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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories.
Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.
The Wood-Sprite
Russian Spoken Here
Sounds
Wingstroke
Gods
A Matter of Chance
The Seaport
Revenge
Beneficence
Details of A Sunset
The Thunderstorm
La Veneziana
Bachmann
The Dragon
Christmas
A Letter That Never Reached Russia
The Fight
The Return of Chorb
A Guide to Berlin
A Nursery Tale
Terror
Razor
The Passenger
The Doorbell
An Affair of Honor
The Christmas Story
The Potato Elf
The Aurelian
A Dashing Fellow
A Bad Day
The Visit to the Museum
A Busy Man
Terra Incognita
The Reunion
Lips to Lips
Orache
Music
Perfection
The Admiralty Spire
The Leonardo
In Memory of L.I. Shigaev
The Circle
A Russian Beauty
Breaking the News
Torpid Smoke
Recruiting
A Slice of Life
Spring in Fialta
Cloud, Castle, Lake
Tyrants Destroyed
Lik
Mademoiselle O
Vasiliy Shishkov
Ultima Thule
Solus Rex
The Assistant Producer
That in Aleppo Once
A Forgotten Poet
Time and Ebb
Conversation Piece, 1945
Signs and Symbols
First Love
Scenes From the Life of A Double Monster
The Vane Sisters
Lance
Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.
The Wood-Sprite
Russian Spoken Here
Sounds
Wingstroke
Gods
A Matter of Chance
The Seaport
Revenge
Beneficence
Details of A Sunset
The Thunderstorm
La Veneziana
Bachmann
The Dragon
Christmas
A Letter That Never Reached Russia
The Fight
The Return of Chorb
A Guide to Berlin
A Nursery Tale
Terror
Razor
The Passenger
The Doorbell
An Affair of Honor
The Christmas Story
The Potato Elf
The Aurelian
A Dashing Fellow
A Bad Day
The Visit to the Museum
A Busy Man
Terra Incognita
The Reunion
Lips to Lips
Orache
Music
Perfection
The Admiralty Spire
The Leonardo
In Memory of L.I. Shigaev
The Circle
A Russian Beauty
Breaking the News
Torpid Smoke
Recruiting
A Slice of Life
Spring in Fialta
Cloud, Castle, Lake
Tyrants Destroyed
Lik
Mademoiselle O
Vasiliy Shishkov
Ultima Thule
Solus Rex
The Assistant Producer
That in Aleppo Once
A Forgotten Poet
Time and Ebb
Conversation Piece, 1945
Signs and Symbols
First Love
Scenes From the Life of A Double Monster
The Vane Sisters
Lance
685 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1995
About the author
Vladimir Nabokov
719 books13.5k followersRussian:
Владимир Владимирович Набоков
.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery, and had a big interest in chess problems.
Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterized all his works.
Lolita was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels; Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed eighth on the publisher's list of the 20th century's greatest nonfiction. He was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery, and had a big interest in chess problems.
Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterized all his works.
Lolita was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels; Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed eighth on the publisher's list of the 20th century's greatest nonfiction. He was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times.
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March 21, 2012
When I feel utterly overwhelmed by meaninglessness of life there are only two things I turn to: weed and Nabokov. We’re all lovers of literature here, but don’t you often feel like what’s the point of it all? That it’s all just bullshit? I do, all the time. So maybe I’m a misanthrope, I do actively hope for the end of the human race on a regular basis, and it’s not just all literature I often think is a worthless meaningless sham but whole of art, science, and every other human attempt to make sense of it all. And then I read Nabokov and I think maybe I’m wrong?
If, by chance, the existence of our universe turns out to be some sort of comic competition amongst numberless universes produced by endlessly cascading big bangs, all competing for some unnamed cosmic prize, then I nominate this book, The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, to serve as our entry to that contest, not just as a representative Earth, but as the single representation of the pinnacle of comic evolution in our universe. I don’t think I’m overstating the case. Vladimir Nabokov justifies the existence of, not only the human race, but all life that exists in our universe. If 14.5 billion years ago the big bang happened simply so 8 billion years later a planet would form in an arm of an ordinary galaxies amongst billions of identical galaxies, so that life might evolve, eventually followed by language, simply so that a boy would be born in Russia who would one day write this very book, then that is as much meaning in life as one could ever possibly hope for. This book is miraculous, and the closest to a religious worldview as I will ever come, and that’s more than enough for me.
Now I hope I’m not overselling this book, and I don’t think I am, but I just wanted to make clear that the reason I took 2 years (yes two years) to finish it was because I wanted to savory every bit of it, some of these stories I’ve reread a half dozen times. And now that it’s finally finished I feel a sense of sadness that this book, which has sat on my nightstand for years yellowing before my eyes, and has had no fewer than a hundred joints rolled on its cover, and has talked me down from three separate panic attacks, will now be placed in a bookshelf next to regular undeserving books, yet on the other hand if I were to die now, I could feel like I accomplished at least one thing in my life and it wasn’t all a waste.
A Letter That Never Reached Russia
My charming, dear, distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray haired, azure-liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvorov Museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox. How ardently we kissed behind a waxen grenadier's back! And later, when we came out of that antique dust, how dazzled we were by the silvery blaze of the Tavricheski Park, and how odd it was to hear the cheery, avid, deep-fetched grunts of soldiers, lunging on command, slithering across the icy ground, plunging a bayonet into the straw-bellied German-helmeted dummy in the middle of a Petersburg street.
Yes, I know that I had sworn, in my previous letter to you, not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to possess a lofty pudicity of expression, and yet, here I am, from the very first lines, disdaining that right to sublime imperfection, and defeating with epithets the recollection on which you touched with such lightness and grace. Not of the past, my love, do I wish to speak to you.
It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects—the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one's desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nestling in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A glass column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop, and, for some reason, I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty. Through its windows one can clearly see the rows of brightly lit brown seats between which a lone ticket collector with a black satchel at his side makes his way, reeling a bit and thus looking a little tight—as he moves against the direction of the car's travel.
As I wander along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the glass pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute.
A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow passes under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted–except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she passes under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply.
And beyond the bend, above the sidewalk—how unexpectedly!—the front of a cinema ripples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-pale screen you can watch more-or-less skillfully trained mimes: the huge face of a girl with gray, shimmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, shining tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) there appears real life, unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright waters, a noiselessly but visibly rustling tree.
Farther on, at the corner of a square, a stout prostitute in black furs slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the shiny silk of her peach-colored stockings. I like to observe this placid middle-aged whore, as she is approached by an elderly man with a mustache, who came on business that morning from Papenburg (first he passes her and takes two backward glances). She will conduct him unhurriedly to a room in a nearby building, which, in the daytime, is quite undistinguishable from other, equally ordinary buildings. A polite and impassive old porter keeps an all-night vigil in the unlighted front hall. At the top of a steep staircase an equally impassive old woman will unlock with sage unconcern an unoccupied room and receive payment for it.
And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music that I cannot help imagining the sunny lands toward which I shall depart as soon as I have procured those extra hundred marks for which I long so blandly, so lightheartedly.
I am so lighthearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local café. Many fellow exiles of mind denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about. And of course these so-called modern dances of ours are actually anything but modern: the craze goes back to the days of the Directoire, for then as now women's dresses were worn next to the skin, and the musicians were Negroes. Fashion breathes thought the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fashion's breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances. Our dances, after all, are very natural and pretty innocent, and sometimes—in London ballrooms—perfectly graceful in their monotony. We all remember what Pushkin wrote about the waltz: "monotonous and mad." It's all the same thing. As for the deterioration of morals... Here's what I found in D'Agricourt's memoirs: "I know nothing more depraved than the minuet, which they see fit to dance in our cities."
And so I enjoy watching, in the cafés dansants here, how "pair after pair flick by," to quote Pushkin again. Amusingly made-up eyes sparkle with simple human merriment. Black-trousered and light-stockinged legs touch. Feet turn this way and that. And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night with its moist reflections, hooting cars, and gusts of high-blowing wind.
On that kind of of night, at the Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city, an old lady of seventy committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. I happened to go there the next morning, and the watchman, a badly crippled veteran of the Denikin campaign, moving on crutches that creaked with every swing of his body, showed me the white cross on which she hanged herself, and the yellow strands still adhering where the rope ("brand new one," he said gently) had chafed. Most mysterious and enchanting of all, though, were the crescent-shaped prints left by her heels, tiny as a child's, on the damp soil by the plinth. "She trampled the ground a bit, poor thing, but apart from that there's no mess at all," observed the watchman calmly, and, glancing at those yellow strands and at those little depressions, I suddenly realized that one can distinguish a naive smile even in death. Possibly, dear, my main reason for writing this letter is to tell you of that easy, gentle end. Thus the Berlin night resolved itself.
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
If, by chance, the existence of our universe turns out to be some sort of comic competition amongst numberless universes produced by endlessly cascading big bangs, all competing for some unnamed cosmic prize, then I nominate this book, The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, to serve as our entry to that contest, not just as a representative Earth, but as the single representation of the pinnacle of comic evolution in our universe. I don’t think I’m overstating the case. Vladimir Nabokov justifies the existence of, not only the human race, but all life that exists in our universe. If 14.5 billion years ago the big bang happened simply so 8 billion years later a planet would form in an arm of an ordinary galaxies amongst billions of identical galaxies, so that life might evolve, eventually followed by language, simply so that a boy would be born in Russia who would one day write this very book, then that is as much meaning in life as one could ever possibly hope for. This book is miraculous, and the closest to a religious worldview as I will ever come, and that’s more than enough for me.
Now I hope I’m not overselling this book, and I don’t think I am, but I just wanted to make clear that the reason I took 2 years (yes two years) to finish it was because I wanted to savory every bit of it, some of these stories I’ve reread a half dozen times. And now that it’s finally finished I feel a sense of sadness that this book, which has sat on my nightstand for years yellowing before my eyes, and has had no fewer than a hundred joints rolled on its cover, and has talked me down from three separate panic attacks, will now be placed in a bookshelf next to regular undeserving books, yet on the other hand if I were to die now, I could feel like I accomplished at least one thing in my life and it wasn’t all a waste.
A Letter That Never Reached Russia
My charming, dear, distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray haired, azure-liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvorov Museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox. How ardently we kissed behind a waxen grenadier's back! And later, when we came out of that antique dust, how dazzled we were by the silvery blaze of the Tavricheski Park, and how odd it was to hear the cheery, avid, deep-fetched grunts of soldiers, lunging on command, slithering across the icy ground, plunging a bayonet into the straw-bellied German-helmeted dummy in the middle of a Petersburg street.
