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The Nabokov Assignment: For more information on this project and Nabokov, click here. Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5
The Dragon / Christmas /
A Letter That Never Reached Russia /
The Fight / The Return of Chorb /
A Guide to Berlin
The Dragon,
1924 Excerpt
He lived in reclusion in a deep, murky cave, in the very
heart of a rocky mountain, feeding only on bats, rats, and mold. Occasionally, it is true, stalactite hunters or snoopy travelers would come
peeking into the cave, and that was a tasty treat. Other pleasant
memories included a brigand attempting to flee from justice, and two dogs
that were once let loose to ascertain if the passage did not go clear
through the mountain. The surrounding country was wild, porous snow
lay here and there on the rock, and waterfalls rumbled with an icy roar. He had hatched some thousand years ago, and, perhaps because it had happened
rather unexpectedly―the enormous egg was cracked open by a lightning bolt
one stormy night―the dragon had turned out cowardly and not overly bright. Besides, he was strongly affected by his mother's death.... Analysis/Synthesis "The Dragon" was never published in Nabokov's lifetime. Was it because Nabokov wasn't sure of the story? Did he worry that it wasn't original enough (as Shrayer asserts here)? I'm not so sure. This story describes a dragon who leaves his cave to rid himself of an overwhelming melancholy brought about, ostensibly, by his mother's tragic slaying many years prior. Unfortunately for him, he eats several people full on wine, and the alcohol goes straight to his head: he passes out. This is where the story grows unusual, and I say that not because a dragon story in itself is unusual, but because of the sudden merging of realism and the fabulous. A greedy tobacconist―not a store owner but the head of a company―decides to plaster the snoozing dragon with advertisement flyers. The brand: Miracle. The dragon wakes, is angry and on a rampage when the town's competing tobacconist's gimmick―a giant knight on a horse―terrifies the reptilian creature back into reclusion, where he promptly dies. The cause? The knight reminded him of his mother's death. This might be a good as time as any to mention Nabokov's hostile reception of Sigmund Freud. Nabokov had many not-nice things to say of Freud's theories. My good friend Dr. Green wrote a book on the two men, actually. It is titled, aptly, Freud and Nabokov (I suppose because the reverse order doesn't have the proper "ring"). Should we look at the dragon's death with a psychoanalytic eye (no matter how the author may flounder in his grave)? It seems here that Nabokov was having more fun with the second brand of tobacco's name (Big Helmut) than worrying about the connection to Freud. The other possibility is that the dragon's death is a sarcastic jab at Freud. Nabokov was a smoker at this time; is that relevant? You decide.
Read the full text of the story
here.
Christmas, 1924 Excerpt
A little farther, the supports of a footbridge stuck out
of the snow, and there Sleptsov stopped. Bitterly, angrily, he pushed
the thick, fluffy covering off the parapet. He vividly recalled how
this bridge looked in summer. There was his son walking along the
slippery planks, flecked with aments, and deftly plucking off with his net a
butterfly that had settled on the railing. Now the boy sees his
father. Forever-lost laughter plays on his face, under the turned-down
brim of a straw hat burned dark by the sun; his hand toys with the chainlet
of the leather purse attached to his belt, his dear, smooth, suntanned legs
in their serge shorts and soaked sandals assume their usual cheerful
widespread stance. Just recently, in Petersburg, after having babbled
in his delirium about school, about his bicycle, about some great Oriental
moth, he died, and yesterday Sleptsov had taken the coffin―weighed down, it
seemed, with an entire lifetime―to the country, into the family vault near
