i read this book while i was living in france and starved for english. even though the stories are translated from the original russian, the language was so elegant and easy, i was compelled to read some of them aloud. to myself. in hushed tones so that i wouldn't wake the babes. nothing brings me back to that time, to that room, like this book.

I started it last spring when I went to NYC for vacation. Read it on the bus on the way there, then I thought I lost the copy for good. Luckily it was unearthed amid the general displacements of moving out of my old apartment.

I'm about a 150 pages in. I think it might be a good smaller, bit-by-bit type of reading experience. I do enjoy having some outside material to take refuge in when schoolwork starts to crowd my brain. A couple stories a week on the train? Some lazy afternoon weekend reading? Why the hell not?

Nabokov's one of those guys who I admire from afar. Sure I read Lolita, and of course it's superb. I've poked around elsewhere in his collected works and I think I'm going to wade into his stuff little by little. Not so much out of intimidation, mind, but more because I have the feeling that when I get into him it'll be all-consuming.

There are a few things I've sort of held off on getting into, simply to respectfully wait to open space in my mind until I can appreciate them fully. This applies to Nabokov equally as much as it does Elvis Costello, old timey country music, The Meters, Duke Ellington, Charlie Chaplin, Indian cuisine, sushi, War and Peace, Don Quixote, Hegel, Proust, and homemade cocktails. It might seem like a long list but there's plenty of life to live, isn't there?

***

Ok, long breath...now it's finished. It took me awhile to get through all of it, but as of yesterday this collection is toast.

A couple of thoughts, right off the bat:

* I don't particularly like the "collected stories" framework. It's daunting and somewhat intimidating to have 6-700 pages of story after story in one's hands. Years and years of work and the many detailed layers of plot, character, voice, and so on are bundled up only to be made more dense and somewhat less palatable, like stacks of carrots in the supermarket. Give that prose some room to breathe!

I think I'd much prefer having single collections of short stories, which are more hit-or-miss for me in general, as a reader. I usually check to see if the short story is *actually* short, i.e. less than 50 pages or so. I don't do short stories that stretch to novella-length. Unless, of course, they are exceptionally gripping...

* I think Poe was right about this, if nothing else, that short stories should be read in one sitting. This isn't just about length of story, it's also about how engaging it is. One of the greatest things about literature (for me, as for a lot of people) is it's capacity to take you to another world. I don't want a short story to drag, no one does, but for some reason when and if this happens, it's somehow more annoying than when a novel does. I expect novels to be occasionally dull or uninteresting, I understand how difficult it would be to sustain every reader's interest in anything for 200, 300, 400, 500 pages. I get that; it's not quite my problem with short stories.

I find that if a short story I'm reading isn't working for me I'm sort of trapped- I'm a stickler for finishing books I start, if for no other reason than pride and the nagging feeling that the book might pick up a bit at the end or something. I need a short story to really work for me, pretty much off the bat...it's kind of entitled and maybe a bit unfair but that's how my reading habits seem to go.


So, on to the issue of Nabokov himself. I honor him, I respect his sophistication and consummate skill with words, images, sentiments, etc. His taste is incredible. Never overdoes it, always notices the essential minor detail of a person's clothing, face, spatial position, etc. He's that way philosophically, too- he never misses a beat with registering a quirk of fate, unevenness of character, complex, ironic situation, etc. The back cover refers to his "connesieur's sampling of the table of human folly" and I thought about that many times after I started repeatedly dipping into the text. Nothing's lost on Mr. Nabokov, of this I am sure. Henry James would have nodded his approval; Hemingway would have surely grunted in approval of V.N.'s shite detector.

The man's got...sensibility. I have a feeling that he would be fascinating to meet in person. Composed, scrupulously curteous, witty, engaging, and yet with a deep, ironic, elegant reserve where strange images and memories might be bubbling.

Martin Amis, a writer and reader I respect tremendously and who certainly knows his Nabokov frontwards and back, likes to make the analogy of writing with being a host. Do you prepare for your guests? Bring out the fine china? Sweep the rug? Buy good booze or tons of the cheap stuff? Do you even bother with them? I think it's a really interesting idea and I can see what he means. The author is 'hosting' the reader in a way. You spend perhaps a great deal of time in his or her company, they show you around, all that kind of thing. They guide you and they focus your attention and try to make you experience something worthwhile, pleasurable or funny or whatever.

