Win The Stories Of Vladimir Nabokov Executed By Vladimir Nabokov Paper Copy

summer ofwas a Nabokov story a day, imbuing each day with his golden mellifluous magic, Really that is the healthy way to conquerstories by the same author without burning out, Sure, only twenty five of them reach the excellent to great's status in my book, so perhaps my rating isn't holistic, It helps when the firststories 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 Conradinspired "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,
A collection of translated stories from Nabokovs early writings in Russia, mostly from thes ands ands

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,

. Potato Elf in this story an oft ridiculed circus dwarf falls for his conjurer friends wife, She may have ulterior motives, The story is a bit Kafkaesque and well told,

. 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,

. 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,

. First Love a story about a little boys vacation in Western Europe in, At the beach he falls in love with a French girl named Colette, Beautifully descriptive.

.stars
Pentru mâna aceea de povestiri pe care eu, unul, nu leam înțeles, nici prea gustat, no să scad scorul întregii cărți lastele.
E posibil să nu fi fost îndeajuns de atent ori să fie ele prea deștepte pentru mine nar fi prima dată,

Foarte plăcută și solicitantă călătoria asta prin imaginația și harul lui Nabokov, preț dede 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 săl “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 amp încâlci mici istorii, de ași reaminti, de a născoci sau reînvia din memorie caractere.
I am far from Nabokovs completist, Ive read just two of his novels, the one in Russian and one in English, Ive read and enjoyed his literary criticism in spite of his “strong opinions” and I could not care for his memoirs that much, But Ive recently come across sitelinkThe Circle, It was a little discovery and I've decided to read more of his stories, Ive 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 theth century.
Nabokov wrote these stories of thes ands,

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 “Nabokovs dozen”:

Passenger

It is a very short text that might be a keyhole view of Nabokovs 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,

Lance

This one is written in English, There is a scifi 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 thanyears, 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 ones 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 companys pictorial advertisement.
”


A Nursery Tale

A relatively simple antifairy tale with a devil in interesting reincarnation who might grant a wish to a young and not very pleasant man.
Execution is superb and some very early connotations of Lolita,

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.


Lik

It is the one of the most realistic and less playful Nabokovs stories, Still he is making it metafictional 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 relativebully, This man is suddenly resurfaced in the actors 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,

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 manthe 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.
"


“Doorbell”

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


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 brightcoloured stickers:”Nurberg, Stuttgart, Koln and even Lido but that one is fraudulent.
We have a swarthy complexion, a network of purplered 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 thirdclass compartment alone and therefore bored

But the authors gaze is very present in this opening as well, “hairy nostrils and heavy breathing” doubtfully this chap is so selfcritical,

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, Ive come across a similar framing in the recently published novel sitelinkCheckout by C L Bennet

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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,


“An affair of honour”

In this one Nabokov subverts well established genre of story about a duel, Almost all selfrespected 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 Nabokovs own words about Gogols 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, literatureappeals 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 Nabokovs own writing,

The Circle

This was the first story by Nabokov Ive 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 sitelinka great review of this one,

La Veneziana

It is the one of his early stories, It hasnt 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.


The Vane Sisters

This story is an object of art, Ricardo Piglia said in his brilliant essay sitelinkTheses on a short story that the best of them contain two levels the one on the surface and the one carefully hidden.
And a storys 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, Ive 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, "
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