The Nabokov Assignment:
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
For more information on this project and Nabokov, click here.
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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
On pronunciation /
Sirin / Revolution
The Wood
Sprite, 1921
[The Sprite]
Nezhit'*
Excerpt
He heaved a deep sigh, and once again I had visions of billowing nimbus, lofty leafy undulations, bright flashes of birch bark like splashes of sea foam, against a dulcet, perpetual, hum.... He bent toward me and glanced gently into my eyes. "Remember our forest, fir so black, birch all white? They've cut it all down. The grief was unbearable―I saw my dear birches crackling and falling, and how could I help? Into the marshes they drove me, I wept and howled, I boomed like a bittern, and then left lickety-split for a neighboring pinewood."
Analysis/Synthesis
This world is a complicated world. Of course, to appreciate the story you do not need to know that Nabokov was exiled from Russia after the Bolshevik revolution. You do not need to know this man's life story from birth to death, his literary output or his lepidopterist yearnings. An image of the elderly Nabokov, Vera tucked in a cabin nearby napping, perhaps, as he takes his crystalline butterfly net and snags another Blue will not really help you understand this story any better. What it does, for me, is give a context and a frame. The opposing forces of literary theory say, at once, that a writer's life is indispensable and insignificant to the understanding of the text.
But what we're dealing with is a sprite, a fairy, a brownie, if you will.
The story begins thus: "I was pensively penning the outline of the inkstand's circular, quivering shadow. In a distant room a clock struck the hour, while I, dreamer that I am, imagined someone was knocking at the door, softly at first, then louder and louder. He knocked twelve times and paused expectantly."
This is the author, the aesthete, who, yearning for contact, for a friend, suddenly invents one. But the sprite doesn't have a very positive, uplifting story to tell. He has been driven from his homeland, Rus'. Nabokov, twenty-two when this story was published, had fled to Germany just two years prior. When the sprite says he could find "no peace," that it was "stillness, desolation, mortal boredom or such horror it's better not to think about it," we can assume he's speaking for two. Or the hundreds of thousands (millions?) that fled the new Soviet Republic.
Additional Links:
More about wood sprites
here.
About the story
here.
Russian
Spoken Here, 1923
Govoryat po-russki*
Excerpt
Martin went into the corridor. Petya and I
followed. The old man in his cozy house jacket really did look like a
prison
warden. He produced the key as he walked, and there was something almost
professional in the way he inserted it in the lock. The lock crunched
twice, and Martin threw open the door. Far from being some ill-lit
hole, it was a splendid, spacious bathroom, of the kind one finds in
comfortable German dwellings. Electric light, bright yet pleasing to
the eye, burned behind a merry, ornate shade. A mirror glistened on
the left-hand wall. On the night table by the bathtub there were
books, a peeled orange on a lustrous plate, and an untouched bottle of beer.
In the white bathtub, on a mattress covered with a clean sheet, with a large
pillow under the back of his head, lay a well-fed, bright-eyed fellow with a
long growth of beard, in a bathrobe (a hand-me-down from the master) and
warm, soft slippers.
Analysis/Synthesis
Martin Martinich, a Russian tobacconist who fled the revolution and emigrated to Berlin, confesses to the narrator of the story that he has, for six months, kept prisoner a Soviet loyalist and suspected spy. Nabokov himself adds a footnote immediately prior to the secret's divulgence―"In this narrative, all traits and distinguishing marks that might hint at the identity of the real Martin are of course deliberately distorted"―perhaps to add realism to a fantastically told tale.
It is not that the situation is so hard to swallow, the situation in general, I mean, but Martin Martinich is not the type to hold a hostage. His victory is his particular brand of resistance, of defiance that takes a comical turn. That the hostage is but a boy of twenty-four, a peasant shows that Martinich's tolerance is less than admirable, his vengeance a bit misdirected.
I will likely have more to say about this story after reading "The Razor."
Additional Links:
About the story
here (you'll
have to dig a bit―note "6")
The text of the story
here.
Sounds, 1923
Zvuki*
Excerpt
It was necessary to shut the window: rain was striking the sill and splashing the parquet and armchairs. With a fresh, slippery sound, enormous silver specters sped through the garden, through the foliage, along the orange sand. The drainpipe rattled and choked. You were playing Bach. The piano had raised its lacquered wing, under the wing lay a lyre, and little hammers were rippling across the strings. The brocade rug, crumpling into coarse folds, had slid partway off the piano's tail, dropping an opened opus onto the floor. Every now and then, through the frenzy of the fugue, your ring would clink on the keys as, incessantly, magnificently, the June shower slashed the windowpanes. And you, without interrupting your playing, and slightly tilting your head, were exclaiming, in time to the beat, "The rain, the rain... I am go-ing to drown it out...."
