Vladimir Nabokov Archives - Page 4 of 8

32 – A Russian Beauty

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘A Russian Beauty’ (July 1934) which Nabokov himself describes as ‘an amusing miniature’ (RB,p.2) is not very much more than the use of the short story form as the frame for a character sketch – and it is an outline or a thumbnail sketch at that.

Olga is an attractive young Russian woman over whom men go wild. After the revolution she moves with her family to Berlin and becomes a fashionable young thing, but following the death of her father she begins to decline both socially and physically. She also feels that she is too old at thirty to ever marry. When some friends introduce her to a wealthy businessman she accepts his proposal, but dies the following year in childbirth.

In a superficial sense that is all there is to the story. The character is rendered largely in terms of her physical appearance and her gestures – something which Nabokov is particularly skillful at depicting:

‘she languidly danced the foxtrot to the sound of the gramophone, shifting the elongated calf of her leg not without grace and holding away from her the cigarette she had just finished smoking, and when her eyes located the ashtray that revolved with the music she would shove the butt into it, without missing a step’ (p.5)

But underneath the surface of the sketch we are offered a parallel which is being drawn, as in so many of his other stories of the twenties and thirties, between Russia and a woman. For Olga represents the old Tsarist Russia which many thought might survive the emigration to make a come-back, but which by the early thirties was obviously dead. Olga ‘was born in the year 1900, in wealthy, carefree family of nobles … Her childhood passed festively, securely, gaily, as was the custom in our country’ (p.3). This upbringing also incidentally parallels Nabokov’s own, and of course he often puts himself forward as a representative of the ancien regime.

Olga has a portrait of the Tsar pinned to her door – that is, she keeps alive the old traditions and beliefs, and it is only when her father dies (he too is a representative of Tsarist Russia) that she begins to go into decline. And even though she appears to have located her saviour, a husband, it is too late: she cannot survive beyond the early 1930s.

The parallel is not heavily underscored. She is given the hint of an illness at the outset to make the early death plausible – but there are so many other instances of women and Russia being offered alongside each other in some way (one thinks of Mary, his first novel) that the reading seems justified.

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

33 – Torpid Smoke

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Torpid Smoke’ (February 1935) brings the short story into the condition of what Clare Hanson has called ‘a form which mediates between the lyric poem and the novel’ (CH,p.9). The overt subject matter is reduced to no more than the protagonist’s dreamy reflections on the physical world around him and the joy he finds in poetic composition. In this sense it is not unlike one of the stories of ‘organised reflections’ by Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf.

One senses Nabokov gaining confidence about this time, perhaps spurred on by his success as a novelist. He seems to be making a clearer distinction between those effects possible in longer or shorter pieces of prose. Here the narrative element is played down, leaving poetic meditation and unity of tone and structure to do the work of holding the story together.

Grisha is a nineteen year old émigré relaxing after supper in the apartment where he lives with his father and sister. He is allowing himself to sink into a voluptuous languor of poetic image-making, which the third person narrative reflects by passing into the tones and rhythms of the prose poem, coming fairly close to the dissolution of meaning into ‘word music’:

‘an illusory perspective was formed, a remote mirage enchanting in its graphic transparency and isolation: a stretch of water, say, and a black promontory with the minuscule silhouette of an araucaria’ (RB,p.27).

This is Nabokov the writer in love with alliteration, verbal sonorities, and lexical delights: most readers are driven to a dictionary to discover that “araucaria” has more poetic possibilities than its more prosaic meaning of ‘monkey-puzzle tree’. But what might be seen as verbal self-indulgence can be justified here by its appropriateness to Grisha’s late-adolescent literary strivings. He is aware that his poems are ‘puerile [and] perishable’ (p.33) but he is enchanted by the process of composition itself.

He is also indulging a physical state of being which approximates to this mental state – one in which he feels that he is dissolving into the material world of which he is a part:

‘For example, the lane on the other side of the house might be his own arm, while the long skeletal cloud that stretched across the whole sky with a chill of stars in the east might be his backbone’ (p.29)

These elements of poetic meditation and the dissolution of the self into the everyday world are remarkably similar to the states of mind and being which Virginia Woolf had explored in her own short stories such as The Mark on the Wall and Reflections in a Looking Glass only a few years earlier.

In the midst of these reveries Grisha remembers seeing smoke on a rooftop earlier that day and feels a special sense of significance in it: ‘the chimney smoke hugged the roof, creeping low, heavy with damp, sated with it, sleepy, refusing to rise, refusing to detach itself from beloved decay’ (p.30). Of course the scene reflects his own state of being, but more than that he feels he feels what turns out to be the impulse towards a poetic recreation of his observation.

This process is interrupted by the only overt ‘action’ of the story. His sister asks him for some cigarettes. He gives them to her, sinks back into his horizontal repose, and the narrative passes into the first person to describe the thrill of composition: ‘a metrical line extended and bent; at the bend a rhyme was coming deliciously and hotly alight’ (p.33). It is a process which Grisha feels is the source of great pleasure – ‘this happiness is the greatest thing existing on earth’ (p.33).

