The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (114 page)

“The Wood-Sprite” is the first story Nabokov published and one of the first he wrote. It was signed “Vladimir Sirin”
(sirin
is a bird of Russian fable as well as the modern hawk owl), the pseudonym that, in his youth, the author used for many of his works.

Nabokov’s debut as a writer came when he was still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge (in May 1919 he had arrived in England with his family, abandoning Russia forever); he nurtured his passion for poetry, while also translating
Colas Breugnon
, a novella by Romain Rolland.

D.N.

“Russian Spoken Here”
(Govoryat po-russki)
dates from 1923, most likely early in the year. It remained unpublished until the current collections.

The “Meyn Ried” mentioned in the story is Thomas Mayne Reid (1818–1883), author of adventure novels. “Mister Ulyanov” is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who entered history under the stage name V. I. Lenin. The GPU, originally known as the Cheka, and later designated by the acronyms NKVD, MVD, and KGB, was the Bolshevik political secret police. Among the books the “prisoner” was allowed to read were the
Fables
of Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (1768–1844) and
Prince Serebryanïy
, a popular historical novel by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817–1875).

D.N.

“Sounds”
(Zvuki)
was written in September 1923 and was published in my English translation in
The New Yorker
on August 14, 1995, and now in the current collections.

Nabokov did not resume writing stories until lanuary 1923, two years after the publication of “The Wood-Sprite.” In the interim he had finished his studies at Cambridge (in the summer of 1922). He was now living in Berlin, where his family had moved in October 1920, and where his father was assassinated on March 28, 1922. At the time he was composing “Sounds,” Nabokov published two volumes of poetry and his Russian version of
Alice in Wonderland
. The story is, among other things, a transmuted evocation of a youthful love affair, almost certainly with his cousin Tatiana Evghenievna Segelkranz (the likely spelling of her military husband’s name, cited incorrectly elsewhere), née Rausch, who also makes an appearance in
The Gift
.

D.N.

“Wingstroke”
(Udar krïla)
, written in October 1923, was published in
Russkoye Ekho (The Russian Echo)
, an émigré periodical in Berlin, in January 1924, and now
in the current collections. Although the story is set in Zermatt, it refracts the recollection of a brief vacation Nabokov had taken in St. Moritz in December 1921, with his Cambridge friend Bobby de Calry.

We learn from a letter to his mother (who had moved to Prague late in 1923 while Nabokov remained in Berlin, where, in April 1924, he married Vera Slonim) that, in December 1924, he sent her a “continuation” of “Wingstroke,” presumably in published form. To date, no trace of this piece has been found. My English translation was published, with one differently worded sentence, under the titlle “Wing-beat” in
The Yale Review
, vol. 80, nos. 1 and 2, April 1992.

D.N.

Nabokov wrote “Gods”
(Bogi)
in October 1923. The story remained unpublished until the current collections.

Nabokov was working on what is probably his most important play, the five-act
Traghediya Gospodina Morna (The Tragedy of Mr. Morn)
, soon to be published for the first time by Ardis Press.

D.N.

“Sluchaynost’,”
one of my earliest tales, written at the beginning of 1924, in the last afterglow of my bachelor life, was rejected by the Berlin émigré daily
Rul’
(“We don’t print anecdotes about cocainists,” said the editor, in exactly the same tone of voice in which, thirty years later, Ross of
The New Yorker
was to say, “We don’t print acrostics,” when rejecting “The Vane Sisters”) and sent, with the assistance of a good friend, and a remarkable writer, Ivan Lukash, to the Rigan
Segodnya
, a more eclectic emigre organ, which published it on June 22, 1924. I would never have traced it again had it not been rediscovered by Andrew Field a few years ago.

V.N.,
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
, 1975

“The Seaport”
(Port)
, written during the first months of 1924, appeared in
Rul’
on December 24 of the same year, and now in the current collections. This story was later published, with a handful of minor changes, in
Vozvrashchenie Chorba (The Return of Chorb
, Slovo, Berlin, 1930), Nabokov’s first collection of short stories, which also included twenty-four poems. “The Seaport” has, in part, an autobiographical genesis: in July 1923, during a visit to Marseilles, Nabokov was fascinated by a Russian restaurant that he visited numerous times and where, among other things, two Russian sailors proposed that he embark for Indochina.

D.N.

“Revenge”
(Mest’)
, written in the spring of 1924, appeared in
Russkoye Ekho
on April 20, 1924, and now in the current collections.

“Beneficence”
(Blagost’)
, written in March 1924, was published in
Rul’
on April 28, 1924. Subsequently it appeared in
The Return of Chorb
, and now in the current collections.

D.N.

I doubt very much that I was responsible for the odious title
(“Katastrofa”)
inflicted upon this story. It was written in June 1924 in Berlin and sold to the Riga emigre daily
Segodnya
, where it appeared on July 13 of that year. Still under that label, and no doubt with my indolent blessings, it was included in the collection
Soglyadatay
, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.

I have now given it a new title, one that has the triple advantage of corresponding to the thematic background of the story, of being sure to puzzle such readers as “skip descriptions,” and of infuriating reviewers.

V.N.,
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
, 1976

Thunder is
grom
in Russian, storm is
burya
, and thunderstorm is
groza
, a grand little word, with that blue zigzag in the middle.

“Groza,”
written in Berlin sometime in the summer of 1924, was published in August 1924 in the émigré daily
Rul’
and collected in the
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
volume, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.

V.N.,
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
, 1976

“La Veneziana”
(Venetsianka)
was written mainly in September 1924; the manuscript is dated October 5 of that year. The story remained unpublished and untranslated until the current collections, becoming the title story for the French and Italian volumes. The recently completed English version was printed separately in a special edition celebrating the sixtieth birthday of Penguin, England, in 1995.

The painting by Sebastiano (Luciani) del Piombo (ca. 1485–1547) that almost certainly inspired the canvas described in the story is
Giovane romana detta Dorotea
, ca. 1512. Nabokov may have seen it at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum (now the Staatliche Museen) in Berlin. Possibly the painter’s birthplace—Venice—induced Nabokov to transform the lady from
“Romana”
to
“Veneziana.”
And it is almost certainly the same artist’s
Ritratto di donna
, which is in the Earl of Rador’s collection at Longford Castle, to which Nabokov alludes in his brief mention of “Lord Northwick from London, the owner … of another painting by the same del Piombo.”

D.N.

“Bakhman”
was written in Berlin in October 1924. It was serialized in
Rul’
, November 2 and 4 of that year, and included in my
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
collection of short stories, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. I am told that a pianist existed with some of my invented musician’s peculiar traits. In certain other respects he is related to Luzhin, the chess player of
The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina
, 1930), G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1964.

V.N.,
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
, 1975

“The Dragon”
(Drakon)
, written in November 1924, was published in a French translation by Vladimir Sikorsky, and now in the current collections.

D.N.

“Rozhdestvo”
was written in Berlin at the end of 1924, published in
Rul’
in two installments, January 6 and 8, 1925, and collected in
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. It oddly resembles the type of chess problem called “selfmate.”

V.N.,
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
, 1976

Sometime in 1924, in émigré Berlin, I had begun a novel tentatively entitled
Happiness (Schastie)
, some important elements of which were to be reslanted in
Mashen’ka
, written in the spring of 1925 (published by Slovo, Berlin, in 1926, translated into English under the title of
Mary
in 1970, McGraw-Hill, New York, and reprinted in Russian from the original text, by Ardis and McGraw-Hill, in 1974). Around Christmas 1924, I had two chapters of
Schastie
ready but then, for some forgotten but no doubt excellent reason, I scrapped chapter 1 and most of 2. What I kept was a fragment representing a letter written in Berlin to my heroine who had remained in Russia. This appeared in
Rul’
(Berlin, January 29, 1925) as
“Pis’mo
(Letter)
v Rossiyu,”
and was collected in
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
, in Berlin, 1930. A literal rendering of the title would have been ambiguous and therefore had to be changed.