Analysis/Synthesis
I finally read the story correctly. Today when I read "Sounds" for perhaps the twentieth time (but who is counting?), I finally finally finally read it as Nabokov had intended I read it. Now, I can't promise that he intended everyone else to read it this way―the way I'm about to describe―but I will set it out for you so that you can see where I'm coming from. [Side note; you know that Oates story "Where are you going, where have you been"?―did you know about the Gauguin painting with a similar title; they both ripped the line from the old testament...]
Brian Boyd, a Nabokov biographer I happen to be reading presently, says that "Sounds" is a semi-autobiographical story. I don't care about that too much. Everything is partially autobiographical since memory and imagination are essentially, physically, the same thing.
In the story, an unnamed narrator recalls, quite romantically, his unnamed paramour, a married schoolmarm (I never liked that word). She plays the piano―beautifully, of course―they stroll, visit a friend and return home. The day is uneventful except that her husband has announced his unexpected arrival that night, thereby ending the relationship.
The first time I read the story I thought it was so wonderfully romantic, and just issued forth this sublime perfection of sounds and colors and shapes and humidities and animals and hats. It was just me, though.
What I saw this time (remember that "ostensibly" bit back in story-a-day?―here, if you don't) was a more playful, and hence, more Nabokovian, piece, that shows―beautifully and cleverly―a young man caught in his fancy. This, in some ways, reminds me of "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" by Hawthorne since both stories present a delusional observer and expect that you, the reader, will somehow correct their myopia long enough to see the sadness in so blind a soul. Sadness? Yes, "Sounds" is very sad. But maybe the narrator's naiveté also shows an aspect of real, true love. Somewhere among the sentimental wobbling eye mole and the romantic exploding toads is a man in love, and for Nabokov's terribly original (and brilliant) method of showing it, I love this story and always will.
Additional Links:
The full text of the story
here.
Find sounds across the internet here.
Listen to Irkland's sounds
here.
NOTE
on pronunciation
Nobody likes sounding like a fool when they say a word they've read but never heard aloud. It's possible you've never heard the word "Nabokov" said aloud, and even more possible that you have heard it aloud but pronounced incorrectly. For the "correct" pronunciation (insofar as any is), let us turn to two sources, the first the long-winded author himself, and the second one of his biographers, Brian Boyd:
It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"― filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word "nobody" when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer― rhyming with "redeemer"― not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think).
- Vladimir Nabokov, Interview 1965 (full
text)
Pronounced Vluh-DEEM-ear Nuh-BOK-off. The second syllable of the surname sounds very like the British pronunciation of "awkward," a little less like its American counterpart.
- Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, The Russian Years, 1990
Wingstroke, 1924
Udar krďla*
Excerpt
When the curved tip of one ski crosses the other, you tumble forward. The scalding snow goes up your sleeves, and it is very hard to get back on your feet. Kern, who had not skied for a long time, rapidly worked up a sweat. Feeling slightly dizzy, he yanked off the woolen cap that had been tickling his ears, and brushed the moist sparks from his eyelashes.
Analysis/Synthesis
Nabokov was twenty-four years old when he wrote "Wingstroke" (also "A Stroke of the Wing"). The next year he would marry Véra, the woman with whom he spent the rest of his life. It's a bit comforting for us to know that the young Nabokov had found his one, true, everlasting love, but he probably was unaware of this fact. Perhaps when he was in his seventies, as he sat in his finely furnished Swiss hotel suite with his wife of fifty-odd years―perhaps then he knew it was forever, that he'd locked in correctly. I wonder when she knew.
"Wingstroke" is a bit of a bizarre story; I haven't found too much critical commentary on it, so let me make some up. But first, a synopsis. Kern, a thirty-five-year-old gent with no country of origin, is vacationing at a ski resort, perhaps to get over the loss of his wife who had committed suicide. Kern, as he does elsewhere, notices the inkling of an amorous feelings toward Isabel, an Englishwoman and fellow vacationer, and he promptly courts her with these words: "I need your love. Tomorrow I shall shoot myself." What a guy. Aside from the invisible Great Dane and the red-bearded, pool-playing, Job-writing-about Monfiori (think: angel) and Isabel's terrible skiing accident (which leaves her dead at the end) and the narrator's promise of suicide, nothing else happens in the story.
I say Nabokov really wrote the story about William Tell. The William Tell Overture?? No, just plain old shoot-the-apple-off-my-son's-head Swiss William Tell. It's mentioned twice; twice is enough for anything to mean something (though Hemingway was a fan of thrice). We have William Tell and we have a Great Dane (or a perceived Great Dane, which is somehow more exciting)...what was Nabokov doing?