There is almost no external eventfulness in the story at all. Following his predecessors Turgenev and Chekhov, Nabokov replaced overt causality as the subject of his story with that of the resolution of certain states of being, thus creating what is now seen by most commentators as the truly modern short story – one which Eileen Baldeshwiler calls ‘The Lyric Short Story’:

‘the locus of narrative art has moved from external action to internal states of mind, and the plot line will hereafter consist, in this mode, of tracing complex emotions to a closing cadence utterly unlike the reasoned resolution of the conventional cause-and-effect story. It is here that we observe the birth of the open story‘ (CM,p.206)

Although he has created a young and amateur writer as protagonist, the depiction of this creative exultation seems very convincing, especially since it accords with what one gathers from those other stories of Nabokov’s which deal with the relationship between art and life and this process of being creative. His next story from 1935 takes up this same there and adds to it a twist taken from his repertoire of concealed narrators.

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

34 – Recruiting

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Recruiting’ (July 1935) starts off as if it is offering yet another character sketch from émigré life, but in the end it turns out to be concerned with the joys of literary composition. Vasily Ivanovich is a tired old Russian émigré who has lost all his relatives and is now desperately poor, having ‘reached the point where a man no longer asks himself on what he will live tomorrow, but merely wonders what he had lived on the day before’ (TD,p.103).

His beloved sister is dead, and on the day of the story he has visited her grave whilst at the burial of another émigré, Professor D. The story switches from third to first person mode to describe a curious sense of spiritual uplift he nevertheless feels whilst viewing the world around him as he sits in a public garden enjoying the sunshine:

‘A wet red hose lay across the entire lawn in the centre of the … garden and, a little way off, radiant water gushed from it, with a ghostly iridescence in the aura of its spray’ (p.107)

A man with a newspaper comes to sit beside him on the bench and reveals that what we have so far learned so far is in fact his own speculation about Vasily, and that he might not even be Russian at all. This suddenly-appearing narrator tells us that Vasily’s sister has been assembled out of the details of someone else, and that both these sketches have been created to fill spaces in a novel on which he has been working.

The narrator then indulges in one of those speculations regarding the relationship between one level of fictionality and another which can make readers feel that they are being asked to turn their own minds inside-out:

‘I felt I was infecting that stranger with the blazing creative happiness that sends a chill over an artist’s skin … [and that happiness ought to] be accessible to two people at least, becoming their topic of conversation and thus acquiring rights to routine existence’ (p.109)

Before the narrator can speak with this man onto whom he has projected his own wellbeing, Vasily gets up from the bench and walks away. But the narrator feels that he has anyway captured his character forever for his own literary purposes, and he tells us that the man will appear in a future chapter of his novel.

But then another narrator steps into the story, reducing the inner narrator to “my representative, the man with the Russian newspaper” (p.110) and reveals that we have not two but three levels of fictionality.

It would be misleading to dwell too much on parallels between two writers so dissimilar as Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, but ‘Recruiting’ is remarkably similar to An Unwritten Novel which deals with this subject of imagined lives and their imprecise connexion with a ‘true identity’ which is itself fictional. In the light of the fictions-within-fictions which have become such a tiresome cliché of postmodernism, it is worth noting that although this sudden appearance of a hitherto concealed outer narrator is something of a trick against which the reader has no defence, Nabokov only uses the device once (rather like his acrostic at the end of The Vane Sisters).

And is the story merely a trick? Well – no, because it is in the end designed to create a character, whether his name is Vasily or not, who carries his émigré status, his age, and his poverty with a certain amount of dignity and pride. He is another actor in the large cast of Nabokov’s record of the emigration, and if he is produced via a certain amount of literary sleight of hand, he lives nonetheless for that.

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

35 – A Slice of Life

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

In ‘A Slice of Life’ (September 1935) Nabokov returns to the seedy and vulgar side of émigré existence to explore a part of it which is almost the polar opposite of the joys of literary creation – the world of shabbiness and moral squalor which he had touched on in An Affair of Honour and A Dashing Fellow.

All the characters in ‘A Slice of Life’ are horrendously degenerate, self-seeking and crude. In dealing with them Nabokov sets himself two problems in terms of narrative mode. First of all he chooses one of this vulgar company as first person narrator, and it is not easy to convey vulgarity via the mind of someone who is vulgar whilst at the same time being both logically and aesthetically coherent. The second novelty (a strategy he used only once in all of his work) is that the narrator is female.

Maria Vasilevna is a slattern (by her own admission) who has previously been enamoured of Pavel Romanovich, a crop-haired slob of a man whose behaviour becomes worse and worse as the story progresses. He is obsessed with the fact that his wife has left him for another man, and he enlists Maria’s help in a plan which purports to warn the wife of her folly.

Pavel drunkenly concocts the scheme in a mood which ignores Maria’s feelings for him and swings violently from braggadocio to maudlin self-pity. They arrange for Maria to bring his ex-wife to a bar for an ‘important discussion’ but when they arrive there Pavel pulls out a gun and wounds her. There is a fracas in the bar from which everyone is led away, leaving Maria to be picked up then abandoned by a complete stranger.

As an exercise in revealing squalid behaviour the story is very successful indeed and a typically Nabokovian study in the grotesque. But unfortunately its coherence is undermined by an unusual failure to control the narrative mode. He creates a reasonably credible female point of view: “Yes, I wear mourning, for everybody, for everything, for my own self, for Russia, for the fetuses scraped out of me” (DS,p.142). But problems arise when he confronts the difficulty of dealing with two aspects of the narrative which are essentially in opposition to each other.

First of all there is the problem of having this narrator reveal her own vulgarity: would such a person really confess herself honestly as being “in the rumpled dress of a slatternly after-lunch siesta, and no doubt still bearing the pillow’s imprint on my cheek” (p.141)? Even allowing a certain amount of suspension of disbelief for the poetic rhythms of her expression, surely one of the hallmarks of vulgarity is a lack of self-consciousness. It does not seem psychologically credible to have fictional characters aware of their own lack of judgement and taste. And though it is credible for a woman with little of either to be enamoured of a brute, Nabokov has not created a completely convincing manner to have her reveal this to us.

The second problem concerns fictions narrated from limited points of view. Smurov in The Eye is a liar who even tries to deceive himself – but at least he is reasonably well educated, so we could believe that a character like him could offer such a narrative. It is possible to circumvent the limitations of a naive or a simple narrator who must deliver an account of morally complex events, as Huckelberry Finn or Diary of a Madman show, and in ‘A Slice of Life’ it might have been possible to stay within the consciousness of a slovenly and presumably uneducated woman for such a relatively short span (3,000 words) without boring the reader.

Nabokov has certainly engineered this feat successfully on other occasions; but here he cannot resist the desire to stray outside that limitation and creep towards the intelligent and perceptive inventions of some of his other narrators. It is simply not possible to maintain suspension of disbelief when this supposedly stupid woman describes Pavel’s descent into drunkenness thus:

En passant, he managed to finish the decanter, and presently entered … the final part of that drunken syllogism which had already united, in keeping with strict dialectical rules, an initial show of bright efficiency and a central period of utter gloom’ (p.147)

Women like Maria do not, could not think in such terms. Nabokov is too clearly present in what is supposed to be someone else’s narrative at such points, and the thread connecting our credulity to the story snaps. This is a fairly rare lapse in what is normally one of his strong characteristics as a writer – the skillful control of narrative and narrators.

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

36 – Spring in Fialta

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

There appears to be confusion over the date of first publication of ‘Spring in Fialta’ (April 1936) but general agreement that it is the highpoint in Nabokov’s achievement as a writer of short stories.

As Barbara Heldt Monter justly claims ‘It is as clear a masterpiece among Nabokov’s short stories as Lolita and Pale Fire among his novels.’ (Appel,p.129). It combines a number of his favourite and well-tested themes – recapturing the past, the Double, amorous yearning, Russia and The Woman – and to tell the story he combines several narrative devices – circular construction, absence of ‘plot’, scrambled chronology, and unreliable narrator.

Victor, the first person narrator, is a businessman who recounts the events of a brief visit to Fialta in the early 1930s where he bumps into Nina, a woman he had known since they were both teenagers in Russia in 1917, and with whom he has been in love ever since. He recalls to himself their first meeting and the fact that they have only met very sporadically since.

These meetings are recollected in flashback and woven very skilfully around his account of the day that they spend together in Fialta. Both of them have since married, and Victor is acquainted with Nina’s husband Ferdinand. They all lunch together, and Victor is invited to join them for a drive; but he declines. Some days later he reads in a newspaper that the car was involved in an accident that very afternoon, killing Nina.

The large scale parallels between Nina and Russia are obvious enough in the light of Nabokov’s earlier stories. Victor meets Nina in the fatidic years of 1917 and every time they subsequently meet he wishes to lead her back into the past before discussing what they have done since they last met. He even draws a comparison between this process and the narrative strategies employed in Russian fairy tales, wherein ‘the already told is bunched up again at every new twist of the story’ (ND,p.5).

This is an approach to story telling which exactly describes the narration of ‘Spring in Fialta’ itself. Victor throws loops into the past in his efforts to recapture memories of the enigmatic and illusive Nina, and these loops are thrown from a very slowly moving account of the day they meet for the last time.

What hold together these fragments of memory and the events of the narrative present are a series of cleverly arranged details which echo and connect with each other. The story is a ‘mosaic’, as is hinted at in the text itself, rather than a conventional tale with linear chronology. There scenes which repeat each other; characters who act as links; colours which act as leitmotives; and a series of visual clues which plot the way to Nina’s death. All these details and devices are so closely packed together that several careful readings of the story are necessary before their significance and the connections they have with each other become apparent. To illustrate this point, these few lines come from the opening of the story:

‘I found myself, all my senses wide open, on one of Fialta’s little steep streets, taking in everything at once, that marine rococo on the stand … and the dejected poster of a visiting circus, one corner of its drenched paper detached from the wall, and a yellow bit of unripe orange peel on the old, slate-blue sidewalk, which retained here and there a fading memory of ancient mosaic design’ (p.1)

Every one of these statements and details has a significance or a connection with what is to follow in the story. The pieces of marine rococo are seaside souvenirs, one of which Ferdinand buys later in the story. It is a small piece of marble imitating a local mountain ‘showing a black tunnel at its base … with a compartment for pens in the semblance of railroad tracks’ (p.19).

This description itself echoes Victor’s account of his journey to Fialta by an express train which ‘with that reckless gusto particular to trains in mountainous country, had done its thundering best to collect throughout the night as many tunnels as possible’ (p.2). This link also helps establish the Double theme between Victor and Ferdinand, of which more in a moment.

The circus poster is one of a number which are mentioned like motifs throughout the account of the day they meet, and in the last few moments of their time together Victor and Nina actually see some of its performers sent ahead as an advertising pageant. This carefully plotted line of clues leads ultimately to Nina’s death – as it is one of the circus trucks into which the car crashes.

The car itself is coloured yellow, as is Nina’s scarf, the Russian church wax mentioned in one of Victor’s most lyrical memories of her – and of course the unripe orange peel on the sidewalk.