the village church. Analysis/Synthesis Brian Boyd, a Nabokov biographer, calls this the author's best story to date (that date being 1924). I would somewhat agree with that statement. I just can't imagine knowing four words for one thing (be it "death" or "love" or whatever) and then writing a coherent sentence without moving from one to another, thinking all the while, "Maybe I should choose this word; maybe it will sound better this way in French." I suspect Nabokov stuck to one language while writing a story. But maybe not. In this story, "Christmas," a father, Sleptsov, buries his young child and mourns the loss. The chap takes it pretty hard, actually. The whole setup―and this is a bit of Nabokov's mind going to work and fixing all these details beforehand―is this: It's wintertime but Sleptsov can't help but going back to his summer home where he has his fondest memories of his son. Being winter, everything is cold, the house shut up (save one wing where the caretakers keep it warm). The father decides that he cannot survive one more day (until Christmas), and that he must end his life somehow. He decides this after taking many of the son's belongings out of the frigid wing of the house and going through them. Sleptsov finds butterfly spreads (for his son was an avid amateur lepidopterist―as Nabokov was), notebooks, and an old papery cocoon. Reading the notebook and seeing the servants' Christmas tree pushes him over the edge and decides his fate. "The clock ticked. Frost patterns overlapped on the blue glass of the window." Time, ever-present, stops. You should really read the ending yourself. Nabokov himself called this story a form of a selfmate, which, in chess, is a far-from-desirable move that results in the person essentially walking themselves into checkmate. In the complete absence of defense, your vulnerability is what pushes you over the edge. In this story, it is Sleptsov's decision to remove the son's belongings from the cold wing of the house. "The cocoon in the biscuit tin had burst at its tip, and a black, wrinkled creature the size of a mouse was crawling up the wall above the table....It had emerged from the chrysalid because a man overcome with grief had transferred a tin box to his warm room, and the warmth had penetrated its taut leaf-and-silk envelope; it had awaited this moment so long, had collected it strength so tensely, and now, having broken out, it was slowly and miraculously expanding." So there's love and death, revolution and butterflies. There are languages and always chess, always numbers and tricks and deceptive labyrinths of beauty and truth.
More about this story here.
A Letter That Never Reached Russia, 1924 Excerpt
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. Analysis/Synthesis I chose this excerpt because it reminded me of how closely some of Nabokov's work resembles writing for the screen―or even an adaptation of something filmed in his mind. It is said that Hitchcock knew every scene of every picture he was working on before he ever sat down to film it. He never looked through the camera because that perspective was unnecessary; he had already identified the most crucial moments, and the rest was merely a re-acting of a movie already shot. Nabokov, it is also said, had entire chapters or books or stories in his head before he sat down to write them, that it was merely a matter of finding time to set the words in print rather than writing as we think of it―as an intensive process, a discovery. Nabokov must have gone through this level of discovery as well; it just happened long before he wrote the story or book. Many people are aware that Nabokov wrote the screenplay to the Lolita that Stanley Kubrick would direct (1962), but not as many are familiar that a lot of his stories float from image to image and scene to scene like a montage or a carefully edited film. I wouldn't say this is always the case, or even that Nabokov was writing screenplays all the time, but I think the comparison is fair. Nabokov was writing scenario treatments at this point in his life, and he did pen a few dramas, but none of this brought him much attention or notoriety. Some say his genius lay more in storytelling and less in dialogue; this is for each individual to decide. "A Letter That Never Reached Russia," the author claims, is a distilment of two chapters of novel that was never completed, but rather later adapted into Mary. It describes émigré life in Berlin, describes it in an attempt to share it with someone, a lover. There goes the stout prostitute, there goes the Great Dane. The Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city...there it goes.
Read the full text of the story
here.