Amis says that if you visited Mr. Nabokov he would fuss over you. Prosaically, he sits you in his favorite chair and offers you his best wine and cigars. I like this notion, and I can see it at work here. It's kind of what I meant about being well-mannered and tasteful before. One can open up the book and find something beautifully well-turned on pretty much every page. In terms of sheer writing, just perfectly arranged language and exquisite imagery, the man is puttin' down.

Mailer once made a really insightful comment on the "tensile strength" of a sentence...I think it's a physics term about how pressure is distributed on an object or somthing, it's about tension and force...I don't remember, exactly, but the guy got a degree from Harvard in engineering before he wrote about a million sentences so hopefully he's on to something. Nabokov's sentences have that perfect weight, time and again he never loses his balance. His poise is impeccable. It's a very rare trait, if you think about it, in both literature and life.

I think the reason why I just didn't take to this book (after deliberating a bit I'm sticking with 3 stars) has to do with the sheer density of pages, certainly, but it also has to do with the staggering amount of good stuff here. I didn't take to every story but the ones that I did were pretty breathtaking- pellucid, engaging, wise.

I think what it is is that Nabokov is just too...adult for me, shall we say. He is SO sophisticated, erudite and streetwise, SUCH an immaculate stylist that turning hundreds of pages makes me feel like I'm sort of eating chocolate chip after chip after chocolate chip until the sum total is sort of a big, black, gooey, sweet mess. I wouldn't blame this on Nabokov himself, certainly not his fault he's so rarefied and I doubt that quality might be called a "fault", either. It's just that going through all this prose became rather burdensome- there was so much of it, and so much to enjoy and appreciate that taking it in steadily became engorging.

To get back to the ambiguous use of the word "adult" I don't mean I want my prose writers to be immature. Far from it. I just mean that Nabokov's prose is appropriately nape-tingling (as he felt all good prose must be) but also as polished as a new hard wood floor, almost embalmed in wax. I get antsy around crisply decorated spaces- floors, kitchens, museums, bathrooms, etc. I prefer a little lived-in feeling than a decorative pristine.

It's similar in my aesthetic tastes, too. I like it when works are filled with the tension between opposites: coherence vs. incoherence, form and impression, plain speech and flourid eloquence...I like it when my art is a fragile if firm stay against chaos or just a change of form in and of itself. Think of bebop, if you want to hear it in musical terms. I don't want controlled chaos as much as I want the open window in the church, the rigorous scholarship amid the drunken improvisation and the obscene gesture in the midst of the erudite exegesis. I like a little risk for the author, as well as a risk for the reader.

I don't quite think Nabokov is too polite, it's just that I think he executes something extremely well, and I sort of have to step on my tippytoes to reach it, let alone peek over the height. Lolita very much has the qualities I'm talking about, at least in the sense that it constantly walks the line between its outrageous premise and its bewitching, intoxicating language.

Nabokov's prose is a little too...pristine, for me. When read in fragments it's succulent; in bulk its suffocating. Next thing I read of his (and there will definitely be more, don't you worry about that) should be a shorter piece. I don't think he's pretentious or showing off. I just think it's a difference in taste.

All in all, I enjoyed and profited from having read this book, and I would very much like to revisit it but I don't think it spoke to me as openly as I'd imagined it would. I listed Nabokov among the tastes I hope to aquire in all the different avenues of life and so it remains, albeit a little less so now. My ignorance is dimmed, though perhaps not diminished. Lord knows, it would take more than one 600 page book to do that...

I'm not worthy!

This is a story about a young couple that is visiting a cemetery. Throughout the story, the man is trying to comfort his partner by providing her with details of the beautiful and magnificent things happening around her. The perspective shifts are a dizzying spectacle and you really have to stay with him. The ball around the house which reminds them of what is lost, a kid drawing a picture of God on the sidewalk, a chicken in a cage - in a balloon: there's quite a few things happening here, but the prose eases you in gently.

"Listen--I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of
my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life."

What an intensely heart-rending story.

I guess every genius has to start somewhere. This 600-page behemoth is wildly uneven and can be a bit of a slog. A lot of the early stories are barely distinguishable, aimlessly descriptive meditations on émigré life; I look back on the table of contents and it's alarming how many titles conjure nothing: no particular character, feeling, or image. "The Seaport," "Beneficence," "The Fight," "The Doorbell"—what were these stories about again?