These are the sorts of repetitions and links which give such elegant form to what superficially appear to be unconnected reminiscences in the narrative. Victor on entering the town notices someone selling lollipops – ‘elaborate looking things with a lunar gloss’ (p.3) – and it is one of these – ‘a long stick of moonstone candy’ (p.17) – which Nina’s husband is eating when they all meet later in the day.

Victor notices an Englishman in plus fours, and it is this man’s lustful glance towards Nina which leads Victor to see her. Later, the Englishman reappears in the restaurant where Nina, Victor and Ferdinand are lunching. This time his gaze is attracted to a moth which he catches in a pill box. Similarly, a young girl appears briefly at the beginning of the story ‘with a string of beads around her dusky neck’ (p.2) and then later in the day Victor notices ‘a swarthy girl with beads around her pretty neck’ (p.18).

These are some of the small details which form the pattern of the ‘mosaic’. But they are not just simple structural echoes or walk-on-walk-off parts for secondary characters which in themselves would make the story no more than choreographically interesting. They also tell us something about Victor’s reliability as a narrator. In the first of these examples it seems that he misjudged the Englishman, and in the second it is evident that he himself fails to recognise the little girl on the second occasion of seeing her. Are his senses as wide open as he originally claimed they were?

Almost all other commentators on this story take Victor at face value. He purports to be telling us of a love affair with this tantalising and somewhat promiscuous woman which has lasted on and off for fifteen years. Andrew Field, conflating Victor and his creator, discusses Nina in terms of Nabokov’s taste for ‘acerbic women’ (Field, VN, p.163). Monter describes it as ‘a love story’ (Appel, p.133) and thinks the Englishman is Nabokov in disguise just because he is a lepidopterist. And Lee only begins to suspect an element of the Double in the relationship between Victor and Ferdinand (Lee,p.32).

In fact Victor is one of the most cunningly presented of all Nabokov’s unreliable narrators. He thinks he is telling us the truth, but the reader is given just enough information within his account to recognise that he is failing to understand the world he is in, deluding himself regarding Nina, misrepresenting people and their motives, and often behaving in a gauchely insensitive manner.

We begin with his own claim to be sensitive, which he repeats for emphasis: ‘how gratefully my whole being responded to the flutter and effluvia of that grey day saturated with a vernal essence which itself it seemed slow in perceiving’ (p.3). Quite apart from the florid vanity and the absurd anthropomorphism of this claim, all the subsequent evidence he offers proves that on the contrary he responds inappropriately to just about everything – but most of all to Nina.

He cannot find a term precise enough to define the nature of the relationship he has with her – and inattentive readers are given every opportunity to assume that it is of a conventionally romantic nature. Yet right from the outset we are also offered clues that it is at the very least a one-sided affair. ‘Every time I had met her … she had not seemed to recognise me at once’ (p.4). In fact on all the occasions he describes except one he is put out by the fact that she either ignores him or has forgotten him.

On the first occasion that they meet, even though he knows that she is engaged to be married, he makes a physical advance to her which she reciprocates very briefly: but then for the remainder of the meeting she ignores him.

Then on the second meeting – and this is quite some time later – he assumes a degree of intimacy which could not possibly be justified, and he even imputes knowledge of it to others: ‘at once it became clear to everyone, beginning with her, that we had long been on intimate terms’ (p.9). He does this knowing that the one brief kiss they have exchanged is not sufficient basis for such a claim. And in addition he is physically importunate yet again: ‘when that night I happened to be seated beside her at supper, I shamelessly tested the extent of her secret patience’ (p.10).

This pattern of behaviour is repeated on each of the subsequent occasions he recalls, with the added twist to his erotomania that he becomes absurdly jealous and possessive of her. When years later he bumps into her as she is being seen off at a railway station, he describes her as being ‘in the midst of a group of people she had befriended without my knowledge’ (p.10). Later, when he meets her with her husband and his friends he says that ‘doubtless two or three of the lot had been intimate with [her]’ (p.16).

He has absolutely no evidence for these suppositions, but he goes on making them nevertheless. Even when she is in the presence of her husband, Victor is still physically demanding and insensitive: ‘seizing the opportunity when Ferdinand … stopped at the post office, I hastened to lead her away’ (p.19).

All these clues are offered in the smallest scraps of gesture and movement. When they are walking together, it is Nina who is forced to adjust her stride to Victor’s (p.4) and when he asks her if she can remember when they last met he wilfully misunderstands her reaction: ‘the shake of her head and the puckered brow seemed less to imply forgetfulness than to deplore the flatness of an old joke’ (p.7).

Victor’s grossness and lack of sensitivity are brought to an impressively dramatised finale just before the fatal crash. Having prised Nina away from her husband for a moment, he makes a declaration to her which is simultaneously clumsy and insultingly phrased. When it is met with what are obviously horror and embarrassment, he retracts in bad faith and makes another gauche gesture:

‘I said (substituting for our cheap, formal ‘thou’ that strangely full and expressive ‘you’…) “Look here – what if I love you?” Nina looked at me … something like a bat passed swiftly across her face, a quick, queer, almost ugly expression … “Never mind, I was only joking”, I hastened to say, lightly circling her waist’ (p.29)

This is Nabokov at his very best in terms of subtly narrative – absent from the picture, letting the character reveal his own inadequacies. The choice of second person plural address is completely inappropriate to such a declaration; ‘what if’ is hedging his bets; Nina is clearly disgusted; and the retraction is both quite insincere and underscored by the possessive arm in a manner which seems designed to produce embarrassed squirming in the reader.