These are the things that go through a writer's head when she begins to write and then writes a story:
What happens? Who tells it? How does s/he tell it? Why does s/he tell it? Who will want to read this? Do I really want to write this? What is the point―the cosmic point―of writing this? What do I need to write this? Can I possibly write this? I'm writing this. Here I go. First sentence: fine. Now, more alliteration or less? Heavy on the symbolism or light? Absent of magical realism or saturated? Á la Poe? Á la Hawthorne? Á la Melville? Internal rhyme or none? Quotation marks or dashes or nothing? Dialogue? What is my dialogue bringing to this story and what is it taking away? Should I have long, flowing paragraphs or terse ones? What should I call it? What will people think of it? I don't care. I'll just write it. Sentence two: okay. A little off topic after that brilliant sentence one, but we'll keep at it. Now. What's the vocabulary level of the narrator? What period of time is s/he writing in? In what economic situation does s/he live? What does s/he hope to gain from telling this story? Will my third person narrative follow one person or be truly omniscient? Should I break the story into sections? Chapters? Should I use little stars to denote section breaks? One space between sentences or two? Font? What's another word for "thought"? Why am I so hungry if I've just eaten?
So my critical Nabokov theory for "Wingstroke" is as follows: The twenty-four-year-old Nabokov decided that his father had wanted to kill him (William Tell), and the only way to escape was to flee to Switzerland, where he met a charming young woman (Elizabeth―a derivative of Isabel―or vice versa) who was suicidal (the desire of which was shifted to Kern in the story―so named for the Swiss town Bern) and who had remarkably red lips. It was this crimson, carmine color young Vladimir had witnessed in Elizabeth that caused him to write sentences like (in translation): "He exhaled a megaphone of smoke."
And don't get me started on the music, which Nabokov's narrator calls "pounding," "moaning," rattling, wailing, and clattering. We'll address the author's peculiar relationship to music another time.
Additional Links:
The full text of the story
here.
More about the story
here.
Learn about William Tell
here.
Gods, 1924
Bogi*
Excerpt
Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance. The water runs down the drainpipes from steeply sloping roofs. Under the snake's-mouth of each pipe stands a green-hooped bucket. Rows of buckets line the black walls on either side of the street. I watch as they fill with cold mercury. The pluvial mercury swells and overflows. The bareheaded lamps float in the distance, their rays standing on end in the rainy murk. The water in the buckets is overflowing.
Thus I gain entry to your overcast eyes, to a narrow alley of black glimmer where the nocturnal rain gurgles and rustles. Give me a smile. Why do you look at me so balefully and darkly? It's morning. All night the stars shrieked with infant voices and, on the roof, someone lacerated and caressed a violin with a sharp bow. Look, the sun slowly crossed the wall like a blazing sail. You emanate an enveloping smoky haze. Dust starts swirling in your eyes, millions of golden worlds. You smiled!
Analysis/Synthesis
"Gods" is an unusual story for Nabokov to have written. In a dissimilar vein from his other stories, and dealing heavily with free association―and perhaps madness―it ostensibly deals with the fanciful visions the narrator gleans from his lover's eyes. The repeated exaltation of himself and his lover―"For aren't you and I gods?"―might be welcome to Nabokov devotees who think the author may have dabbled in a little metaphysical transubstantiation.
I'm rather perplexed by the chicken story: "I need a cage too," being, if anything, the punch line.
If, as Boyd says, "Gods" is Nabokov's bizarre method of showing the extraordinary in the ordinary, I don't see why he dislikes it so much. Placed alongside Pale Fire or Lolita, one might laugh at "Gods," one might say, "Look at that strapping young man try to find his way among myriad styles and literary techniques." But I enjoyed the story if only because it confirms that Nabokov could think and write as madly as...others I know. I feel better.
Additional Links:
The full text of the story
here.
More about gods here.
A Matter of
Chance, 1924
Sluchaynost'*
Excerpt
The car would arrive in Berlin at five p.m., and at seven it would depart in the opposite direction, toward the French border. Luzhin lived on a kind of steel seesaw: he had time to think and reminisce only at night, in a narrow nook that smelled of fish and dirty socks. His most frequent recollections were of a house in St. Petersburg, of his study there, with those leather buttons on the curves of overstuffed furniture, and of his wife Lena, of whom he had had no news for five years. At present, he felt his life wasting away. Too-frequent sniffs of cocaine had ravaged his mind; the little sores on the inside of his nostrils were eating into the septum.
Analysis/Synthesis
Italo Calvino, a fictional man and not the famous author, sits on a worn, dusty upholstered seat in a railcar; in fact, moments before, when he threw his sac de voyage upon it, the horribly stained and uncomfortable thing emitted a cloud of dust that very well could have produced a sneeze in a head of cattle standing idly beside the tracks of the passing locomotive, perhaps waiting to cross or just looking for unevenly distributed fodder. Nevertheless, he sits, quite alone, in the dimly lit compartment. He has decided, for one reason or another―his fictional books aren't selling well, his wife has left him for an imbecile with a poorly fitted toupee, his steel sphere became unjustly lodged in an ill-conceived hole at the pinball game before boarding the train―that today, August 2, at five in the evening, he will end his life. Nothing anyone could say would possibly change his mind. It's a "done deal," as they say. He no longer finds solace in the small, insignificant things a detailed observer discerns. Just one day earlier he may have been fascinated by the howling sirens' squeak of the compartment door...but no longer.