I think there's a reason Nabokov is remembered as a novelist and not as a master of the short form. It's also telling that he gave up on short stories entirely in the early '50s. I suspect he viewed the short story as an experimental exercise rather than an end unto itself—a realm where muscles were built rather than flexed, in which he could try out new techniques without having to worry too much about failure. Understandably, then, some of the stories are failures (at best, interesting—at worst, terribly uninteresting*), and many are devoted solely to development of the descriptive muscle to the detriment of everything else.

I don't want to spend too much time on individual stories because there are a lot of them. Two of his earliest descriptive rambles—"Sounds" and "Gods"—are among his best in that category; they have an emotional punch that much of his later work lacks. I liked his forays into fantasy even when they were not entirely successful because they broke up the monotony: "Wingstroke," "La Veneziana," "A Nursery Tale," and "The Visit to the Museum" were all memorable for that reason. (Nabokov dismisses "A Nursery Tale" in his own notes as "a rather artificial affair, composed a little hastily, with more concern for the tricky plot than for imagery and good taste," a comment which suggests to me that Nabokov might have been a much more interesting short story writer had he been more slapdash and cared less about imagery and good taste.) Another early story of note is "Terror," one of his best and perhaps his first real classic.

The overall quality improves somewhere around "The Aurelian" (although you have to wade through 250 pages to get there) and then again, markedly, with the lovely "Spring in Fialta" (around page 400). The last twenty stories or so achieve a nice balance between exquisite prose and stuff like plot and character and experimental narrative technique. Happily, even the final three stories, which were written very early in his career but only published recently, are quite good; there is no noticeable dip in quality as the collection draws to a close.

I would recommend this book to Nabokov fanatics who want to read everything the man's ever written. To everyone else I would recommend one of his novels.

* "A Busy Man" has got to be one of the dumbest, most worthless stories I have ever read. Skip it.

Dmitri Nabokov (1934-2012) would let me read excerpts prior to the publication of the book. He would fax me his manuscripts: La Veneziana.

When I lived at the shores of Lake Geneva and attended Art Center (Europe) I was given Nabokov as a subject to read and write about in literature class. I did not want to read anything, because I was ignorant and the Lolita stereotype filled my mind. Little did I know that Nabokov is one of the finest bilingual writers I have found. I even ended up befriending his (late) son Dmitri, who lived a few houses up from mine in Montreux and now, after almost two decades living in the USA I am ready to pin down my own memoir, because the encounter with Nabokov made my life immensely beautiful, and lived to the fullest.

Choppy, but when they're good they're great.

Not every story in here was perfect, but at the end of the day, the dude can write a f'n sentence.

Just wonder how it should be if anyone tries to translate this piece(or the last paragraph, more specifically)...

P.S. Ready for a search for acrostics, starting from Shakespeare’s sonnets... :)

This book is ongoing with me. I will pick it back up for more short stories in a month or two. What I have read so far, I loved.

Nabokov is amazing. The level of detail, and wit he puts into every single sentence is astounding and even in his shorter works you can find this same level of genuine passion for what he does. Excellent stuff.

Nabokov's short stories tend to vary in quality moreso than his novels, but the best of the best in this complete collection rival the best stories any writer (Hemingway, O'Connor, Melville). A common theme in these stories is Nabokov's exile from his Russian homeland and I found it interesting how many of the stories ("Conversation Piece", "Russian Spoken Here" just to name a few) were much more political in nature than his novels. The majority of these stories were originally written in Russian, but I find that they have translated extremely well, with the rich language being intact.

Best Stories

1. "Signs and Symbols"
2. "The Vane Sisters"
3. "Sounds"
4. "Terra Incognita"
5. "Wingstroke"

Also, it is interesting to note that Christopher Nolan likely "borrowed" a scene from "The Return of Chorb" which he used in his universally-acclaimed film Memento.