Throughout the story Victor is embedded in a comfortable bourgeois marriage, so his rhapsodies concerning Nina are romantic at best and more probably just wish-fulfilments. For they are based upon no evidence of reciprocity. There is only one occasion when we are given anything other than signs of Nina’s being either merely friendly or disattentive towards him. They are in a hotel together when she tells him that her husband has gone fencing and takes him to her room: ‘when the door had been locked … a little later I stepped out onto the diminutive cast-iron balcony’ (p.12)

These are the only clues we have: there is no evidence of any other sexual connection between them in the story – and plenty of Nina’s lack of interest in him. There are thus two possibilities: either Nina is generous and lighthearted and does give herself to him this once, but takes no serious interest in him at all, or Victor is wishing this reciprocation into being. This is not an easy crux to unravel – but there is further evidence in the text to help.

There are several other instances of Victor’s stupidity and contradictions in his own narrative. In addition to his failure to recognise the little girl and his misinterpretation of the Englishman’s attentions, he describes a holder of the legion d’honeur as ‘some Frenchman [who] for some reason or other [had] a little red ribbon or something on his coat lapel’ (p.17). And when he meets Segur, a friend of Nina’s husband, he complains that he raises the weather as a subject of conversation – even though the opening of Victor’s account centres on precisely the same topic: the story begins ‘Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp’ (p.1).

Victor’s account of Ferdinand, Nina’s husband, also raises doubts about the reliability of his judgement. He is quite clearly jealous – ‘I would rather not dwell upon him’ (p.13) – and yet the description of his technique as a writer is clearly designed to let the reader see him in a favourable light: ‘Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words’ (p.13)

Victor’s judgement of this skill is peevish and philistine: ‘I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books’ (p.13). He later pours scorn on certain literary techniques, and even though he subsequently admits that none of it is relevant to Ferdinand, the smear sticks.

There are in fact elements of the Double at work here – reflected in the fact that they dress in very similar clothes and their prose styles are not unalike. We are given a brief extract from one of Ferdinand’s stories:

‘Her face … was rather nature’s snapshot than a meticulous portrait … all he could visualise were fleeting glimpses of disconnected features: the downy outline of her pommettes in the sun’ (p.20)

There is an additional complication in the fact that Ferdinand is also something of a portrait of Nabokov himself. He is given the same appearance, he writes in a foreign language and enjoys puns, and he has the same lofty and mocking literary manner. But this detail is best left to those like Field who wish to read biographical significance into it (Field-VN,p.163).

‘Spring in Fialta’ is without doubt Nabokov’s finest achievement as a writer of short fictions, and it bears all the qualities and characteristics of the very greatest short stories. It has a flawless unity of time, place, and action, and its flashbacks are very elegantly and unobtrusively woven into the narrative. It has a dense verbal texture full of echoes, poetic repetitions, and leitmotives which are firmly related to its themes. And it has one of the most subtly concealed of all Nabokov’s unreliable narrators.

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

37 – Cloud, Castle, Lake

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Having published Invitation to a Beheading in 1935, Nabokov obviously felt that there was still something to say on the subject of tyranny and oppression – for two stories followed which produced variations on this theme. ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ appeared first (June 1937) as Khodasevich suggests (LA,p.196) almost as an ‘afterword’ to the novel. The story is rather an uneasy mixture of realism, fantasy, and poetic lyricism – which eventually serve to illustrate that it is not always possible to combine successfully in the short story elements which are essentially heterogeneous.

A modest young bachelor, Vasili Ivanovich, wins a ticket for a pleasure excursion which he would rather not take, but he is obliged to do so by the ‘Bureau of Pleasantrips’ (ND,p.112). There follows a hiking expedition amongst a group of vulgar Germans who bully and humiliate him, and he is forced to participate in organised entertainment and collective enjoyment.

Before setting off he had a presentiment that he would encounter something that would make him tremendously happy, and after two days of torment this experience comes to him in the form of the vision of an idyllic landscape (the cloud, castle, and lake). Nearby is an inn kept by a fellow Russian. The setting is so beautiful that Vasili feels he would like to live there forever. But the tour leader will not allow it: the group returns to Berlin, beating and torturing Vasili on the way back. At the end of the story he reports to his ‘boss’ (who is the narrator) saying that he has not ‘the strength to belong to mankind any longer’ (p.124).

Obviously the story is a plea for the value of private and individual experience against social coercion and what Nabokov sees as the dehumanising effects of ‘the collective’. And of course this overt content acts as a completely accurate prophecy of what was to happen in Germany in the eight years to follow. As a cartoon sketch of social ugliness and menace the story is quite disturbing in the same way as was ‘The Leonardo’. But unfortunately for the artistic cohesion of the piece, the realistic and fantasy elements work against each other.

If a piece of fiction is to create an acceptably fantastic world, then it must have time to establish the credibility of this world, and the suspension of the reader’s disbelief must not be punctured or interrupted by switches from realism to fantasy and back again.

In such a short work as this , asking the reader to believe in a real Berlin, a real train journey, and a credible émigré Vasili Ivanovich are one thing. But a Bureau of Pleasantrips and the idea of a charity prize which cannot be refused belong to a different order of fictional existence. The two cannot be successfully blended, for there is too great a disparity between them, and the tone of the story is disrupted by the attempted admixture.

It is possible to combine realism and fantasy more successfully, as ‘The Visit to the Museum’ will show, but the transition from one to the other must be very subtle and much more gradual than is the case here.

