Nabokov elbette çok önemli bir yazın insanı. Ama açıkçası toplu öykülerini içeren bu koca tuğla boyutundaki kitaptan edebi anlamda pek keyif aldığımı söyleyemeyeceğim. Tabii Nabokov öykülerinden çok romanlarıyla öne çıkmış bir isim. Ben gerçi Lolita ve Sebastian Knight’ın Gerçek Yaşamı dışındaki romanlarını henüz okumadım, yıllar önce aldığım başyapıtlarından Pale Fire (Solgun Ateş) uzaklarda beni bekler.

Oğlu Dmitri’nin çevirdiği öyküler ile doğrudan İngilizce yazdığı öyküleri biraz farklı buldum. Her ne kadar oğlunun çevirilerine üstadın “nezaret ettiği” bilinse de, bu öykülerin dili görece daha sade. Görece. Doğrudan İngilizce yazdığı öykülerin dili ise kılçıklı. Konuları, işleniş tarzı da çoğunlukla bayıcı. Kullanım frekansı o kadar düşük kelimeler var ki okuyana (en azından bana) bu kadar kasmasaydı kendini, bu kadar fiyaka/bilgiçlik yapmasaydı keşke dedirtiyor. Tamam, Nabokov büyük bir üslupçu, namını biraz da bu yönüne borçlu ama bana bu özelliği hitap etmedi.

İçerik olarak da çoğu öyküyü zorlama buldum. Öte yandan keskin gözlemciliği, zaman zaman başvurduğu mizah gücü takdire değer. 1917 Devrimi sonrası Nabokov ve ailesi gibi Avrupa’da mülteci konumuna düşmüş Rusların (bir-iki yerde İstanbul’a da pek övücü olmayan şekilde değiniliyor) farklı yönleriyle hayatlarını işleyen birçok öykü de ilginç. Ama öykülerin geneline boğucu bir hava hakim. Fantastik/metafizik unsurlar içerenleri de var. Özetle benim için mutlu bir okuma olmadı. İletişim bu toplu öykülerin Türkçe çevirisini basmış, belki oradan okumak daha farklı hissetirebilir, emin değilim.

Nabokov walks that fine line between poetry and prose. His words are as carefully selected as flowers for a bouquet, and his insights are as pointed as the sturdiest thorn. I loved almost every story in this book. But a few deserve special mention:
'Terror', which is one of the scariest horror stories I've ever read, and one of the most succinct expressions of existential terror I've seen so far.
'The Dragon', a funny and concise takedown of commercial culture.
'The Wood-Sprite', a melancholy ode to classic Russian folklore.
And 'Revenge', which felt like Nabokov's take on a ghoulish mystery.
All the other stories range from good to very good, but I believe these are the ones that'll stay with me the longest. I loved this book overall, and it was great to see such a master explore so many facets of life within two covers.

"Cuentos Completos" de Vladimir Nabokov

Me topé con Nabokov el primer mes de un año rarísimo: 2020.
Comencé con "La Defensa" y no pude más que escribir: obnubilada, enternecida por el tan querible Luzhin.

Luego incursioné con "Gloria" y reencontré la melancolía, el desamparo en la nimiedad, una voz apagada y sin prisa.

Tomé a "Lolita" entre mis brazos y me compadecí por momentos, por ella, por él, y sufrí el encantamiento de aquel personaje histriónico, confesamente pedófilo. Hubieron instantes en los que olvidé por completo la violencia implícita y silenciosa, enamorándome libremente de la belleza estética de su narración.

Todo fue bello con Nabokov y aún pende un largo camino colmado de mariposas y lleno de sol y de lluvia.

Sin embargo, ante la insistencia de un lector cuyos estándares de criterio aprecio y admiro, me vi tentada a leer sus cuentos.

Al principio opté por seguir la guía recomendada por este individuo lector que regaba día a día la semilla de la curiosidad.

