The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  The Stories of

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  “[This collection] brings the reader closer to his magic.… Those who know Nabokov the novelist and have forgotten that Nabokov the story writer exists now have a precious gift in their hands.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “His English is an extraordinary instrument, at once infinitely delicate and muscularly robust: no other writer of our time, not even Joyce, can catch the shifting play of the world’s light and shade as he does.”

  —Boston Globe

  “These stories are wonders of the English language.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “It startles, then it provokes, and finally it satisfies in a way that a more domesticated fiction cannot.… An enduring tribute to Nabokov’s ability to charm … and inspire.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “They offer a startling, cloudless view of a writer’s development.… The effect of such felicities en masse is not only addictive; they point to the finesse of Nabokov’s ear [and] to the extreme and unembarrassable weirdness of his invention, the plain flights of his fancy.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Glorious.… Should please Nabokov’s devoted admirers and new readers, too.… Early story or late, the tales all read as rich as smoky dark chocolates.”

  —Denver Post

  “Wonderful.… This rich and satisfying book shows how much is lacking in the pale and tremulous fiction of the ’90s.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “A major literary event.… These works display the same high level of sensibility, acute perception, sharp wit and stylistic legerdemain that is the recognized signature of Nabokov the novelist.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “They steam with fresh memories and tussle and toy with fate’s wicked irony.… Redemption shimmers in Nabokov’s darkly turbulent work.”

  —Newsday

  “Demonstrates his dazzling powers of description, his tender evocation of the past, and his ability to focus on odd angles of consciousness.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “It leaves you open-mouthed.”

  —Newsweek

  “These stories would delight anyone for whom humanity and its ideas and foibles are truly important.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “This is genius.… Generously sculpted sentences plunge but never stumble toward the invariably original image, letting language push logic as far as it can go without calling attention to itself.”

  —Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram

  “No writer has expressed more vividly, or explored with greater variety and power, the psychic imperative to give shape and meaning to one’s experience and thereby understand and endure it.”

  —Washington Times

  The Stories of

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including Lolita—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

  BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  NOVELS

  Mary

  King, Queen, Knave

  The Defense

  The Eye

  Glory

  Laughter in the Dark

  Despair

  Invitation to a Beheading

  The Gift

  The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

  Bend Sinister

  Lolita

  Pnin

  Pale Fire

  Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

  Transparent Things

  Look at the Harlequins!

  SHORT FICTION

  Nabokov’s Dozen

  A Russian Beauty and Other Stories

  Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories

  Details of a Sunset and Other Stories

  The Enchanter

  The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

  DRAMA

  The Waltz Invention

  Lolita: A Screenplay

  The Man from the USSR and Other Plays

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS

  Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

  Strong Opinions

  BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

  Nikolai Gogol

  Lectures on Literature

  Lectures on Russian Literature

  Lectures on Don Quixote

  TRANSLATIONS

  Three Russian Poets:

  Translations of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev

  A Hero of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)

  The Song of Igor’s Campaign (Anon.)

  Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

  LETTERS

  Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:

  The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971

  Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977

  MISCELLANEOUS

  Poems and Problems

  The Annotated Lolita

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1997

  Copyright © 1995, 2002, 2006 by Dmitri Nabokov

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995, in slightly different form.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged

  the Knopf edition as follows:

  Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977.

  [Short stories]

  The stories of Vladimir Nabokov.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78809-2

  1. Manners and customs—Fiction. 1. Title.

  PS3527 .A15A6 1995

  813′.54—dc20 95-23466

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Barbara de Wilde

  Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

  v3.1

  To Véra

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  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
r />   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

  EASTER RAIN

  THE WORD

  Notes

  Appendix

  Books by Vladimir Nabokov

  Preface

  HAVING APPEARED individually in periodicals and in various assortments in previous volumes, fifty-two of Vladimir Nabokov’s stories were eventually published, during his lifetime, in four definitive English collections: Nabokov’s Dozen and three other thirteen-story “dozens”—A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, and Details of a Sunset and Other Stories.

  Nabokov had long expressed the intention of issuing a final batch, but was not sure whether there were enough stories that met his standard to make up a fifth Nabokovian—or numerical—dozen. His creative life was too full, and was truncated too suddenly, for him to make a final selection. He had penciled a brief list of stories he considered worthy of publication and labeled it “bottom of the barrel.” He was referring, he explained to me, not to their quality, but to the fact that, among the materials available for consultation at the moment, they were the final ones worthy of publication. Nonetheless, after our archive had been organized and thoroughly checked, Véra Nabokov and I came up with a happy total of thirteen, all of which, in our circumspect estimation, Nabokov might have deemed suitable. Hence Nabokov’s “bottom of the barrel” list, reproduced following this preface, should be considered partial and preliminary; it contains only eight of the thirteen newly collected stories, and also includes The Enchanter, which does not appear in the present collection but has been published in English as a separate short novel (New York, Putnam’s, 1986; New York, Vintage International, 1991). Nor do the author’s working titles correspond in every case to those decided upon for this volume.

  From the list entitled “Stories written in English,” also reproduced following the preface, Nabokov omitted “First Love” (first published in The New Yorker as “Colette”), either through an oversight or because of its transformation into a chapter of Speak, Memory (original title: Conclusive Evidence). Some alignment instructions—albeit in Russian—in the upper left-hand corner suggest that this list was a fair copy prepared for typing. The two facsimile lists contain a few inaccuracies. “The Vane Sisters,” for example, was written in 1951.

