The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Irving Malin

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. 660 pages. $35.

The publication of Nabokov's complete stories is a significant event. In addition to republishing all of his previously published tales in chronological order, Knopf has also included 13 "new" ones, for which we are also thankful. All of the stories give the sense that Nabokov's obsessive themes--the loss or absence of a lover; the uncanny intrusion of omens; the importance of dreams and hallucinations--recur throughout his career.

One good way to approach this collection of 65 stones--most translated from the Russian by the author--is to explicate the very first. "The WoodSprite" first appeared in 1921, when Nabokov was 22, and although it is a mere three pages long, it offers clues to all the fiction of the master.

The very first sentence is: "I was pensively penning the outline of the inkstand's circular quivering shadow." Such preciously punning narrators reappear in Lolita and Pak Fire (to mention only two of the novels); here he is associated with such recurring symbols as the shadow and the circle. The second sentence mentions "a distant room"--distance, exile, and the psychic spaces they herald will reappear many times in Nabokov's fiction. He hears a clock, and in his "dream" state he "imagines" the knock on the door. The knock increases in intensity, and the "someone" who is knocking "pauses expectantly." Throughout the fiction there are such pauses; think, for example, of the pregnant pauses in Pnin.

Fire is alluded to in the third paragraph. So is a tilt; likewise, all of Nabokov's fictions are tilted, angled, crooked. The word "shadow" is repeated. The narrator writes: "I knew his face--oh, how long I had known it." The face is somewhat deformed; the narrator refers to a "right eye"--is there a pun here?--still in the shadows. We are told that the left eye is "elongated": "the pupil glowed like a point of rust." The eyebrow is scarcely noticeable, but it seems to make the narrator remember-speak, memorybut then he can't truly remember "the where and the when of the meetings." The figure "perched like a crow on a tree stump." There is certainly a hint of death in this crow, as there is in the shadow that also adumbrates s in the shadow that also adumbrates the many doubles in Nabokov's work.

The visitor is afraid of the streets--the city tends to be dangerous in many of Nabokov's fictions. He claims that he and the narrator "used to romp together" in "the old country" (the old country: is it the past? Is it the point of origin?). The narrator is "blinded by the voice." How strange--and how typical--is this blending of senses and two characters!

The narrator then begins to doubt his vision; he thinks the whole visit to be a kind of "capricious delirium" (like those of Humbert, Kinbote or the narrator of Despair). And when the visitor maintains that he is a "former elf," one is startled. We did not expect a "sprite"; we expected a human being. We also begin to think that perhaps the narrator has undergone a metamorphosis. (Remember that Kafka's story was one of the few that Nabokov considered truly great.)

Space does not permit a close reading of the entire story, but this explication has already borne fruit. Almost all of its details will reappear in Nabokov's long and brilliant career, as if the mature butterfly emerged fully developed from his cocoon. Each story--each sentence in each story--merits such dose reading. This very fact indicates the extraordinary complexity and density of Nabokov's fiction.