Field suggests that the story is ‘indisputably a fable or allegory’ (LA,p.197) – but Nabokov’s own description, within the text, of “a hideous fairy tale’ (p.123) seems more appropriate. For the tale is a looser, less demanding form than that of the short story in its modern phase.

What the story does have to recommend it is a successful control of the narrative voice. The outer narrator – a sort of author substitute figure- pretends to be a businessman and speaks of Vasili as ‘one of my representatives’ (p.112) in a manner which recalls Nabokov’s use of substitute figures in ‘Recruiting’. For the most part this narrator is absent from the story, and we must believe that Vasili gives him the details to report in his final account of the trip. But the narrator makes one brief interjection to speak of himself and Vasili in the first person plural: ‘we both, Vasili Ivanovich and I, have always been impressed by the anonymity of all the parts of a landscape’ (p.115).

The narrative also includes addresses to an unnamed second person – ‘from somewhere there came the odour of jasmine and hay, my love’ (p.118) – which are Vasili’s thoughts (imputed to him by the narrator) addressed to a woman. This unobtrusive detail holds together three important elements of the themes which so many of Nabokov’s stories have been exploring – memory, a search for the past and a Russia that has been lost, states of aesthetic bliss as transcendent experiences, and the connection between all of these and a woman. For as Vasili believes at the outset of his trip

‘This happiness would have something in common with his childhood, and with the excitement aroused in him by Russian lyrical poetry … and with that lady … whom he had hopelessly loved for seven years’ (p.113).

When Vasili returns from his trip disenchanted and reports that he can stand humankind no longer, the narrator tells us ‘Of course, I let him go’ (p.124) – thus dissolving Vasili as a fictional construct and drawing attention to the narrator himself as a figure for Nabokov’s own narrative convenience.

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

38 – Tyrants Destroyed

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Tyrants Destroyed’ (June 1938) was a twin to ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ but took quite a different narrative approach to the same theme. In this story, Nabokov returns to the Dostoyevskian form of the quasi-philosophic monologue – the outpouring of rage, frustration, and neurosis which pretends to no particular structure, does away with characterisation and plot, and concentrates on an idea; in this case, the hatefulness of tyrants.

The unnamed narrator is a typical man-from-underground, a schoolteacher who has led ‘a hard, lonely life, always indigent, in shabby lodgings’ (TD,p.6). He has become an insomniac and is totally obsessed with his hatred of his country’s dictator who he knew personally as a youth. This hatred has grown into a neurosis which obliterates everything else from his life.

The narrative takes the form of an analysis of dictators – their mediocrity, vulgarity, shabbiness, cruelty, and their moral degeneracy. Nabokov takes the fairly commonplace view that dictators are petty-bourgeois nonentities seeking revenge on others for their own shortcomings and what they perceive to be the injustices that life has meted out to them.

From a fictional point of view the problem is that this portrait is generalised rather than specific. The dictator is an identikit figure, as Nabokov himself hints: ‘Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin dispute my tyrant’s throne in this story’ (p.2). Narrative interest therefore focuses not so much on the dictator as on the narrator himself and what he will do to overcome his obsession.

Fuelled by his hatred, he decides that the tyrant must die, but cannot bring himself to commit the act on the grounds that murder is a shabby, vulgar act only worthy of the very type he wishes to eliminate. Instead, in typically Dostoyevskian manner, he contemplates suicide: ‘By killing myself I would kill him, as he was totally inside me, fattened on the intensity of my hatred’ (p.33). But on re-reading the notes which constitute his narrative he feels that the mockery and scorn he has poured onto the dictator constitute a sort of triumph over him, and that they will exist to be of help to others in similar need: ‘This is an incantation, an exorcism, so that henceforth any man can exorcise bondage’ (p.36).

This is not an altogether convincing argument, but it is a neat resolution to the problem of the narrative itself. The story is another variation on the theme of Art transcending the vulgarities of human existence, but it is not one of his most convincing.

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

39 – The Visit to the Museum

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

By the end of the 1930s, prompted by the threats of the Nazis, Nabokov had moved from Berlin to Paris – the second centre of Russian emigration. From there he was to travel even further westwards to America in 1940. Undoubtedly conscious of this growing exile from his native land, he turned back in 1939, for one of his last short stories to be written in Russian, to the topic he had treated in poems and stories many times before – the return to Russia. And for this occasion he chose to employ the form of the conte fantastique, a tradition in story-telling which goes back to Gautier and E.T.A. Hoffmann.

The narrator of ‘The Visit to the Museum’ (September 1938) has been asked by a friend to locate and purchase a portrait of his Russian grandfather which has found its way into a small provincial museum in France. The narrator is sceptical and reluctant, but when he visits the museum the portrait is there. Suddenly his interest is aroused: ‘It is fun to be present at the coming true of a dream, even if it is not one’s own’ (RB,p.70).

He applies to the curator for permission to purchase, but the curator denies the existence of the painting. The narrator bets him the money he has been given to make the purchase, and when they go to check the curator admits that he was wrong. But when the narrator presses his claim the curator disappears and the narrator becomes lost in a maze of rooms in the fantastically expanding museum.