Yes, I know that I had sworn, in my previous letter to you, not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to possess a lofty pudicity of expression, and yet, here I am, from the very first lines, disdaining that right to sublime imperfection, and defeating with epithets the recollection on which you touched with such lightness and grace. Not of the past, my love, do I wish to speak to you.
It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects—the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one's desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nestling in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A glass column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop, and, for some reason, I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty. Through its windows one can clearly see the rows of brightly lit brown seats between which a lone ticket collector with a black satchel at his side makes his way, reeling a bit and thus looking a little tight—as he moves against the direction of the car's travel.
As I wander along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the glass pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute.
A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow passes under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted–except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she passes under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply.
And beyond the bend, above the sidewalk—how unexpectedly!—the front of a cinema ripples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-pale screen you can watch more-or-less skillfully trained mimes: the huge face of a girl with gray, shimmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, shining tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) there appears real life, unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright waters, a noiselessly but visibly rustling tree.
Farther on, at the corner of a square, a stout prostitute in black furs slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the shiny silk of her peach-colored stockings. I like to observe this placid middle-aged whore, as she is approached by an elderly man with a mustache, who came on business that morning from Papenburg (first he passes her and takes two backward glances). She will conduct him unhurriedly to a room in a nearby building, which, in the daytime, is quite undistinguishable from other, equally ordinary buildings. A polite and impassive old porter keeps an all-night vigil in the unlighted front hall. At the top of a steep staircase an equally impassive old woman will unlock with sage unconcern an unoccupied room and receive payment for it.
And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music that I cannot help imagining the sunny lands toward which I shall depart as soon as I have procured those extra hundred marks for which I long so blandly, so lightheartedly.
I am so lighthearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local café. Many fellow exiles of mind denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about. And of course these so-called modern dances of ours are actually anything but modern: the craze goes back to the days of the Directoire, for then as now women's dresses were worn next to the skin, and the musicians were Negroes. Fashion breathes thought the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fashion's breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances. Our dances, after all, are very natural and pretty innocent, and sometimes—in London ballrooms—perfectly graceful in their monotony. We all remember what Pushkin wrote about the waltz: "monotonous and mad." It's all the same thing. As for the deterioration of morals... Here's what I found in D'Agricourt's memoirs: "I know nothing more depraved than the minuet, which they see fit to dance in our cities."
And so I enjoy watching, in the cafés dansants here, how "pair after pair flick by," to quote Pushkin again. Amusingly made-up eyes sparkle with simple human merriment. Black-trousered and light-stockinged legs touch. Feet turn this way and that. And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night with its moist reflections, hooting cars, and gusts of high-blowing wind.
On that kind of of night, at the Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city, an old lady of seventy committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. I happened to go there the next morning, and the watchman, a badly crippled veteran of the Denikin campaign, moving on crutches that creaked with every swing of his body, showed me the white cross on which she hanged herself, and the yellow strands still adhering where the rope ("brand new one," he said gently) had chafed. Most mysterious and enchanting of all, though, were the crescent-shaped prints left by her heels, tiny as a child's, on the damp soil by the plinth. "She trampled the ground a bit, poor thing, but apart from that there's no mess at all," observed the watchman calmly, and, glancing at those yellow strands and at those little depressions, I suddenly realized that one can distinguish a naive smile even in death. Possibly, dear, my main reason for writing this letter is to tell you of that easy, gentle end. Thus the Berlin night resolved itself.
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
May 20, 2024
This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.
Sublime, sprightly, brilliant – returning to Nabokov again, I am tripping over superlatives. Further thoughts to come.
Sublime, sprightly, brilliant – returning to Nabokov again, I am tripping over superlatives. Further thoughts to come.
April 5, 2021
“The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
In someways reading Nabokov's stories is like swimming in a turbulent river of all his great themes (doppelgängers, the creative process, loss, nostalgia for Russia, the individual, obsession, dreams/reality, etc*).
While there were some stories that were masterpieces, the strength of this book really is the ability it gives the Nabokov enthusiast to see the development of a brilliant writer from the early 20s (egg) to the late 50s (imago).
One only needs to read 'Terra Incognita' to see the seeds of his novel 'Ada: or Ardor' or read 'Tyrants Destroyed' to see the seeds of 'Invitation to Beheading'. This collection is a must for those who adore Nabokov, but also an interesting introduction to Nabokov for those whose only exposure may be "Lolita'.
* I am certain I am leaving out a major theme. Each time I change,, update the review it peeks out at me but disappears as soon as my eyes focus and my fingers start to type.
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
In someways reading Nabokov's stories is like swimming in a turbulent river of all his great themes (doppelgängers, the creative process, loss, nostalgia for Russia, the individual, obsession, dreams/reality, etc*).
While there were some stories that were masterpieces, the strength of this book really is the ability it gives the Nabokov enthusiast to see the development of a brilliant writer from the early 20s (egg) to the late 50s (imago).
One only needs to read 'Terra Incognita' to see the seeds of his novel 'Ada: or Ardor' or read 'Tyrants Destroyed' to see the seeds of 'Invitation to Beheading'. This collection is a must for those who adore Nabokov, but also an interesting introduction to Nabokov for those whose only exposure may be "Lolita'.
* I am certain I am leaving out a major theme. Each time I change,, update the review it peeks out at me but disappears as soon as my eyes focus and my fingers start to type.
August 29, 2022
I was very sorry to finish this. In an ideal world I'd have a new Nabokov short story to read every day. The stories are arranged chronologically so you get a real sense of the growing complexities of the challenges he set himself as a writer. It's his novels that are important. These stories are like watching a virtuoso dancer hone his genius in front of mirrors.
I'm mostly locked out of my account and can't make comments anywhere on the site so apologise for being unable to answer any compliment or criticism levelled at my reviews.
I'm mostly locked out of my account and can't make comments anywhere on the site so apologise for being unable to answer any compliment or criticism levelled at my reviews.
October 13, 2021
I am far from Nabokov’s completist. I’ve read just two of his novels, the one in Russian and one in English. I���ve read and enjoyed his literary criticism in spite of his “strong opinions” and I could not care for his memoirs that much. But I’ve recently come across The Circle. It was a little discovery and I've decided to read more of his stories. I’ve read all the major ones now. I tried to read them in the language he has initially written them. The majority of the Russian language stories are actually written in Berlin. The English ones - in America. But soon enough after his arrival there, Nabokov has stopped writing them all together.
In general, I am very impressed with the sheer variety of those stories. It is amazing how he does not repeat himself considering that his protagonists are all immigrants and his setting is more or less constant be it Berlin, Nice or Boston. But he experiments so much in terms of style, form and the language that I never knew what to expect. His texts are rarely traditional stories with the infamous arc of a plot. Moreover, he actively strives to subvert the usual expectations. He uses amazing variety of tricks: narrators talk to the characters, many of them cannot be trusted; the narration moves from the third to the first person without any warning to a reader; prose rhymes - all these tricks for me firmly belong to the second time of the 20th century. Nabokov wrote these stories of the 20s and 30s.
The impression Nabokov left me with is very different from Chekhov, my favourite Russian writer of short stories. Chekhov rarely fails to move me deeply. While Nabokov has created a sense of aesthetic admiration, almost collaboration when I felt a huge pleasure in identifying a clue he would deliberately leave or noticing a device he used to move the narrative into a different gear. But the stories are still very much populated by very human beings full of very human passions.
It is likely, Nabokov was more interested in writing his novels rather than short stories. Some of them contain the ideas or sketches of his future novels. But still he managed to create some unforgettable ones.
Below is my extremely subjective “Nabokov’s dozen”:
13 Passenger
It is a very short text that might be a key-hole view of Nabokov’s writing philosophy. It involves a train journey and the conversation between a writer and a critic (not on the train). As a bonus, the comic element is sharp.
12 Lance
This one is written in English. There is a sci-fi element to it. But it is not essential. It is more like a spoof. What is essential is a conflict of modernity and human values. It is based on a similar themes as his much wider admired “Signs and Symbols”. Though the context is entirely different. But I prefer this one. It also contains a paragraph that has become even more relevant after more than 70 years. I wonder what he would make out of social media:
“I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one’s imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tyre company’s pictorial advertisement.”
11 A Nursery Tale
A relatively simple anti-fairy tale with a devil (in interesting re-incarnation) who might grant a wish to a young and not very pleasant man. Execution is superb and some very early connotations of Lolita.
10 The Aurelian
This one really made me understand how people felt after hyperinflation in Weimar Republic. But apart from it, it is formerly orchestrated with two point of views, unlikable, but at the same time deeply human main character and some butterflies in the mix.
9 Lik
It is the one of the most realistic and less playful Nabokov’s stories. Still he is making it meta-fictional starting with a bad play within the story where a Russian character played by a provincial Russian actor. The core element is the collision between the actor and his forgotten relative-bully. This man is suddenly resurfaced in the actor’s life from nowhere. And they seem to be mirroring each other by being a double version of a miserable emigrant existence. The finale is worthy of Dostoevsky.
8 Potato Elf
This story would make a good movie. I think it was the intent as Nabokov initially planned to write a script. In the centre there is an unusual and slightly sinister love triangle. The story is dramatic, almost artificially so, almost farcical. But there is a glimpse of authentic sense of melancholy and transience of life. And this passage resonated with me deeply:
"Every separate day in the year is a gift presented to only one man—the happiest one; all other people use his day, to enjoy the sunshine or berate the rain, never knowing however to whom that day really belongs; and its fortunate owner is pleased and amused by their ignorance. A person cannot foreknow which day exactly will fall to his lot, what trifle he will remember forever: the ripple of reflected sunlight on a wall bordering water or the revolving fall of a maple leaf; and it often happens that he recognizes his day only in retrospection, long after he has plucked, and crumpled, and chucked under his desk the calendar leaf with the forgotten figure."
7 “Doorbell”
I would be short about this one. It guarantees to subvert your expectations.
6 ‘Dashing Fellow”
Very nasty unlikable protagonist. But it is a fantastic story - the way how Nabokov is creating this type. The story starts from the perspective of the main character presented in the plural first person “we”:
‘Our suitcase is carefully embellished with bright-coloured stickers:”Nurberg, Stuttgart, Koln - and even Lido (but that one is fraudulent). We have a swarthy complexion, a network of purple-red veins, a black moustache, trimly clipped, and hairy nostrils. We breathe hard through our nose as we try to solve a crossword puzzle in an emigre paper. We are alone in a third-class compartment – alone and therefore bored’
But the author’s gaze is very present in this opening as well. “hairy nostrils and heavy breathing” doubtfully this chap is so self-critical.
The story then moves into the third person narration, swiftly and gracefully toggles between that and the proper first single. Despicable things happen. And then this ending:
“When we have fed and slept, life will regain its looks …And then, sometime later, we die’
What a brilliant framing of the story and that last line!
Coincidently, I’ve come across a similar framing in the recently published novel Checkout 19 by C L Bennet
5. Music
This is probably the most lyrical story out of this selection of mine. It nods to both Chekhov and Tolstoy. It is beautiful and sad, the one of those stories when something does not happen. But I loved it. The most striking is how the development of the story within the story moves in unison with the music performed in it. Describing the music through the words is very rarely successful. But here, Nabokov achieved something even more special.
4 “An affair of honour”
In this one Nabokov subverts well established genre of story about a duel. Almost all self-respected Russian writers would have written the one. I believe the French did the same. And here comes Nabokov. The story is very Gogolian. It is both comic and profound. In Nabokov’s own words (about Gogol’s tales):
“..’mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the Chaos from which they had all derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature…appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships.”
This is perfectly applicable to this story and to many more pieces of Nabokov’s own writing.
3 The Circle
This was the first story by Nabokov I’ve read. And, it holds well in my ranking. Here I would just say - how about starting a story from “Secondly,..”. My wonderful GR friend, Ilse has written a great review of this one.
2 La Veneziana
It is the one of his early stories. It hasn’t been published until after his death. Maybe he did not like it. I do not know. But I enjoyed it enormously. At the centre of it is a painting (there is a “prototype” in real life). Through a bunch of the brilliantly crafted characters, he examines the sublime. This is combined with a satire on English affluent class and its way of life. Wonderfully composed story.
1 The Vane Sisters
This story is an object of art. Ricardo Piglia said in his brilliant essay Theses on a short story that the best of them contain two levels - the one on the surface and the one carefully hidden. And a story’s essence lies in how these two levels interact.
This story is a superb example of this. But one needs to look hard to see it. I’ve spent a lot of time with this story. If you like looking for a clues, intertextuality and text puzzles, it is the one for you. But even if not, the imagery and the lyrics of a mundane hardly would make anyone unaffected.
I would recommend to read Nabokov's stories if you want to find out what literature could do apart from straightforward storytelling. How it can "appeal to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships."
In general, I am very impressed with the sheer variety of those stories. It is amazing how he does not repeat himself considering that his protagonists are all immigrants and his setting is more or less constant be it Berlin, Nice or Boston. But he experiments so much in terms of style, form and the language that I never knew what to expect. His texts are rarely traditional stories with the infamous arc of a plot. Moreover, he actively strives to subvert the usual expectations. He uses amazing variety of tricks: narrators talk to the characters, many of them cannot be trusted; the narration moves from the third to the first person without any warning to a reader; prose rhymes - all these tricks for me firmly belong to the second time of the 20th century. Nabokov wrote these stories of the 20s and 30s.
The impression Nabokov left me with is very different from Chekhov, my favourite Russian writer of short stories. Chekhov rarely fails to move me deeply. While Nabokov has created a sense of aesthetic admiration, almost collaboration when I felt a huge pleasure in identifying a clue he would deliberately leave or noticing a device he used to move the narrative into a different gear. But the stories are still very much populated by very human beings full of very human passions.
It is likely, Nabokov was more interested in writing his novels rather than short stories. Some of them contain the ideas or sketches of his future novels. But still he managed to create some unforgettable ones.
Below is my extremely subjective “Nabokov’s dozen”:
13 Passenger
It is a very short text that might be a key-hole view of Nabokov’s writing philosophy. It involves a train journey and the conversation between a writer and a critic (not on the train). As a bonus, the comic element is sharp.
12 Lance
This one is written in English. There is a sci-fi element to it. But it is not essential. It is more like a spoof. What is essential is a conflict of modernity and human values. It is based on a similar themes as his much wider admired “Signs and Symbols”. Though the context is entirely different. But I prefer this one. It also contains a paragraph that has become even more relevant after more than 70 years. I wonder what he would make out of social media:
“I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one’s imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tyre company’s pictorial advertisement.”
11 A Nursery Tale
A relatively simple anti-fairy tale with a devil (in interesting re-incarnation) who might grant a wish to a young and not very pleasant man. Execution is superb and some very early connotations of Lolita.
10 The Aurelian
This one really made me understand how people felt after hyperinflation in Weimar Republic. But apart from it, it is formerly orchestrated with two point of views, unlikable, but at the same time deeply human main character and some butterflies in the mix.
9 Lik
It is the one of the most realistic and less playful Nabokov’s stories. Still he is making it meta-fictional starting with a bad play within the story where a Russian character played by a provincial Russian actor. The core element is the collision between the actor and his forgotten relative-bully. This man is suddenly resurfaced in the actor’s life from nowhere. And they seem to be mirroring each other by being a double version of a miserable emigrant existence. The finale is worthy of Dostoevsky.
8 Potato Elf
This story would make a good movie. I think it was the intent as Nabokov initially planned to write a script. In the centre there is an unusual and slightly sinister love triangle. The story is dramatic, almost artificially so, almost farcical. But there is a glimpse of authentic sense of melancholy and transience of life. And this passage resonated with me deeply:
"Every separate day in the year is a gift presented to only one man—the happiest one; all other people use his day, to enjoy the sunshine or berate the rain, never knowing however to whom that day really belongs; and its fortunate owner is pleased and amused by their ignorance. A person cannot foreknow which day exactly will fall to his lot, what trifle he will remember forever: the ripple of reflected sunlight on a wall bordering water or the revolving fall of a maple leaf; and it often happens that he recognizes his day only in retrospection, long after he has plucked, and crumpled, and chucked under his desk the calendar leaf with the forgotten figure."
7 “Doorbell”
I would be short about this one. It guarantees to subvert your expectations.
6 ‘Dashing Fellow”
Very nasty unlikable protagonist. But it is a fantastic story - the way how Nabokov is creating this type. The story starts from the perspective of the main character presented in the plural first person “we”:
‘Our suitcase is carefully embellished with bright-coloured stickers:”Nurberg, Stuttgart, Koln - and even Lido (but that one is fraudulent). We have a swarthy complexion, a network of purple-red veins, a black moustache, trimly clipped, and hairy nostrils. We breathe hard through our nose as we try to solve a crossword puzzle in an emigre paper. We are alone in a third-class compartment – alone and therefore bored’
But the author’s gaze is very present in this opening as well. “hairy nostrils and heavy breathing” doubtfully this chap is so self-critical.
The story then moves into the third person narration, swiftly and gracefully toggles between that and the proper first single. Despicable things happen. And then this ending:
“When we have fed and slept, life will regain its looks …And then, sometime later, we die’
What a brilliant framing of the story and that last line!
Coincidently, I’ve come across a similar framing in the recently published novel Checkout 19 by C L Bennet
5. Music
This is probably the most lyrical story out of this selection of mine. It nods to both Chekhov and Tolstoy. It is beautiful and sad, the one of those stories when something does not happen. But I loved it. The most striking is how the development of the story within the story moves in unison with the music performed in it. Describing the music through the words is very rarely successful. But here, Nabokov achieved something even more special.
4 “An affair of honour”
In this one Nabokov subverts well established genre of story about a duel. Almost all self-respected Russian writers would have written the one. I believe the French did the same. And here comes Nabokov. The story is very Gogolian. It is both comic and profound. In Nabokov’s own words (about Gogol’s tales):
“..’mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the Chaos from which they had all derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature…appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships.”
This is perfectly applicable to this story and to many more pieces of Nabokov’s own writing.
3 The Circle
This was the first story by Nabokov I’ve read. And, it holds well in my ranking. Here I would just say - how about starting a story from “Secondly,..”. My wonderful GR friend, Ilse has written a great review of this one.
2 La Veneziana
It is the one of his early stories. It hasn’t been published until after his death. Maybe he did not like it. I do not know. But I enjoyed it enormously. At the centre of it is a painting (there is a “prototype” in real life). Through a bunch of the brilliantly crafted characters, he examines the sublime. This is combined with a satire on English affluent class and its way of life. Wonderfully composed story.
1 The Vane Sisters
This story is an object of art. Ricardo Piglia said in his brilliant essay Theses on a short story that the best of them contain two levels - the one on the surface and the one carefully hidden. And a story’s essence lies in how these two levels interact.
This story is a superb example of this. But one needs to look hard to see it. I’ve spent a lot of time with this story. If you like looking for a clues, intertextuality and text puzzles, it is the one for you. But even if not, the imagery and the lyrics of a mundane hardly would make anyone unaffected.
I would recommend to read Nabokov's stories if you want to find out what literature could do apart from straightforward storytelling. How it can "appeal to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships."
March 4, 2021
You know, sitting down to review (I rarely review standing up much these days), the entire corpus of stories by Nabokov is not an undaunting challenge, especially for someone as lazy and prone to haiku-length spasms of critique as me. The bulk of these stories are from the Russian, circa 1921-1940, meaning the style is predominantly early Vlad—an astonishing felicity for pastoral and psychological detail, a playfulness uncorroded by the arch cynicism of the later novels, and the firm establishment of the Master’s stylistic brilliance, where every sentence instantly compels you into a world that is serenely vivid, surreally off-beam, and recognisably Nabokovian. As Nabokov’s prose is exhaustively magnificent from sentence to sentence, the density of the quality of these stories is a challenge for speedier readers like me (and two were skipped—‘Ultima Thule’ and ‘Solus Rex’). Among the most memorable for me were ‘Spring in Fialta’, ‘Tyrants Destroyed’, ‘The Admiralty Spire’ and ‘A Forgotten Poet’, each mixing the sardonic humour and penchant for literary mischievousness that makes Nabokov one of the 20thC’s most lovable literary imps. There are occasional thickets of wild Nabokovian prose where lucidity is sacrificed at the altar of his more abstruse, opaque stylistic leanings (stories like ‘Lance’ or ‘Easter Rain’), but rarely is a Collected Stories as consistently breathtaking as this. The conclusion? Nabokov’s stories sit alongside Gogol’s and Chekhov’s as among of the finest of the Russian short form.
May 20, 2007
For better dreams: Eat one slice before bedtime.
January 7, 2020
It took me over a year to get through this one but like many others, it was because I wanted to savor it. What can I say - Nabokov's short stories are absolutely on par with his novels. I sometimes felt that the short format even works better with his style - everything is in excess anyway and it is like an explosive colorful burst when it only a few pages - the effect is stronger.
