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These chronologically ordered stories are extraordinary—there is not a bad one in the lot. Vladimir gets off to a great start with "The Wood-Sprite," written when he was only twenty-two or so, and he continues to stun, impress, and entertain from there. The second story, "Russian Spoken Here," is so sophisticated, confident, poised, cruel, and above all so worldly, that it seems as if it was written by a much older writer, with shades of his mature novels. In fact, nearly every clever and ingenious idea in his novels is first sketched out here in these stories. His psychological portraits are precise and scientific, and he combines a wrenching understanding of human cruelty with satire, wit, a staggering command of language, an ability to paint a scene with vivid brushstrokes, a high-minded literariness that works like poetry, an intense personal element, and an impish sense of fun as he dips into popular genres such as crime and science fiction to remake them in his own style. There is even scathing literary criticism within, as several stories lampoon mediocre writers and tired genre cliches.
I think if all the people who condemn Lolita would read these stories, they would understand much better where Nabokov was coming from when he penned that notorious masterpiece. In his early stories especially, he depicts every kind of scoundrel, gets into every type of deranged psychology. He was remarkably good at getting inside the minds of criminals; and not just criminals, but people with mental and physical defects, lonely people, people who can’t communicate, people experiencing deep grief, ordinary people in awful circumstances.
There are stories you really can’t believe, such as "A Dashing Fellow," in which a dandy picks up a girl and goes to her flat. When she goes out for food, someone comes to convey the urgent message that her father is dying and won’t last the night, but he is so impatient to bed her that he basically rapes her when she returns, suddenly becomes disgusted with her slovenly person and surroundings, and leaves without giving her the message. In another story, "A Nursery Tale," a voyeur violates women and young girls in his head all day long, until the devil in the form of a German prostitute grants him a wish to have all the girls he wants, with macabre results.
Many of the stories are about the cruel shock of sudden death, such as the excellent "The Return of Chorb," "Details of a Sunset," "A Matter of Chance," and "Spring in Fialta." Others are playful and charming puzzles, like "La Veneziana," in which a man disappears into a painting, and "That in Aleppo Once," a crime story in which the crime is absent from the page, except in italicized quotes from Othello which hint at the truth. One of the early stories, "The Potato Elf," reminded me of Todd Browning’s Freaks in its depiction of a carnival midget in love with a showgirl, who in turn loves a handsome and charismatic magician. But Nabokov’s story came first, and is startlingly original. The theme of cuckoldry makes its appearance several times, most stunningly in "An Affair of Honor," and there is a rare and splendid science fiction story called "Lance" which includes a diatribe against the mediocrity of ordinary science fiction novels; these he compares to Christmas cookies stamped in various shapes to fool the consumer into thinking they’re getting variety, when in fact they all taste the same.
This snide commentary about lazy and uninspired writing is a clue to the construction of Nabokov’s entire oeuvre. Above all he strove for originality. He could write a better science fiction story (Ada), and a better crime novel (Lolita, Pale Fire), than other writers because he strove for truth above all, and because he styled his stories to fit the truth rather than molding the stories to fit genre expectations. This startling truth he combined with impeccable style, and a strict avoidance of the vulgar, the moralistic, and the commonplace. Some of his stories—"Terror," "Signs and Symbols"—depict schizophrenia so accurately that one pauses to wonder if Nabokov himself suffered from such an ailment. But no, it’s just that he was so good at depicting mental states that he could get into any sort of mind in the most terrifying detail, including, as he later did so brilliantly, the mind of a sociopathic pedophile.
His particular gifts and circumstances—he was a chess strategist, a scientist, trilingual, and was raised in a noble Russian family where he was pampered, well-educated, and staggeringly well-read in several languages at a young age—plus his shocking displacement into exile, near poverty, and dramatic family tragedy, including the assassination of his father, combined with his synesthesia, which made him experience life in a particularly vivid way—are what give his writing such a clear edge over the competition. (He himself acknowledged that if he hadn't been exiled, he never would have become a writer, but would have remained instead a dandy nobleman puttering around his estate and collecting butterflies.) Many others can paint deep psychological portraits, but few have his scientific eye; and many have a gift for vivid detail, but rarely do they combine it with his chess-like precision in storytelling. It goes without saying that his sense of humor is peerless. And of course, none of it would work without his humanism and the deep personal element present in every story, which bursts forth no matter how carefully hidden. It’s never merely “clever” writing; it always offers the reader a complete emotional experience, even when presented as aesthetics or as a game.
If he was dismissive of other writers, it was because critics often failed to acknowledge his unique and matchless gifts (as exampled by awarding more mainstream authors such as Pasternak instead of him with the Nobel Prize in Literature). That his writing was better than many more lauded writers of his time is a fact; and I would argue that Nabokov was a good literary critic rather than an egotist for knowing it.
Edit: I forgot to mention one of the best stories, "In Memory of I. L. Shigaev." Like Pale Fire it's presented as a tribute to another man, but is in actuality all about the narrator himself, who is totally insane. I am including an excerpt for your delectation:
I think if all the people who condemn Lolita would read these stories, they would understand much better where Nabokov was coming from when he penned that notorious masterpiece. In his early stories especially, he depicts every kind of scoundrel, gets into every type of deranged psychology. He was remarkably good at getting inside the minds of criminals; and not just criminals, but people with mental and physical defects, lonely people, people who can’t communicate, people experiencing deep grief, ordinary people in awful circumstances.
There are stories you really can’t believe, such as "A Dashing Fellow," in which a dandy picks up a girl and goes to her flat. When she goes out for food, someone comes to convey the urgent message that her father is dying and won’t last the night, but he is so impatient to bed her that he basically rapes her when she returns, suddenly becomes disgusted with her slovenly person and surroundings, and leaves without giving her the message. In another story, "A Nursery Tale," a voyeur violates women and young girls in his head all day long, until the devil in the form of a German prostitute grants him a wish to have all the girls he wants, with macabre results.
Many of the stories are about the cruel shock of sudden death, such as the excellent "The Return of Chorb," "Details of a Sunset," "A Matter of Chance," and "Spring in Fialta." Others are playful and charming puzzles, like "La Veneziana," in which a man disappears into a painting, and "That in Aleppo Once," a crime story in which the crime is absent from the page, except in italicized quotes from Othello which hint at the truth. One of the early stories, "The Potato Elf," reminded me of Todd Browning’s Freaks in its depiction of a carnival midget in love with a showgirl, who in turn loves a handsome and charismatic magician. But Nabokov’s story came first, and is startlingly original. The theme of cuckoldry makes its appearance several times, most stunningly in "An Affair of Honor," and there is a rare and splendid science fiction story called "Lance" which includes a diatribe against the mediocrity of ordinary science fiction novels; these he compares to Christmas cookies stamped in various shapes to fool the consumer into thinking they’re getting variety, when in fact they all taste the same.
This snide commentary about lazy and uninspired writing is a clue to the construction of Nabokov’s entire oeuvre. Above all he strove for originality. He could write a better science fiction story (Ada), and a better crime novel (Lolita, Pale Fire), than other writers because he strove for truth above all, and because he styled his stories to fit the truth rather than molding the stories to fit genre expectations. This startling truth he combined with impeccable style, and a strict avoidance of the vulgar, the moralistic, and the commonplace. Some of his stories—"Terror," "Signs and Symbols"—depict schizophrenia so accurately that one pauses to wonder if Nabokov himself suffered from such an ailment. But no, it’s just that he was so good at depicting mental states that he could get into any sort of mind in the most terrifying detail, including, as he later did so brilliantly, the mind of a sociopathic pedophile.
