The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
By Vladimir Nabokov
Translated by Dmitri Nabokov
Knopf, 659 pages, $35
In the present age, still shaking off the sentiment of the Victorians and the haste and heat of the Romantics, genius is often seen as something unrestrained and uncontrollable, a mad rush toward truth to which the artist helplessly submits. Greatness in art is assumed to include the throbbing heart laid bare and is commonly summoned up in metaphors of fiery passion and descent into darkness that suggest a subterranean furnace room. How liberating, then, to read the stories of Vladimir Nabokov, undoubted works of genius that evoke not the cellar but the chilly, joyous clarity of a view in full daylight from a windy rooftop.
Written over a period of more than 50 years, beginning in 1922, and translated often decades later by the author’s son, Dmitri, these 65 stories straight-arm sentiment. With comic, record-setting brevity, Nabokov once, in the novel “Ada,” announced the means of a character’s death in three words: “A picnic. Lightning.” Here, in “A Russian Beauty,” a story written in Germany in 1926, he leashes the emotions just as strictly, summarizing a young girl’s history during the Russian Revolution: “Everything happened in full accord with the style of the period. Her mother died of typhus, her brother was executed by the firing squad. All these are readymade formulae, of course, the usual dreary small talk, but it all did happen.”
The dispassionate tone is the more remarkable because Nabokov’s own history was also “in the style of the period.” His grandfather had been the much-hated minister of justice under Czar Alexander II, and in 1922, the author’s father, driven into exile after serving as a member of Russia’s first parliament, was assassinated in Berlin.
Nonetheless, these stories have about them a Mozartian joy. Nabokov’s ease of creation and his powers of observation are themselves consolatory, happy. His determined coolness to human suffering does not leave us dry because his is a world in which every tree limb and its scrambled shadow, every curious terrier, pink belly mottled with a map of brownish spots, has a serious and tender and comic importance.
The superb story “Christmas” concerns a father heartbroken at the death of his son, but that does not prevent Nabokov from catching the radiance of a morning on which that bereaved father awakes:
“After a night spent in nonsensical, fragmentary dreams totally unrelated to his grief, as Slepstov stepped out onto the cold veranda, a floorboard emitted a merry pistol crack underfoot, and the reflections of the many-colored panes formed paradisal lozenges on the whitewashed cushionless window seats. The outer door resisted at first, then opened with a luscious crunch. . . . The reddish sand providently sprinkled on the ice coating the porch steps resembled cinnamon. . . . The snowdrifts reached all the way to the windows of the annex, tightly gripping the snug little wooden structure in their frosty clutches.”
The beauty of this description, its quality of safety and wholesomeness and harmony, the pleasant connotations of cinnamon and snugness, lusciousness and dazzlement, amount to a trust in life than transcends human sorrow. Nabokov was both a collector of butterflies and a composer of chess problems, and his satiric and heartbroken awareness of how odd, ridiculous and even odious human beings are never expunges his sense of the beauty of the natural world; the particular qualities–amounting to personality–of ordinary objects; or the almost mathematical mate and checkmate of an intricate plot.
Like the painter John Singer Sargent, Nabokov is aristocratic, unsentimental and addicted to the play of light that makes a moment itself. Like Sargent, too, he is no more interested in the inner workings of people than in their brilliant, idiosyncratic surfaces.
Many of these stories are plotted with a clockmaker’s precision, an example being “A Matter of Chance.” In it, a Russian aristocrat in exile boards a train without knowing that her husband, from whom she has been separated by the revolution, is working on that same train as a waiter in the dining car. Believing his wife dead, he has resolved to kill himself that very night. As the train hurtles along, Nabokov teasingly presents a series of exquisitely worked-out opportunities for them to encounter one another.
Even more intricate is the ghost story “The Vane Sisters,” written in 1951 when Nabokov was teaching at Cornell. The priggish narrator, a teacher of French, unconsciously reports to the reader a most delicate form of haunting. Two artistic sisters whom he knew slightly before their deaths, and whose supernatural views he ridiculed, conspire to let him see the world for an afternoon as they themselves saw it, with a freshness and dazzlement that stuns the dust-dry professor. Without realizing it, he then pens an anagram within the story that explains what the dead sisters have done.
Thematically, this story is related to “The Return of Chorb,” written a quarter of a century earlier, in which a widower tells himself that the soul of his dead wife lingers in what she observed while living. “If he managed to gather all the little things they had noticed together–if he re-created thus the near past–her image would grow immortal.” In this attempt, Chorb allows the present to creep up on him unseen, with humiliating consequences.
Other marvelously fanciful stories include “A Nursery Tale,” in which the devil appears as a stylish woman, and the sinister “Revenge.” Although it ends implausibly, this early story contains a creature of horror Poe might have envied. To frighten his unfaithful wife, a sadistic biologist tells a tale in which a “corpse began to unwind like a huge ball of yarn. . . . Her body was a thin, endless worm, which was disentangling itself and crawling, slithering out through the crack under the door while on the bed there remained a naked, white, still humid skeleton.”
That story is uncommon in putting the imagination at the service of terror. Generally, readers feel a Chorb-like yearning simply to experience Nabokov’s superlative, almost ecstatic way of seeing. In these stories the usual lures of plot and character are, however perfect, nothing compared to the swift, exact encapsulation of life in metaphor. A folded map falls open “like a flight of stairs.” A piano raises its “lacquered wing,” and a lover who sees his girlfriend approaching, yet unaware of him, observes “her yellow scarf already on the move, like those dogs who recognize you before their owners do.” Almost better than metaphor is an ability to seize with unerring rapidity the detail that brings its object irresistibly into the reach of our senses: the “bitter, rubbery” taste of cocaine, the “gleaming white calves” of a peasant woman wringing a rag into a bucket, the sunbather with his “jolly meaty belly with a woolly path down the center.”
A passionate interest in the world is Nabokov’s genius, his salvation, his nature. Or as the narrator of “The Fight” observes, after seeing the father and lover of a young girl come to blows over the price of a glass of brandy: “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. . . . Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy . . . 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. . . .”
By such faithfulness to what is fleeting, Nabokov seems well on the way toward immortality.