It contains 65 stories, and they are organized chronologically. This order of appearance confirmed what I already knew before - the I prefer his earlier work. Especially that which was written during his emigre years (in Berlin). Those stories are sentimental and melancholy but at the same time so optimistic and full of life, appreciating its minute details despite the hardships the characters face. And always with subtle humor. Of course, this all comes in the sauce of wonderful wordplay and LOTS of adjectives. Like a marzipan cake with over the top decorations combined with the lingering smell of coffee and cognac in the air, jolly chansons playing on the background and someone laughing through tears. This comforting feeling and a whiff of a bygone world where everything seemed simpler, romantic and never were the streetlights not reflecting on the puddle or someone taking a tram somewhere.
The feeling when you get good news that you don’t want to share right away. The desire to keep this warm fuzzy feeling a little longer. This is what this book feels like to me. A special treat, a secret place, an incredible ode to life and a superbly efficient cure for apathy.
Of course with such scope, not all the stories are equally brilliant. I skipped maybe five or six that I felt that were not doing anything for me.
I marked the best ones and I will list them here. Some of those I read more than once and will revisit in the future.
----
Top three marked with an asterisk):
The Wood Sprite
Sounds
Beneficence
Christmas *
A Letter That Never Reached Russia *
Terror
The Aurelian
A Dashing Fellow
The Reunion
Lips to Lips
Orache *
A Russian Beauty
Signs and Symbols
It contains 65 stories, and they are organized chronologically. This order of appearance confirmed what I already knew before - the I prefer his earlier work. Especially that which was written during his emigre years (in Berlin). Those stories are sentimental and melancholy but at the same time so optimistic and full of life, appreciating its minute details despite the hardships the characters face. And always with subtle humor. Of course, this all comes in the sauce of wonderful wordplay and LOTS of adjectives. Like a marzipan cake with over the top decorations combined with the lingering smell of coffee and cognac in the air, jolly chansons playing on the background and someone laughing through tears. This comforting feeling and a whiff of a bygone world where everything seemed simpler, romantic and never were the streetlights not reflecting on the puddle or someone taking a tram somewhere.
The feeling when you get good news that you don’t want to share right away. The desire to keep this warm fuzzy feeling a little longer. This is what this book feels like to me. A special treat, a secret place, an incredible ode to life and a superbly efficient cure for apathy.
Of course with such scope, not all the stories are equally brilliant. I skipped maybe five or six that I felt that were not doing anything for me.
I marked the best ones and I will list them here. Some of those I read more than once and will revisit in the future.
----
Top three marked with an asterisk):
The Wood Sprite
Sounds
Beneficence
Christmas *
A Letter That Never Reached Russia *
Terror
The Aurelian
A Dashing Fellow
The Reunion
Lips to Lips
Orache *
A Russian Beauty
Signs and Symbols
February 14, 2022
Pentru mâna aceea de povestiri pe care eu, unul, nu le-am înțeles, nici prea gustat, n-o să scad scorul întregii cărți la 4 stele. E posibil să nu fi fost îndeajuns de atent ori să fie ele prea deștepte pentru mine (n-ar fi prima dată).
Foarte plăcută și solicitantă călătoria asta prin imaginația și harul lui Nabokov, preț de 700 de pagini! Dacă dăm puțin la o parte vălul ficțional al prozelor, cartea asta poate fi parcursă binișor și ca o fragmentată și infidelă autobiografie.
Nu spun că narațiunile adunate în acest volum ar fi inspirate direct din viața autorului, dar după câteva zeci citite, ajungi să-l “vezi” pe Nabokov dincolo de ele, cu cinismul lui verde, cu frustrările lui, cu nostalgia lui nestinsă pentru Rusia (copilăriei și a primei tinereți) cea lăsată în urmă și definitiv înstrăinată, chipul ei și firea oamenilor schimonosite de experimentul comunist.
Mai “vezi” printre rânduri și un scriitor suportabil de infatuat, copleșitor, superior, suveran absolut al tehnicii de a depăna, de a împleti & încâlci mici istorii, de a-și reaminti, de a născoci sau reînvia din memorie caractere.
Foarte plăcută și solicitantă călătoria asta prin imaginația și harul lui Nabokov, preț de 700 de pagini! Dacă dăm puțin la o parte vălul ficțional al prozelor, cartea asta poate fi parcursă binișor și ca o fragmentată și infidelă autobiografie.
Nu spun că narațiunile adunate în acest volum ar fi inspirate direct din viața autorului, dar după câteva zeci citite, ajungi să-l “vezi” pe Nabokov dincolo de ele, cu cinismul lui verde, cu frustrările lui, cu nostalgia lui nestinsă pentru Rusia (copilăriei și a primei tinereți) cea lăsată în urmă și definitiv înstrăinată, chipul ei și firea oamenilor schimonosite de experimentul comunist.
Mai “vezi” printre rânduri și un scriitor suportabil de infatuat, copleșitor, superior, suveran absolut al tehnicii de a depăna, de a împleti & încâlci mici istorii, de a-și reaminti, de a născoci sau reînvia din memorie caractere.
March 10, 2021
The start of my obsession. Anthony Lane's rapturous review in The New Yorker brought Nabokov to my 15-year-old mind. I recently came across a contemporaneous, lukewarm-to-negative notice by Edmund White; glad that review wasn't my first exposure.
There's so much to love here ("The Admiralty Spire" and "Spring in Fialta" are tricky, odd, and totally successful - absolute triumphs of the form), but I'm particularly attached to the impressionistic short pieces written in the mid-twenties ("A Guide to Berlin," "The Letter That Never Reached Russia") and the few but mighty stories written during the American years ("That in Aleppo Once..." and the incomparable "Signs & Symbols").
During the leisure hours when the crystal-bright waves of the drug beat at him... I remember reading that sentence (it's in "A Matter of Chance,” the protagonist is a coke head) and wondering what it was that I had just found. His prose - so colorful, so nimble and definite - changed my life. My UK Penguin edition doesn't bear the usual Updike laud (“...ecstatically”), but one from James Wood: "A gorgeous book, a tutor in exquisiteness."
There's so much to love here ("The Admiralty Spire" and "Spring in Fialta" are tricky, odd, and totally successful - absolute triumphs of the form), but I'm particularly attached to the impressionistic short pieces written in the mid-twenties ("A Guide to Berlin," "The Letter That Never Reached Russia") and the few but mighty stories written during the American years ("That in Aleppo Once..." and the incomparable "Signs & Symbols").
During the leisure hours when the crystal-bright waves of the drug beat at him... I remember reading that sentence (it's in "A Matter of Chance,” the protagonist is a coke head) and wondering what it was that I had just found. His prose - so colorful, so nimble and definite - changed my life. My UK Penguin edition doesn't bear the usual Updike laud (“...ecstatically”), but one from James Wood: "A gorgeous book, a tutor in exquisiteness."
March 20, 2016
After chipping away at this immense thing for something like three goddamn years, I've finally finished this extraordinary collection. This spans Nabokov's entire literary career but, honestly, these are all so consistently wonderful it's hard to periodize them except to say that Nabby is one of the finest craftsman of the short story I've ever read. Scads/lightyears beyond either Lolita or Pale Fire. Nabby was so much better with intimate little tales, almost interruptions. It's hard to even begin to characterize them and probably pointless to. It'd be like a Talmudic scholar trying to convince someone of the spiritual merit of the Old Testament: you just know it's all good.
Read
December 8, 2016
20/09/16
I'm taking a class on Nabokov this semester and have finally been sent the reading list. This seemed like a really good collection to buy, because it includes almost all of the short stories on my set text list. The whole collection is huge, with 65 stories, and clearly it'll probably be a very long time before I read the whole thing, but I need to keep track of the stories I do need to read for class.
I've also found copies of the Russian originals, and although I'm not required to read the originals for the class, I feel like I should at least try. Anyone who has read anything by Nabokov will know his use of language, even in English, is complex and difficult, so I don't have much hope for any success in reading his style in Russian, but I'll at least have a look. His novels/novellas are definitely way out of my league, but I'm planning to try the short stories on my set text list.
So the lists below will help me keep track...
08/12/16
The semester is (finally) coming to an end and I've finished all the set reading for this class. Have I read all 65 stories in this collection? No. Will I read more by Nabokov in the future, including from this collection? Almost certainly, but probably after a bit of a break, as otherwise I'd be risking Nabokov fatigue. I've really enjoyed this module, even if it was hard going at times (and I still have an essay to write..), and I think it's given me a really good grounding of Nabokov's work. I marking this as read for now (I think I've read enough to say I've 'read' his short stories!), but I'll be keeping a list below of the stories I'd like to try in the future, whenever I have the urge to dip into the collection again.
For anyone looking to try Nabokov's short stories, my favourites and the ones I'd recommend were 'Signs and Symbols', 'Spring in Fialta' and 'Terra Incognita'.
Stories to read in English for class:
Terra Incognita
: (read 20/09/16) ★★★★½. Well, this was definitely a fantastic start! I attempted this in Russian first and, surprisingly, didn't find the language too taxing. When I read it in English straight after, I hadn't really missed out on anything. On top of that, it was also a first-class short story, enthralling and disturbing, about a feverish, nightmare of an expedition into the jungle gone awry, where perhaps reality isn't so certain.
The Leonardo
: (read 21/09/16) ★★★. The beginning and end of the story were the best parts: the framing of the story with the narrator setting the scene with bringing on props. Basically loved the narration, but there wasn't anything that interesting about the story itself. Also found it much trickier to read in Russian and didn't really understand the story fully until I read it in English. Maybe I need to re-read it now to see if I can make more sense of the language now.
Spring in Fialta
: (read 16/10/16) ★★★★. Beautiful, vivid prose in a sad reflection of past love. Perhaps a bit more straightforward then I'm used to with Nabokov by now, but the ending still packed a punch and there is an abundance of gorgeous imagery to lose yourself in. (I've yet to attempt this in Russian though..)
Visit to the Museum
: (read 19/10/16) ★. Zzzzzzz....
That Once In Aleppo
: (read 20/10/16) ★★★.
Signs and Symbols
: (read 22/10/16) ★★★★★. I am pretty certain this is the shortest of Nabokov's short stories I have read so far, but don't let that fool you. It packs a punch. If you haven't read much by Nabokov yet, and are unsure where to start, this was certainly be a good place to begin. It's a powerful, moving glimpse into the life of an immigrant couple visit their son in a mental asylum on his birthday. The denial, fear, hopelessness, desperation for understanding is clear. Simply perfect and an example of what a short story should be.
The Vane Sisters
: (read 24/10/16) ★★★½. Again beautiful, vivid language, but content wise I simply didn't feel as moved by this one as, for example, 'Spring in Fialta' or 'Signs and Symbols'.
Stories to attempt in Russian for class:
Terra Incognita / Терра Инкогнита
The Leonardo / Королек
Spring in Fialta / Весна в Фиальте
Visit to the Museum / Посещение музея
That Once In Aleppo / Как-то раз в Алеппо...