The Fight, 1925 Excerpt
I neither know nor wish to know who was wrong and who was
right in this affair. The story could have been given a different
twist, and made to depict compassionately how a girl's happiness had been
mortified for the sake of a copper coin, how Emma spent the whole night
crying, and how, after falling asleep toward morning, she saw again, in her
dreams, the frenzied face of her father as he pummeled her lover. Or
perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the
play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on
this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable
way. Analysis/Synthesis Conversation overheard at Gough and Geary―sort of by that big church thing: Man 1: ...just by counting spuds on the Potato Elf. But when you consider light―illumination―as such, it's a different matter entirely. My favorite instance is "The Fight," in which he [the author, I'm assuming] does that light game. You remember, right? The shadows, the illumination, the brilliantine afterglow from across the lake, the Berlin sun burning through the Berlin clouds―winning―but then failing so miserably. Man 2: Two words: blue light. That's everything for me. He's [the narrator, presumably] got his eyes closed while he's sun bathing and when he opens them, everything is blue. Man 1: And the dog catcher and the sunbather's navel―like an eye staring up toward heaven―and the forest and the lake: it's all what it is, and this guy's telling us about it. Man 2: Well, yeah, but if light were everything, then why does he have to tell us that "maybe, after all, light is everything"? I mean, if it were everything, it would be everything―end of story. Man 1: I guess everyone doesn't agree. I mean, some days I don't agree. I can't go through the day relying on the pure existence of things, relying on life as a justification of life―its sole justification and sole gratification. That's where meaning-making comes in. I wake up in the morning living my life very pragmatically: there is no art for art's sake and beauty in the steam of my French roast coffee. It's when I'm on the commuter train, crammed next to a hundred yawning, cranky people that I try to figure it all out, try to make some sense of everything. When we come out of the tunnel―every time―I see that sky and it is what it is, and it's something related to our concept of beauty―only grander. Man 2: If that's the case, then there's beauty in death. There's beauty in a guy climbing to the top of this cathedral and leaping off to his death. There's beauty in finding him there splayed like a collection of parts, like an-assemblage-of-vital-organs-rendered-useless, lying under a canary yellow phosphor security light at dawn. Man 1: Exactly. There exactly is beauty in that. Like what he says in the end. He says something like "Maybe it's just the light and the dark on a human body that means something," and it's for us to decide how subjective a process that is, and how much it can or should serve as a connection to our fellow man. Is it the guy tanning himself―the witness, the narrator―with whom we identify, or is it with the lightness and the darkness, the pallid hues glimmering from the other side of the lake. The beauty is in the connection. We form a triad with the story: there is you, there is the story, and there is its representation―the very thing that you struggle encapsulating, and it's already been encapsulated; so the three of you, the self, the life and the art walk hand-in-hand through the forest back into Berlin, where the language slightly escapes you. Man 2: Okay, but that doesn't much describe the taxis I had observed last Friday. There's no way you can tell me that the huge amount of light didn't make those creatures shuffle around. There's no way...
More about self-defense here.
The Return of Chorb, 1925 Excerpt
He passed in reverse through all the spots they had
visited together during their honeymoon journey. In Switzerland where
they had wintered and where the apple trees were now in their last bloom, he
recognized nothing except the hotels. As to the Black Forest, through
which they had hiked in the preceding autumn, the chill of the spring did
not impede memory. And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to
find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular white little
belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so
now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her
exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer
of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white
torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of
fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider's web between two
telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. Analysis/Synthesis Chorb is a bizarre name. It must have seemed really bizarre to Chorb's in-laws. "Chorb" is his last name, by the way. The in-laws are even more bothered by that fact. Their daughter is Mrs. Chorb. I think "Chorb" serves to render the character in a veil. If his name were "John" or "Fred" or even "Akaky Akakievich," he would have a more concrete character. But Chorb. Remember the cocoon in "Christmas"? That was the narrator supposedly responsible for his own "selfmate." Well, clearly Nabokov designed the selfmate; it didn't just happen. The impact such of such a "twist" or coincidence is largely determined by how clumsy the author is. If you can see her strong hands pulling the marionette strings, then a "magical, touching moment," shan't be any of that. In "The Return of Chorb," Nabokov constructs a variation on coincidence that is even more remarkable than the one in "Christmas" because it doesn't rely on any sleight-of-hand trick. When one rereads "Christmas," and one comes, once again, across the words "well-heated room," the magic of the metamorphosis loses some of its poignancy. "Chorb" is different, though. Here Nabokov uses time and a disjointed narration to impose a form on the story. The Kellers are returning from the opera and decide to find that no-good Chorb and their daughter at the run-down hotel they are reportedly at. Then we follow Chorb's trials and tribulations: while honeymooning his wife died suddenly and unexpectedly; he never informed her family. Then we move back even further―to the wedding―when Chorb rushed his bride out of the reception at the Kellers', and brought her to a run-down hotel. All the while Chorb is in the run-down hotel remembering his past with his wife. His past in the hotel, his present in the hotel. He hires a harlot. She arrives in the room, but he doesn't want to sleep with her. Chorb's mind fluctuates back and forth: present/past/present/past. They both sleep. They are sleeping when suddenly Chorb screams because he wakes to see his wife lying next to him when she ought to be dead. But now he sees the harlot for who she is. She dresses to leave. The Kellers have arrived and are knocking at the door.
The Kellers have arrived and are knocking at the door. Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
A Guide to Berlin, 1925 Excerpt
The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the
trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the
twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of
technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow,
uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes
dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor's uniform. Then he will go
home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor's
purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which
our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine―everything will be ennobled
and justified by its age. Analysis/Synthesis "Despite its simple appearance, this 'Guide' is one of my trickiest pieces," wrote Nabokov, referring both to the difficulty of its translation and its overall comprehension. "A Guide to Berlin" is a playful piece that foreshadows the Nabokov to come, the man who would write Pale Fire. Ostensibly, it is, in outline form, a sort of guide to Berlin. Within the guide itself, though, is an interaction between its fictional creator and a friend, while in a bar, and printed in the very section titled "The Pub." The preceding sections ("The Pipes," "The Streetcar," "Work," and "Eden") are all depreciated by the narrator's companion, labeled as events of one's lazy day. After all, "Who cares about how you took a streetcar and went to the Berlin Aquarium?" Thus reduced, the narrator, our guide, looks longingly to the bartender's child, and realizes that this setting―the pub―will form the bulk of his memories. "He will remember the billiard table and the coatless evening visitor who used to draw back his sharp white elbow and hit the ball with his cue, and the blue-gray cigar smoke, and the din of voices, and my empty right sleeve and scarred face, and his father behind the bar, filling a mug for me from the tap."
The child (whose own child may be around in the 2020s to
visit the various Berlin museums) thus validates the drinker's existence,
even if only in the latter's mind. It is not certain that we all fit
so cleanly and necessarily into such a glorious universal web, but it is
certain that we yearn for this, yearn to be a part of something bigger than
ourselves, connected at once to everything wonderful and beautiful―because
we feel wonderful and beautiful―and everything terrible and ugly―because
we feel, at the same time, terrible and ugly. We all crave a past
whose every trifle is valuable and meaningful. Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
A Nursery Tale, 1926 Excerpt
One Saturday, on a frivolous evening in May, Erwin was
sitting at a sidewalk table. He watched the tripping throng of the
avenue, now and then biting his lip with a quick incisor. The entire
sky was tinged with pink and the streetlamps and shop-sign bulbs glowed with
a kind of unearthly light in the gathering dusk. The first lilacs were
being hawked by an anemic but pretty young girl. Rather fittingly the
cafe phonograph was singing the Flower Aria from Faust. Analysis/Synthesis "Tell me about the story!" yelled Corporal Livingston from the prow of the ship. [but actually corporals are in the army―not the navy...boatswain livingston?] "Tell me about that story!" yelled Lieutenant Livingston. [i like the alliteration better that way] "Yes, sir, I, uh, sir the devil is..." "The devil? Do you want me to tell you a thing or two about the devil, son? It can be arranged." "What he's trying to say, sir, is that the story you asked about has, as one of its characters, the devil." "Was I talking to you?" [maybe they're on a carousel―two young lovers watching over someone's sibling, conversing almost silently despite the clamor of the droning music. he leans in to hear her better. she speaks:] "The man's name is Erwin"―(he lips the name Erwin to himself―"and he falls in lust with every girl who passes him." [the boy is struck by his conscience; he looks for the child they are supposed to be safeguarding, and because of this, she almost wants to start over] "The devil appears to Erwin―as an old woman, mind you―and offers him a harem of his own choosing so long as he keeps odd the number of women"―(odd, the boy says)―"and he is to begin the next day." [the carousel stops. the people are not dizzy, but they could be. they could be dizzy] "He finds twelve, and as time runs out, chooses his last girl. But she turns out to be the first girl of the day, so he has really only got twelve. The devil has won again." The sergeant lieutenant corporal recites these words from Nabokov, 1975: "A rather artificial affair, composed a little hastily, with more concern for the tricky plot than for imagery and good taste...." The boy, to impress the girl, says, quoting Nabokov, 1975, he was "eerily startled to meet a somewhat decrepit but unmistakable Humbert escorting his nymphet in the story...."
Faust and Marlowe and Nabokov and Milton and the
rest―they've all got devils. Additional Links: More about this story here.
Terror,
1926 Excerpt
On the fifth day, after a bad night, I took time out for
a stroll. I wish the part of my story to which I am coming now could
be set in italics; no, not even italics would do: I need some new, unique
kind of type. Insomnia had left me with an exceptionally receptive
void within my mind. My head seemed made of glass, and the slight
cramp in my calves had also a vitreous character. As soon as I came
out of the hotel― Yes, now I think I have found the right words. I
hasten to write them down before they fade. When I came out on the
street, I suddenly saw the world as it really is. You see, we
find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us,
that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can
represent it to ourselves. Analysis/Synthesis The terror referred to in the title is the very crisis mentioned above, an existential terror. It comes when the narrator leaves his mistress on business, and finds himself unusually alone. He is suddenly struck with something so terrifying it is incomprehensible. He escapes the terror that time... This story is quite unique relative to the previous stories in that its subject is vague. But the genius, for me, lies in the fact that the narrator's biggest terror at the moment is twofold: first, that the earth-shattering ultimate terror might someday return, and second, that he might not ever be able to describe this terror to someone else. At one point he says, "I am convinced that nobody ever saw the world the way I saw it during those moments," a notion that only increases the stakes for him to convey his helplessness to others. Little in this story could be said to be contrived; the narrator's struggling language aides that sense, and so too does the universality of his feelings: "I assume that those sensations...are familiar to many." In the collection Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (1975), Nabokov said of this story, "It preceded Sartre's La Nausée, with which it shares certain shades of thought, and none of that novel's fatal defects, by at least a dozen years."
Let's not forget the naked eye, the double and the
wholiveira. Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
Razor,
1926 Excerpt His regimental comrades had good reason to dub him "Razor." The man's face lacked a façade. When his acquaintances thought of him they could imagine him only in profile, and that profile was remarkable: nose sharp as a draftsman's triangle; chin sturdy as an elbow; long, soft eyelashes characteristic of certain very obstinate, very cruel people. His name was Ivanov.
That nickname of former days contained a strange
clairvoyance. It is not rare for a man called Stone or Stein to become
a perfectly good mineralogist. Captain Ivanov, after an epic escape
and sundry insipid ordeals, had ended up in Berlin, and chosen the very
trade at which his nickname had hinted―that of a barber. Analysis/Synthesis A story of émigré revenge (as "Russian Spoken Here" is―hence why this story was alluded to before), "Razor" describes the sharp-featured Ivanov mortifying a Russian official who has come for a shave. So much power does the barber yield over his unsuspecting patron, that the latter becomes paralyzed when the threats fly (and the blade is produced). The revenge, though, is not death. In fact, we're not even quite sure what Ivanov suffered at the hand of this other Russian gentleman. After the scare, Ivanov lets him go. To choose, I prefer "Russian Spoken Here" because it provides more grist for the mill, as they say. Martin Martinich's decision to lock up that poor boy who entered his smoke shop says so many things to me: that the Russians who had fled were not so organized or so devious that they intended wide-spread acts of dissent; that the decision was not motivated by revenge or anger (perhaps Petya's decision was), but by a longing to be a part of a bigger resistance, a nobler cause; that survival mattered more than the solitary human acts responsible for producing certain situations. It says these things to me regardless of whether they were really true, and all of them add to my notion of the characters in the story (how I can relate to them, understand or appreciate them as people). In "Razor," by contrast, the protagonist (who antagonizes) scares a man with a blade. That's it. The stakes have been raised―blades and blood are involved, and unspeakable tortures are alluded to. But what has happened to the collective group of emigrants? Ivanov's revenge is personal and singular; it is individual. Good news, though. I got my hands on Shrayer's The World of Nabokov's Stories, and I'm quite excited to see how it might help with these parenthetical "notes," which have been so "note"ably absent as of late. Additional Links:
More about Occam's Razor
here.