Entonces, leí "Aquí se habla ruso".
El cuento carga con una tensión casi constante y, teniendo en cuenta el ritmo calmo con el que Nabokov, en la mayoría de sus novelas, nos hace y deshace, no resultaría del todo aventurado decir que el cuento tiene acción, tiene movimiento. Además de cautivarnos por su estética, los hechos que transcurren resultan de un atractivo y originalidad admirable.

Así, continué leyendo sus cuentos, algunos releídos y discutidos numerosas veces, y descubrí, casi sin darme cuenta, que no existieron nunca cuentos más bellos que aquellos nacidos de la pluma delicada de Nabokov.

The start of my obsession. Anthony Lane's rapturous review in The New Yorker brought Nabokov to my 15-year-old mind. I recently came across a contemporaneous, lukewarm-to-negative notice by Edmund White; glad that review wasn't my first exposure.

There's so much to love here ("The Admiralty Spire" and "Spring in Fialta" are tricky, odd, and totally successful - absolute triumphs of the form), but I'm particularly attached to the impressionistic short pieces written in the mid-twenties ("A Guide to Berlin," "The Letter That Never Reached Russia") and the few but mighty stories written during the American years ("That in Aleppo Once..." and the incomparable "Signs & Symbols").

During the leisure hours when the crystal-bright waves of the drug beat at him... I remember reading that sentence (it's in "A Matter of Chance,” the protagonist is a coke head) and wondering what it was that I had just found. His prose - so colorful, so nimble and definite - changed my life. My UK Penguin edition doesn't bear the usual Updike laud (“...ecstatically”), but one from James Wood: "A gorgeous book, a tutor in exquisiteness."

Stories read:
- A Nursery Tale
- Spring in Fialta
- The Vane Sisters
- Signs and Symbols


——
Reread 2018: love it even more. Like. This is why I study literature.

I know and love Nabokov. Now that I've read this collection I know him a lot better, and probably love him a little bit less, though my appreciation of him as an artist remains undiminished.

Some of these stories are marvels of auctorial craft and inspiration. The rest, with a few exceptions, are very, very good.

I've never taken so long to read a work of fiction. 648 pages of dense, poetic prose. The first third took me a long time because the stories in this part are very short and each one is like a chocolate truffle - more than one or two at a time and you'll overdose. The middle third took me still longer because, while the stories were still good, I was beginning to tire of reading about the lives of post-Revolutionary Russian expatriates in Berlin. The last third was the quickest, because the stories are generally longer and more in Nabokov's mature style, when he had learnt how to handle readers professionally.

Highly recommended for all story lovers and those who delight in language.

Why do I love him less? Because his ruthless manipulation and frequent contempt for his characters are not charming qualities.

When I feel utterly overwhelmed by meaninglessness of life there are only two things I turn to: weed and Nabokov. We’re all lovers of literature here, but don’t you often feel like what’s the point of it all? That it’s all just bullshit? I do, all the time. So maybe I’m a misanthrope, I do actively hope for the end of the human race on a regular basis, and it’s not just all literature I often think is a worthless meaningless sham but whole of art, science, and every other human attempt to make sense of it all. And then I read Nabokov and I think maybe I’m wrong?

If, by chance, the existence of our universe turns out to be some sort of comic competition amongst numberless universes produced by endlessly cascading big bangs, all competing for some unnamed cosmic prize, then I nominate this book, The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, to serve as our entry to that contest, not just as a representative Earth, but as the single representation of the pinnacle of comic evolution in our universe. I don’t think I’m overstating the case. Vladimir Nabokov justifies the existence of, not only the human race, but all life that exists in our universe. If 14.5 billion years ago the big bang happened simply so 8 billion years later a planet would form in an arm of an ordinary galaxies amongst billions of identical galaxies, so that life might evolve, eventually followed by language, simply so that a boy would be born in Russia who would one day write this very book, then that is as much meaning in life as one could ever possibly hope for. This book is miraculous, and the closest to a religious worldview as I will ever come, and that’s more than enough for me.

