THIS treasure chest contains sixty five stories, thirteen here collected for the first time and eleven of that thirteen translated into English for their first appearance. The helpful Preface by Dimitri Nabokov (VN's son and translator) and the brief, useful apparatus of Notes and Appendix, give essential bibliographic details for those with a passion for precision. The stories are arranged chronologically there are just a couple of moments of instability arising from incomplete scholarship so that we are given gems strung on a life, or better, precise co-ordinates for plotting the star bound trajectory of an incomparable creative career.
Nabokov's career as a short story writer begins in 1921 with the publication in Berlin of "The Wood sprite", a folksy, Gogolian and thoroughly Russian tale, and ends in the pages of the New Yorker with "Lance", a rich and enigmatic weave of medieval chivalric lore, satire of science fiction, and tender parental love. Strung between them there are pure diamonds and a couple of duds which serve to highlight the beautifully levigated facets of the real sparklers.
But let us pocket all this Pateresque patter and come to cases. Most of the stories use the milieux of Russian emigre life as their settings Berlin, Paris, the south of France, the east coast of the United States. Future historians of the post revolutionary diaspora will rifle them for their faithful recordings of poverty and bravery, cupidity and generosity. Present readers will value them for their wit, imagination and much else besides. Casually, in the course of "The Return of Chorb" (1925), you will encounter a piercing criticism of American letters and Wagnerian opera "The same black poodle with apathetic eyes was in the act of raising a thin hind leg near a Morris pillar, straight at the scarlet lettering of a playbill announcing Parsifal." In "Spring in Fialta" (1937, and one of the best stories in the canon) there is a portrait of an unnamed Franco Hungarian writer modelled on Nabokov himself but written by a disaffected, hostile and jealous witness.
There is a brace of stories ("Russian Spoken Here", "Revenge" a poorly cobbled thing "Razor", "The Christmas Story", "Tyrants Destroyed") in which scorn and contempt are heaped on the discredited Soviet system and its functionaries. "The Leonardo" and "Cloud, Castle, Lake" perform a similar service for European fascism, and "Conversation Piece, 1945" drags in American fellow travellers as suitable cases for Nabokov's inimitable treatment. Late and detached Nabokov, the ice bound Olympian, is not present in these stories. Here he is fielding History's best shots and redirecting the slings and arrows to their proper targets.
Many of the stories are conventional tales of hauntings, young love, vanity and loss. Quite a few feature "a twist in the tale", a happy or unhappy chance, a piece of poor timing, a wrong choice. But the universe wherein Nabokovian events occur is light years away from that of O. Henry or of his sterile, dim and desolate moon, Lord Archer. Nabokov is required reading for what he achieves within the conventions. The brief story, "A Matter of Chance" (1924), is a marvel of scrupulous synchronisation the even briefer "Signs and Symbols" (1948) turns on the jejune device of an intrusively ringing telephone. And while you sit in stunned admiration, melting in the golden peace that flows from contact with true artistry, the stories release their scalding contents of anguish and suffering.
In a hurt letter to Katharine White at the New Yorker in 1951 (the magazine had just rejected his acrostically tailed "The Vane Sisters" on the grounds of its "light story, elaboration and overwhelming style"), Nabokov maintained "For me style is matter." That tenet is vindicated on almost every one of these pages. "Spring in Fialta" contains a sentence of some 230 words, five semi colons, thirty eight commas, two parentheses, a snatch of a French song of doomed love (not included in the word count) which registers the narrator's guilty but ecstatic feelings for a woman not his wife. Yet the sentence has neither guilt nor ecstasy, just the careful accumulation of physical detail, the orchestration of images and memories. In Nabokov's prose, the meaning arrives in the wake of the words.
Here is a beauty from "Lik" (1939) "Koldunov has been a hopelessly poor student his was that peculiarly Russian hopelessness of the seemingly bewitched dunce as he sinks, in a vertical position, through the transparent strata of several repeated classes, so that the youngest boys gradually reach his level, numb with fear, and then, a year later, leave him behind with relief." We all know this character and have felt the fear he induces but we also know in our bones that he can be flayed with our laughter. Nabokov's fictions are equipment for living read them and live a little.