Gradually he finds himself amongst familiar houses and streets, a light snow is falling, and he realises that he is back in Russia. It is not the Russia of his childhood however, but that of the present day under the Soviets. His dream turns into a nightmare, and he is forced to throw away everything which would identify him as a returned émigré. Then the story ends abruptly with a summary of subsequent events:

‘I shall not recount how I was arrested nor tell of my subsequent ordeals … it cost me incredible patience and effort to get back abroad, and … ever since I have foresworn carrying out commissions’ (p.79)

The formula is traditional enough – a transfer from one plane of reality to another and back again, though the ‘return’ is dealt with in so rapid and summary a fashion it seems that Nabokov is more interested in establishing the shock value of the initial transfer. It is this which gives rise to the principal problem with the story and the reason why it might have to be counted amongst his interesting failures.

The problem is the lack of relation between the first and the second part of the story. A realistic setting is established and the museum visit is perfectly credible, all in keeping with Nabokov’s normal manner of controlling narratives. Then along with the entrance of the curator, one or two mysteries are introduced: he resembles a Russian wolfhound, throws letters he has just written into a wastepaper basket, and does not know his own collection.

But none of these mysteries has any apparent connection with the portrait or the narrator’s subsequent experience in the museum where he wanders from rooms full of steam engines, railroad stations, and The Section of Fountains and Brooks, back into the reconstruction of the Soviet Union. The only element which unites the request, the portrait, narrator, curator, and the fantasy world is that they are all Russian. And these elements cohere only under the canopy of a ‘What if …?’ – the impossibility of recovering the Russian past.

In fictions of the conte fantastique variety we are usually offered some tantalising evidence of the fantasy world when the protagonist returns to the ‘real’ one. In Gautier’s ‘La Cafetiere’ as a typical instance, the narrator awakes from his reverie of dancing with the figures from paintings – but he has a fragment of the coffee pot from this other world beside him. No such evidence connects the two worlds of ‘The Visit to the Museum’.

Of course the story is not offered in a state of high seriousness, but it recalls The Thunderstorm in failing to make a convincing connection between realism and fantasy. It is as if Nabokov was not comfortable with this mode. He seems to operate at his best when straining against but staying within the bounds of literary realism.

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

40 – Lik

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

Perhaps in keeping with the mood of the decade’s end, ‘Lik’ (November 1938) is one of the most sombre and unremittingly serious of Nabokov’s stories. In it he sticks to a plain third person narrative mode and does not bring into play any of his customary literary amusements. The setting might be the French Riviera, but the subject matter is pain, exile, and death.

Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn, whose initials give the story its title and him his nickname, is a frail and hypersensitive émigré who is scratching a living as an actor in a theatrical company. They are currently touring ‘L’Abime’, a French melodrama in which he plays the (badly-written) part of a stage Russian. He feels himself to be one of life’s permanent outsiders, and he also has a weak heart. Whilst resting between performances he meets a distant relative Koldunov who bullied him as a schoolboy but has now sunk into a pitiful state of dejection and poverty. Koldunov tries to borrow money from him and oppresses him with boorish behaviour.

Just before Lik’s last performance they meet again. Koldunov takes him back to his squalid lodgings, tries to get him drunk, delivers a tirade which catalogues the injustices he has suffered, and demands to know why fate treats the two of them so differently. Lik escapes from this moral harassment, feeling that he is about to have a heart attack. But then he has to turn back because he has left behind a recently purchased pair of shoes. When he arrives at the room however Koldunov has shot himself – after putting on the shoes.

If there is any authorial sleight of hand here, it occurs in two incidents which are both related to the story’s themes. The first is in the opening of the story where Nabokov offers a sort of false beginning by describing the plot of ‘L’Abime’ in a way which leads the reader to expect that this will be the subject of the story: ‘the young man of the play threatens to be somewhat colourless, and it is in a vain attempt to touch him up a little that the author has made him a Russian’ (TD,p.72).

The play is a melodrama, and it is gently mocked for dealing in the stereotypes of what the public supposes to be ‘the Russian character’. But ‘Lik’ as a story is itself melodramatic on the surface, so the play parallels the story, whose own ‘young man’ is Russian – though the play is a paler parodic version of the story. For ‘Lik’ is Russian in a manner which goes straight back to Dostoyevski, who is even acknowledged in the text.

The other instance of Nabokov misleading the reader occurs at the end of the story when Lik has escaped from the importunate demands of Koldunov. He is agitated, ill, and he senses an attack coming on: ‘everything began to spin; his heart was reflected as a terrifying globe on the dark inner side of his eyelids. It continued to swell agonisingly’ (p.97). The reader is given every reason to believe that Lik will die. But he does not: Koldunov dies instead. The justification for the sleight of hand in this instance is that the two men are in fact alternative versions of each other – doubles in a very subtle manner.

Lik is a twofold outsider – an émigré, and a man alone. He is described in a manner which echoes many characters from Russian nineteenth century fiction: ‘he had…the feeling of being superfluous, of having usurped somebody else’s place’ (p.75). He lives on his own, has no friends, and feels a painful sense of separation from his fellow men – even his fellow actors – which borders on paranoia.

This cocktails of problems, in addition to his illness, makes him hypersensitive. He realises that if he had not lost both parents and been forced into the life of an émigré he could have been more stable and enjoyed a normal life. As it is, he feels death calling him, and that even this might at least give his life some meaning: ‘If death did not present him with an exit into true reality, he would simply never come to know life’ (p.80).

He also has an artistic sensibility which he applies to this problem, reflecting on the possibility of moving his existence from the real world into that of art:

‘Lik might hope, one vague and lonely night, in the midst of the usual performance, to tread…on a quicksandy spot: something would give, and he would sink forever into a newborn element…developing the play’s threadbare themes in a way altogether new’ (p.77)

Using Lik’s hypersensitivity as a justification, Nabokov is here toying with the metaphysical notion of an ‘existence’ which can slip between one level of reality and another.

Koldunov at first sight appears to be quite unlike Lik. He is vulgar, clumsy, ‘an idler, a drunkard and a boor’ (p.89). But he is related by family to Lik, and Nabokov provides a series of subtle hints, parallels and twinnings which invite us to view him as Lik’s double – the other development of Lik’s possible life chances. Even Lik himself is vaguely aware of this: ‘With Koldunov’s resurrection, he had to admit the possibility of two parallel lines crossing after all’ (p.82)

Koldunov like him is in exile, is poor, and he too feels that his life has become so desperate that it must be near its end. He torments Lik, hinting at suicide: ‘the other day I was thinking that all was lost. Do you understand what I am saying’ (p.88). His life has gone onto a downward trajectory, but in a way which is not altogether unlike Lik’s: ‘heavy cycles of ignoble idleness and ignoble toil’ (p.92).

This plunge into the lower depths prompts him, in a clearly Dostoyevskian manner, to pose philosophic questions about it, and in doing so he uses a theatrical metaphor which echoes the ‘part’ Lik is employed to play: ‘Why have I been assigned the part of some kind of miserable scoundrel who is spat on by everybody, gypped, bullied, thrown into jail?’ (p.94).

We take it from his vulgar behaviour, the quarrels he picks, and his insensitivity, that some of this misfortune is probably of his own making, but there is a sense in which he has every right to pose these questions. Lik himself is poor enough, but Koldunov is even poorer: why does the world treat him this way? Just because he is shabby and vulgar, this is no justification. He goes back as a literary conception to the downtrodden little men of nineteenth century fiction. To ‘poor Yevgeni’ of Pushkin’s ‘The Bronze Horseman’:

But my poor, poor
Yevgeni! … Alas! his confused mind could not endure
The shocks he had suffered …
… He grew
A stranger to the world”

Or to Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich whose overcoat is stolen and who can find no justice in life:

‘A human being whom no one ever thought of protecting, who was dear to no one, in whom no one was the least interested, not even the naturalist who cannot resist sticking a pin into a common fly and examining it under the microscope’ (Gogol,p.102)

And of course to so many of Dostoyevski’s furious individuals who rant against the injustices of life.

The double theme is woven into the story by a number of hints, repetitions, and events which echo each other. Koldunov is mentioned to Lik for instance by

‘a loquacious old Russian (who had managed on two occasions already to recount to Lik the story of his life, first in one direction, from the present to the past, and then in the other, against the grain, resulting in two different lives, one successful, the other not)’ (p.81)

This of course describes in a way the lives of Lik and Koldunov as presented by the story, and the link between the two of them is firmly underscored at the end by the fact that Koldunov has put on Lik’s shoes before shooting himself.

‘Lik’ stands alongside Spring in Fialta and The Return of Chorb as one of Nabokov’s major achievements in the short story form, and it illustrates in both theme and treatment the continuing strength of his links with the Russian literary tradition at a time when he was about to begin his third stage of exile from his native country and about to start writing in a language which was ‘foreign’ to him.

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

41 – Vasiliy Shishkov

September 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a critical examination of Nabokov’s collected stories

‘Vasiliy Shishkov’ (August 1939) need not detain us long. It is a story which would hardly make any sense at all without its biographical note. The émigré poet George Adamovich had been a consistent critic of Nabokov’s work, and Nabokov had tricked him by writing a poem under the eponymous pseudonym which Adamovich had praised. To capitalise on this by revealing the joke, Nabokov published the story in question in the newspaper to which Adamov contributed a weekly column. This is a very typical piece of Nabokov’s literary mischief.

The first person narrator, who turns out to be called Gospodin Nabokov, is approached by an eager young man: ‘My name is Vasiliy Shishkov. I am a poet’ (TD,p.207). He wants Nabokov to give him a sincere judgement of his work. When he produces the poems they turn out to be worthless trash, and Nabokov tells him so, whereupon he reveals that he has deliberately made them so to test the rigour of Nabokov’s honesty.

He then produces his real work, which is very good. In addition he confesses to suffering an acute form of Weltschmerz and even plans to publish a magazine called ‘A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity’. When this project falls through he decides to simply disappear, leaving his work behind. The joke concludes with the narrator’s observation ‘in a wildly literal sense … he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse’ (p.215).

It is only in this sense, as a case study of what Nabokov (Vladimir Nabokov, that is) calls ‘one poet dissolving in another’ (p.206) that the story has any independent meaning, and even then the fiction quickly bites its own tail because there is not an extant body of work by the imaginary poet, only that written by Nabokov under his name. But what the story does show is the manner in which Nabokov was keen to exploit the interfaces between art and life as the sources for his fiction.

So the story is autobiographical in two senses. Its origins lie in the historical rivalry between Adamovich and Nabokov; and Nabokov’s own life as an exile in 1939 is obviously being paralleled in the concerns of a poet who feels under threat from the world and who hopes that his work will survive him.

Although ‘Vasiliy Shishkov’ might be a slight piece of work, Nabokov went on later the same year to produce one of his most serious and accomplished longer stories – and one which deals with precisely the desperate extremes of émigré life. It even reflects the geographic relocations of emigration at that time. For as the Nazis moved westwards there was only one direction to go for those émigrés trapped in Paris, and that was southwards towards the Riviera.

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

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

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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