Complete Rankings
The Vane Sisters - 5/5
The Assistant Producer - 2/5
The Wood Sprite - 3/5
Signs and Symbols - 5/5
Russian Spoken Here - 3/5
Sounds - 5/5
Wingstroke - 4/5
Conversation Piece, 1945 - 1/5
Time and Ebb - 3/5
The Return of Chorb - 4/5
Lance - 4/5
The Aurelian - 3/5
Terra Incognita - 5/5
Cloud, Lake, Castle - 3/5
First Love - 4/5
Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster - 3/5
Mademoiselle O - 5/5
Easter Rain - 2/5
The Christmas Story - 1/5
Razor - 3/5
Perfection - 4/5
Terror - 3/5
Recruiting - 2/5
Music - 3/5
A Nursery Tale - 4/5
Tyrants Destroyed - 3/5
Vasiliy Shishkov - 2/5
The Admiralty Spire - 3/5
In Memory of L. I. Shigaev - 2/5
The Fight - 4/5
The Dragon - 2/5
Bachmann - 4/5
The Veneziana - 4/5
Beneficence - 3/5
Revenge - 3/5
A Slice of Life - 2/5
Orache - 3/5
The Reunion - 4/5
A Busy Man - 3/5
A Bad Day - 2/5
The Doorbell - 3/5
The Passenger - 5/5
A Guide to Berlin - 4/5
Christmas - 4/5
The Letter that Never Reached Russia - 4/5
The Thunderstorm - 3/5
Details of a Sunset - 4/5
Lips to Lips - 3/5
A Dashing Fellow - 3/5
Torpid Smoke - 4/5
Solus Rex - 2/5
Ultima Thule - 3/5
The Potato Elf - 4/5
The Leonardo - 2/5
Breaking the News - 3/5
The Circle - 2/5
A Russian Beauty - 3/5
That in Aleppo Once... - 4/5
A Forgotten Poet - 2/5
Spring in Fialta - 4/5
An Affair of Honour - 4/5
A Visit to the Museum - 2/5
Lik - 4/5
The Seaport - 4/5
A Matter of Chance - 4/5
Gods - 4/5

I am far from Nabokov’s completist. I’ve read just two of his novels, the one in Russian and one in English. I’ve read and enjoyed his literary criticism in spite of his “strong opinions” and I could not care for his memoirs that much. But I’ve recently come across The Circle. It was a little discovery and I've decided to read more of his stories. I’ve read all the major ones now. I tried to read them in the language he has initially written them. The majority of the Russian language stories are actually written in Berlin. The English ones - in America. But soon enough after his arrival there, Nabokov has stopped writing them all together.

In general, I am very impressed with the sheer variety of those stories. It is amazing how he does not repeat himself considering that his protagonists are all immigrants and his setting is more or less constant be it Berlin, Nice or Boston. But he experiments so much in terms of style, form and the language that I never knew what to expect. His texts are rarely traditional stories with the infamous arc of a plot. Moreover, he actively strives to subvert the usual expectations. He uses amazing variety of tricks: narrators talk to the characters, many of them cannot be trusted; the narration moves from the third to the first person without any warning to a reader; prose rhymes - all these tricks for me firmly belong to the second time of the 20th century. Nabokov wrote these stories of the 20s and 30s.

The impression Nabokov left me with is very different from Chekhov, my favourite Russian writer of short stories. Chekhov rarely fails to move me deeply. While Nabokov has created a sense of aesthetic admiration, almost collaboration when I felt a huge pleasure in identifying a clue he would deliberately leave or noticing a device he used to move the narrative into a different gear. But the stories are still very much populated by very human beings full of very human passions.

It is likely, Nabokov was more interested in writing his novels rather than short stories. Some of them contain the ideas or sketches of his future novels. But still he managed to create some unforgettable ones.

Below is my extremely subjective “Nabokov’s dozen”:

13 Passenger

It is a very short text that might be a key-hole view of Nabokov’s writing philosophy. It involves a train journey and the conversation between a writer and a critic (not on the train). As a bonus, the comic element is sharp.

12 Lance

This one is written in English. There is a sci-fi element to it. But it is not essential. It is more like a spoof. What is essential is a conflict of modernity and human values. It is based on a similar themes as his much wider admired “Signs and Symbols”. Though the context is entirely different. But I prefer this one. It also contains a paragraph that has become even more relevant after more than 70 years. I wonder what he would make out of social media:

“I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one’s imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tyre company’s pictorial advertisement.”


11 A Nursery Tale

A relatively simple anti-fairy tale with a devil (in interesting re-incarnation) who might grant a wish to a young and not very pleasant man. Execution is superb and some very early connotations of Lolita.

10 The Aurelian

This one really made me understand how people felt after hyperinflation in Weimar Republic. But apart from it, it is formerly orchestrated with two point of views, unlikable, but at the same time deeply human main character and some butterflies in the mix.