A woman, not the blonde in the station with the suitcase, Ms. Marne, nor the chief of police's wife, Mrs. Gorin, but Calvino's own estranged wife, who seems to be in the throes of unimaginable remorse (try to imagine it anyway), boards a train at an unattended station about two miles from the residence of her former lover, a man so generous that he became grotesque in recent days (the toupee scarcely helped). It being a Thursday, the train was fairly empty, and it being only three in the afternoon, Mrs. Calvino had her choice of compartment among the many. Whether guided by superstition (skipping odd-numbered compartments) or intuition (attracted to bronze letters over silver) she finally picked a vacant room in the car directly in front of the dining car. Her tight-collared dress, while en vogue and quite becoming, didn't aid much with her intake of air, so she tenaciously crawled over the dusty seat cushion to open the window. Inexperienced train passengers always have difficulty opening these windows, which, in reality, were never designed to open in the first place. After the violent snapping of the latch, Mrs. Calvino tumbled to the coach floor and found herself face-to-face with a sliver of gold, kicked, most likely, under the bench by accident. Seizing the ring―for it was precisely that―she drew it close to her hyperopic brown eyes. At exactly that moment, as she, at five past three o'clock stared cross-eyed into the golden band of the fictional Italo Calvino, the conductor flung open the rusted, screechy door and asked for her ticket. The woman looked at him with an ashen complexion. The ticket-taker took this as a response and he, in turn, provided, with alacrity, the missing piece of information: "Strange you chose this car, ma'am: 'twas just the day before this one today that we found a man deader than a doornail lying right where you are now. S'pose you read about it in the papers, miss? About 'round five the eventide, I think it was."
Additional Links:
More about Nabokov and "A Matter of Chance"
here.
What are the chances you'll
die?
What are the chances you'll win the
lottery?
NOTE
Sirin explained
O. Henry and George Orwell had them, but what was Nabokov doing with a pseudonym? Rather than an attempt to conceal his identity, it seems Nabokov used the nom de plume "Sirin" to differentiate the author Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov from his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, who was a well-known political figure, serving as a minister of justice (among other political and civic roles).
Nabokov kept the name "Sirin" throughout his career as a Russian writer in Europe. The nom de plume served merely to distinguish him from V.D. Nabokov, whose byline appeared frequently in Rul' ["The Rudder," a Russian-language, Berlin-based émigré paper] and elsewhere in the émigré press. Its referent was never secret; the name could appear as Vladimir Sirin, V.V. Sirin, or even, before French or English audiences in the 1930s, as Sirin-Nabokoff or Nabokoff-Sirin.
- Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, The Russian Years, 1990
Nabokov himself weighs in on the matter in an interview:
In modern times sirin is one of the popular Russian names of the Snowy Owl, the terror of tundra rodents, and is also applied to the handsome Hawk Owl, but in old Russian mythology it is a multicolored bird, with a woman's face and bust, no doubt identical with the "siren," a Greek deity, transporter of souls and teaser of sailors. In 1920, when casting about for a pseudonym and settling for that fabulous fowl, I still had not shaken off the false glamour of Byzantine imagery that attracted young Russian poets of the Blokian era. Incidentally, circa 1910 there had appeared literary collections under the editorial title of Sirin devoted to the so-called "symbolist" movement, and I remember how tickled I was to discover in 1952 when browsing in the Houghton Library at Harvard that its catalogue listed me as actively publishing Blok, Bely, and Bryusov at the age of ten.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Interview 1970 (full text)
The Seaport, 1924
[The Port]
Port*
Excerpt
The seaman who had been talking to Nikitin turned and asked, "Couldn't you speak Russian?"
The man in the window said, "I managed to get this music, Lyalya. Remember?"
That was the momentary aura, and it felt almost deliberate, as if someone were having fun inventing this girl, this conversation, this small Russian restaurant in a foreign port―an aura of dear workaday provincial Russia, and right away, by some miraculous, secret association of thoughts, the world appeared grander to Nikitin, he yearned to sail the oceans, to put into legendary bays, to eavesdrop everywhere on other people's souls.
"You asked what run we're on? Indochina," spontaneously said the seaman.
Analysis/Synthesis
Here's the moment, appearing in a relatively unknown and widely overlooked story, when Vladimir Nabokov, man without a homeland, at the age of twenty-five, declares remembrance of the moment that inspired his lifetime of literary creation. "And the dog seemed to be thinking in Russian," he writes. "The Seaport" (also known previously as "The Port") is a semi-autobiographical story (as many V.N. stories seem to be) about a Russian emigrant in search of work in a port in the south of France. He gets a haircut and wanders around a bit. Settling into a comfortable Russian-speaking restaurant, he makes the acquaintance of a few seamen who invite him to shovel coal aboard a ship. Instead of carefully listening, he daydreams and soaks up the conversation of the people around him: namely that of the restaurant-owner's daughter. With her he is transfixed. Women in this short story are symbols of the lost country, representations of the comfortable and the lovable, and they are none too friendly.
Yes, "the low-ceilinged barbershop smelled of stale roses," and "the sunlight blazed on the floor in puddles of molten honey." We are walking, step-by-step through a man's life.
Additional Links:
Read the story in Russian
here.
The history of the Port of San Francisco
here.
Revenge, 1924
Mest*
Excerpt
The customs officer, after rattling off the items ineligible for import, asked him to open a suitcase―the new, orange one. The professor turned the lightweight key in its lock and swung open the leather flap. Some Russian lady behind him loudly exclaimed, "Good Lord!" and gave a nervous laugh. Two Belgians standing on either side of the professor cocked their heads and gave a kind of upward glance. One shrugged his shoulders and the other gave a soft whistle, while the English turned away with indifference. The official, dumbfounded, goggled his eyes at the suitcase's contents. Everybody felt very creepy and uncomfortable. The biologist phlegmatically gave his name, mentioning the university museum. Expressions cleared up. Only a few ladies were chagrined to learn that no crime had been committed.
Analysis/Synthesis
"Revenge" reads more like a Nabokovesque screenplay outline than a short story for the simple fact that Nabokov was engaged in scenario writing at the time (so he reported to his mother). In the story, an old professor plots a torturous method of deadly revenge on his wife, whom he suspects of infidelity. In actuality, the evidence for her transgression was little more than a short note she wrote not to her lover but an apparition that had been visiting her. He commits the crime by placing the skeleton of a hunchback in his stead under the blankets of their bed.
But even though the story is outlinesque, it is not devoid of Nabokov's familiar descriptions (in places, no less, that would be superfluous if it were merely intended as a motion picture scenario). The author dwells on the theme of darkness and light, possibly to bring out the complicated character of the professor. Also prevalent in the story is the professor's rejection of anything poetic, far-fetched or intangible. As the wife says, he "studied the minutiae of life, he refused to enter her world, where the poetry of de la Mare flowed and infinitely tender astral spirits hurtled." For such a complicated subject, remarkably little of the story is devoted to it.
On a different note, I'm not sure how much influence―if any―King Lear had on Nabokov at this time, for the elements of revenge, the white cliffs of Dover, and the pastures of Kent all figure in both "Revenge" and Shakespeare's play. The author is supposedly to have read all of Shakespeare's works (in English) by the age of fourteen or fifteen.
Additional Links:
The full text of the story
here.
A bit more about the story
here.
More about revenge here.
Beneficence,
1924
[Grace]
*Blagost'
Excerpt
Recently I had come across an empty matchbox on your bedside table. On it there was a small funereal mound of ashes and a golden cigarette butt―a coarse, masculine one. I implored you to explain. You laughed unpleasantly. Then you burst into tears and I, forgiving everything, embraced your knees and pressed my wet eyelashes to the warm black silk. After that I did not see you for two weeks.
The autumn morning shimmered in the breeze. I carefully stood the pole in a corner. The tiled roofs of Berlin were visible through the window's broad span, their outlines varying with the iridescent inner irregularities of the glass; in their midst, a distant cupola rose like a bronze watermelon. The clouds were scudding, rupturing, fleetingly revealing an astonished, gossamer autumnal blue.
Analysis/Synthesis
This story, about a forgiving fellow who waits for a meeting with his estranged lover, is truly amazing. Nabokov has to walk a fine line between talking about beneficence and showing it, and he does. The narrator of this story echoes that of "Sounds" in his manner, mien and attitude of oneness with life. It is so peculiar to see such romance and faith coming from the same playful trickster who wrote brilliant tomes and who sped across the United States in search of rare butterfly specimens. It's wonderful, really. For when the narrator, after waiting and waiting and waiting, says that here, here, he "became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized the joy I had sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain," one is quite inclined to believe him. This is a difficult thing to do. What I mean is it's a difficult relationship to form with the reader. Nabokov, above all, is a writer who thinks about that relationship: what he has to offer and what he expects from us.
Once I was up late with a cousin of mine and we were trying to come up with a pompous-sounding declaration to include in a greeting card for our recently graduated mutual friend. I suggested the word "magnanimous" at one point (roused from my thought process from too much Dostoevsky, perhaps) and we included it at once, describing some element of his baccalaurean accomplishment (yes, I just made up that word, "baccalaurean"). Anyhow, the next day, while humoring us with laughter from our attempt at witticism, the issue of definition arose: "What precisely does 'magnanimous' mean," some brave soul inquired. I immediately proffered the one word which I, while reading Dostoevsky, so oft inserted in its stead: "noble." My cousin, the co-author of the manifesto, immediately objected. "No, it means beneficent." Thus ensued a vociferous shouting match, each party conceding not one inch. This one word, so hotly contested, apparently has a few definitions, among them "noble," "lofty," and "generous." "Beneficence" often falls into that latter category, and so, luckily, we both survived the argument and lived to tell about it. The careful reader may, however, notice that while "beneficence" can be inferred from the trait of magnanimity, "nobility" is almost unequivocally associated with it. You're it.
Additional Links:
Beneficence can't be taught, but you might go
here to practice.
Let Irkland guide the way
here.
Details of a Sunset, 1924
[The Catastrophe]
Katastrofa*
Excerpt
He grasped the iron handrails with both hands, leaned forward, calculated his jump. Down below, the asphalt streamed past, smooth and glistening. Mark jumped. There was a burn of friction against his soles, and his legs started running by themselves, his feet stamping with involuntary resonance. Several odd things occurred simultaneously: from the front of the car, as it swayed away from Mark, the conductor emitted a furious shout; the shiny asphalt swept upward like the seat of a swing; a roaring mass hit Mark from behind. He felt as if a thick thunderbolt had gone through him from head to toe, and then nothing. He was standing alone on the glossy asphalt. He looked around. He saw, at a distance, his own figure, the slender back of Mark Standfuss, who was walking diagonally across the street as if nothing had happened. Marveling, he caught up with himself in one easy sweep, and now it was he nearing the sidewalk, his entire frame filled with a gradually diminishing vibration.
That was stupid. Almost got run over by a bus....
Analysis/Synthesis
It was Nabokov himself who changed the title of this story to "Details of a Sunset" long after it had been written. He released it as the title story in a collection of a Nabokovian dozen (13). I think it's an interesting turn, and shows an older Nabokov concerned with completely different things than his younger counterpart. In fact, if you could, picture the two Nabokovs, the one in 1975, comfortable in his Montreux hotel, aged, famous, positive that his literary legacy would live on into the future; and the young Nabokov who wrote "Katastrofa" while he was living in Berlin, and who was not so concerned with brushing his literary precursors off his shoulder. This idea―the double―figures prominently into Nabokov's work, but while the younger, 1924 Nabokov seems interested enough in mimicking the masters of the double before him, the older, Montreux Nabokov is battling to redefine his entire literary career, deemphasizing that which he quite obviously borrowed, and bringing to the forefront that which is quite characteristically him (or is of such blended progeny it is impossible to simply identify).
In the story, just as in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek," the life of a man (in this case Mark Standfuss) is dissevered; the story continues with his life, while he, in fact, dies. Bierce's story, though, is more of a physical distortion of time through conceit, while Nabokov's story is quite clear about the creation of a double.
I propose that the Montreux Nabokov was exhibiting a bit of revisionism when he chose to rename the story. By calling it "Details of a Sunset," he was attempting to shift the story's theme from that of fate and catastrophe (which leads to the double) to that of the implication of the double―its resulting enlightenment, its gift to the character and reader, and its ability to teach; it is only once the catastrophe occurs that the character―and hence, the reader―can discern "translucent porticoes, friezes and frescoes, trellises covered with orange roses, winged statues that lifted skyward golden, unbearably blazing lyres."
The double cannot always be easily reconciled. The young Nabokov might be very upset at his older self's manipulation of the story. But we know that, in fact, the two Nabokovs shall inevitably become one; a unity will occur bridging the gap between young man and old, and we will have but one, dead Nabokov, author of everything.
Additional Links:
More about the story
here.
The scientific details of a sunset
here.
Find the time of the sunset where you live,
here.
Borges was a
master of the double, of mirrors and labyrinths.
The Thunderstorm, 1924
Groza*
Excerpt
The Thunder-god, who had fallen onto the roof, rose heavily. His sandals started slipping; he broke a dormer window with his foot, grunted, and, with a sweep of his arm grasped a chimney to steady himself. He slowly turned his frowning face as his eyes searched for something―probably the wheel that had flown off its golden axle. Then he glanced upward, his fingers clutching at his ruffled beard, shook his head crossly―this was probably not the first time that it had happened―and, limping slightly, began a cautious descent.
Analysis/Synthesis
A couple years ago I was driving through Minnesota, looking (as do most people, I suppose) at the corn fields on the side of the road. I was hungry, so I stopped for a bite to eat at some family diner. Smoking wasn't allowed yet; it must have been early in the day. Anyhow, there was this little kid hopping in the booth right behind me while I was eating. I have a fairly high tolerance level when it comes to this kind of stuff, so I shrugged it off like anyone would. But then, while I'm trying to rescue the islands of pancake from the moat of syrup that is nearly flooding off my plate, the kid leans over to my ear―almost touching it with that little head of his―and says, "I can take you into my arms." Sometimes when people say things at a low volume level they can sound ungodly; that's how this was. I turned to look at the kid, but he'd resumed jumping around, his parents ignoring him just as before while they sucked down sausage digits the size of large pharmaceutical pills.