  The four “definitive” volumes mentioned above had been painstakingly assorted and orchestrated by Nabokov using various criteria—theme, period, atmosphere, uniformity, variety. It is appropriate that each of them conserve its “book” identity for future publication as well. The thirteen stories published in France and Italy as, respectively, La Vénitienne and La veneziana have also perhaps earned the right to appear as a separate English-language volume. These thirteen have made other individual and collective debuts in Europe, and the four previous dozens have appeared worldwide, sometimes in different constellations such as the recent Russkaya Dyuzhena (Russian Dozen) in Israel. I shall not touch on publication in post-Perestroyka Russia, which, with few exceptions, has been mega-copy piracy in every sense until now, although improvements shimmer on the horizon.

  The present comprehensive collection, while not intended to eclipse the previous groupings, is deliberately arranged in chronological sequence, or the best possible approximation thereof. To this end, the order used in previous volumes has occasionally been altered, and the newly collected pieces have been integrated where appropriate. Date of composition was the criterion of choice. When this was not available or not dependable, date of first publication or other mentions became the guide. Eleven of the newly incorporated thirteen have never before been translated into English. Five of them remained unpublished until the recent appearance of the “new” thirteen in several European languages. Further bibliographical essentials and certain other interesting details appear at the back of this volume.

  One obvious bonus of the new arrangement is a convenient overview of Nabokov’s development as a writer of fiction. It is interesting, too, that the vectors are not always linear, and a strikingly mature short story may suddenly crop up amid the younger, simpler tales. While illuminating the evolution of the creative process, and affording exciting insights into the themes and methods to be used later—particularly in the novels—Vladimir Nabokov’s stories are nevertheless among his most immediately accessible work. Even when linked in some way to the larger fictions, they are self-contained. Even when they can be read on more than one level, they require few literary prerequisites. They offer the reader immediate gratification whether or not he has ventured into Nabokov’s larger and more complex writings or delved into his personal history.

  My translations of the “new” thirteen are my responsibility alone. The translation of most of the previously published Russian stories was the fruit of a cloudless collaboration between father and son, but the father had authorial license to alter his own texts in their translated form as, on occasion, he deemed appropriate. It is conceivable he might have done so, here and there, with the newly translated stories as well. It goes without saying that, as lone translator, the only liberty I have taken was the correction of the obvious slip or typo, and of editorial blunders from the past. The worst of those was the omission of the entire, wonderful, final page of “The Assistant Producer” in all English-language editions, it seems, subsequent to the first. Incidentally, in the song that twice meanders through the story, the Don Cossack who heaves his bride into the Volga is Stenka Razin.

  I confess that, during the long gestation of this collection, I have taken advantage of queries and comments from hawk-eyed translators and editors of recent and concurrent translations into other tongues, and of fine-toothed inspections by those who are publishing a few of the stories individually in English. No matter how intense and pedantic the checking, a flounder or several will slip through the net. Nevertheless, future editors and translators should be aware that the present volume reflects what, at the time of its publication, are the most accurate versions of the English texts and, especially with regard to the thirteen newly collected pieces, of the underlying Russian originals (which were at times very hard to decipher, contained possible or probable author’s or copyist’s slips necessitating sometimes difficult decisions, and on occasion had one or more variants).

  To be fair, I would like to acknowledge, with gratitude, spontaneously submitted draft translations of two stories. One came from Charles Nicol, the other from Gene Barabtarlo. Both are appreciated, and both yielded trouvailles. However, in order to maintain an appropriately homogeneous style, I have stuck, by and large, to my own English locutions. I am indebted to Brian Boyd, Dieter Zimmer, and Michael Juliar for their invaluable bibliographical research. Above all, I am grateful to Véra Nabokov for her infinite wisdom, her
superlative judgment, and the willpower that compelled her, with failing eyesight and enfeebled hands, to jot a preliminary translation of several passages of “Gods” in her very last days.

  It would take much more than a brief preface to trace themes, methods, and images as they weave and develop in these stories, or the echoes of Nabokov’s youth in Russia, his university years in England, the émigré period in Germany and France, and the America he was inventing, as he put it, after having invented Europe. To choose at random from the thirteen newly collected stories, “La Veneziana,” with its astonishing twist, echoes Nabokov’s love for painting (to which he intended, as a boy, to dedicate his life) against a backdrop that includes tennis, which he played and described with a special flair. The other twelve range from fable (“The Dragon”) and political intrigue (“Russian Spoken Here”) to a poetical, personal impressionism (“Sounds” and “Gods”).

  Nabokov gives in his notes (which appear at the end of this volume) certain insights regarding the previously collected stories. Among the many things one might add is the eerie doubling of space-time (in “Terra Incognita” and “The Visit to the Museum”) that foreshadows the atmosphere of Ada, Pale Fire, and, to a degree, Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins! Nabokov’s predilection for butterflies is a central theme of “The Aurelian” and flickers through many other stories. But what is stranger, music, for which he never professed a special love, often figures prominently in his writing (“Sounds,” “Bachmann,” “Music,” “The Assistant Producer”).

  Particularly touching to me personally is the sublimation, in “Lance” (as my father told me), of what my parents experienced in my mountain-climbing days. But perhaps the deepest, most important theme, be it subject or undercurrent, is Nabokov’s contempt for cruelty—the cruelty of humans, the cruelty of fate—and here the instances are too numerous to name.

  DMITRI NABOKOV

  St. Petersburg, Russia, and Montreux, Switzerland

  June 1995

  A note from Georg Heepe, editorial director of Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, traces the discovery of “Easter Rain,” now appended to this edition. It reads in part: