The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories.
Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers and intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

The wood-sprite --
Russian spoken here --
Sounds --
Wingstroke --
Gods --
A matter of chance --
The seaport --
Revenge --
Beneficence --
Details of a sunset --
The thunderstorm --
La veneziana --
Bachmann --
The dragon --
Christmas --
A letter that never reached Russia --
The fight --
The return of Chorb --
A guide to Berlin --
A nursery tale --
Terror --
Razor --
The passenger --
The doorbell --
An affair of honor --
The Christmas story --
The potato elf --
The aurelian --
A dashing fellow --
A bad day --
The visit to the museum --
A busy man --
Terra incognita --
The reunion --
Lips to lips --
Orache --
Music --
Perfection --
The admiralty spire --
The Leonardo --
In memory of L.I. Shigaev --
The circle --
A Russian beauty --
Breaking the news --
Torpid smoke --
Recruiting --
A slice of life --
Spring in Fialta --
Cloud, castle, lake --
Tyrants destroyed --
Lik --
Mademoiselle O --
Vasiliy Shishkov --
Ultima Thule --
Solus Rex --
The assistant producer --
That in aleppo once --
A forgotten poet --
Time and ebb --
Conversation piece, 1945 --
Signs and symbols --
First love --
Scenes from the life of a double monster --
The Vane sisters --
Lance.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Russia, Classics, Literature, Russian Literature, 20th Century

680 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

About the author

Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he grew up trilingual, speaking Russian, English, and French in a household that nurtured his intellectual curiosities, including a lifelong passion for butterflies. This seemingly idyllic, privileged existence was abruptly shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced the family into permanent exile in 1919. This early, profound experience of displacement and the loss of a homeland became a central, enduring theme in his subsequent work, fueling his exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievable past.
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to

Reviews

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I feel utterly overwhelmed by meaninglessness of life there are only two things I turn to: weed and Nabokov. We’re all lovers of literature here, but don’t you often feel like what’s the point of it all? That it’s all just bullshit? I do, all the time. So maybe I’m a misanthrope, I do actively hope for the end of the human race on a regular basis, and it’s not just all literature I often think is a worthless meaningless sham but whole of art, science, and every other human attempt to make sense of it all. And then I read Nabokov and I think maybe I’m wrong?

If, by chance, the existence of our universe turns out to be some sort of comic competition amongst numberless universes produced by endlessly cascading big bangs, all competing for some unnamed cosmic prize, then I nominate this book, The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, to serve as our entry to that contest, not just as a representative Earth, but as the single representation of the pinnacle of comic evolution in our universe. I don’t think I’m overstating the case. Vladimir Nabokov justifies the existence of, not only the human race, but all life that exists in our universe. If 14.5 billion years ago the big bang happened simply so 8 billion years later a planet would form in an arm of an ordinary galaxies amongst billions of identical galaxies, so that life might evolve, eventually followed by language, simply so that a boy would be born in Russia who would one day write this very book, then that is as much meaning in life as one could ever possibly hope for. This book is miraculous, and the closest to a religious worldview as I will ever come, and that’s more than enough for me.

Now I hope I’m not overselling this book, and I don’t think I am, but I just wanted to make clear that the reason I took 2 years (yes two years) to finish it was because I wanted to savory every bit of it, some of these stories I’ve reread a half dozen times. And now that it’s finally finished I feel a sense of sadness that this book, which has sat on my nightstand for years yellowing before my eyes, and has had no fewer than a hundred joints rolled on its cover, and has talked me down from three separate panic attacks, will now be placed in a bookshelf next to regular undeserving books, yet on the other hand if I were to die now, I could feel like I accomplished at least one thing in my life and it wasn’t all a waste.



A Letter That Never Reached Russia

My charming, dear, distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray haired, azure-liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvorov Museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox. How ardently we kissed behind a waxen grenadier's back! And later, when we came out of that antique dust, how dazzled we were by the silvery blaze of the Tavricheski Park, and how odd it was to hear the cheery, avid, deep-fetched grunts of soldiers, lunging on command, slithering across the icy ground, plunging a bayonet into the straw-bellied German-helmeted dummy in the middle of a Petersburg street.

Yes, I know that I had sworn, in my previous letter to you, not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to possess a lofty pudicity of expression, and yet, here I am, from the very first lines, disdaining that right to sublime imperfection, and defeating with epithets the recollection on which you touched with such lightness and grace. Not of the past, my love, do I wish to speak to you.

It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects—the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one's desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nestling in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A glass column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop, and, for some reason, I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty. Through its windows one can clearly see the rows of brightly lit brown seats between which a lone ticket collector with a black satchel at his side makes his way, reeling a bit and thus looking a little tight—as he moves against the direction of the car's travel.

As I wander along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the glass pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute.

A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow passes under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted–except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she passes under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply.

And beyond the bend, above the sidewalk—how unexpectedly!—the front of a cinema ripples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-pale screen you can watch more-or-less skillfully trained mimes: the huge face of a girl with gray, shimmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, shining tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) there appears real life, unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright waters, a noiselessly but visibly rustling tree.

Farther on, at the corner of a square, a stout prostitute in black furs slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the shiny silk of her peach-colored stockings. I like to observe this placid middle-aged whore, as she is approached by an elderly man with a mustache, who came on business that morning from Papenburg (first he passes her and takes two backward glances). She will conduct him unhurriedly to a room in a nearby building, which, in the daytime, is quite undistinguishable from other, equally ordinary buildings. A polite and impassive old porter keeps an all-night vigil in the unlighted front hall. At the top of a steep staircase an equally impassive old woman will unlock with sage unconcern an unoccupied room and receive payment for it.

And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music that I cannot help imagining the sunny lands toward which I shall depart as soon as I have procured those extra hundred marks for which I long so blandly, so lightheartedly.

I am so lighthearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local café. Many fellow exiles of mind denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about. And of course these so-called modern dances of ours are actually anything but modern: the craze goes back to the days of the Directoire, for then as now women's dresses were worn next to the skin, and the musicians were Negroes. Fashion breathes thought the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fashion's breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances. Our dances, after all, are very natural and pretty innocent, and sometimes—in London ballrooms—perfectly graceful in their monotony. We all remember what Pushkin wrote about the waltz: "monotonous and mad." It's all the same thing. As for the deterioration of morals... Here's what I found in D'Agricourt's memoirs: "I know nothing more depraved than the minuet, which they see fit to dance in our cities."

And so I enjoy watching, in the cafés dansants here, how "pair after pair flick by," to quote Pushkin again. Amusingly made-up eyes sparkle with simple human merriment. Black-trousered and light-stockinged legs touch. Feet turn this way and that. And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night with its moist reflections, hooting cars, and gusts of high-blowing wind.

On that kind of of night, at the Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city, an old lady of seventy committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. I happened to go there the next morning, and the watchman, a badly crippled veteran of the Denikin campaign, moving on crutches that creaked with every swing of his body, showed me the white cross on which she hanged herself, and the yellow strands still adhering where the rope ("brand new one," he said gently) had chafed. Most mysterious and enchanting of all, though, were the crescent-shaped prints left by her heels, tiny as a child's, on the damp soil by the plinth. "She trampled the ground a bit, poor thing, but apart from that there's no mess at all," observed the watchman calmly, and, glancing at those yellow strands and at those little depressions, I suddenly realized that one can distinguish a naive smile even in death. Possibly, dear, my main reason for writing this letter is to tell you of that easy, gentle end. Thus the Berlin night resolved itself.

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am far from Nabokov’s completist. I’ve read just two of his novels, the one in Russian and one in English. I’ve read and enjoyed his literary criticism in spite of his “strong opinions” and I could not care for his memoirs that much. But I’ve recently come across The Circle. It was a little discovery and I've decided to read more of his stories. I’ve read all the major ones now. I tried to read them in the language he has initially written them. The majority of the Russian language stories are actually written in Berlin. The English ones - in America. But soon enough after his arrival there, Nabokov has stopped writing them all together.

In general, I am very impressed with the sheer variety of those stories. It is amazing how he does not repeat himself considering that his protagonists are all immigrants and his setting is more or less constant be it Berlin, Nice or Boston. But he experiments so much in terms of style, form and the language that I never knew what to expect. His texts are rarely traditional stories with the infamous arc of a plot. Moreover, he actively strives to subvert the usual expectations. He uses amazing variety of tricks: narrators talk to the characters, many of them cannot be trusted; the narration moves from the third to the first person without any warning to a reader; prose rhymes - all these tricks for me firmly belong to the second time of the 20th century. Nabokov wrote these stories of the 20s and 30s.

The impression Nabokov left me with is very different from Chekhov, my favourite Russian writer of short stories. Chekhov rarely fails to move me deeply. While Nabokov has created a sense of aesthetic admiration, almost collaboration when I felt a huge pleasure in identifying a clue he would deliberately leave or noticing a device he used to move the narrative into a different gear. But the stories are still very much populated by very human beings full of very human passions.

It is likely, Nabokov was more interested in writing his novels rather than short stories. Some of them contain the ideas or sketches of his future novels. But still he managed to create some unforgettable ones.

Below is my extremely subjective “Nabokov’s dozen”:

13 Passenger

It is a very short text that might be a key-hole view of Nabokov’s writing philosophy. It involves a train journey and the conversation between a writer and a critic (not on the train). As a bonus, the comic element is sharp.

12 Lance

This one is written in English. There is a sci-fi element to it. But it is not essential. It is more like a spoof. What is essential is a conflict of modernity and human values. It is based on a similar themes as his much wider admired “Signs and Symbols”. Though the context is entirely different. But I prefer this one. It also contains a paragraph that has become even more relevant after more than 70 years. I wonder what he would make out of social media:

“I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one’s imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tyre company’s pictorial advertisement.”


11 A Nursery Tale

A relatively simple anti-fairy tale with a devil (in interesting re-incarnation) who might grant a wish to a young and not very pleasant man. Execution is superb and some very early connotations of Lolita.

10 The Aurelian

This one really made me understand how people felt after hyperinflation in Weimar Republic. But apart from it, it is formerly orchestrated with two point of views, unlikable, but at the same time deeply human main character and some butterflies in the mix.

9 Lik

It is the one of the most realistic and less playful Nabokov’s stories. Still he is making it meta-fictional starting with a bad play within the story where a Russian character played by a provincial Russian actor. The core element is the collision between the actor and his forgotten relative-bully. This man is suddenly resurfaced in the actor’s life from nowhere. And they seem to be mirroring each other by being a double version of a miserable emigrant existence. The finale is worthy of Dostoevsky.

8 Potato Elf

This story would make a good movie. I think it was the intent as Nabokov initially planned to write a script. In the centre there is an unusual and slightly sinister love triangle. The story is dramatic, almost artificially so, almost farcical. But there is a glimpse of authentic sense of melancholy and transience of life. And this passage resonated with me deeply:

"Every separate day in the year is a gift presented to only one man—the happiest one; all other people use his day, to enjoy the sunshine or berate the rain, never knowing however to whom that day really belongs; and its fortunate owner is pleased and amused by their ignorance. A person cannot foreknow which day exactly will fall to his lot, what trifle he will remember forever: the ripple of reflected sunlight on a wall bordering water or the revolving fall of a maple leaf; and it often happens that he recognizes his day only in retrospection, long after he has plucked, and crumpled, and chucked under his desk the calendar leaf with the forgotten figure."


7 “Doorbell”

I would be short about this one. It guarantees to subvert your expectations.


6 ‘Dashing Fellow”

Very nasty unlikable protagonist. But it is a fantastic story - the way how Nabokov is creating this type. The story starts from the perspective of the main character presented in the plural first person “we”:

‘Our suitcase is carefully embellished with bright-coloured stickers:”Nurberg, Stuttgart, Koln - and even Lido (but that one is fraudulent). We have a swarthy complexion, a network of purple-red veins, a black moustache, trimly clipped, and hairy nostrils. We breathe hard through our nose as we try to solve a crossword puzzle in an emigre paper. We are alone in a third-class compartment – alone and therefore bored’

But the author’s gaze is very present in this opening as well. “hairy nostrils and heavy breathing” doubtfully this chap is so self-critical.

The story then moves into the third person narration, swiftly and gracefully toggles between that and the proper first single. Despicable things happen. And then this ending:

“When we have fed and slept, life will regain its looks …And then, sometime later, we die’

What a brilliant framing of the story and that last line!

Coincidently, I’ve come across a similar framing in the recently published novel Checkout 19 by C L Bennet

5. Music

This is probably the most lyrical story out of this selection of mine. It nods to both Chekhov and Tolstoy. It is beautiful and sad, the one of those stories when something does not happen. But I loved it. The most striking is how the development of the story within the story moves in unison with the music performed in it. Describing the music through the words is very rarely successful. But here, Nabokov achieved something even more special.


4 “An affair of honour”

In this one Nabokov subverts well established genre of story about a duel. Almost all self-respected Russian writers would have written the one. I believe the French did the same. And here comes Nabokov. The story is very Gogolian. It is both comic and profound. In Nabokov’s own words (about Gogol’s tales):

“..’mumble, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into the Chaos from which they had all derived. At this superhigh level of art, literature…appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships.”

This is perfectly applicable to this story and to many more pieces of Nabokov’s own writing.

3 The Circle

This was the first story by Nabokov I’ve read. And, it holds well in my ranking. Here I would just say - how about starting a story from “Secondly,..”. My wonderful GR friend, Ilse has written a great review of this one.

2 La Veneziana

It is the one of his early stories. It hasn’t been published until after his death. Maybe he did not like it. I do not know. But I enjoyed it enormously. At the centre of it is a painting (there is a “prototype” in real life). Through a bunch of the brilliantly crafted characters, he examines the sublime. This is combined with a satire on English affluent class and its way of life. Wonderfully composed story.


1 The Vane Sisters

This story is an object of art. Ricardo Piglia said in his brilliant essay Theses on a short story that the best of them contain two levels - the one on the surface and the one carefully hidden. And a story’s essence lies in how these two levels interact.

This story is a superb example of this. But one needs to look hard to see it. I’ve spent a lot of time with this story. If you like looking for a clues, intertextuality and text puzzles, it is the one for you. But even if not, the imagery and the lyrics of a mundane hardly would make anyone unaffected.

I would recommend to read Nabokov's stories if you want to find out what literature could do apart from straightforward storytelling. How it can "appeal to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadow of nameless and soundless ships."

[Ilse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.



Sublime, sprightly, brilliant – returning to Nabokov again, I am tripping over superlatives. Further thoughts to come.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.”

― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov



In someways reading Nabokov's stories is like swimming in a turbulent river of all his great themes (doppelgängers, the creative process, loss, nostalgia for Russia, the individual, obsession, dreams/reality, etc*).

While there were some stories that were masterpieces, the strength of this book really is the ability it gives the Nabokov enthusiast to see the development of a brilliant writer from the early 20s (egg) to the late 50s (imago).

One only needs to read 'Terra Incognita' to see the seeds of his novel 'Ada: or Ardor' or read 'Tyrants Destroyed' to see the seeds of 'Invitation to Beheading'. This collection is a must for those who adore Nabokov, but also an interesting introduction to Nabokov for those whose only exposure may be "Lolita'.

* I am certain I am leaving out a major theme. Each time I change,, update the review it peeks out at me but disappears as soon as my eyes focus and my fingers start to type.

[Violet wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was very sorry to finish this. In an ideal world I'd have a new Nabokov short story to read every day. The stories are arranged chronologically so you get a real sense of the growing complexities of the challenges he set himself as a writer. It's his novels that are important. These stories are like watching a virtuoso dancer hone his genius in front of mirrors.

I'm mostly locked out of my account and can't make comments anywhere on the site so apologise for being unable to answer any compliment or criticism levelled at my reviews.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know, sitting down to review (I rarely review standing up much these days), the entire corpus of stories by Nabokov is not an undaunting challenge, especially for someone as lazy and prone to haiku-length spasms of critique as me. The bulk of these stories are from the Russian, circa 1921-1940, meaning the style is predominantly early Vlad—an astonishing felicity for pastoral and psychological detail, a playfulness uncorroded by the arch cynicism of the later novels, and the firm establishment of the Master’s stylistic brilliance, where every sentence instantly compels you into a world that is serenely vivid, surreally off-beam, and recognisably Nabokovian. As Nabokov’s prose is exhaustively magnificent from sentence to sentence, the density of the quality of these stories is a challenge for speedier readers like me (and two were skipped—‘Ultima Thule’ and ‘Solus Rex’). Among the most memorable for me were ‘Spring in Fialta’, ‘Tyrants Destroyed’, ‘The Admiralty Spire’ and ‘A Forgotten Poet’, each mixing the sardonic humour and penchant for literary mischievousness that makes Nabokov one of the 20thC’s most lovable literary imps. There are occasional thickets of wild Nabokovian prose where lucidity is sacrificed at the altar of his more abstruse, opaque stylistic leanings (stories like ‘Lance’ or ‘Easter Rain’), but rarely is a Collected Stories as consistently breathtaking as this. The conclusion? Nabokov’s stories sit alongside Gogol’s and Chekhov’s as among of the finest of the Russian short form.

[Laura Wetsel · Rating 4 out of 5]

For better dreams: Eat one slice before bedtime.

[Cristians. Sirb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pentru mâna aceea de povestiri pe care eu, unul, nu le-am înțeles, nici prea gustat, n-o să scad scorul întregii cărți la 4 stele. E posibil să nu fi fost îndeajuns de atent ori să fie ele prea deștepte pentru mine (n-ar fi prima dată).

Foarte plăcută și solicitantă călătoria asta prin imaginația și harul lui Nabokov, preț de 700 de pagini! Dacă dăm puțin la o parte vălul ficțional al prozelor, cartea asta poate fi parcursă binișor și ca o fragmentată și infidelă autobiografie.

Nu spun că narațiunile adunate în acest volum ar fi inspirate direct din viața autorului, dar după câteva zeci citite, ajungi să-l “vezi” pe Nabokov dincolo de ele, cu cinismul lui verde, cu frustrările lui, cu nostalgia lui nestinsă pentru Rusia (copilăriei și a primei tinereți) cea lăsată în urmă și definitiv înstrăinată, chipul ei și firea oamenilor schimonosite de experimentul comunist.

Mai “vezi” printre rânduri și un scriitor suportabil de infatuat, copleșitor, superior, suveran absolut al tehnicii de a depăna, de a împleti & încâlci mici istorii, de a-și reaminti, de a născoci sau reînvia din memorie caractere.

[Liina · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me over a year to get through this one but like many others, it was because I wanted to savor it. What can I say - Nabokov's short stories are absolutely on par with his novels. I sometimes felt that the short format even works better with his style - everything is in excess anyway and it is like an explosive colorful burst when it only a few pages - the effect is stronger.

It contains 65 stories, and they are organized chronologically. This order of appearance confirmed what I already knew before - the I prefer his earlier work. Especially that which was written during his emigre years (in Berlin). Those stories are sentimental and melancholy but at the same time so optimistic and full of life, appreciating its minute details despite the hardships the characters face. And always with subtle humor. Of course, this all comes in the sauce of wonderful wordplay and LOTS of adjectives. Like a marzipan cake with over the top decorations combined with the lingering smell of coffee and cognac in the air, jolly chansons playing on the background and someone laughing through tears. This comforting feeling and a whiff of a bygone world where everything seemed simpler, romantic and never were the streetlights not reflecting on the puddle or someone taking a tram somewhere.

The feeling when you get good news that you don’t want to share right away. The desire to keep this warm fuzzy feeling a little longer. This is what this book feels like to me. A special treat, a secret place, an incredible ode to life and a superbly efficient cure for apathy.

Of course with such scope, not all the stories are equally brilliant. I skipped maybe five or six that I felt that were not doing anything for me.
I marked the best ones and I will list them here. Some of those I read more than once and will revisit in the future.

----

Top three marked with an asterisk):

The Wood Sprite

Sounds

Beneficence

Christmas *

A Letter That Never Reached Russia *

Terror

The Aurelian

A Dashing Fellow

The Reunion

Lips to Lips

Orache *

A Russian Beauty

Signs and Symbols

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

The start of my obsession. Anthony Lane's rapturous review in The New Yorker brought Nabokov to my 15-year-old mind. I recently came across a contemporaneous, lukewarm-to-negative notice by Edmund White; glad that review wasn't my first exposure.

There's so much to love here ("The Admiralty Spire" and "Spring in Fialta" are tricky, odd, and totally successful - absolute triumphs of the form), but I'm particularly attached to the impressionistic short pieces written in the mid-twenties ("A Guide to Berlin," "The Letter That Never Reached Russia") and the few but mighty stories written during the American years ("That in Aleppo Once..." and the incomparable "Signs & Symbols").

During the leisure hours when the crystal-bright waves of the drug beat at him... I remember reading that sentence (it's in "A Matter of Chance,” the protagonist is a coke head) and wondering what it was that I had just found. His prose - so colorful, so nimble and definite - changed my life. My UK Penguin edition doesn't bear the usual Updike laud (“...ecstatically”), but one from James Wood: "A gorgeous book, a tutor in exquisiteness."

[Fionnuala]

I treat myself to one of these every now and again...sometimes I write a separate review of one of the stories, sometimes not.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

After chipping away at this immense thing for something like three goddamn years, I've finally finished this extraordinary collection. This spans Nabokov's entire literary career but, honestly, these are all so consistently wonderful it's hard to periodize them except to say that Nabby is one of the finest craftsman of the short story I've ever read. Scads/lightyears beyond either Lolita or Pale Fire. Nabby was so much better with intimate little tales, almost interruptions. It's hard to even begin to characterize them and probably pointless to. It'd be like a Talmudic scholar trying to convince someone of the spiritual merit of the Old Testament: you just know it's all good.

[Anna Biller · Rating 5 out of 5]

These chronologically ordered stories are extraordinary—there is not a bad one in the lot. Vladimir gets off to a great start with "The Wood-Sprite," written when he was only twenty-two or so, and he continues to stun, impress, and entertain from there. The second story, "Russian Spoken Here," is so sophisticated, confident, poised, cruel, and above all so worldly, that it seems as if it was written by a much older writer, with shades of his mature novels. In fact, nearly every clever and ingenious idea in his novels is first sketched out here in these stories. His psychological portraits are precise and scientific, and he combines a wrenching understanding of human cruelty with satire, wit, a staggering command of language, an ability to paint a scene with vivid brushstrokes, a high-minded literariness that works like poetry, an intense personal element, and an impish sense of fun as he dips into popular genres such as crime and science fiction to remake them in his own style. There is even scathing literary criticism within, as several stories lampoon mediocre writers and tired genre cliches.

I think if all the people who condemn Lolita would read these stories, they would understand much better where Nabokov was coming from when he penned that notorious masterpiece. In his early stories especially, he depicts every kind of scoundrel, gets into every type of deranged psychology. He was remarkably good at getting inside the minds of criminals; and not just criminals, but people with mental and physical defects, lonely people, people who can’t communicate, people experiencing deep grief, ordinary people in awful circumstances.

There are stories you really can’t believe, such as "A Dashing Fellow," in which a dandy picks up a girl and goes to her flat. When she goes out for food, someone comes to convey the urgent message that her father is dying and won’t last the night, but he is so impatient to bed her that he basically rapes her when she returns, suddenly becomes disgusted with her slovenly person and surroundings, and leaves without giving her the message. In another story, "A Nursery Tale," a voyeur violates women and young girls in his head all day long, until the devil in the form of a German prostitute grants him a wish to have all the girls he wants, with macabre results.

Many of the stories are about the cruel shock of sudden death, such as the excellent "The Return of Chorb," "Details of a Sunset," "A Matter of Chance," and "Spring in Fialta." Others are playful and charming puzzles, like "La Veneziana," in which a man disappears into a painting, and "That in Aleppo Once," a crime story in which the crime is absent from the page, except in italicized quotes from Othello which hint at the truth. One of the early stories, "The Potato Elf," reminded me of Todd Browning’s Freaks in its depiction of a carnival midget in love with a showgirl, who in turn loves a handsome and charismatic magician. But Nabokov’s story came first, and is startlingly original. The theme of cuckoldry makes its appearance several times, most stunningly in "An Affair of Honor," and there is a rare and splendid science fiction story called "Lance" which includes a diatribe against the mediocrity of ordinary science fiction novels; these he compares to Christmas cookies stamped in various shapes to fool the consumer into thinking they’re getting variety, when in fact they all taste the same.

This snide commentary about lazy and uninspired writing is a clue to the construction of Nabokov’s entire oeuvre. Above all he strove for originality. He could write a better science fiction story (Ada), and a better crime novel (Lolita, Pale Fire), than other writers because he strove for truth above all, and because he styled his stories to fit the truth rather than molding the stories to fit genre expectations. This startling truth he combined with impeccable style, and a strict avoidance of the vulgar, the moralistic, and the commonplace. Some of his stories—"Terror," "Signs and Symbols"—depict schizophrenia so accurately that one pauses to wonder if Nabokov himself suffered from such an ailment. But no, it’s just that he was so good at depicting mental states that he could get into any sort of mind in the most terrifying detail, including, as he later did so brilliantly, the mind of a sociopathic pedophile.

His particular gifts and circumstances—he was a chess strategist, a scientist, trilingual, and was raised in a noble Russian family where he was pampered, well-educated, and staggeringly well-read in several languages at a young age—plus his shocking displacement into exile, near poverty, and dramatic family tragedy, including the assassination of his father, combined with his synesthesia, which made him experience life in a particularly vivid way—are what give his writing such a clear edge over the competition. (He himself acknowledged that if he hadn't been exiled, he never would have become a writer, but would have remained instead a dandy nobleman puttering around his estate and collecting butterflies.) Many others can paint deep psychological portraits, but few have his scientific eye; and many have a gift for vivid detail, but rarely do they combine it with his chess-like precision in storytelling. It goes without saying that his sense of humor is peerless. And of course, none of it would work without his humanism and the deep personal element present in every story, which bursts forth no matter how carefully hidden. It’s never merely “clever” writing; it always offers the reader a complete emotional experience, even when presented as aesthetics or as a game.

If he was dismissive of other writers, it was because critics often failed to acknowledge his unique and matchless gifts (as exampled by awarding more mainstream authors such as Pasternak instead of him with the Nobel Prize in Literature). That his writing was better than many more lauded writers of his time is a fact; and I would argue that Nabokov was a good literary critic rather than an egotist for knowing it.

Edit: I forgot to mention one of the best stories, "In Memory of I. L. Shigaev." Like Pale Fire it's presented as a tribute to another man, but is in actuality all about the narrator himself, who is totally insane. I am including an excerpt for your delectation:

By dint of prolonged, persistent, solitary drinking I drove myself to the most vulgar of visions, the most Russian of all hallucinations: I began seeing devils. I saw them in the evening as soon as I emerged from my diurnal dreamery to dispel with my wretched lamp the twilight that was already engulfing us. Yes, even more clearly than I now see the perpetual tremor of my hand, I saw the precious intruders and after some time I even became accustomed to their presence, as they kept pretty much to themselves. They were smallish but rather plump, the size of an overweight toad—peaceful, limp, black-skinned, more or less warty little monsters. They crawled rather than walked, but, with all their feigned clumsiness, they proved uncapturable. I remember buying a dog whip and, as soon as enough of them had gathered on my desk, I tried to give them a good lashing, but they miraculously avoided the blow; I struck again, and one of them, the nearest, only blinked, screwing up his eyes crookedly, like a tense dog that someone wishes to threaten away from some tempting bit of ordure. The others dispersed, dragging their hind legs. But they all stealthily clustered together again while I wiped up the ink spilled on the desk and picked up a prostrate portrait. Generally speaking, their densest habitat was the vicinity of my writing table; they materialized from somewhere underneath and, in leisurely fashion, their sticky bellies crepitating and smacking against the wood, made their way up the desk legs, in a parody of climbing sailors. I tried smearing their route with Vaseline but this did not help, and only when I happened to select some particularly appetizing little rotter, intently clambering upward, and swatted him with the whip or with my shoe, only then did he fall on the floor with a fat-toad thud; but a minute later there he was again, on his way up from a different corner, his violet tongue hanging out from the strain, and once over the top he would join his comrades. They were numerous, and at first they all seemed alike to me: dark little creatures with puffy, basically rather good-natured faces; they sat in groups of five or six on the desk, on various papers, on a volume of Pushkin, glancing at me with indifference. One of them might scratch behind his ear with his foot, the long claw making a coarse scraping sound, and then freeze motionless, forgetting his leg in midair. Another would doze, uncomfortably crowding his neighbor, who, for that matter, was not blameless either: the reciprocal inconsiderateness of amphibians, capable of growing torpid in intricate attitudes. Gradually I began distinguishing them, and I think I even gave them names depending on their resemblance to acquaintances of mine or to various animals. One could make out larger and smaller specimens (although they were all of quite portable size), some were repulsive, others more acceptable in aspect, some had lumps or tumors, others were perfectly smooth. A few had a habit of spitting at each other. Once they brought a new boy, an albino, of a cinereous tint, with eyes like beads of red caviar; he was very sleepy and glum, and gradually crawled away.

[Imi]

20/09/16

I'm taking a class on Nabokov this semester and have finally been sent the reading list. This seemed like a really good collection to buy, because it includes almost all of the short stories on my set text list. The whole collection is huge, with 65 stories, and clearly it'll probably be a very long time before I read the whole thing, but I need to keep track of the stories I do need to read for class.

I've also found copies of the Russian originals, and although I'm not required to read the originals for the class, I feel like I should at least try. Anyone who has read anything by Nabokov will know his use of language, even in English, is complex and difficult, so I don't have much hope for any success in reading his style in Russian, but I'll at least have a look. His novels/novellas are definitely way out of my league, but I'm planning to try the short stories on my set text list.

So the lists below will help me keep track...

08/12/16

The semester is (finally) coming to an end and I've finished all the set reading for this class. Have I read all 65 stories in this collection? No. Will I read more by Nabokov in the future, including from this collection? Almost certainly, but probably after a bit of a break, as otherwise I'd be risking Nabokov fatigue. I've really enjoyed this module, even if it was hard going at times (and I still have an essay to write..), and I think it's given me a really good grounding of Nabokov's work. I marking this as read for now (I think I've read enough to say I've 'read' his short stories!), but I'll be keeping a list below of the stories I'd like to try in the future, whenever I have the urge to dip into the collection again.

For anyone looking to try Nabokov's short stories, my favourites and the ones I'd recommend were 'Signs and Symbols', 'Spring in Fialta' and 'Terra Incognita'.

Stories to read in English for class:
Terra Incognita : (read 20/09/16) ★★★★½. Well, this was definitely a fantastic start! I attempted this in Russian first and, surprisingly, didn't find the language too taxing. When I read it in English straight after, I hadn't really missed out on anything. On top of that, it was also a first-class short story, enthralling and disturbing, about a feverish, nightmare of an expedition into the jungle gone awry, where perhaps reality isn't so certain.
The Leonardo : (read 21/09/16) ★★★. The beginning and end of the story were the best parts: the framing of the story with the narrator setting the scene with bringing on props. Also loved how the narrator was shocked and disappointed in the characters at the end of the story despite setting things in motion in the first place! Basically loved the narration, but there wasn't anything that interesting about the story itself. Also found it much trickier to read in Russian and didn't really understand the story fully until I read it in English. Maybe I need to re-read it now to see if I can make more sense of the language now.
Spring in Fialta : (read 16/10/16) ★★★★. Beautiful, vivid prose in a sad reflection of past love. Perhaps a bit more straightforward then I'm used to with Nabokov by now, but the ending still packed a punch and there is an abundance of gorgeous imagery to lose yourself in. (I've yet to attempt this in Russian though..)
Visit to the Museum : (read 19/10/16) ★. Zzzzzzz....
That Once In Aleppo : (read 20/10/16) ★★★.
Signs and Symbols : (read 22/10/16) ★★★★★. I am pretty certain this is the shortest of Nabokov's short stories I have read so far, but don't let that fool you. It packs a punch. If you haven't read much by Nabokov yet, and are unsure where to start, this was certainly be a good place to begin. It's a powerful, moving glimpse into the life of an immigrant couple visit their son in a mental asylum on his birthday. The denial, fear, hopelessness, desperation for understanding is clear. Simply perfect and an example of what a short story should be.
The Vane Sisters : (read 24/10/16) ★★★½. Again beautiful, vivid language, but content wise I simply didn't feel as moved by this one as, for example, 'Spring in Fialta' or 'Signs and Symbols'.

Stories to attempt in Russian for class:
Terra Incognita / Терра Инкогнита
The Leonardo / Королек
Spring in Fialta / Весна в Фиальте
Visit to the Museum / Посещение музея
That Once In Aleppo / Как-то раз в Алеппо...

>Stories to read outside of class:
The Wood-Sprite
Russian Spoken Here
The Potato Elf
The Circle
A Russian Beauty
Torpid Smoke
Cloud, Castle, Lake
Lik
Mademoiselle O
Time and Ebb

[তানজীম রহমান · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nabokov walks that fine line between poetry and prose. His words are as carefully selected as flowers for a bouquet, and his insights are as pointed as the sturdiest thorn. I loved almost every story in this book. But a few deserve special mention:
'Terror', which is one of the scariest horror stories I've ever read, and one of the most succinct expressions of existential terror I've seen so far.
'The Dragon', a funny and concise takedown of commercial culture.
'The Wood-Sprite', a melancholy ode to classic Russian folklore.
And 'Revenge', which felt like Nabokov's take on a ghoulish mystery.
All the other stories range from good to very good, but I believe these are the ones that'll stay with me the longest. I loved this book overall, and it was great to see such a master explore so many facets of life within two covers.

[Nhi Nguyễn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nửa đầu của tuyển tập truyện ngắn này, thú thật là mình chỉ thấy thích (phải nói là cực thích :D) và ấn tượng có mỗi truyện "Một truyện đồng thoại", còn lại thì đọc kiểu cho qua chữ chứ chả hiểu (và vì thế cũng chả nhớ) gì mấy. Cơ mà nửa sau của quyển sách, kể từ truyện "Hành khách" trở đi, thì ôi thôi phải nói là hay tuyệt cú mèo. Nhờ vậy mới cho cuốn này 4 sao :)) Thích nhất là những truyện "Hành khách", "Mỹ nhân Nga", "Cảnh đời một quái vật kép", "Chị em nhà Vane", "Mối tình đầu" và "Mưa Phục sinh" (ôi chà, mình thích nhiều thế nhỉ? :D).

Theo lời nhà xuất bản thì đây mới chỉ là quyển 1 trong số 4 quyển thuộc Tổng Tập Truyện Ngắn Nabokov, dự kiến hoàn thành trong vòng 3 năm. Mình sẵn sàng bỏ tiền ra mua 3 quyển còn lại, miễn là nó hay được như (hoặc hơn) quyển này :D

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nabakov is a master of the form. Although I've read a couple of his novels I will definitely track down a few more

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preface, by Dmitri Nabokov

--The Wood-Sprite
--Russian Spoken Here
--Sounds
--Wingstroke
--Gods
--A Matter of Chance
--The Seaport
--Revenge
--Beneficence
--Details of a Sunset
--The Thunderstorm
--La Veneziana
--Bachmann
--The Dragon
--Christmas
--A Letter that Never Reached Russia
--The Fight
--The Return of Chorb
--A Guide to Berlin
--A Nursery Tale
--Terror
--Razor
--The Passenger
--The Doorbell
--An Affair of Honor
--The Christmas Story
--The Potato Elf
--The Aurelian
--A Dashing Fellow
--A Bad Day
--The Visit to the Museum
--A Busy Man
--Terra Incognita
--The Reunion
--Lips to Lips
--Orache
--Music
--Perfection
--The Admiralty Spire
--The Leonardo
--In Memory of L. I. Shigaev
--The Circle
--A Russian Beauty
--Breaking the News
--Torpid Smoke
--Recruiting
--A Slice of Life
--Spring in Fialta
--Cloud, Castle, Lake
--Tyrants Destroyed
--Lik
--Mademoiselle
--Vasiliy Shishkov
--Ultima Thule
--Solus Rex
--The Assistant Producer
--'That in Aleppo Once . . .'
--A Forgotten Poet
--Time and Ebb
--Conversation Piece, 1945
--Signs and Symbols
--First Love
--Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster
--The Vane Sisters
--Lance
--Easter Rain
--The Word
--Natasha

Notes
Appendix

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started it last spring when I went to NYC for vacation. Read it on the bus on the way there, then I thought I lost the copy for good. Luckily it was unearthed amid the general displacements of moving out of my old apartment.

I'm about a 150 pages in. I think it might be a good smaller, bit-by-bit type of reading experience. I do enjoy having some outside material to take refuge in when schoolwork starts to crowd my brain. A couple stories a week on the train? Some lazy afternoon weekend reading? Why the hell not?

Nabokov's one of those guys who I admire from afar. Sure I read Lolita, and of course it's superb. I've poked around elsewhere in his collected works and I think I'm going to wade into his stuff little by little. Not so much out of intimidation, mind, but more because I have the feeling that when I get into him it'll be all-consuming.

There are a few things I've sort of held off on getting into, simply to respectfully wait to open space in my mind until I can appreciate them fully. This applies to Nabokov equally as much as it does Elvis Costello, old timey country music, The Meters, Duke Ellington, Charlie Chaplin, Indian cuisine, sushi, War and Peace, Don Quixote, Hegel, Proust, and homemade cocktails. It might seem like a long list but there's plenty of life to live, isn't there?

***

Ok, long breath...now it's finished. It took me awhile to get through all of it, but as of yesterday this collection is toast.

A couple of thoughts, right off the bat:

* I don't particularly like the "collected stories" framework. It's daunting and somewhat intimidating to have 6-700 pages of story after story in one's hands. Years and years of work and the many detailed layers of plot, character, voice, and so on are bundled up only to be made more dense and somewhat less palatable, like stacks of carrots in the supermarket. Give that prose some room to breathe!

I think I'd much prefer having single collections of short stories, which are more hit-or-miss for me in general, as a reader. I usually check to see if the short story is *actually* short, i.e. less than 50 pages or so. I don't do short stories that stretch to novella-length. Unless, of course, they are exceptionally gripping...

* I think Poe was right about this, if nothing else, that short stories should be read in one sitting. This isn't just about length of story, it's also about how engaging it is. One of the greatest things about literature (for me, as for a lot of people) is it's capacity to take you to another world. I don't want a short story to drag, no one does, but for some reason when and if this happens, it's somehow more annoying than when a novel does. I expect novels to be occasionally dull or uninteresting, I understand how difficult it would be to sustain every reader's interest in anything for 200, 300, 400, 500 pages. I get that; it's not quite my problem with short stories.

I find that if a short story I'm reading isn't working for me I'm sort of trapped- I'm a stickler for finishing books I start, if for no other reason than pride and the nagging feeling that the book might pick up a bit at the end or something. I need a short story to really work for me, pretty much off the bat...it's kind of entitled and maybe a bit unfair but that's how my reading habits seem to go.


So, on to the issue of Nabokov himself. I honor him, I respect his sophistication and consummate skill with words, images, sentiments, etc. His taste is incredible. Never overdoes it, always notices the essential minor detail of a person's clothing, face, spatial position, etc. He's that way philosophically, too- he never misses a beat with registering a quirk of fate, unevenness of character, complex, ironic situation, etc. The back cover refers to his "connesieur's sampling of the table of human folly" and I thought about that many times after I started repeatedly dipping into the text. Nothing's lost on Mr. Nabokov, of this I am sure. Henry James would have nodded his approval; Hemingway would have surely grunted in approval of V.N.'s shite detector.

The man's got...sensibility. I have a feeling that he would be fascinating to meet in person. Composed, scrupulously curteous, witty, engaging, and yet with a deep, ironic, elegant reserve where strange images and memories might be bubbling.

Martin Amis, a writer and reader I respect tremendously and who certainly knows his Nabokov frontwards and back, likes to make the analogy of writing with being a host. Do you prepare for your guests? Bring out the fine china? Sweep the rug? Buy good booze or tons of the cheap stuff? Do you even bother with them? I think it's a really interesting idea and I can see what he means. The author is 'hosting' the reader in a way. You spend perhaps a great deal of time in his or her company, they show you around, all that kind of thing. They guide you and they focus your attention and try to make you experience something worthwhile, pleasurable or funny or whatever.

Amis says that if you visited Mr. Nabokov he would fuss over you. Prosaically, he sits you in his favorite chair and offers you his best wine and cigars. I like this notion, and I can see it at work here. It's kind of what I meant about being well-mannered and tasteful before. One can open up the book and find something beautifully well-turned on pretty much every page. In terms of sheer writing, just perfectly arranged language and exquisite imagery, the man is puttin' down.

Mailer once made a really insightful comment on the "tensile strength" of a sentence...I think it's a physics term about how pressure is distributed on an object or somthing, it's about tension and force...I don't remember, exactly, but the guy got a degree from Harvard in engineering before he wrote about a million sentences so hopefully he's on to something. Nabokov's sentences have that perfect weight, time and again he never loses his balance. His poise is impeccable. It's a very rare trait, if you think about it, in both literature and life.

I think the reason why I just didn't take to this book (after deliberating a bit I'm sticking with 3 stars) has to do with the sheer density of pages, certainly, but it also has to do with the staggering amount of good stuff here. I didn't take to every story but the ones that I did were pretty breathtaking- pellucid, engaging, wise.

I think what it is is that Nabokov is just too...adult for me, shall we say. He is SO sophisticated, erudite and streetwise, SUCH an immaculate stylist that turning hundreds of pages makes me feel like I'm sort of eating chocolate chip after chip after chocolate chip until the sum total is sort of a big, black, gooey, sweet mess. I wouldn't blame this on Nabokov himself, certainly not his fault he's so rarefied and I doubt that quality might be called a "fault", either. It's just that going through all this prose became rather burdensome- there was so much of it, and so much to enjoy and appreciate that taking it in steadily became engorging.

To get back to the ambiguous use of the word "adult" I don't mean I want my prose writers to be immature. Far from it. I just mean that Nabokov's prose is appropriately nape-tingling (as he felt all good prose must be) but also as polished as a new hard wood floor, almost embalmed in wax. I get antsy around crisply decorated spaces- floors, kitchens, museums, bathrooms, etc. I prefer a little lived-in feeling than a decorative pristine.

It's similar in my aesthetic tastes, too. I like it when works are filled with the tension between opposites: coherence vs. incoherence, form and impression, plain speech and flourid eloquence...I like it when my art is a fragile if firm stay against chaos or just a change of form in and of itself. Think of bebop, if you want to hear it in musical terms. I don't want controlled chaos as much as I want the open window in the church, the rigorous scholarship amid the drunken improvisation and the obscene gesture in the midst of the erudite exegesis. I like a little risk for the author, as well as a risk for the reader.

I don't quite think Nabokov is too polite, it's just that I think he executes something extremely well, and I sort of have to step on my tippytoes to reach it, let alone peek over the height. Lolita very much has the qualities I'm talking about, at least in the sense that it constantly walks the line between its outrageous premise and its bewitching, intoxicating language.

Nabokov's prose is a little too...pristine, for me. When read in fragments it's succulent; in bulk its suffocating. Next thing I read of his (and there will definitely be more, don't you worry about that) should be a shorter piece. I don't think he's pretentious or showing off. I just think it's a difference in taste.

All in all, I enjoyed and profited from having read this book, and I would very much like to revisit it but I don't think it spoke to me as openly as I'd imagined it would. I listed Nabokov among the tastes I hope to aquire in all the different avenues of life and so it remains, albeit a little less so now. My ignorance is dimmed, though perhaps not diminished. Lord knows, it would take more than one 600 page book to do that...

I'm not worthy!

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of translated stories from Nabokov’s early writings in Russia, mostly from the 20’s and 30’s and 40’s

Nabokov was well traveled — so some of the stories take place in France, Germany, England and the U.S. as well. I tended to like these stories better. The Russian centered stories tend to be quite bleak.

So here are the followings stories I liked the most — they felt rather timeless.

1. Potato Elf — in this story an oft ridiculed circus dwarf falls for his conjurer friend’s wife. She may have ulterior motives. The story is a bit Kafka-esque and well told.

2. The Leonardo — two dastardly brothers despise a newly arrived neighbor who is a bookish merchant — they view him as different and elitist. An insightful story about populism and rationalizing outcomes — eerily reminiscent to Trumpism today.

3. Signs and Symbols — probably the most perfect and most relatable story in the collection. An aging couple are at a loss about what to do about their institutionalized son.

4. First Love — a story about a little boy’s vacation in Western Europe in 1909. At the beach he falls in love with a French girl named Colette. Beautifully descriptive.

3.5 stars

[Hakan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nabokov elbette çok önemli bir yazın insanı. Ama açıkçası toplu öykülerini içeren bu koca tuğla boyutundaki kitaptan edebi anlamda pek keyif aldığımı söyleyemeyeceğim. Tabii Nabokov öykülerinden çok romanlarıyla öne çıkmış bir isim. Ben gerçi Lolita ve Sebastian Knight’ın Gerçek Yaşamı dışındaki romanlarını henüz okumadım, yıllar önce aldığım başyapıtlarından Pale Fire (Solgun Ateş) uzaklarda beni bekler.

Oğlu Dmitri’nin çevirdiği öyküler ile doğrudan İngilizce yazdığı öyküleri biraz farklı buldum. Her ne kadar oğlunun çevirilerine üstadın “nezaret ettiği” bilinse de, bu öykülerin dili görece daha sade. Görece. Doğrudan İngilizce yazdığı öykülerin dili ise kılçıklı. Konuları, işleniş tarzı da çoğunlukla bayıcı. Kullanım frekansı o kadar düşük kelimeler var ki okuyana (en azından bana) bu kadar kasmasaydı kendini, bu kadar fiyaka/bilgiçlik yapmasaydı keşke dedirtiyor. Tamam, Nabokov büyük bir üslupçu, namını biraz da bu yönüne borçlu ama bana bu özelliği hitap etmedi.

İçerik olarak da çoğu öyküyü zorlama buldum. Öte yandan keskin gözlemciliği, zaman zaman başvurduğu mizah gücü takdire değer. 1917 Devrimi sonrası Nabokov ve ailesi gibi Avrupa’da mülteci konumuna düşmüş Rusların (bir-iki yerde İstanbul’a da pek övücü olmayan şekilde değiniliyor) farklı yönleriyle hayatlarını işleyen birçok öykü de ilginç. Ama öykülerin geneline boğucu bir hava hakim. Fantastik/metafizik unsurlar içerenleri de var. Özetle benim için mutlu bir okuma olmadı. İletişim bu toplu öykülerin Türkçe çevirisini basmış, belki oradan okumak daha farklı hissetirebilir, emin değilim.

[Rick Slane · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the stories I liked the most featured a unique take on life imprisonment. Another involved a barber given a chance to shave someone who had tortured him in the past.

[Irina Constantin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stau aici cât să îngroș întunericul, cât sa îmi apară pete deasupra altora pete ca într-un tablou prost construit unde contururile depășesc marginile...
Stau aici pe marginea nopții ca să îmi citesc amintirile. Tot trecutul meu sparge venele și inundă chiuveta cu sânge proaspăt, poate dacă aș fi trăit cu câțiva ani mai puțin, înaintea la tot ce mă urmărește astăzi.
Nu sunt o fire demonica, dar ma obsedează orice clar de lună, văd strălucirea ei nordică și mă încarc de energii albe, reci, hibernale...
Nabokov nu a reușit cu " Povestiri", scrise la 26 de ani, aproape că îl trage de mânecă pe Dostoievski cu cel mai prost început al său de scriitor și anume "Oameni sarmani".
Povestirile nu au final, se întrerup prea repede, lipsește conexiunea dintre scriitor și cititor.
Un elogiu al mamei Rusia înainte de exil, aproape că îl întrevăd pe tânărul Dostoievski chinuindu-se cu prima sa nuvelă așa cum îl descrie Henry Troyat în "Dostoievski".
Nabokov e pradă atmosferei fantomatice a nopții când creatorul ar trebui sa nu dorma, ci sa se sufoce cu lanțurile creației.
Pe Nabokov nu-l caracterizează simplele povestiri, deși la Cehov ieșeau de minune aceste exerciții de scris fragmentar.
Cu degete reci, selenare, sting această lumânare fumeganda, ca un sărman Dionis a lui Eminescu...
Nu, nu e în stilul lui Nabokov acest acces schopenhauerian, de părăsire totală a voinței, el, care visează doar nimfete, care le descrie atât de savuros, dând muzicalitate chiar și unei pietre fade de pe drum.
Aici nu e Nabokov, fie Povestiri e doar un capriciu al condeiului său, sau doar un jurnal ieftin al tinereții sale plăpânde în marea Rusiei.

[Smiley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 stars

Finally I finished reading this book with its 68 stories (sixty-five stories, as informed in one of its back pages), I found most of them enjoyable but some a bit lengthy, tedious and typically Russian since, I think, Nabokov's written impeccably in inimitable English narrative as well as some French, German and Russian phrases/sentences here and there with which his readers should be familiar, for the sake of better understanding. For instance:
1) Tu es tres hippique ce matin (p. 489)
2) Was dort fur Skandale? (p. 336)
3) il y a pauvre Ilya (p. 574)
etc.
I'm sorry each is Greek to me, how should I solve the problem? I hit a snag every time I came across these non-English sentences/phrases, therefore, they've posted obvious obstacles that definitely nullify my understanding.
One more thing, when we read stories written by Russian authors, they tend to put Russian names as their characters, I wonder why. I think it might be one of their linguistic identities, therefore, we need to recall which ones have said or done anything in what context in a particular story. I usually find it a bit harder than reading the stories written by other Western writers from the U.K., The U.S., or Australia.

There are three stories I liked most:

1) "A Letter that Never Reached Russia", written from Berlin, has presumably revealed a Russian emigrant’s deepening love as noted from his addressing in the letter: “My charming, dear, distant one” (p. 155), “my love” (p. 155), and “dear” (twice, p. 158). Thus, we can’t help visualizing his loving thought of her and I liked this excerpt in the last paragraph:
"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. … " (p. 158)

2) "A Nursery Tale" which is about “a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil” (back cover) due to his roving eyes wherever he sits in public places, therefore, he is doomed to engage in a race against time despite the warning from Frau Monde, “Well, that’s your stop. Very wise to call it a day.” (p. 189).

3) "First Love" involves the narrator’s journey from Russia to stay near the beach in France in Parts 1-2. The opening paragraph in Part 3 wonderfully sets the scene:
" On the browner and wetter part of the plage, that part which at low tide yielded the best mud for castles, I found myself digging, one day, side by side with a little French girl called Colette." (p. 696)
And admittedly, “… Two years before, on the same plage, I had been much attached to the lovely, suntanned little daughter of a Serbian physician; but when I met Colette, I knew at once that this was the real thing. …” (p. 697)
We can see the narrator has his own means in proving his love and an unexpected reward, “… I could not destroy the mosquitoes that had left their bites on her frail neck, but I could and did, have a successful fistfight with a red-haired boy who had been rude to her. She used to give me warm handfuls of hard candy. One day, as we were bending together over a starfish, and Colette’s ringlets were tickling my ears, she suddenly turned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. So great was my emotion that all I could think of saying was, ‘You little monkey.’” (p. 697)

However, I’ll find time to reread "The Visit to the Museum" so that I would write something about it because it is also my favorite because its plot is uniquely of subtle horror I've never read before.

Reading Nabokov's stories, I think, we can learn a lot from his narrative, that is, we'd of course find many new words used in various contexts since he's written these stories as a professional. Interestingly, he has coined some new words for his readers such as raylets (p. 186), orangeade (p. 613), marbleized (p. 676), etc.

Some sentences are impressively unique, for instance: "Since morning the sky had been blindingly white and the sun had been moonlike." (p. 38), "I'm no longer in the bloom of youth." (p. 301), "The folly of chance is the logic of fate." (p. 334), etc.

Moreover, the pages around one third of the copy, that is, after Page 500 miserably split from its spine due to, I think, the glue quality and I found them impossible to replace them to their normal position. This is one of the reasons why the hard-cover ones rarely split due to the more permanently binding quality. I have no choice so “I’ll grin and bear it”. (p. 25)

Find one yourself, read as many stories as you like to learn how Nabokov has moulded and manipulated the language (as reviewed by Daily Mail) and enjoy!

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The man - really full of himself - at one with the world - but at the same time lacking in empathy for his fellows.

I realized that eveything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the water, you...All was unified, equivalent, divine.

and

I had once been splintered into a million beings and objects. Today I am one: tomorrow I shall splinter again.

Nabokov waxes lyrical on nature but I admired best his economy when describing the last interaction he had with his lover. That bit, few words, elegant execution.



Merged review:

This was strange, I have not got the words but it has me thinking about it since I read it. It was almost like they had a pet.

Is keeping someone jailed us trying to control the 'bad' out there, as if by jailing we feel safe from the badness out there - false safety.

But it's not only other men we jail we also jail animals and call them pets or zoos - is that us trying to control 'uncontrollable' nature?

And who is the jailed and who is the jailor? - because the jailed cannot be left alone so the jailor is in fact jailed to him like Martin is.



Merged review:

I like the language, the words. It's full of loss, sorrow, need. It kind of reminded me of The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die.

There was a bit at the begining of the story where instead of seeing the sprite he saw a man who was wearing a wrongly buttoned coat, buttoned up the feminine way he said. Wonder what that means.

Merged review:

A slice of sorrow topped with that strange chaotic kaleidoscope of how we see the world around us when sorrow, pain, rips away all our feelings and nothing has worth any more, nothing is beautiful, we can no longer care.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The summer of 2016 was a Nabokov story a day, imbuing each day with his golden mellifluous magic. Really that is the healthy way to conquer 67 stories by the same author without burning out. Sure, only twenty five of them reach the excellent to great (4-5*'s) status in my book, so perhaps my rating isn't holistic. It helps when the first 3-4 stories you publish are so superb, containing three of my top five favorite Nabokov's: "The Wood Sprite", "Sounds", "Wingstroke". All of the writing is superior, but I find myself pulled to his stories of the fantastic: "La Veneziana", "The Dragon", "A Nursery Tale", "Ultima Thule", and the always exciting supernatural puzzle at the end of "The Vane Sisters". Also monumental are the Chekovian "An Affair of Honor", the Conrad-inspired "Terra Incognita", the augural "Tyrants Destroyed", and the heartbreaking "Lik". Again, there are no bad stories, perhaps at the worst, Nabokov would call dalliances, little bonbons, while the others are impressionistic exercises, interesting character studies, or veiled etudes in memoir. I would of thought from reading "The Vane Sisters" in anthologies that Nabokov hit his short story stride in English later in his life, but I found almost the opposite to be true with all the wonderful Russian stories from the twenties. I posture that Nabokov was more intent on the novel form in America.

[R. Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

I fell in love with Nabokov's style in Lolita but hated the story, so I'm torn. The answer? His short stories. Many of them are an absolute joy to read for a writer, perfection in style and pacing. A must read in my opinion for any writer wanting to write short stories. This will probably always be an book I'm reading rather a "read" book, as it is so worth re-reading and re-reading. If you haven't read any of his short stories, "Signs and Symbols" is where to begin. As I write this (21 February 2013) the New Yorker has "Signs and Symbols" available to read online at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1948... .

It's quite possibly the best short story ever written, which is not just my opinion, but that of many.

Another must read is "The Potato Elf," a dwarf love story.

A famous Nabokov quote about writing: "Caress the detail, the divine detail."

And another: "I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, S,the stronger and stranger it is."

Robert Burns
email: robertnovel2002@gmail.com
Website: http://magichatbooks.com
Blog: http://unselfishgene.com/blog
Amazon author page: http://amzn.to/R9Uzso

[Abigail Sarah Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dmitri Nabokov (1934-2012) would let me read excerpts prior to the publication of the book. He would fax me his manuscripts: La Veneziana.

When I lived at the shores of Lake Geneva and attended Art Center (Europe) I was given Nabokov as a subject to read and write about in literature class. I did not want to read anything, because I was ignorant and the Lolita stereotype filled my mind. Little did I know that Nabokov is one of the finest bilingual writers I have found. I even ended up befriending his (late) son Dmitri, who lived a few houses up from mine in Montreux and now, after almost two decades living in the USA I am ready to pin down my own memoir, because the encounter with Nabokov made my life immensely beautiful, and lived to the fullest.

[Noreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruth Bader Ginsberg had Nabakov as an English professor at Cornell. Had to have been before Lolita, because he quit teaching and moved out of the country after Lolita’s success.

Amy Tan chose “Lolita “ as her one book
to read stuck on a desert island.

I read the 10 “best” short stories, as a Lolita warm up, plus “The Vane Sisters” recommended by
Harold Bloomberg.

The stories cover dark human undersides, reminiscent of Carson McCullers. Could read one short story as a daily or weekly vocabulary builder.

[Kiki Bolwijn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ik heb heel erg lang over dit boek gedaan omdat ik soms de verhalen nog even wilde bewaren. Een bundel om lang te lezen, opnieuw te lezen. Ik denk dat hij gewoon op mijn nachtkastje zal blijven liggen.