Now, Minnesota not being much related to anything you can foresee, you're probably thinking, "Well, where's the story? Where's the connection?" and that's what I'm trying to tell you. Because, see, Nabokov's story "The Thunderstorm" has this... well let me finish my story and everything will be clear.
So I get back on the road―I'm hugging I-90, right along the southern border of the state―and the clouds darken. The music I had playing was lost a bit in the pressure of this massive group of clouds coming my way. In the distance I could see lightning in such a volume that it was as if someone had a Zippo and they were flicking the flint over and over across the horizon. I became mesmerized by this a bit (as anyone would, I suppose) and started daydreaming out the window. Not one with a reckless or extreme imagination, the clouds, while darkening the landscape, didn't look inherently evil. I merely suspected a really big thunderstorm, the thunderstorm.
Well then I thought of that kid and what he'd said, and it began rubbing me in the wrong way. I had a difficult time imagining his face again, so that I'd wonder who exactly had said that line "I can take you into my arms." "Maybe it's a song lyric?" I thought. I must have been daydreaming too long because a long line of cars, stopped in the freeway because of some construction ahead, surprised me all of a sudden and I found I couldn't stop. My car went to the right―to the shoulder―and I hurtled through short grasses and weed bushes until a tractor came from nowhere and hit the car. It was orange―fire―everything orange. Plumes of smoke and construction workers with orange vests running to get me out. "I can take you into my arms," someone said.
A bolt of lightning, closer than the rest, shocked me back to the road. The landscape was serene, the traffic sparse. I'd envisioned a terrible catastrophe, actually seen myself go through a collision, but in reality I was just making good time along the smooth pavement. I raced the storms all the way to Wisconsin, where I was meeting someone. The first thing I said upon arrival was, "You should have seen those clouds―they could have taken you into their arms."
Additional Links:
More about the story
here.
Something about Ostrovsky, whose masterpiece The Thunderstorm was
written in 1860: here
Read Ostrovsky's The Thunderstorm
here. [this
novel (later drama, opera) is also known as The Storm]
NOTE
The Russian Revolution
What was this beast that caused Nabokov and his family emigrate to Czechoslovakia (where they were in 1924)? The author famously relocated to Berlin soon after, where he resumed his prolific literary career and acquired a series of educational posts (more specifically tutoring at this point). Keep in mind that in 1918, Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar (New Style or NS), but previously had been using the Julian calendar (Old Style or OS), which differed, at the time of the revolution, by 13 days. Hence, their "February Revolution" actually took place in March, and their "October Revolution" took place in November. But months and days are arbitrary labels...
The February Revolution of 1917 in Russia was the first stage of the Russian
Revolution of 1917. Its immediate result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas
II.
It occurred largely as a result of dissatisfaction with the way the Tsar was
running the country, in particular Russia's ongoing involvement in the First
World War. It saw a largely bloodless transfer of power from the Tsar. The
regime that came into being was an alliance between liberals and socialists
who wanted to instigate political reform, creating a democratically elected
executive and constituent assembly.
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_Revolution
On October 25, 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin led his leftist
revolutionaries in a nearly bloodless uprising in Petrograd, the then
capital of Russia, against the ineffective Kerensky Provisional Government.
Later official accounts of the revolution from the Soviet Union would depict
the events in October as being far more dramatic than they actually had
been.
For the most part, the revolt in Petrograd was bloodless, with the
Bolsheviks taking over major government facilities with little opposition
before finally launching an assault on the Winter Palace. Official films
made much later showed a huge storming of the Winter Palace and fierce
fighting, but in reality the Bolshevik insurgents faced little or no
opposition and were practically able to just walk into the building and take
it over.
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution
One of Vladimir Nabokov's best critics [Simon Karlinsky] observes that his
family connections gave Nabokov "a ringside seat for observing the Russian
Revolution." True, but he didn't show up for the fight.
- Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, The Russian Years, 1990
At the age of eighteen, his father in Petrograd (working as a judicial
official), Nabokov lived in Vyra with his family. Here he attended
Tenishev School. On November 15, 1917 (NS), Vladimir (the author) and
Sergey, his brother, left for the Crimean town Gaspra (near Yalta) since
this territory still remained free. By January the Bolsheviks were
moving into Yalta. Let us not forget that then, in 1918, nearly the
whole world was engaged in war. For the Nabokovs it was impossible to
forget: after the Bolshevik threat they had to worry over the approaching
German army. Ironically, the Germans were seen as liberators in a
sense, when the other option was the harsh Red Army. V.N. lived among
this strife until he sailed, with his family, for Constantinople in April of
1919. In October of that year, the writer would begin his studies at
Trinity College, Cambridge, U.K.
