The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (2 page)

From the list entitled “Stories written in English,” also reproduced following the preface, Nabokov omitted “First Love” (first published
in
The New Yorker
as “Colette”), either through an oversight or because of its transformation into a chapter of
Speak, Memory
(original title:
Conclusive Evidence)
. Some alignment instructions—albeit in Russian—in the upper left-hand corner suggest that this list was a fair copy prepared for typing. The two facsimile lists contain a few inaccuracies. “The Vane Sisters,” for example, was written in 1951.

The four “definitive” volumes mentioned above had been painstakingly assorted and orchestrated by Nabokov using various criteria—theme, period, atmosphere, uniformity, variety. It is appropriate that each of them conserve its “book” identity for future publication as well. The thirteen stories published in France and Italy as, respectively,
La Vénitienne
and
La veneziana
have also perhaps earned the right to appear as a separate English-language volume. These thirteen have made other individual and collective debuts in Europe, and the four previous dozens have appeared worldwide, sometimes in different constellations such as the recent
Russkaya Dyuzhena (Russian Dozen)
in Israel. I shall not touch on publication in post-Perestroyka Russia, which, with few exceptions, has been mega-copy piracy in every sense until now, although improvements shimmer on the horizon.

The present comprehensive collection, while not intended to eclipse the previous groupings, is deliberately arranged in chronological sequence, or the best possible approximation thereof. To this end, the order used in previous volumes has occasionally been altered, and the newly collected pieces have been integrated where appropriate. Date of composition was the criterion of choice. When this was not available or not dependable, date of first publication or other mentions became the guide. Eleven of the newly incorporated thirteen have never before been translated into English. Five of them remained unpublished until the recent appearance of the “new” thirteen in several European languages. Further bibliographical essentials and certain other interesting details appear at the back of this volume.

One obvious bonus of the new arrangement is a convenient overview of Nabokov’s development as a writer of fiction. It is interesting, too, that the vectors are not always linear, and a strikingly mature short story may suddenly crop up amid the younger, simpler tales. While illuminating the evolution of the creative process, and affording exciting insights into the themes and methods to be used later—particularly in the novels—Vladimir Nabokov’s stories are nevertheless among his most immediately accessible work. Even when linked in some way to the larger fictions, they are self-contained. Even when they can be read on more than one level, they require few literary prerequisites. They offer the reader immediate gratification whether or not he has ventured
into Nabokov’s larger and more complex writings or delved into his personal history.

My translations of the “new” thirteen are my responsibility alone. The translation of most of the previously published Russian stories was the fruit of a cloudless collaboration between father and son, but the father had authorial license to alter his own texts in their translated form as, on occasion, he deemed appropriate. It is conceivable he might have done so, here and there, with the newly translated stories as well. It goes without saying that, as lone translator, the only liberty I have taken was the correction of the obvious slip or typo, and of editorial blunders from the past. The worst of those was the omission of the entire, wonderful, final page of “The Assistant Producer” in all English-language editions, it seems, subsequent to the first. Incidentally, in the song that twice meanders through the story, the Don Cossack who heaves his bride into the Volga is Stenka Razin.

I confess that, during the long gestation of this collection, I have taken advantage of queries and comments from hawk-eyed translators and editors of recent and concurrent translations into other tongues, and of fine-toothed inspections by those who are publishing a few of the stories individually in English. No matter how intense and pedantic the checking, a flounder or several will slip through the net. Nevertheless, future editors and translators should be aware that the present volume reflects what, at the time of its publication, are the most accurate versions of the English texts and, especially with regard to the thirteen newly collected pieces, of the underlying Russian originals (which were at times very hard to decipher, contained possible or probable author’s or copyist’s slips necessitating sometimes difficult decisions, and on occasion had one or more variants).

To be fair, I would like to acknowledge, with gratitude, spontaneously submitted draft translations of two stories. One came from Charles Nicol, the other from Gene Barabtarlo. Both are appreciated, and both yielded
trouvailles
. However, in order to maintain an appropriately homogeneous style, I have stuck, by and large, to my own English locutions. I am indebted to Brian Boyd, Dieter Zimmer, and Michael Juliar for their invaluable bibliographical research. Above all, I am grateful to Véra Nabokov for her infinite wisdom, her superlative judgment, and the willpower that compelled her, with failing eyesight and enfeebled hands, to jot a preliminary translation of several passages of “Gods” in her very last days.

It would take much more than a brief preface to trace themes, methods, and images as they weave and develop in these stories, or the echoes of Nabokov’s youth in Russia, his university years in England,
the émigré period in Germany and France, and the America he was inventing, as he put it, after having invented Europe. To choose at random from the thirteen newly collected stories, “La Veneziana,” with its astonishing twist, echoes Nabokov’s love for painting (to which he intended, as a boy, to dedicate his life) against a backdrop that includes tennis, which he played and described with a special flair. The other twelve range from fable (“The Dragon”) and political intrigue (“Russian Spoken Here”) to a poetical, personal impressionism (“Sounds” and “Gods”).

Nabokov gives in his notes (which appear at the end of this volume) certain insights regarding the previously collected stories. Among the many things one might add is the eerie doubling of space-time (in “Terra Incognita” and “The Visit to the Museum”) that foreshadows the atmosphere of
Ada, Pale Fire
, and, to a degree,
Transparent Things
and
Look at the Harlequins!
Nabokov’s predilection for butterflies is a central theme of “The Aurelian” and flickers through many other stories. But what is stranger, music, for which he never professed a special love, often figures prominently in his writing (“Sounds,” “Bachmann,” “Music,” “The Assistant Producer”).

Particularly touching to me personally is the sublimation, in “Lance” (as my father told me), of what my parents experienced in my mountain-climbing days. But perhaps the deepest, most important theme, be it subject or undercurrent, is Nabokov’s contempt for cruelty—the cruelty of humans, the cruelty of fate—and here the instances are too numerous to name.

DMITRI NABOKOV
St. Petersburg, Russia, and Montreux, Switzerland
June 1995

A note from Georg Heepe, editorial director of Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, traces the discovery of “Easter Rain,” now appended to this edition. It reads in part:

Thus “Easter Rain”—first discovered by Svetlana Polsky, though we only learned her name some years later; translated into English in collaboration with Peter Constantine for the Spring 2002 issue of
Conjunctions
—now joins this volume.

DMITRI NABOKOV
Vevy, Switzerland
May 2002

A Russian text for “The Word” first came to my attention in the spring of 2005, a story so startlingly emotional that, before I translated it, I had to quell some doubts regarding its authenticity. It was the second story my father published, and the first he published after the assassination of his father in 1922; composed in Berlin, it appeared in a January 1923 issue of
Rul’
, the Russian emigre periodical his father had co-published in Berlin. Like “Ultima Thule” a decade later, “The Word” contains an all-explaining secret we never learn. Like “The Wood-Sprite” and an early poem, “Revolution,” “The Word” projects an idyllic, kindly world against barbarous reality, ominously silhouetted by its pagination in
Rul’:
it appeared next to an unfinished fragment by his father.

“The Word” is also one of the very few Vladimir Nabokov stories in which angels take part. They are, of course, a very personal embodiment, much more closely related to angels of fable, fantasy, and fresco than to the standard angels of Russian Orthodox religion. It is also true that symbols of religious faith appeared ever less frequently in Nabokov’s fiction after his father’s death (see “Wingstroke” for a very different kind of angel). The ingenuous rapture of “The Word” surfaces in my father’s later works, but only fleetingly, in an otherworld Nabokov could only hint at. He explained, however, that he would be unable to say as much as he did, had he not known more than he said.

DMITRI NABOKOV
Montreux, Switzerland
January 2006

I
WAS
pensively penning the outline of the inkstand’s circular, quivering shadow. In a distant room a clock struck the hour, while I, dreamer that I am, imagined someone was knocking at the door, softly at first, then louder and louder. He knocked twelve times and paused expectantly.

“Yes, I’m here, come in.…”

The doorknob creaked timidly, the flame of the runny candle tilted, and he hopped sidewise out of a rectangle of shadow, hunched, gray, powdered with the pollen of the frosty, starry night.

I knew his face—oh, how long I had known it!

His right eye was still in the shadows, the left peered at me timorously, elongated, smoky-green. The pupil glowed like a point of rust.… That mossy-gray tuft on his temple, the pale-silver, scarcely noticeable eyebrow, the comical wrinkle near his whiskerless mouth—how all this teased and vaguely vexed my memory!

I got up. He stepped forward.

His shabby little coat seemed to be buttoned wrong—on the female side. In his hand he held a cap—no, a dark-colored, poorly tied bundle, and there was no sign of any cap.…

Yes, of course I knew him—perhaps had even been fond of him, only I simply could not place the where and the when of our meetings. And we must have met often, otherwise I would not have had such a firm recollection of those cranberry lips, those pointy ears, that amusing Adam’s apple.…

With a welcoming murmur I shook his light, cold hand, and touched the back of a shabby armchair. He perched like a crow on a tree stump, and began speaking hurriedly.

“It’s so scary in the streets. So I dropped in. Dropped in to visit you. Do you recognize me? You and I, we used to romp together and
halloo at each other for days at a time. Back in the old country. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

His voice literally blinded me. I felt dazzled and dizzy—I remembered the happiness, the echoing, endless, irreplaceable happiness.…