>Stories to read outside of class:
The Wood-Sprite
Russian Spoken Here
The Potato Elf
The Circle
A Russian Beauty
Torpid Smoke
Cloud, Castle, Lake
Lik
Mademoiselle O
Time and Ebb
I'm taking a class on Nabokov this semester and have finally been sent the reading list. This seemed like a really good collection to buy, because it includes almost all of the short stories on my set text list. The whole collection is huge, with 65 stories, and clearly it'll probably be a very long time before I read the whole thing, but I need to keep track of the stories I do need to read for class.
I've also found copies of the Russian originals, and although I'm not required to read the originals for the class, I feel like I should at least try. Anyone who has read anything by Nabokov will know his use of language, even in English, is complex and difficult, so I don't have much hope for any success in reading his style in Russian, but I'll at least have a look. His novels/novellas are definitely way out of my league, but I'm planning to try the short stories on my set text list.
So the lists below will help me keep track...
08/12/16
The semester is (finally) coming to an end and I've finished all the set reading for this class. Have I read all 65 stories in this collection? No. Will I read more by Nabokov in the future, including from this collection? Almost certainly, but probably after a bit of a break, as otherwise I'd be risking Nabokov fatigue. I've really enjoyed this module, even if it was hard going at times (and I still have an essay to write..), and I think it's given me a really good grounding of Nabokov's work. I marking this as read for now (I think I've read enough to say I've 'read' his short stories!), but I'll be keeping a list below of the stories I'd like to try in the future, whenever I have the urge to dip into the collection again.
For anyone looking to try Nabokov's short stories, my favourites and the ones I'd recommend were 'Signs and Symbols', 'Spring in Fialta' and 'Terra Incognita'.
Stories to read in English for class:
Stories to attempt in Russian for class:
Spring in Fialta / Весна в Фиальте
Visit to the Museum / Посещение музея
That Once In Aleppo / Как-то раз в Алеппо...
>Stories to read outside of class:
The Wood-Sprite
Russian Spoken Here
The Potato Elf
The Circle
A Russian Beauty
Torpid Smoke
Cloud, Castle, Lake
Lik
Mademoiselle O
Time and Ebb
August 2, 2018
Nabokov walks that fine line between poetry and prose. His words are as carefully selected as flowers for a bouquet, and his insights are as pointed as the sturdiest thorn. I loved almost every story in this book. But a few deserve special mention:
'Terror', which is one of the scariest horror stories I've ever read, and one of the most succinct expressions of existential terror I've seen so far.
'The Dragon', a funny and concise takedown of commercial culture.
'The Wood-Sprite', a melancholy ode to classic Russian folklore.
And 'Revenge', which felt like Nabokov's take on a ghoulish mystery.
All the other stories range from good to very good, but I believe these are the ones that'll stay with me the longest. I loved this book overall, and it was great to see such a master explore so many facets of life within two covers.
'Terror', which is one of the scariest horror stories I've ever read, and one of the most succinct expressions of existential terror I've seen so far.
'The Dragon', a funny and concise takedown of commercial culture.
'The Wood-Sprite', a melancholy ode to classic Russian folklore.
And 'Revenge', which felt like Nabokov's take on a ghoulish mystery.
All the other stories range from good to very good, but I believe these are the ones that'll stay with me the longest. I loved this book overall, and it was great to see such a master explore so many facets of life within two covers.
June 17, 2017
Nửa đầu của tuyển tập truyện ngắn này, thú thật là mình chỉ thấy thích (phải nói là cực thích :D) và ấn tượng có mỗi truyện "Một truyện đồng thoại", còn lại thì đọc kiểu cho qua chữ chứ chả hiểu (và vì thế cũng chả nhớ) gì mấy. Cơ mà nửa sau của quyển sách, kể từ truyện "Hành khách" trở đi, thì ôi thôi phải nói là hay tuyệt cú mèo. Nhờ vậy mới cho cuốn này 4 sao :)) Thích nhất là những truyện "Hành khách", "Mỹ nhân Nga", "Cảnh đời một quái vật kép", "Chị em nhà Vane", "Mối tình đầu" và "Mưa Phục sinh" (ôi chà, mình thích nhiều thế nhỉ? :D).
Theo lời nhà xuất bản thì đây mới chỉ là quyển 1 trong số 4 quyển thuộc Tổng Tập Truyện Ngắn Nabokov, dự kiến hoàn thành trong vòng 3 năm. Mình sẵn sàng bỏ tiền ra mua 3 quyển còn lại, miễn là nó hay được như (hoặc hơn) quyển này :D
Theo lời nhà xuất bản thì đây mới chỉ là quyển 1 trong số 4 quyển thuộc Tổng Tập Truyện Ngắn Nabokov, dự kiến hoàn thành trong vòng 3 năm. Mình sẵn sàng bỏ tiền ra mua 3 quyển còn lại, miễn là nó hay được như (hoặc hơn) quyển này :D
July 25, 2022
Preface, by Dmitri Nabokov
--The Wood-Sprite
--Russian Spoken Here
--Sounds
--Wingstroke
--Gods
--A Matter of Chance
--The Seaport
--Revenge
--Beneficence
--Details of a Sunset
--The Thunderstorm
--La Veneziana
--Bachmann
--The Dragon
--Christmas
--A Letter that Never Reached Russia
--The Fight
--The Return of Chorb
--A Guide to Berlin
--A Nursery Tale
--Terror
--Razor
--The Passenger
--The Doorbell
--An Affair of Honor
--The Christmas Story
--The Potato Elf
--The Aurelian
--A Dashing Fellow
--A Bad Day
--The Visit to the Museum
--A Busy Man
--Terra Incognita
--The Reunion
--Lips to Lips
--Orache
--Music
--Perfection
--The Admiralty Spire
--The Leonardo
--In Memory of L. I. Shigaev
--The Circle
--A Russian Beauty
--Breaking the News
--Torpid Smoke
--Recruiting
--A Slice of Life
--Spring in Fialta
--Cloud, Castle, Lake
--Tyrants Destroyed
--Lik
--Mademoiselle
--Vasiliy Shishkov
--Ultima Thule
--Solus Rex
--The Assistant Producer
--'That in Aleppo Once . . .'
--A Forgotten Poet
--Time and Ebb
--Conversation Piece, 1945
--Signs and Symbols
--First Love
--Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster
--The Vane Sisters
--Lance
--Easter Rain
--The Word
--Natasha
Notes
Appendix
--The Wood-Sprite
--Russian Spoken Here
--Sounds
--Wingstroke
--Gods
--A Matter of Chance
--The Seaport
--Revenge
--Beneficence
--Details of a Sunset
--The Thunderstorm
--La Veneziana
--Bachmann
--The Dragon
--Christmas
--A Letter that Never Reached Russia
--The Fight
--The Return of Chorb
--A Guide to Berlin
--A Nursery Tale
--Terror
--Razor
--The Passenger
--The Doorbell
--An Affair of Honor
--The Christmas Story
--The Potato Elf
--The Aurelian
--A Dashing Fellow
--A Bad Day
--The Visit to the Museum
--A Busy Man
--Terra Incognita
--The Reunion
--Lips to Lips
--Orache
--Music
--Perfection
--The Admiralty Spire
--The Leonardo
--In Memory of L. I. Shigaev
--The Circle
--A Russian Beauty
--Breaking the News
--Torpid Smoke
--Recruiting
--A Slice of Life
--Spring in Fialta
--Cloud, Castle, Lake
--Tyrants Destroyed
--Lik
--Mademoiselle
--Vasiliy Shishkov
--Ultima Thule
--Solus Rex
--The Assistant Producer
--'That in Aleppo Once . . .'
--A Forgotten Poet
--Time and Ebb
--Conversation Piece, 1945
--Signs and Symbols
--First Love
--Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster
--The Vane Sisters
--Lance
--Easter Rain
--The Word
--Natasha
Notes
Appendix
July 31, 2020
Nabakov is a master of the form. Although I've read a couple of his novels I will definitely track down a few more
August 22, 2020
A collection of translated stories from Nabokov’s early writings in Russia, mostly from the 20’s and 30’s and 40’s
Nabokov was well traveled — so some of the stories take place in France, Germany, England and the U.S. as well. I tended to like these stories better. The Russian centered stories tend to be quite bleak.
So here are the followings stories I liked the most — they felt rather timeless.
1. Potato Elf — in this story an oft ridiculed circus dwarf falls for his conjurer friend’s wife. She may have ulterior motives. The story is a bit Kafka-esque and well told.
2. The Leonardo — two dastardly brothers despise a newly arrived neighbor who is a bookish merchant — they view him as different and elitist. An insightful story about populism and rationalizing outcomes — eerily reminiscent to Trumpism today.
3. Signs and Symbols — probably the most perfect and most relatable story in the collection. An aging couple are at a loss about what to do about their institutionalized son.
4. First Love — a story about a little boy’s vacation in Western Europe in 1909. At the beach he falls in love with a French girl named Colette. Beautifully descriptive.
3.5 stars
Shelved as 'ongoing'
February 15, 2022I treat myself to one of these every now and again...
September 9, 2011
I started it last spring when I went to NYC for vacation. Read it on the bus on the way there, then I thought I lost the copy for good. Luckily it was unearthed amid the general displacements of moving out of my old apartment.
I'm about a 150 pages in. I think it might be a good smaller, bit-by-bit type of reading experience. I do enjoy having some outside material to take refuge in when schoolwork starts to crowd my brain. A couple stories a week on the train? Some lazy afternoon weekend reading? Why the hell not?
Nabokov's one of those guys who I admire from afar. Sure I read Lolita, and of course it's superb. I've poked around elsewhere in his collected works and I think I'm going to wade into his stuff little by little. Not so much out of intimidation, mind, but more because I have the feeling that when I get into him it'll be all-consuming.
There are a few things I've sort of held off on getting into, simply to respectfully wait to open space in my mind until I can appreciate them fully. This applies to Nabokov equally as much as it does Elvis Costello, old timey country music, The Meters, Duke Ellington, Charlie Chaplin, Indian cuisine, sushi, War and Peace, Don Quixote, Hegel, Proust, and homemade cocktails. It might seem like a long list but there's plenty of life to live, isn't there?
***
Ok, long breath...now it's finished. It took me awhile to get through all of it, but as of yesterday this collection is toast.
A couple of thoughts, right off the bat:
* I don't particularly like the "collected stories" framework. It's daunting and somewhat intimidating to have 6-700 pages of story after story in one's hands. Years and years of work and the many detailed layers of plot, character, voice, and so on are bundled up only to be made more dense and somewhat less palatable, like stacks of carrots in the supermarket. Give that prose some room to breathe!