9 Lik

It is the one of the most realistic and less playful Nabokov’s stories. Still he is making it meta-fictional starting with a bad play within the story where a Russian character played by a provincial Russian actor. The core element is the collision between the actor and his forgotten relative-bully. This man is suddenly resurfaced in the actor’s life from nowhere. And they seem to be mirroring each other by being a double version of a miserable emigrant existence. The finale is worthy of Dostoevsky.

8 Potato Elf

This story would make a good movie. I think it was the intent as Nabokov initially planned to write a script. In the centre there is an unusual and slightly sinister love triangle. The story is dramatic, almost artificially so, almost farcical. But there is a glimpse of authentic sense of melancholy and transience of life. And this passage resonated with me deeply:

"Every separate day in the year is a gift presented to only one man—the happiest one; all other people use his day, to enjoy the sunshine or berate the rain, never knowing however to whom that day really belongs; and its fortunate owner is pleased and amused by their ignorance. A person cannot foreknow which day exactly will fall to his lot, what trifle he will remember forever: the ripple of reflected sunlight on a wall bordering water or the revolving fall of a maple leaf; and it often happens that he recognizes his day only in retrospection, long after he has plucked, and crumpled, and chucked under his desk the calendar leaf with the forgotten figure."


7 “Doorbell”

I would be short about this one. It guarantees to subvert your expectations.


6 ‘Dashing Fellow”

Very nasty unlikable protagonist. But it is a fantastic story - the way how Nabokov is creating this type. The story starts from the perspective of the main character presented in the plural first person “we”:

‘Our suitcase is carefully embellished with bright-coloured stickers:”Nurberg, Stuttgart, Koln - and even Lido (but that one is fraudulent). We have a swarthy complexion, a network of purple-red veins, a black moustache, trimly clipped, and hairy nostrils. We breathe hard through our nose as we try to solve a crossword puzzle in an emigre paper. We are alone in a third-class compartment – alone and therefore bored’

But the author’s gaze is very present in this opening as well. “hairy nostrils and heavy breathing” doubtfully this chap is so self-critical.

The story then moves into the third person narration, swiftly and gracefully toggles between that and the proper first single. Despicable things happen. And then this ending:

“When we have fed and slept, life will regain its looks …And then, sometime later, we die’

What a brilliant framing of the story and that last line!

Coincidently, I’ve come across a similar framing in the recently published novel Checkout 19 by C L Bennet

5. Music

This is probably the most lyrical story out of this selection of mine. It nods to both Chekhov and Tolstoy. It is beautiful and sad, the one of those stories when something does not happen. But I loved it. The most striking is how the development of the story within the story moves in unison with the music performed in it. Describing the music through the words is very rarely successful. But here, Nabokov achieved something even more special.


4 “An affair of honour”

In this one Nabokov subverts well established genre of story about a duel. Almost all self-respected Russian writers would have written the one. I believe the French did the same. And here comes Nabokov. The story is very Gogolian. It is both comic and profound. In Nabokov’s own words (about Gogol’s tales):

“..’mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the Chaos from which they had all derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature…appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships.”

This is perfectly applicable to this story and to many more pieces of Nabokov’s own writing.

3 The Circle

This was the first story by Nabokov I’ve read. And, it holds well in my ranking. Here I would just say - how about starting a story from “Secondly,..”. My wonderful GR friend, Ilse has written a great review of this one.

2 La Veneziana

It is the one of his early stories. It hasn’t been published until after his death. Maybe he did not like it. I do not know. But I enjoyed it enormously. At the centre of it is a painting (there is a “prototype” in real life). Through a bunch of the brilliantly crafted characters, he examines the sublime. This is combined with a satire on English affluent class and its way of life. Wonderfully composed story.


1 The Vane Sisters

This story is an object of art. Ricardo Piglia said in his brilliant essay Theses on a short story that the best of them contain two levels - the one on the surface and the one carefully hidden. And a story’s essence lies in how these two levels interact.

This story is a superb example of this. But one needs to look hard to see it. I’ve spent a lot of time with this story. If you like looking for a clues, intertextuality and text puzzles, it is the one for you. But even if not, the imagery and the lyrics of a mundane hardly would make anyone unaffected.

I would recommend to read Nabokov's stories if you want to find out what literature could do apart from straightforward storytelling. How it can "appeal to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships."