The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (116 page)

“Krug”
was published in 1936, in Paris, but the exact date and periodical (presumably,
Poslednie Novosti)
have not yet been established in bibliographic retrospect. It was reprinted twenty years later in the collection of my short stories
Vesna v Fialte
, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956.

V.N.,
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973

“A Russian Beauty”
(Krasavitsa)
is an amusing miniature, with an unexpected solution. The original text appeared in the émigré daily
Poslednie Novosti
, Paris, August 18, 1934, and was included in
Soglyadatay
, the collection of the author’s stories published by Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, 1938. The English translation appeared in
Esquire
in April, 1973.

V.N.,
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
, 1973

“Breaking the News” appeared under the title
“Opoveshchenie”
(Notification) in an émigré periodical around 1935 and was included in my collection
Soglyadatay
(Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, 1938).

The milieu and the theme both correspond to those of “Signs and Symbols,” written ten years later in English (see
The New Yorker
, May 15, 1948, and
Nabokov’s Dozen
, Doubleday, 1958).

V.N.,
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
, 1973

“Torpid Smoke”
(Tyazhyolyy dym)
appeared in the daily
Poslednie Novosti
, Paris, March 3, 1935, and was reprinted in
Vesna v Fialte
, New York, 1956. The present translation has been published in
Triquarterly
, no. 27, Spring 1973. In two or three passages brief phrases have been introduced to elucidate points of habitus and locale, unfamiliar today not only to foreign readers but to the incurious grandchildren of the Russians who fled to western Europe in the first three or four years after the Bolshevist Revolution; otherwise the translation is acrobatically faithful—beginning with the title, which in a coarse lexical rendering that did not take familiar associations into account would read “Heavy Smoke.”

The story belongs to that portion of my short fiction which refers to émigré, life in Berlin between 1920 and the late thirties. Seekers of biographical tidbits should be warned that my main delight in composing those things was to invent ruthlessly assortments of exiles who in character, class, exterior features, and so forth were utterly unlike any of the Nabokovs. The only two affinities here between author and hero are that both wrote Russian verse and that I had lived at one time or another in the same kind of lugubrious Berlin apartment as he. Only very poor readers (or perhaps some exceptionally good ones) will scold me for not letting them into its parlor.

V.N.,
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
, 1973

“Nabor”
was written in the summer of 1935 in Berlin. It appeared on August 18 of that year in
Poslednie Novosti
, Paris, and was included twenty-one years later in my
Vesna v Fialte
collection, published by the Chekhov Publishing House in New York.

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

The original title of this entertaining tale is “
Sluchay in zhizni.”
The first word means “occurrence,” or “case,” and the last two “from life.” The combination has a deliberately commonplace, newspaper nuance in Russian which is lost in a lexical version. The present formula is truer in English tone, especially as it fits so well my man’s primitive jargon (hear his barroom maunder just before the fracas).

What was your purpose, sir, in penning this story, forty years ago in Berlin? Well, I did pen it (for I never learned to type and the long reign of the 3B pencil, capped with an eraser, was to start much later—in parked motorcars and motels); but I had never any “purpose” in mind when writing stories—for myself, my wife, and half a dozen dear dead chuckling friends. It was first published in
Poslednie Novosti
, an émigré daily in Paris, on September 22, 1935, and collected three years later in
Soglyadatay
, Russkiya Zapiski (Annales Russes, 51, rue de Turbigo, Paris, a legendary address).

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

“Spring in Fialta” is from
Nabokov’s Dozen
, 1958 (see
Appendix
).

“Cloud, Castle, Lake” is from
Nabokov’s Dozen
, 1958 (see
Appendix
).

“Istreblenie tiranov”
was written in Mentone in spring or early summer 1938. It appeared in the
Russkiya Zapiski
, Paris, August 1938, and in my
Vesna v Fialte
collection of short stories, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956. Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin dispute my tyrant’s throne in this story—and meet again in
Bend Sinister
, 1947, with a fifth toad. The destruction is thus complete.

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

“Lik”
was published in the émigré review
Russkiya Zapiski
, Paris, February 1939, and in my third Russian collection
(Vesna v Fialtre
, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956).
“Lik”
reflects the miragy Riviera surroundings among which I composed it and attempts to create the impression of a stage performance engulfing
a neurotic performer, though not quite in the way that the trapped actor expected when dreaming of such an experience.

The present English translation appeared first in
The New Yorker
, October 10, 1964, and was included in
Nabokov’s Quartet
, Phaedra Publishers, New York, 1966.

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

“Mademoiselle O” is from
Nabokov’s Dozen
, 1958 (see
Appendix
).

To relieve the dreariness of life in Paris at the end of 1939 (about six months later I was to migrate to America) I decided one day to play an innocent joke on the most famous of émigré critics, George Adamovich (who used to condemn my stuff as regularly as I did the verse of his disciples) by publishing in one of the two leading magazines a poem signed with a new pen name, so as to see what he would say, about that freshly emerged author, in the weekly literary column he contributed to the Paris émigré daily
Poslednie Novosti
. Here is the poem, as translated by me in 1970 (
Poems and Problems
, McGraw-Hill, New York):

The Russian original appeared in October or November 1939 in the
Russkiya Zapiski
, if I remember correctly, and was acclaimed by Adamovich in his review of that issue with quite exceptional enthusiasm. (“At last a great poet has been born in our midst,” etc.—I quote from memory, but I believe a bibliographer is in the process of tracking down this item.) I could not resist elaborating the fun and, shortly after the eulogy appeared, I published in the same
Poslednie Novosti
(December 1939? Here again the precise date eludes me) my prose piece “Vasiliy Shishkov” (collected in
Vesna v Fialte
, New York, 1956), which could be regarded, according to the émigré reader’s degree of acumen, either as an actual occurrence involving a real person called Shishkov, or as a tongue-in-cheek story about the strange case of one poet dissolving in another. Adamovich refused at first to believe eager friends and foes who drew his attention to my having invented Shishkov; finally, he gave in and explained in his next essay that I “was a sufficiently skillful parodist to mimic genius.” I fervently wish all critics to be as generous as he. I met him, briefly, only twice; but many old literati have spoken a lot, on the occasion of his recent death, about his kindliness and penetrativeness. He had really only two passions in life: Russian poetry and French sailors.

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

The winter of 1939–40 was my last season of Russian prose writing. In spring I left for America, where I was to spend twenty years in a row writing fiction solely in English. Among the works of those farewell months in Paris was a novel which I did not complete before my departure, and to which I never went back. Except for two chapters and a few notes, I destroyed the unfinished thing. Chapter 1, entitled “Ultima Thule,” appeared in 1942
(Novyy Zhurnal
, vol. 1, New York). It had been preceded by the publication of chapter 2, “Solus Rex,” in early 1940
(Sovremennyya Zapiski
, vol. 70, Paris). The present translation, made in February 1971 by my son with my collaboration, is scrupulously faithful to the original text, including the restoration of a scene that had been marked in the
Sovremennyya Zapiski
by suspension points.

Perhaps, had I finished my book, readers would not have been left wondering about a few things: was Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom
the narrator’s dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a phrase which her husband did or did not recognize? Be that as it may, one thing is clear enough. In the course of evolving an imaginary country (which at first merely diverted him from his grief, but then grew into a self-contained artistic obsession), the widower becomes so engrossed in Thule that the latter starts to develop its own reality, Sineusov mentions in chapter 1 that he is moving from the Riviera to his former apartment in Paris; actually, he moves into a bleak palace on a remote northern island. His art helps him to resurrect his wife in the disguise of Queen Belinda, a pathetic act which does not let him triumph over death even in the world of free fancy. In chapter 3 she was to die again, killed by a bomb meant for her husband, on the new bridge across the Egel, a few minutes after returning from the Riviera. That is about all I can make out through the dust and debris of my old fancies.

A word about K. The translators had some difficulty about that designation because the Russian for “king,”
korol
, is abbreviated as “Kr” in the sense it is used here, which sense can be rendered only by “K” in English. To put it rather neatly, my “K” refers to a chessman, not to a Czech. As to the title of the fragment, let me quote Blackburne,
Terms & Themes of Chess Problems
(London, 1907): “If the King is the only Black man on the board, the problem is said to be of the
‘Solus Rex’
variety.”

Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S. P. Diaghilev (1872–1929), remains one of my favorite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises. I do not remember the details of poor Adulf’s death, except that he was dispatched, in some horrible, clumsy manner, by Sien and his companions, exactly five years before the inauguration of the Egel bridge.

Freudians are no longer around, I understand, so I do not need to warn them not to touch my circles with their symbols. The good reader, on the other hand, will certainly distinguish garbled English echoes of this last Russian novel of mine in
Bend Sinister
(1947) and, especially,
Pale Fire
(1962); I find those echoes a little annoying, but what really makes me regret its noncompletion is that it promised to differ radically, by the quality of its coloration, by the amplitude of its style, by something undefinable about its powerful underflow, from all my other works in Russian. The present translation of “Ultima Thule” appeared in
The New Yorker
, April 7, 1973.

V.N.,
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
, 1973