I think I'd much prefer having single collections of short stories, which are more hit-or-miss for me in general, as a reader. I usually check to see if the short story is *actually* short, i.e. less than 50 pages or so. I don't do short stories that stretch to novella-length. Unless, of course, they are exceptionally gripping...
* I think Poe was right about this, if nothing else, that short stories should be read in one sitting. This isn't just about length of story, it's also about how engaging it is. One of the greatest things about literature (for me, as for a lot of people) is it's capacity to take you to another world. I don't want a short story to drag, no one does, but for some reason when and if this happens, it's somehow more annoying than when a novel does. I expect novels to be occasionally dull or uninteresting, I understand how difficult it would be to sustain every reader's interest in anything for 200, 300, 400, 500 pages. I get that; it's not quite my problem with short stories.
I find that if a short story I'm reading isn't working for me I'm sort of trapped- I'm a stickler for finishing books I start, if for no other reason than pride and the nagging feeling that the book might pick up a bit at the end or something. I need a short story to really work for me, pretty much off the bat...it's kind of entitled and maybe a bit unfair but that's how my reading habits seem to go.
So, on to the issue of Nabokov himself. I honor him, I respect his sophistication and consummate skill with words, images, sentiments, etc. His taste is incredible. Never overdoes it, always notices the essential minor detail of a person's clothing, face, spatial position, etc. He's that way philosophically, too- he never misses a beat with registering a quirk of fate, unevenness of character, complex, ironic situation, etc. The back cover refers to his "connesieur's sampling of the table of human folly" and I thought about that many times after I started repeatedly dipping into the text. Nothing's lost on Mr. Nabokov, of this I am sure. Henry James would have nodded his approval; Hemingway would have surely grunted in approval of V.N.'s shite detector.
The man's got...sensibility. I have a feeling that he would be fascinating to meet in person. Composed, scrupulously curteous, witty, engaging, and yet with a deep, ironic, elegant reserve where strange images and memories might be bubbling.
Martin Amis, a writer and reader I respect tremendously and who certainly knows his Nabokov frontwards and back, likes to make the analogy of writing with being a host. Do you prepare for your guests? Bring out the fine china? Sweep the rug? Buy good booze or tons of the cheap stuff? Do you even bother with them? I think it's a really interesting idea and I can see what he means. The author is 'hosting' the reader in a way. You spend perhaps a great deal of time in his or her company, they show you around, all that kind of thing. They guide you and they focus your attention and try to make you experience something worthwhile, pleasurable or funny or whatever.
Amis says that if you visited Mr. Nabokov he would fuss over you. Prosaically, he sits you in his favorite chair and offers you his best wine and cigars. I like this notion, and I can see it at work here. It's kind of what I meant about being well-mannered and tasteful before. One can open up the book and find something beautifully well-turned on pretty much every page. In terms of sheer writing, just perfectly arranged language and exquisite imagery, the man is puttin' down.
Mailer once made a really insightful comment on the "tensile strength" of a sentence...I think it's a physics term about how pressure is distributed on an object or somthing, it's about tension and force...I don't remember, exactly, but the guy got a degree from Harvard in engineering before he wrote about a million sentences so hopefully he's on to something. Nabokov's sentences have that perfect weight, time and again he never loses his balance. His poise is impeccable. It's a very rare trait, if you think about it, in both literature and life.
I think the reason why I just didn't take to this book (after deliberating a bit I'm sticking with 3 stars) has to do with the sheer density of pages, certainly, but it also has to do with the staggering amount of good stuff here. I didn't take to every story but the ones that I did were pretty breathtaking- pellucid, engaging, wise.
I think what it is is that Nabokov is just too...adult for me, shall we say. He is SO sophisticated, erudite and streetwise, SUCH an immaculate stylist that turning hundreds of pages makes me feel like I'm sort of eating chocolate chip after chip after chocolate chip until the sum total is sort of a big, black, gooey, sweet mess. I wouldn't blame this on Nabokov himself, certainly not his fault he's so rarefied and I doubt that quality might be called a "fault", either. It's just that going through all this prose became rather burdensome- there was so much of it, and so much to enjoy and appreciate that taking it in steadily became engorging.
To get back to the ambiguous use of the word "adult" I don't mean I want my prose writers to be immature. Far from it. I just mean that Nabokov's prose is appropriately nape-tingling (as he felt all good prose must be) but also as polished as a new hard wood floor, almost embalmed in wax. I get antsy around crisply decorated spaces- floors, kitchens, museums, bathrooms, etc. I prefer a little lived-in feeling than a decorative pristine.
It's similar in my aesthetic tastes, too. I like it when works are filled with the tension between opposites: coherence vs. incoherence, form and impression, plain speech and flourid eloquence...I like it when my art is a fragile if firm stay against chaos or just a change of form in and of itself. Think of bebop, if you want to hear it in musical terms. I don't want controlled chaos as much as I want the open window in the church, the rigorous scholarship amid the drunken improvisation and the obscene gesture in the midst of the erudite exegesis. I like a little risk for the author, as well as a risk for the reader.
I don't quite think Nabokov is too polite, it's just that I think he executes something extremely well, and I sort of have to step on my tippytoes to reach it, let alone peek over the height. Lolita very much has the qualities I'm talking about, at least in the sense that it constantly walks the line between its outrageous premise and its bewitching, intoxicating language.
Nabokov's prose is a little too...pristine, for me. When read in fragments it's succulent; in bulk its suffocating. Next thing I read of his (and there will definitely be more, don't you worry about that) should be a shorter piece. I don't think he's pretentious or showing off. I just think it's a difference in taste.
All in all, I enjoyed and profited from having read this book, and I would very much like to revisit it but I don't think it spoke to me as openly as I'd imagined it would. I listed Nabokov among the tastes I hope to aquire in all the different avenues of life and so it remains, albeit a little less so now. My ignorance is dimmed, though perhaps not diminished. Lord knows, it would take more than one 600 page book to do that...
I'm not worthy!
May 12, 2024
Stau aici cât să îngroș întunericul, cât sa îmi apară pete deasupra altora pete ca într-un tablou prost construit unde contururile depășesc marginile...
Stau aici pe marginea nopții ca să îmi citesc amintirile. Tot trecutul meu sparge venele și inundă chiuveta cu sânge proaspăt, poate dacă aș fi trăit cu câțiva ani mai puțin, înaintea la tot ce mă urmărește astăzi.
Nu sunt o fire demonica, dar ma obsedează orice clar de lună, văd strălucirea ei nordică și mă încarc de energii albe, reci, hibernale...
Nabokov nu a reușit cu " Povestiri", scrise la 26 de ani, aproape că îl trage de mânecă pe Dostoievski cu cel mai prost început al său de scriitor și anume "Oameni sarmani".
Povestirile nu au final, se întrerup prea repede, lipsește conexiunea dintre scriitor și cititor.
Un elogiu al mamei Rusia înainte de exil, aproape că îl întrevăd pe tânărul Dostoievski chinuindu-se cu prima sa nuvelă așa cum îl descrie Henry Troyat în "Dostoievski".
Nabokov e pradă atmosferei fantomatice a nopții când creatorul ar trebui sa nu dorma, ci sa se sufoce cu lanțurile creației.
Pe Nabokov nu-l caracterizează simplele povestiri, deși la Cehov ieșeau de minune aceste exerciții de scris fragmentar.
Cu degete reci, selenare, sting această lumânare fumeganda, ca un sărman Dionis a lui Eminescu...
Nu, nu e în stilul lui Nabokov acest acces schopenhauerian, de părăsire totală a voinței, el, care visează doar nimfete, care le descrie atât de savuros, dând muzicalitate chiar și unei pietre fade de pe drum.
Aici nu e Nabokov, fie Povestiri e doar un capriciu al condeiului său, sau doar un jurnal ieftin al tinereții sale plăpânde în marea Rusiei.
Stau aici pe marginea nopții ca să îmi citesc amintirile. Tot trecutul meu sparge venele și inundă chiuveta cu sânge proaspăt, poate dacă aș fi trăit cu câțiva ani mai puțin, înaintea la tot ce mă urmărește astăzi.
Nu sunt o fire demonica, dar ma obsedează orice clar de lună, văd strălucirea ei nordică și mă încarc de energii albe, reci, hibernale...
Nabokov nu a reușit cu " Povestiri", scrise la 26 de ani, aproape că îl trage de mânecă pe Dostoievski cu cel mai prost început al său de scriitor și anume "Oameni sarmani".
Povestirile nu au final, se întrerup prea repede, lipsește conexiunea dintre scriitor și cititor.
Un elogiu al mamei Rusia înainte de exil, aproape că îl întrevăd pe tânărul Dostoievski chinuindu-se cu prima sa nuvelă așa cum îl descrie Henry Troyat în "Dostoievski".
Nabokov e pradă atmosferei fantomatice a nopții când creatorul ar trebui sa nu dorma, ci sa se sufoce cu lanțurile creației.
Pe Nabokov nu-l caracterizează simplele povestiri, deși la Cehov ieșeau de minune aceste exerciții de scris fragmentar.
Cu degete reci, selenare, sting această lumânare fumeganda, ca un sărman Dionis a lui Eminescu...
Nu, nu e în stilul lui Nabokov acest acces schopenhauerian, de părăsire totală a voinței, el, care visează doar nimfete, care le descrie atât de savuros, dând muzicalitate chiar și unei pietre fade de pe drum.
Aici nu e Nabokov, fie Povestiri e doar un capriciu al condeiului său, sau doar un jurnal ieftin al tinereții sale plăpânde în marea Rusiei.
September 16, 2020
3.75 stars
Finally I finished reading this book with its 68 stories (sixty-five stories, as informed in one of its back pages), I found most of them enjoyable but some a bit lengthy, tedious and typically Russian since, I think, Nabokov's written impeccably in inimitable English narrative as well as some French, German and Russian phrases/sentences here and there with which his readers should be familiar, for the sake of better understanding. For instance:
1) Tu es tres hippique ce matin (p. 489)
2) Was dort fur Skandale? (p. 336)
3) il y a pauvre Ilya (p. 574)
etc.
I'm sorry each is Greek to me, how should I solve the problem? I hit a snag every time I came across these non-English sentences/phrases, therefore, they've posted obvious obstacles that definitely nullify my understanding.
One more thing, when we read stories written by Russian authors, they tend to put Russian names as their characters, I wonder why. I think it might be one of their linguistic identities, therefore, we need to recall which ones have said or done anything in what context in a particular story. I usually find it a bit harder than reading the stories written by other Western writers from the U.K., The U.S., or Australia.