His particular gifts and circumstances—he was a chess strategist, a scientist, trilingual, and was raised in a noble Russian family where he was pampered, well-educated, and staggeringly well-read in several languages at a young age—plus his shocking displacement into exile, near poverty, and dramatic family tragedy, including the assassination of his father, combined with his synesthesia, which made him experience life in a particularly vivid way—are what give his writing such a clear edge over the competition. (He himself acknowledged that if he hadn't been exiled, he never would have become a writer, but would have remained instead a dandy nobleman puttering around his estate and collecting butterflies.) Many others can paint deep psychological portraits, but few have his scientific eye; and many have a gift for vivid detail, but rarely do they combine it with his chess-like precision in storytelling. It goes without saying that his sense of humor is peerless. And of course, none of it would work without his humanism and the deep personal element present in every story, which bursts forth no matter how carefully hidden. It’s never merely “clever” writing; it always offers the reader a complete emotional experience, even when presented as aesthetics or as a game.
If he was dismissive of other writers, it was because critics often failed to acknowledge his unique and matchless gifts (as exampled by awarding more mainstream authors such as Pasternak instead of him with the Nobel Prize in Literature). That his writing was better than many more lauded writers of his time is a fact; and I would argue that Nabokov was a good literary critic rather than an egotist for knowing it.
Edit: I forgot to mention one of the best stories, "In Memory of I. L. Shigaev." Like Pale Fire it's presented as a tribute to another man, but is in actuality all about the narrator himself, who is totally insane. I am including an excerpt for your delectation:
By dint of prolonged, persistent, solitary drinking I drove myself to the most vulgar of visions, the most Russian of all hallucinations: I began seeing devils. I saw them in the evening as soon as I emerged from my diurnal dreamery to dispel with my wretched lamp the twilight that was already engulfing us. Yes, even more clearly than I now see the perpetual tremor of my hand, I saw the precious intruders and after some time I even became accustomed to their presence, as they kept pretty much to themselves. They were smallish but rather plump, the size of an overweight toad—peaceful, limp, black-skinned, more or less warty little monsters. They crawled rather than walked, but, with all their feigned clumsiness, they proved uncapturable. I remember buying a dog whip and, as soon as enough of them had gathered on my desk, I tried to give them a good lashing, but they miraculously avoided the blow; I struck again, and one of them, the nearest, only blinked, screwing up his eyes crookedly, like a tense dog that someone wishes to threaten away from some tempting bit of ordure. The others dispersed, dragging their hind legs. But they all stealthily clustered together again while I wiped up the ink spilled on the desk and picked up a prostrate portrait. Generally speaking, their densest habitat was the vicinity of my writing table; they materialized from somewhere underneath and, in leisurely fashion, their sticky bellies crepitating and smacking against the wood, made their way up the desk legs, in a parody of climbing sailors. I tried smearing their route with Vaseline but this did not help, and only when I happened to select some particularly appetizing little rotter, intently clambering upward, and swatted him with the whip or with my shoe, only then did he fall on the floor with a fat-toad thud; but a minute later there he was again, on his way up from a different corner, his violet tongue hanging out from the strain, and once over the top he would join his comrades. They were numerous, and at first they all seemed alike to me: dark little creatures with puffy, basically rather good-natured faces; they sat in groups of five or six on the desk, on various papers, on a volume of Pushkin, glancing at me with indifference. One of them might scratch behind his ear with his foot, the long claw making a coarse scraping sound, and then freeze motionless, forgetting his leg in midair. Another would doze, uncomfortably crowding his neighbor, who, for that matter, was not blameless either: the reciprocal inconsiderateness of amphibians, capable of growing torpid in intricate attitudes. Gradually I began distinguishing them, and I think I even gave them names depending on their resemblance to acquaintances of mine or to various animals. One could make out larger and smaller specimens (although they were all of quite portable size), some were repulsive, others more acceptable in aspect, some had lumps or tumors, others were perfectly smooth. A few had a habit of spitting at each other. Once they brought a new boy, an albino, of a cinereous tint, with eyes like beads of red caviar; he was very sleepy and glum, and gradually crawled away.