NOTE Vladimir Nabokov was just like you or me; he needed money to get by. Though his family was considered well-off before the revolution, Nabokov had little money after emigrating. He worked a number of jobs, the most common being that of tutor. Nabokov, living in Germany, would tutor students in English, French or Russian. Living in England he would tutor them in French or Russian. He also taught tennis and, disposed to pugilism (it occasionally serves as a metaphor in a Nabokov text), boxing. The Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd lists some other employment: bank clerk, farm laborer, film extra, freelance translator, and reviewer [of literature, I'm guessing]. Later in life he taught (at Wellesley and Cornell University) and served as curator of Lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. I'm told he was also a writer. Here is a link to the New York Public Library's exhibition on Nabokov: Under the Glass
The Passenger, 1927 Excerpt
"Our last recourse, then, is to cheat," continued the
writer, absentmindedly throwing a match into the critic's empty wineglass.
"All that's left to us is to treat her creations as a film producer does a
famous novel. The producer needs to prevent servant maids from being bored
on Saturday nights; therefore he alters the novel beyond recognition; minces
it, turns it inside out, throws out hundreds of episodes, introduces new
characters and incidents he has invented himself―and all this for the sole
purpose of having an entertaining film unfold without a hitch, punishing
virtue in the beginning and vice at the end, a film perfectly natural in
terms of its own conventions and, above all, furnished with an unexpected
but all-resolving outcome. Exactly thus do we, writers, alter the themes of
Life to suit us in our drive toward some kind of conventional harmony, some
kind of artistic conciseness. We spice our savorless plagiarisms with our
own devices. We think that Life's performance is too sweeping, too uneven,
that her genius is too untidy. To indulge our readers we cut out Life's
untrammeled novels our neat little tales for the use of schoolchildren.
Allow me, in this connection, to impart to you the following experience." Analysis/Synthesis I enjoy stories that engage me on more than one level. If this is something you like, I encourage you to read Nabokov. And don't merely read him, re-read him. Even if you move only once through the text, slow down or read aloud. Take the book away from your hands and put it on your lap, then, afterwards, put it on your desk and go outside. Come back and find your page. Back up a paragraph or two. Re-familiarize yourself with something you had just begun to understand. Forget one thing and remember a hundred others. This story, "The Passenger," is about a writer recounting a story to a critic. The critic in the story, Nabokov tells us, is modeled after one Yuliy Ayhenvald―but this means little to the modern English reader. The writer, after the brief diatribe above, tells of a train experience: half-waking in a sleeper car, he notices that another passenger enters his room in the middle of the night, and takes the top bunk. Soon he hears the faint sound of muffled weeping. The writer is later roused and prepares to depart at the crack of dawn. But suddenly the train is halted and police board: there has been a murder, they say, and the criminal is aboard the train. It makes so much sense, the writer says, for the weeping man to have been the murderer. It fits into the story. But alas, the weeper and murderer are not one and the same. We yearn, in this chaotic life, for a sense of order and predictability. We come to predict the unpredictable by virtue of its randomness. An artist, in her attempt to capture a piece of Life, will construct a unity that doesn't exist―but why? We seem to appreciate life and its beauties and wonder. Why in its conveyance do we distort it so? The critic, whether he is Ayhenvald or not, can be thought of as the reader, and the story itself can be thought of as a dialogue between writer and reader. Nabokov calls the former a "middlebrow author" but even the greatest genius considers such things. We should lament the death of the train and pray for its rebirth. If it were to come again we would all be greatly helped. Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
The Doorbell, 1927 Excerpt
He was kissing her at random, on the cheeks, on the hair,
everywhere, unable to see anything in the dark but with some interior vision
recognizing all of her from head to toe, and only one thing about her had
changed (and even this novelty unexpectedly made him recall his earliest