There are three stories I liked most:
1) "A Letter that Never Reached Russia", written from Berlin, has presumably revealed a Russian emigrant’s deepening love as noted from his addressing in the letter: “My charming, dear, distant one” (p. 155), “my love” (p. 155), and “dear” (twice, p. 158). Thus, we can’t help visualizing his loving thought of her and I liked this excerpt in the last paragraph:
"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. … " (p. 158)
2) "A Nursery Tale" which is about “a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil” (back cover) due to his roving eyes wherever he sits in public places, therefore, he is doomed to engage in a race against time despite the warning from Frau Monde, “Well, that’s your stop. Very wise to call it a day.” (p. 189).
3) "First Love" involves the narrator’s journey from Russia to stay near the beach in France in Parts 1-2. The opening paragraph in Part 3 wonderfully sets the scene:
" On the browner and wetter part of the plage, that part which at low tide yielded the best mud for castles, I found myself digging, one day, side by side with a little French girl called Colette." (p. 696)
And admittedly, “… Two years before, on the same plage, I had been much attached to the lovely, suntanned little daughter of a Serbian physician; but when I met Colette, I knew at once that this was the real thing. …” (p. 697)
We can see the narrator has his own means in proving his love and an unexpected reward, “… I could not destroy the mosquitoes that had left their bites on her frail neck, but I could and did, have a successful fistfight with a red-haired boy who had been rude to her. She used to give me warm handfuls of hard candy. One day, as we were bending together over a starfish, and Colette’s ringlets were tickling my ears, she suddenly turned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. So great was my emotion that all I could think of saying was, ‘You little monkey.’” (p. 697)
However, I’ll find time to reread "The Visit to the Museum" so that I would write something about it because it is also my favorite because its plot is uniquely of subtle horror I've never read before.
Reading Nabokov's stories, I think, we can learn a lot from his narrative, that is, we'd of course find many new words used in various contexts since he's written these stories as a professional. Interestingly, he has coined some new words for his readers such as raylets (p. 186), orangeade (p. 613), marbleized (p. 676), etc.
Some sentences are impressively unique, for instance: "Since morning the sky had been blindingly white and the sun had been moonlike." (p. 38), "I'm no longer in the bloom of youth." (p. 301), "The folly of chance is the logic of fate." (p. 334), etc.
Moreover, the pages around one third of the copy, that is, after Page 500 miserably split from its spine due to, I think, the glue quality and I found them impossible to replace them to their normal position. This is one of the reasons why the hard-cover ones rarely split due to the more permanently binding quality. I have no choice so “I’ll grin and bear it”. (p. 25)
Find one yourself, read as many stories as you like to learn how Nabokov has moulded and manipulated the language (as reviewed by Daily Mail) and enjoy!
Finally I finished reading this book with its 68 stories (sixty-five stories, as informed in one of its back pages), I found most of them enjoyable but some a bit lengthy, tedious and typically Russian since, I think, Nabokov's written impeccably in inimitable English narrative as well as some French, German and Russian phrases/sentences here and there with which his readers should be familiar, for the sake of better understanding. For instance:
1) Tu es tres hippique ce matin (p. 489)
2) Was dort fur Skandale? (p. 336)
3) il y a pauvre Ilya (p. 574)
etc.
I'm sorry each is Greek to me, how should I solve the problem? I hit a snag every time I came across these non-English sentences/phrases, therefore, they've posted obvious obstacles that definitely nullify my understanding.
One more thing, when we read stories written by Russian authors, they tend to put Russian names as their characters, I wonder why. I think it might be one of their linguistic identities, therefore, we need to recall which ones have said or done anything in what context in a particular story. I usually find it a bit harder than reading the stories written by other Western writers from the U.K., The U.S., or Australia.
There are three stories I liked most:
1) "A Letter that Never Reached Russia", written from Berlin, has presumably revealed a Russian emigrant’s deepening love as noted from his addressing in the letter: “My charming, dear, distant one” (p. 155), “my love” (p. 155), and “dear” (twice, p. 158). Thus, we can’t help visualizing his loving thought of her and I liked this excerpt in the last paragraph:
"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. … " (p. 158)
2) "A Nursery Tale" which is about “a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil” (back cover) due to his roving eyes wherever he sits in public places, therefore, he is doomed to engage in a race against time despite the warning from Frau Monde, “Well, that’s your stop. Very wise to call it a day.” (p. 189).
3) "First Love" involves the narrator’s journey from Russia to stay near the beach in France in Parts 1-2. The opening paragraph in Part 3 wonderfully sets the scene:
" On the browner and wetter part of the plage, that part which at low tide yielded the best mud for castles, I found myself digging, one day, side by side with a little French girl called Colette." (p. 696)
And admittedly, “… Two years before, on the same plage, I had been much attached to the lovely, suntanned little daughter of a Serbian physician; but when I met Colette, I knew at once that this was the real thing. …” (p. 697)
We can see the narrator has his own means in proving his love and an unexpected reward, “… I could not destroy the mosquitoes that had left their bites on her frail neck, but I could and did, have a successful fistfight with a red-haired boy who had been rude to her. She used to give me warm handfuls of hard candy. One day, as we were bending together over a starfish, and Colette’s ringlets were tickling my ears, she suddenly turned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. So great was my emotion that all I could think of saying was, ‘You little monkey.’” (p. 697)
However, I’ll find time to reread "The Visit to the Museum" so that I would write something about it because it is also my favorite because its plot is uniquely of subtle horror I've never read before.
Reading Nabokov's stories, I think, we can learn a lot from his narrative, that is, we'd of course find many new words used in various contexts since he's written these stories as a professional. Interestingly, he has coined some new words for his readers such as raylets (p. 186), orangeade (p. 613), marbleized (p. 676), etc.
Some sentences are impressively unique, for instance: "Since morning the sky had been blindingly white and the sun had been moonlike." (p. 38), "I'm no longer in the bloom of youth." (p. 301), "The folly of chance is the logic of fate." (p. 334), etc.
Moreover, the pages around one third of the copy, that is, after Page 500 miserably split from its spine due to, I think, the glue quality and I found them impossible to replace them to their normal position. This is one of the reasons why the hard-cover ones rarely split due to the more permanently binding quality. I have no choice so “I’ll grin and bear it”. (p. 25)
Find one yourself, read as many stories as you like to learn how Nabokov has moulded and manipulated the language (as reviewed by Daily Mail) and enjoy!
June 26, 2016
The man - really full of himself - at one with the world - but at the same time lacking in empathy for his fellows.
I realized that eveything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the water, you...All was unified, equivalent, divine.
and
I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one: tomorrow I shall splinter again.
Nabokov waxes lyrical on nature but I admired best his economy when describing the last interaction he had with his lover. That bit, few words, elegant execution.
Merged review:
This was strange, I have not got the words but it has me thinking about it since I read it. It was almost like they had a pet.
Is keeping someone jailed us trying to control the 'bad' out there, as if by jailing we feel safe from the badness out there - false safety.
But it's not only other men we jail we also jail animals and call them pets or zoos - is that us trying to control 'uncontrollable' nature?
And who is the jailed and who is the jailor? - because the jailed cannot be left alone so the jailor is in fact jailed to him like Martin is.
Merged review:
I like the language, the words. It's full of loss, sorrow, need. It kind of reminded me of The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die.
There was a bit at the begining of the story where instead of seeing the sprite he saw a man who was wearing a wrongly buttoned coat, buttoned up the feminine way he said. Wonder what that means.
Merged review:
A slice of sorrow topped with that strange chaotic kaleidoscope of how we see the world around us when sorrow, pain, rips away all our feelings and nothing has worth any more, nothing is beautiful, we can no longer care.
February 22, 2013
I fell in love with Nabokov's style in Lolita but hated the story, so I'm torn. The answer? His short stories. Many of them are an absolute joy to read for a writer, perfection in style and pacing. A must read in my opinion for any writer wanting to write short stories. This will probably always be an book I'm reading rather a "read" book, as it is so worth re-reading and re-reading. If you haven't read any of his short stories, "Signs and Symbols" is where to begin. As I write this (21 February 2013) the New Yorker has "Signs and Symbols" available to read online at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1948... .
It's quite possibly the best short story ever written, which is not just my opinion, but that of many.
Another must read is "The Potato Elf," a dwarf love story.
A famous Nabokov quote about writing: "Caress the detail, the divine detail."
And another: "I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, S,the stronger and stranger it is."
Robert Burns
email: robertnovel2002@gmail.com
Website: http://magichatbooks.com
Blog: http://unselfishgene.com/blog
Amazon author page: http://amzn.to/R9Uzso
It's quite possibly the best short story ever written, which is not just my opinion, but that of many.
Another must read is "The Potato Elf," a dwarf love story.
A famous Nabokov quote about writing: "Caress the detail, the divine detail."
And another: "I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, S,the stronger and stranger it is."
Robert Burns
email: robertnovel2002@gmail.com
Website: http://magichatbooks.com
Blog: http://unselfishgene.com/blog
Amazon author page: http://amzn.to/R9Uzso
December 6, 2021
Ruth Bader Ginsberg had Nabakov as an English professor at Cornell. Had to have been before Lolita, because he quit teaching and moved out of the country after Lolita’s success.
Amy Tan chose “Lolita “ as her one book
to read stuck on a desert island.
I read the 10 “best” short stories, as a Lolita warm up, plus “The Vane Sisters” recommended by
Harold Bloomberg.
The stories cover dark human undersides, reminiscent of Carson McCullers. Could read one short story as a daily or weekly vocabulary builder.
Amy Tan chose “Lolita “ as her one book
to read stuck on a desert island.
I read the 10 “best” short stories, as a Lolita warm up, plus “The Vane Sisters” recommended by
Harold Bloomberg.
The stories cover dark human undersides, reminiscent of Carson McCullers. Could read one short story as a daily or weekly vocabulary builder.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 14, 2020
Ik heb heel erg lang over dit boek gedaan omdat ik soms de verhalen nog even wilde bewaren. Een bundel om lang te lezen, opnieuw te lezen. Ik denk dat hij gewoon op mijn nachtkastje zal blijven liggen.
November 17, 2015
One of the stories I liked the most featured a unique take on life imprisonment. Another involved a barber given a chance to shave someone who had tortured him in the past.
Read
May 5, 2023After a long semester I have successfully trudged through EVERYTHING Vlad wrote. A ranking for you all from worst to best (faves have descriptions).
Do NOT Touch with a 10 Foot Pole: The Gift
Not Worth It: Mary, Look at the harlequins, transparent Things, The Eye, King/Queen/Knave
Pretty Good: Bend Sinister, Sebastian Knight, The Defense, Ada, Glory, Pnin
6th Place: The Stories. Compression was really good for Vlad. He fits so much into so little; Truly almost all of them work well in different ways. Russian Spoken Here, Visit to Museum are favorites.