V.N.,
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
, 1976

“The Fight”
(Draka)
appeared in
Rul’ on
September 26, 1925; in the current collections; in a French translation by Gilles Barbedette; and in my English translation in
The New Yorker
on February 18, 1985.

D.N.

First published in two issues of the Russian émigré
Rul’
(Berlin), November 12 and 13, 1925. Reprinted in the collection
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.

An English version by Gleb Struve (“The Return of Tchorb” by Vladimir Sirin) appeared in the anthology
This Quarter
(vol. 4, no. 4, June 1932), published in Paris by Edw. W. Titus. After rereading that version forty years later I was sorry to find it too tame in style and too inaccurate in sense for my present purpose. I have retranslated the story completely in collaboration with my son.

It was written not long after my novel
Mashen’ka (Mary)
was finished and is a good example of my early constructions. The place is a small town in Germany half a century ago. I notice that the road from Nice to Grasse where I imagined poor Mrs. Chorb walking was still unpaved and chalky with dust around 1920. I have skipped her mother’s ponderous name and patronymic “Varvara Klimovna,” which would have meant nothing to my Anglo-American readers.

V.N.,
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
, 1976

Written in December 1925 in Berlin,
Putevoditel’ po Berlinu
was published in
Rul’
, December 24, 1925, and collected in
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.

Despite its simple appearance, this “Guide” is one of my trickiest pieces. Its translation has caused my son and me a tremendous amount of healthy trouble. Two or three scattered phrases have been added for the sake of factual clarity.

V.N.,
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
, 1976

“A Nursery Tale”
(Skazka)
was written in Berlin in late May or early June 1926, and serialized in the émigré daily
Rul’
(Berlin), in the issues of June 27 and 29 of that year. It was reprinted in my
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
collection, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.

A rather artificial affair, composed a little hastily, with more concern for the tricky plot than for imagery and good taste, it required some revamping here and there in the English version. Young Erwin’s harem, however, has remained intact. I had not reread my
“Skazka”
since 1930 and, when working now at its translation, was eerily startled to meet a somewhat decrepit but unmistakable Humbert escorting his nymphet in the story I wrote almost half a century ago.

V.N.,
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
, 1975

“Uzhas”
was written in Berlin, around 1926, one of the happiest years of my life. The
Sovremennya Zapiski
, the Paris émigré magazine, published it in 1927 and it was included in the first of my three collections of Russian stories,
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. It preceded Sartre’s
La Nausée
, with which it shares certain shades of thought, and none of that novel’s fatal defects, by at least a dozen years.

V.N.,
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
, 1975

“Razor”
(Britva)
first appeared in
Rul’
on September 16, 1926.
Mashen’ka (Mary)
, Nabokov’s first novel, would be published approximately one month later. It was printed, in a French translation by Laurence Doll, in the introductory volume of the Dutch “Nabokov Library” (De Bezige Bij, 1991), and now in the current collections.

D.N.

“Passazhir”
was written in early 1927 in Berlin, published in
Rul’
, Berlin, March 6, 1927, and included in the collection
Vozvrashchenie Chorba
, by V. Sirin, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. An English translation by Gleb Struve appeared in
Lovat Dickson’s Magazine
, edited by P. Gilchrist Thompson (with my name on the cover reading V. Nobokov [sic]-Sirin), vol. 2, no. 6, London, June 1934. It was reprinted in
A Century of Russian Prose and Verse from Pushkin to Nabokov
, edited by O. R. and R. P. Hughes and G. Struve, with the original
en regard
, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1967. I was unable to use Struve’s version in this volume for the same reasons that made me forgo his “Tchorb’s Return” (see Introduction to it).