childhood, when she used to play the piano): the strong, elegant smell of
perfume―as if those intervening years had not existed, the years of his
adolescence and her widowhood, when she no longer wore perfume and faded so
sorrowfully―it seemed as if nothing of that had happened, and he had passed
straight from distant exile into childhood.... Analysis/Synthesis First the threatening, razor-wielding barber who does nothing but threaten his patron (and interrogator), and now the doorbell which signals the denouement without ever allowing it to occur. Whereas the critic in "The Passenger" suffers physical myopia, Nikolay, in "The Doorbell" suffers from the metaphoric variety: he fails to size up the situation properly. What we have here is a story about a man who, after the civil war, frolics around the world―like Jack London―and then returns to Berlin where he hopes to find an old love: his mother. By some twist of fate he finds her speedily, but bursts in on an uncomfortable situation: she is waiting for someone, one whose birthday is to be, ostensibly, celebrated that very evening. Nikolay fails to put everything together. Just as the reader is led to believe in the blatant naiveté of Robin, in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," so too are we here supposed to be as absent-minded as Nabokov's protagonist. But this story is a little sloppy, if you'll allow me to say so. It reveals Nabokov straining to deceive his readers, and this is a man who so often gives the appearance of effortlessness. Even more charming, perhaps, are the little variations in style that I noted in this story: the narration fluctuates from an objective third person to a very subjective―but detached―first person. For example: "On a side trip to Corsica, he met a fellow Russian, the old journalist Grushevski, who was leaving for Berlin. Make inquiries on my behalf. Perhaps you'll find her. Tell her I'm alive and well.... But this source did not bring any news either."
the doorbell rings and rings Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
An Affair of Honor, 1927
[The Cur, or The Scoundrel] Excerpt Must do something, Anton Petrovich thought, but what? He felt a tremor in his legs, an absence of legs―only that cold, aching tremor. Do something quick.... He started pulling a glove off one hand. The glove was new and fit snugly. Anton Petrovich kept jerking his head and muttering mechanically, "Go away immediately. This is dreadful. Go away...." "I'm going, I'm going, Anton," said Berg, squaring his broad shoulders as he leisurely got into his jacket.
If I hit him, he'll hit me too, Anton Petrovich thought
in a flash. He pulled off the glove with a final yank and threw it awkwardly
at Berg. The glove slapped against the wall and dropped into the washstand
pitcher. Analysis/Synthesis Brian Boyd (1990), a Nabokov biographer, called this story the author's "longest and best short story to date" (p.274). I'm beginning to think he will say that about every story in succession. "Oh yes," Boyd could say, "this too is Nabokov's best story to date." Perhaps he had written the phrase "his longest short story to date," and found it lacking in syllables, so he added, rather thoughtlessly, the "and best." Not that this isn't a good story...but c'mon! Don't people find favorites? Am I wrong for clinging to certain stories that stand out? What everyone is clamoring about is this duel thing. The honorable affair is that of a duel. Interestingly, though, the duel never takes place, prompting the reader to consider whether its avoidance might just be more magnanimous than the actual follow-through. So, there's this guy Anton Petrovich (repeated like this all the time). His wife and this guy Berg get caught in a slightly compromising but by no means adulterous situation, and Anton, as thoughtlessly as Boyd threw in his praise, throws his glove at the towering Berg. Later that night, Anton Petrovich (repeated like this all the time) is over at Mityushin's house (giving his cheating wife Tanya a chance to get out), and mentions the bit about a duel. Throwing glove...duel―get it? Let me back up. Dostoevsky has got this novel, The Devils or Possessed or Demons (depending on your translation), and Gaganov and Stavrogin fight a bizarre duel: they both miss (one intentionally and one not so intentionally). And Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina: After Karenin finds out about his wife's affair, he considers his options: "'There is no doubt our society is still so barbarous (it's not the same in England) that very many...look favorably on the duel; but what result is attained by it?'" (Part III, Chapter 