Now I hope I’m not overselling this book, and I don’t think I am, but I just wanted to make clear that the reason I took 2 years (yes two years) to finish it was because I wanted to savory every bit of it, some of these stories I’ve reread a half dozen times. And now that it’s finally finished I feel a sense of sadness that this book, which has sat on my nightstand for years yellowing before my eyes, and has had no fewer than a hundred joints rolled on its cover, and has talked me down from three separate panic attacks, will now be placed in a bookshelf next to regular undeserving books, yet on the other hand if I were to die now, I could feel like I accomplished at least one thing in my life and it wasn’t all a waste.



A Letter That Never Reached Russia

My charming, dear, distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray haired, azure-liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvorov Museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox. How ardently we kissed behind a waxen grenadier's back! And later, when we came out of that antique dust, how dazzled we were by the silvery blaze of the Tavricheski Park, and how odd it was to hear the cheery, avid, deep-fetched grunts of soldiers, lunging on command, slithering across the icy ground, plunging a bayonet into the straw-bellied German-helmeted dummy in the middle of a Petersburg street.

Yes, I know that I had sworn, in my previous letter to you, not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to possess a lofty pudicity of expression, and yet, here I am, from the very first lines, disdaining that right to sublime imperfection, and defeating with epithets the recollection on which you touched with such lightness and grace. Not of the past, my love, do I wish to speak to you.

It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects—the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one's desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nestling in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A glass column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop, and, for some reason, I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty. Through its windows one can clearly see the rows of brightly lit brown seats between which a lone ticket collector with a black satchel at his side makes his way, reeling a bit and thus looking a little tight—as he moves against the direction of the car's travel.

As I wander along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the glass pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute.

A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow passes under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted–except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she passes under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply.

And beyond the bend, above the sidewalk—how unexpectedly!—the front of a cinema ripples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-pale screen you can watch more-or-less skillfully trained mimes: the huge face of a girl with gray, shimmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, shining tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) there appears real life, unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright waters, a noiselessly but visibly rustling tree.

Farther on, at the corner of a square, a stout prostitute in black furs slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the shiny silk of her peach-colored stockings. I like to observe this placid middle-aged whore, as she is approached by an elderly man with a mustache, who came on business that morning from Papenburg (first he passes her and takes two backward glances). She will conduct him unhurriedly to a room in a nearby building, which, in the daytime, is quite undistinguishable from other, equally ordinary buildings. A polite and impassive old porter keeps an all-night vigil in the unlighted front hall. At the top of a steep staircase an equally impassive old woman will unlock with sage unconcern an unoccupied room and receive payment for it.

And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music that I cannot help imagining the sunny lands toward which I shall depart as soon as I have procured those extra hundred marks for which I long so blandly, so lightheartedly.

I am so lighthearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local café. Many fellow exiles of mind denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about. And of course these so-called modern dances of ours are actually anything but modern: the craze goes back to the days of the Directoire, for then as now women's dresses were worn next to the skin, and the musicians were Negroes. Fashion breathes thought the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fashion's breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances. Our dances, after all, are very natural and pretty innocent, and sometimes—in London ballrooms—perfectly graceful in their monotony. We all remember what Pushkin wrote about the waltz: "monotonous and mad." It's all the same thing. As for the deterioration of morals... Here's what I found in D'Agricourt's memoirs: "I know nothing more depraved than the minuet, which they see fit to dance in our cities."

And so I enjoy watching, in the cafés dansants here, how "pair after pair flick by," to quote Pushkin again. Amusingly made-up eyes sparkle with simple human merriment. Black-trousered and light-stockinged legs touch. Feet turn this way and that. And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night with its moist reflections, hooting cars, and gusts of high-blowing wind.

On that kind of of night, at the Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city, an old lady of seventy committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. I happened to go there the next morning, and the watchman, a badly crippled veteran of the Denikin campaign, moving on crutches that creaked with every swing of his body, showed me the white cross on which she hanged herself, and the yellow strands still adhering where the rope ("brand new one," he said gently) had chafed. Most mysterious and enchanting of all, though, were the crescent-shaped prints left by her heels, tiny as a child's, on the damp soil by the plinth. "She trampled the ground a bit, poor thing, but apart from that there's no mess at all," observed the watchman calmly, and, glancing at those yellow strands and at those little depressions, I suddenly realized that one can distinguish a naive smile even in death. Possibly, dear, my main reason for writing this letter is to tell you of that easy, gentle end. Thus the Berlin night resolved itself.