5th Place: Speak, Memory: a beautiful memoir, only hurt by how old the biographies of him that I have read counteract a lot of his idealized vision here. Some of the best writing about how memory works is in here it's so well done. Unfortunately, his life is incredibly irritating, and his whole persona is irritating. HOWEVER, the memory work is SO BEAUTIFUL.
4th Place: Pale Fire. Unfortunately, Nabokov's craft here is incredibly well done. It's almost annoying, scratch that it is annoying, how he gets away with the trick of this book of the poem with the commentary, but the commentary turns into a novel. It's PERFECTLY crafted and I didn't get it till the 4th reading.
3rd Place: Despair AND Laughter in the Dark. A tie!! Both of these books are objectively so fun. It's Nabokov having a good time to make some money without feeling the need to be pretentious We are talking a guy was convinced someone is his twin and murdered him for the insurance money only for the police to say they don't look alike, we are talking a blind man not noticing his daughter is having sex in the same room. They are SO fun. 10/10 beach reads.
2nd Place: Lolita. To me, this is another one of the unfortunately it is good. I'm currently writing my term paper on how in the 1950s this was incredibly groundbreaking and brought attention to the issues presented in the book in a positive way. I understand though that this book is super painful for a lot of people. It leaves me very complicated but I'm very grateful for reading it if that makes sense?
#1: Invitation to a Beheading. Everything about this book is perfect. It is so well crafted, it is so engaging, and it does so much good for society. In the argument it makes. I truly loved it and put nonstop reading it. I canceled plans to stay home and finish this one.
Final thoughts on Vladimir are we got along great for us semester. He's very fun to read carefully even if he also gets incredibly annoying and pretentious: he said that stories like his could only be written once every thousand years. I'm convinced if I ever met him in person I would not like him. But it makes his writing fun to engage with. I will however be taking a break come May 13.
Do NOT Touch with a 10 Foot Pole: The Gift
Not Worth It: Mary, Look at the harlequins, transparent Things, The Eye, King/Queen/Knave
Pretty Good: Bend Sinister, Sebastian Knight, The Defense, Ada, Glory, Pnin
6th Place: The Stories. Compression was really good for Vlad. He fits so much into so little; Truly almost all of them work well in different ways. Russian Spoken Here, Visit to Museum are favorites.
5th Place: Speak, Memory: a beautiful memoir, only hurt by how old the biographies of him that I have read counteract a lot of his idealized vision here. Some of the best writing about how memory works is in here it's so well done. Unfortunately, his life is incredibly irritating, and his whole persona is irritating. HOWEVER, the memory work is SO BEAUTIFUL.
4th Place: Pale Fire. Unfortunately, Nabokov's craft here is incredibly well done. It's almost annoying, scratch that it is annoying, how he gets away with the trick of this book of the poem with the commentary, but the commentary turns into a novel. It's PERFECTLY crafted and I didn't get it till the 4th reading.
3rd Place: Despair AND Laughter in the Dark. A tie!! Both of these books are objectively so fun. It's Nabokov having a good time to make some money without feeling the need to be pretentious We are talking a guy was convinced someone is his twin and murdered him for the insurance money only for the police to say they don't look alike, we are talking a blind man not noticing his daughter is having sex in the same room. They are SO fun. 10/10 beach reads.
2nd Place: Lolita. To me, this is another one of the unfortunately it is good. I'm currently writing my term paper on how in the 1950s this was incredibly groundbreaking and brought attention to the issues presented in the book in a positive way. I understand though that this book is super painful for a lot of people. It leaves me very complicated but I'm very grateful for reading it if that makes sense?
#1: Invitation to a Beheading. Everything about this book is perfect. It is so well crafted, it is so engaging, and it does so much good for society. In the argument it makes. I truly loved it and put nonstop reading it. I canceled plans to stay home and finish this one.
Final thoughts on Vladimir are we got along great for us semester. He's very fun to read carefully even if he also gets incredibly annoying and pretentious: he said that stories like his could only be written once every thousand years. I'm convinced if I ever met him in person I would not like him. But it makes his writing fun to engage with. I will however be taking a break come May 13.
December 1, 2012
I guess every genius has to start somewhere. This 600-page behemoth is wildly uneven and can be a bit of a slog. A lot of the early stories are barely distinguishable, aimlessly descriptive meditations on émigré life; I look back on the table of contents and it's alarming how many titles conjure nothing: no particular character, feeling, or image. "The Seaport," "Beneficence," "The Fight," "The Doorbell"—what were these stories about again?
I think there's a reason Nabokov is remembered as a novelist and not as a master of the short form. It's also telling that he gave up on short stories entirely in the early '50s. I suspect he viewed the short story as an experimental exercise rather than an end unto itself—a realm where muscles were built rather than flexed, in which he could try out new techniques without having to worry too much about failure. Understandably, then, some of the stories are failures (at best, interesting—at worst, terribly uninteresting*), and many are devoted solely to development of the descriptive muscle to the detriment of everything else.
I don't want to spend too much time on individual stories because there are a lot of them. Two of his earliest descriptive rambles—"Sounds" and "Gods"—are among his best in that category; they have an emotional punch that much of his later work lacks. I liked his forays into fantasy even when they were not entirely successful because they broke up the monotony: "Wingstroke," "La Veneziana," "A Nursery Tale," and "The Visit to the Museum" were all memorable for that reason. (Nabokov dismisses "A Nursery Tale" in his own notes as "a rather artificial affair, composed a little hastily, with more concern for the tricky plot than for imagery and good taste," a comment which suggests to me that Nabokov might have been a much more interesting short story writer had he been more slapdash and cared less about imagery and good taste.) Another early story of note is "Terror," one of his best and perhaps his first real classic.
The overall quality improves somewhere around "The Aurelian" (although you have to wade through 250 pages to get there) and then again, markedly, with the lovely "Spring in Fialta" (around page 400). The last twenty stories or so achieve a nice balance between exquisite prose and stuff like plot and character and experimental narrative technique. Happily, even the final three stories, which were written very early in his career but only published recently, are quite good; there is no noticeable dip in quality as the collection draws to a close.
I would recommend this book to Nabokov fanatics who want to read everything the man's ever written. To everyone else I would recommend one of his novels.
* "A Busy Man" has got to be one of the dumbest, most worthless stories I have ever read. Skip it.
I think there's a reason Nabokov is remembered as a novelist and not as a master of the short form. It's also telling that he gave up on short stories entirely in the early '50s. I suspect he viewed the short story as an experimental exercise rather than an end unto itself—a realm where muscles were built rather than flexed, in which he could try out new techniques without having to worry too much about failure. Understandably, then, some of the stories are failures (at best, interesting—at worst, terribly uninteresting*), and many are devoted solely to development of the descriptive muscle to the detriment of everything else.
I don't want to spend too much time on individual stories because there are a lot of them. Two of his earliest descriptive rambles—"Sounds" and "Gods"—are among his best in that category; they have an emotional punch that much of his later work lacks. I liked his forays into fantasy even when they were not entirely successful because they broke up the monotony: "Wingstroke," "La Veneziana," "A Nursery Tale," and "The Visit to the Museum" were all memorable for that reason. (Nabokov dismisses "A Nursery Tale" in his own notes as "a rather artificial affair, composed a little hastily, with more concern for the tricky plot than for imagery and good taste," a comment which suggests to me that Nabokov might have been a much more interesting short story writer had he been more slapdash and cared less about imagery and good taste.) Another early story of note is "Terror," one of his best and perhaps his first real classic.
The overall quality improves somewhere around "The Aurelian" (although you have to wade through 250 pages to get there) and then again, markedly, with the lovely "Spring in Fialta" (around page 400). The last twenty stories or so achieve a nice balance between exquisite prose and stuff like plot and character and experimental narrative technique. Happily, even the final three stories, which were written very early in his career but only published recently, are quite good; there is no noticeable dip in quality as the collection draws to a close.
I would recommend this book to Nabokov fanatics who want to read everything the man's ever written. To everyone else I would recommend one of his novels.
* "A Busy Man" has got to be one of the dumbest, most worthless stories I have ever read. Skip it.
August 6, 2016
The summer of 2016 was a Nabokov story a day, imbuing each day with his golden mellifluous magic. Really that is the healthy way to conquer 67 stories by the same author without burning out. Sure, only twenty five of them reach the excellent to great (4-5*'s) status in my book, so perhaps my rating isn't holistic. It helps when the first 3-4 stories you publish are so superb, containing three of my top five favorite Nabokov's: "The Wood Sprite", "Sounds", "Wingstroke". All of the writing is superior, but I find myself pulled to his stories of the fantastic: "La Veneziana", "The Dragon", "A Nursery Tale", "Ultima Thule", and the always exciting supernatural puzzle at the end of "The Vane Sisters". Also monumental are the Chekovian "An Affair of Honor", the Conrad-inspired "Terra Incognita", the augural "Tyrants Destroyed", and the heartbreaking "Lik". Again, there are no bad stories, perhaps at the worst, Nabokov would call dalliances, little bonbons, while the others are impressionistic exercises, interesting character studies, or veiled etudes in memoir. I would of thought from reading "The Vane Sisters" in anthologies that Nabokov hit his short story stride in English later in his life, but I found almost the opposite to be true with all the wonderful Russian stories from the twenties. I posture that Nabokov was more intent on the novel form in America.
March 30, 2013
Dmitri Nabokov (1934-2012) would let me read excerpts prior to the publication of the book. He would fax me his manuscripts: La Veneziana.
When I lived at the shores of Lake Geneva and attended Art Center (Europe) I was given Nabokov as a subject to read and write about in literature class. I did not want to read anything, because I was ignorant and the Lolita stereotype filled my mind. Little did I know that Nabokov is one of the finest bilingual writers I have found. I even ended up befriending his (late) son Dmitri, who lived a few houses up from mine in Montreux and now, after almost two decades living in the USA I am ready to pin down my own memoir, because the encounter with Nabokov made my life immensely beautiful, and lived to the fullest.
When I lived at the shores of Lake Geneva and attended Art Center (Europe) I was given Nabokov as a subject to read and write about in literature class. I did not want to read anything, because I was ignorant and the Lolita stereotype filled my mind. Little did I know that Nabokov is one of the finest bilingual writers I have found. I even ended up befriending his (late) son Dmitri, who lived a few houses up from mine in Montreux and now, after almost two decades living in the USA I am ready to pin down my own memoir, because the encounter with Nabokov made my life immensely beautiful, and lived to the fullest.
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