More about the 1917 Revolution
here.
La Veneziana, 1924
[The Venetian Woman]
Venetsianka*
Excerpt
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us. That is why Simpson, in front of whom the long-dead Venetian girl had just risen in her cambric and velvet, now reminisced, as he ambled along the violet dirt of the lane, soundless at this evening hour; he reminisced about his friendship with Frank, about his father's harp, about his own cramped, cheerless youth. The resonant forest stillness was complemented now and then by the crackle of a branch touched one knew not by whom. A red squirrel scurried down a tree trunk, ran across to a neighboring trunk with its bushy tail erect, and darted up again. In the soft flow of sunlight between two tongues of foliage midges circled like golden dust, and a bumblebee, entangled in the heavy lacework of a fern, already buzzed with a more reserved, evening tone.
Analysis/Synthesis
Aha! Finally Nabokov writes and writes and gives us something to roll around in our brains. [Funny how the more one has to offer, the more it says about them...or, no―what am I talking about?] This story, set in and around an English castle, has five characters (with a curious, spurious night-watchman), all of whom are round, minutely described people. Frank, the Colonel's artistic and athletic son, is in love with Mrs. McGore, the art-restorer's wife. Simpson (mentioned above) is Frank's college friend, and a bit of a clumsy, pince-nez wearing poor tennis player (to say nothing of his social skills). The Colonel has purchased a work of art from Mr. McGore, the restorer, and the portrait looks shockingly like Mrs. McGore, who commands attraction from both of the young college boys. News of the affair is bound to come out once 4/5 of the guests know of it.
For a while, Nabokov attempts to fool the reader into wandering down the metaphysical path that he has so casually suggested, but anyone familiar with his prose should remain suspect. V.N. never could have written a story like The Picture of Dorian Gray and let another read it in seriousness. In fact, the two stories do have something in common.
But―and this is a big "but" since I rather enjoyed the story―the Colonel's appreciation of his son's "effeminate" (to use Simpson's understanding of Frank's feeling toward his own artistic side) production is not active and heartfelt, but more resigned (as in "Well, he bested me this time"). Thus, Nabokov's snap ending isn't justified for any other reason except its cleverness in converging characters' wants and desires. This previously unpublished story shows Nabokov extending himself in a good way. He is learning, experimenting. To think it's still 1924 for this young man...simply amazing.
Additional Links:
Read the full text of the story
here.
More about the story
here (#3).
Bachmann, 1924
Bakhman*
Excerpt
Only then did she see Bachmann. He was standing a little away from the other guests. His short legs in baggy black trousers were set wide apart. He stood reading a newspaper. He held the rumpled page close up to his eyes, and moved his lips as semiliterate people do when reading. He was short, balding, with a modest lick of hair athwart the top of his head. He wore a starched turndown collar that seemed too large for him. Without taking his eyes off the paper he absentmindedly checked the fly of his trousers with one finger, and his lips began to move with even greater concentration. He had a very funny small rounded blue chin that resembled a sea urchin.
"Don't be surprised," said Sack, "he is a barbarian in the literal sense of the word―as soon as he arrives at a party he immediately picks up something and starts reading."
Analysis/Synthesis
I have often had one of these literal barbarians visit me at home, and I can wholeheartedly empathize with the frustration put forward in this story. Unfortunately (for both me and him), the barbarian who used to pilfer my reading material upon entering my small, rented space was no genius. I suppose that's why we forgive Bachmann.
But wait. Let's not forgive him anything as of yet. We're not there. First we're listening to the narrator, who says that he learned of this love story of a forgotten pianist through his impresario, Sack. With little else, he launches in: "Here it is."
The first line that forces me to drag my wandering, eager eyes back across the page to reread it is this one: "I imagine with particular clarity how she put on a black, décolleté dress, flicked perfume onto her neck and shoulders...." The narrator never knew Bachmann or Mme. Perov, and it is unlikely Sack would have told him such details (or even known them himself). Why is he imagining anything in the middle of a story he's purportedly telling as fact. Of course we never believe any "purported" facts when we are reading Nabokov (though we might want to). I see a narrator who is mourning the death of something lost, something represented by Bachmann as much as the man himself. Is it a country, a homeland, a love, an historical figure? Maybe it was merely potential. Bear with me―since I know his fall represents much more (a culmination of a conceit, perhaps), but Luzhin's final act in The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina) has some relationship to Bachmann's madness at the end of this short story.
The deranged musician and the dying woman. Yes.
Additional Links:
More about the story
here.
More about The Defense
here.
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*when available and appropriate, I'll provide the
original Russian title.
**names in brackets indicate earlier English variations of the titles.