13). Both of these authors are turning the notion of the duel on its head, but, ironically perhaps, they are still romanticizing the idea of a duel, still honoring those feelings of contempt that give way to such a confrontation. "No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman," Karenin concludes. And in Eugene Onegin, by the renowned Pushkin, we also have a duel. Here, though, someone dies. And guess what? Nabokov translated this long poem (in a work he considered one of the most important of his career―Nabokov, that is). In this translation he also includes copious notes of explanation, and a detailed history of the duel. So not terribly surprising that here, in 1927, Nabokov is thinking about the legacy of the duel. Fascinating are both Anton Petrovich (as a simpleton and klutz) and the de-mythologizing of this act of revenge. For instance, Anton's new glove misses his opponent and lands in a pitcher of water. Instead of dueling pistols, they can only get Browning automatics (a hilarious turn, if I do say so). Rather than respectable seconds, Anton Petrovich gets a drunk and a cardsharp (chesssharp?). And Nabokov finds little honor in the act; most of the protagonist's thoughts are based in fear and his inevitable death (he has no aim). Anton Petrovich worries at length about the proper attire for a duel, and whether his black suit will be ruined with a gunshot hole (or a few if Berg gets excited with that Browning).
If we think of a writer's work as a continuum, the good
always replacing the bad, the more developed and carefully planned replacing
the basic and fundamental, then this, by far, is Nabokov's best story ever,
to date, on that day, then, when he wrote it. Dissenting views are always
welcome... Additional Links:
Learn about duels
here.
The Christmas Story, 1928
[A Christmas Story] Excerpt
Silence fell. Pitilessly illuminated by the lamplight,
young and plump-faced, wearing a side-buttoned Russian blouse under his
black jacket, his eyes tensely downcast, Anton Golïy began gathering the
manuscript pages that he had discarded helter-skelter during his reading.
His mentor, the critic from Red Reality, stared at the floor as he
patted his pockets in search of some matches. The writer Novodvortsev was
silent too, but his was a different, venerable, silence. Wearing a
substantial pince-nez, exceptionally large of forehead, two strands of his
sparse dark hair pulled across his bald pate, gray streaks on his
close-cropped temples, he sat with closed eyes [as] if he were still
listening, his heavy legs crossed and one hand compressed between a kneecap
and a hamstring. This was not the first time he had been subjected to such
glum, earnest rustic fictionists. Analysis/Synthesis In addition to finding the book's first typo (see bracket―the original was "is"), I also thought this a unique Nabokov story. It contains three characters, all, we're told by Dmitri Nabokov, the translator, modeled after real people. The trio-triad-troika-triumvirate have just witnessed a reading by Anton Golïy. The older author, Novodvortsev, is then left alone with an idea of a story he is supposedly incapable of writing these days. So he sits down to write the story. I don't know why, but the ending reminded me of Joyce's "The Dead." Nabokov by this time is long done with Mary and had just published, a few months earlier, King, Queen, Knave. He will always write, write until his death.
I was thinking of Christmas trees, how varied they can
be. Just one such tree serves as the central symbol in Novodvortsev's story.
I was thinking of the third grade, during which the teacher set aside a week
to make ornaments for our respective trees. I was thinking of the pretzel
rings, the cotton balls, the glue. I was thinking of passing time and
conscious thought. I was thinking of a parlor in a merchant family's house,
"a large volume of articles and poems with gilt-edged pages," and the tree,
"the woman he loved," and "all of the tree's lights reflected as a crystal
quiver in her wide-open eyes when she plucked a tangerine from a high
branch." I was thinking of the orange at the bottom of my stocking. The
juice might dribble down my chin; it might squirt a bit when I dig my thumb
through the waxy peel. The acidity will constrict all of the cells in my
tongue, my throat and my stomach. I will contract into a single point. Additional Links:
Mike Sacks sends Nabokov's story "Torpid Smoke" to
editors for feedback. Read what they say
here.
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*when available and appropriate, I'll provide the
original Russian title.
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