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.

Cum spunea Mircea Cărtărescu: ”Dacă literatura s-ar face cu cuvinte, Nabokov ar fi cel mai mare scriitor.”, doar că uneori ai vrea să ai mai acut senzația aceea de ”have the skin in the game”.
https://www.ziarulmetropolis.ro/mirce...

Nabokov fascinates me and daunts me at the same time. His attention to details, poignant characterisations, humour and erudite nature cannot be ignored. The best way to put it––he stuns me. How do I review this collection of short stories properly? I don't know. This review is destined to be a mess.

I've read this book slowly, bits by bits, for there is no way one could devour it quickly. It is a garland of gorgeous images, oftentimes abstract and fantastical. ‘A cinematic quality’ is the best way to describe it. Almost as though I'm playing curls of celluloid against sunshine.

Of course, any great author has obstacles to overcome before he knows how to translate his vivid imagination. I'm talking about one's voice, style, structure, etc. And 680 pages portray that. Technically, Nabokov's language is impeccable, sometimes even too clean for my liking (I'll burn in hell!). Certain stories end abruptly. For example, A Matter of Chance. A few others were difficult for me to follow, and I believe it had to do with stream of consciousness that I didn't expect.

Did this tome help me? It did. The way Nabokov describes everyday objects are remarkable. His ideas widened my eyes on a few occasions. I feel like I have to actually study his stories because, yes, they are dense in my opinion.

So why 4 stars...Maybe because I see Nabokov as this magnificent, if a little intimidating, novelist and not so much as a short story writer. The momentum and structure in shorts stories can be crucial and I'm not quite sure it's always there(?)

Well, this one was a hard one to rate. I was happy to read his earlier short stories but they became more tedious as the book progressed. It contains “his complete work”. However, I’m glad I persisted because the last 10 were genius. He is an undisputed master of description and of obsession. I would suggest however reading this as an ebook. I have a fairly good reading vocabulary but I spent much time in the dictionary (and a goodly number were not in the dictionary). An ebook would make it easier to look up places, words etc. So while I loved his novels, I only liked these stories. I also noticed he doesn’t have particularly appealing female characters.

Pentru mâna aceea de povestiri pe care eu, unul, nu le-am înțeles, nici prea gustat, n-o să scad scorul întregii cărți la 4 stele. E posibil să nu fi fost îndeajuns de atent ori să fie ele prea deștepte pentru mine (n-ar fi prima dată).

Foarte plăcută și solicitantă călătoria asta prin imaginația și harul lui Nabokov, preț de 700 de pagini! Dacă dăm puțin la o parte vălul ficțional al prozelor, cartea asta poate fi parcursă binișor și ca o fragmentată și infidelă autobiografie.

Nu spun că narațiunile adunate în acest volum ar fi inspirate direct din viața autorului, dar după câteva zeci citite, ajungi să-l “vezi” pe Nabokov dincolo de ele, cu cinismul lui verde, cu frustrările lui, cu nostalgia lui nestinsă pentru Rusia (copilăriei și a primei tinereți) cea lăsată în urmă și definitiv înstrăinată, chipul ei și firea oamenilor schimonosite de experimentul comunist.

Mai “vezi” printre rânduri și un scriitor suportabil de infatuat, copleșitor, superior, suveran absolut al tehnicii de a depăna, de a împleti & încâlci mici istorii, de a-și reaminti, de a născoci sau reînvia din memorie caractere.

"Su infancia transcurrió como una fiesta, segura y alegre como era costumbre en nuestro país desde tiempo inmemorial. Un rayo de sol hendiendo la cubierta de un volumen de la Bibliothèque Rose en la mansión familiar en el campo, la clásica escarcha de los jardines público de San Petersburgo..."