extended. It is essentially conducted in the first person mode (‘My poor Romantovski’) but most of the time the narrator gives information omnisciently in the third. There are the usual unannounced switches into his characters’ points of view, some interior monologue, and he also passes occasionally into use of the impersonal ‘one’ in order to detach himself – ‘no matter how quietly one advanced towards his door, his light went out instantly’ (p.17).

This device also has the effect of drawing the reader into complicity. The narrator also apostrophises his own creations, speaks directly to the reader, and sometimes gives voice to the voiceless: ‘His long wrists protruded [from a jacket] with a kind of annoying and nonsensical obviousness (‘here we are: what should we do?’)’ (p.14)

Perhaps his most successful effect in this respect is to use the first person plural to indicate the lack of individuality and imagination in his two thugs who are infuriated by their inability to understand Romantovski: ‘the trouble is that we just cannot put our finger on the difference’ (p.18).

These are all devices which he was to develop and use more successfully elsewhere, but their cumulative effect in ‘The Leonardo’ borders on an embarrassing ‘knowingness’ in his narrative which leaves the reader feeling uncomfortable.

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

29 – The Circle

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

It is interesting to note that as Nabokov became more firmly established as a novelist from the early 1930s onwards, he generated a number of stories which came into existence as discarded or extracted fragments of larger works. ‘The Circle’ Nabokov himself describes as ‘a small satellite [which] separated itself from the main body of the novel [Dar]” (RB,p.254). Ultima Thule and Solus Rex are the first and second chapters of a novel (Solus Rex) abandoned during Nabokov’s transition between France and America. ‘Mademoiselle O’ is a chapter from his autobiography, Speak, Memory.

Significant though these might be in relation to the rest of his work, they cannot command serious attention in relation to Nabokov’s contribution to the development of the short story as a literary form, since they were neither conceived nor executed as such. But ‘The Circle'(1936) does have some claim to independent existence as a story, even if some of its details have their origin in the creation of a novel.

The overt content of the narrative is the now-familiar topic of recovering the lost Russia of pre-1917, and this is linked, as it has been before, to tantalising memories of a particular woman. Innokentiy, the protagonist, is sitting in a Parisian cafe recollecting his past. He is the son of the village schoolmaster and his memories centre upon the development of his own sentimental and academic educational.

The story focuses upon his inchoate yearnings and their sudden fixation on Tanya, daughter of the local Count. Tanya’s family move to the Crimea, the war intervenes, and Innokentiy moves on to become a distinguished scholar. Many years later he meets Tanya again. She has married, and her memories of their past are not the same as his. Disappointed by this but still finding her attractive, Innokentiy leaves her and goes to a cafe to indulge his ‘sudden mad hankering after Russia’ (p.255) – that is, in circular fashion, back to the point where the story began.

This circularity is well executed and convincing: it gives a neat logic to the structure of the story. But unfortunately the content of it, Innokentiy’s memories, do not hold together with sufficient thematic coherence: one senses, no matter how much one might sympathise with the experience of exile and loss which give rise to them, that they are ultimately the loose materials of a memoir rather than the rigorously assembled and scrupulously pertinent details of a short story. They might fit easily into one corner of a novel, but for the stringent demands of the story form there are too many non-relevant characters and too many details which, though elegantly expressed, represent dilations in the narrative:

‘Olive-brown atlantes with strongly arched ribs supported a balcony: the strain of their stone muscles and their agonisingly twisted mouths struck our hot-headed uppergrader as an allegory of the enslaved proletariat’ (p.258).

Moreover there is little sense of temporal unity created. The first three quarters of the story deal with Innokentiy’s youthful experiences, all expressed in a leisurely and lyrical manner; then suddenly the story flashes through his later development in a few lines and ends with two or three paragraphs describing the final meeting with Tanya. Innokentiy’s final thoughts underscore the essentially nostalgic impulse behind the story – ‘nothing is lost’ he thinks, ‘nothing whatever; memory accumulates treasures’ (p.268)

Nobody would wish to deny the importance to Nabokov (and all the others who shared his experience) of giving expression to a whole world and culture from which he had been separated. And a work like ‘The Circle’ is readable and entertaining enough. But in the strictest analytical terms it demonstrates one of the dangers of using biographical sources and impulses as the material basis for short fiction, and the fact that even such a strong narrative device as what Nabokov calls ‘the serpent eating its tail’ (p.254) cannot generate the unity in the content if there is none.

But in one sense it might be said that if ‘The Circle’ fails to unite its elements it provided a trial run for a similar attempt which Nabokov made later the same year and was destined to become his masterpiece.

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

30 – Breaking the News

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Breaking the News’ (March 1934) is another light character sketch combined with a study in dramatic irony. We are given what James would call the donée of this story immediately at its outset: ‘Eugenia Isakovna Mints was an elderly émigré widow who always wore black. Her only son had died on the previous day. She had not yet been told’ (RB,p.37). The son has fallen to his death down an elevator shaft, and a group of friends are faced with the task of giving her the information. This is obviously embarrassing for them – especially so since the widow is deaf. One of them wonders ‘What gradual preparation can there be when one has to yell?’ (p.38).

The widow shuffles about her daily business in Berlin, shut off from the world by her affliction but sustained by the fact that her son corresponds with her regularly from his own exile in Paris (the second centre of Russian emigration). She has even just received the last postcard he sent: ‘I continue to be plunged up to the neck in work and when evening comes I literally fall off my feet’ (p.38).

Fortunately Nabokov does not overdo this sort of grim irony in such a short piece. In fact the ending of the story is focused upon an excellent example of restraint. The group of friends finally assemble at the widow’s flat, but still they cannot bring themselves to say anything. She actually holds out her deaf aid for them to speak into, and it is because of their reticence – ‘they … were careful to keep their voices away from her’ (p.44) – that she eventually realises that something very serious must have happened.

There is no need for Nabokov to spell out the drama of what will be inevitable. The characters in the story all know what will happen, and the reader knows too. As in the case ofThe Return of Chorb we are offered not a dramatic confrontation but a study of what is more interesting – what leads up to it and how it comes about. The obvious climax and ending are withheld: Nabokov is following that post-Chekhovian strategy of understatement and the subsuming of dramatic in structural interest which characterises the work of those in the forefront of the development of the short story 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

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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