The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
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Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Stories of
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
“[This collection] brings the reader closer to his magic.… Those who know Nabokov the novelist and have forgotten that Nabokov the story writer exists now have a precious gift in their hands.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“His English is an extraordinary instrument, at once infinitely delicate and muscularly robust: no other writer of our time, not even Joyce, can catch the shifting play of the world’s light and shade as he does.”
—Boston Globe
“These stories are wonders of the English language.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“It startles, then it provokes, and finally it satisfies in a way that a more domesticated fiction cannot.… An enduring tribute to Nabokov’s ability to charm … and inspire.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“They offer a startling, cloudless view of a writer’s development.… The effect of such felicities en masse is not only addictive; they point to the finesse of Nabokov’s ear [and] to the extreme and unembarrassable weirdness of his invention, the plain flights of his fancy.”
—The New Yorker
“Glorious.… Should please Nabokov’s devoted admirers and new readers, too.… Early story or late, the tales all read as rich as smoky dark chocolates.”
—Denver Post
“Wonderful.… This rich and satisfying book shows how much is lacking in the pale and tremulous fiction of the ’90s.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A major literary event.… These works display the same high level of sensibility, acute perception, sharp wit and stylistic legerdemain that is the recognized signature of Nabokov the novelist.”
—Kansas City Star
“They steam with fresh memories and tussle and toy with fate’s wicked irony.… Redemption shimmers in Nabokov’s darkly turbulent work.”
—Newsday
“Demonstrates his dazzling powers of description, his tender evocation of the past, and his ability to focus on odd angles of consciousness.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“It leaves you open-mouthed.”
—Newsweek
“These stories would delight anyone for whom humanity and its ideas and foibles are truly important.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“This is genius.… Generously sculpted sentences plunge but never stumble toward the invariably original image, letting language push logic as far as it can go without calling attention to itself.”
—Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram
“No writer has expressed more vividly, or explored with greater variety and power, the psychic imperative to give shape and meaning to one’s experience and thereby understand and endure it.”
—Washington Times
The Stories of
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel
Lolita
(1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including
Lolita
—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.
BOOKS BY
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
NOVELS
Mary
King, Queen, Knave
The Defense
The Eye
Glory
Laughter in the Dark
Despair
Invitation to a Beheading
The Gift
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Bend Sinister
Lolita
Pnin
Pale Fire
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Transparent Things
Look at the Harlequins!
SHORT FICTION
Nabokov’s Dozen
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
The Enchanter
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
DRAMA
The Waltz Invention
Lolita: A Screenplay
The Man from the USSR and Other Plays
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
Strong Opinions
BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Nikolai Gogol
Lectures on Literature
Lectures on Russian Literature
Lectures on Don Quixote
TRANSLATIONS
Three Russian Poets:
Translations of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev
A Hero of Our Time
(Mikhail Lermontov)
The Song of Igor’s Campaign
(Anon.)
Eugene Onegin
(Alexander Pushkin)
LETTERS
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:
The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971
Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977
MISCELLANEOUS
Poems and Problems
The Annotated Lolita
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1997
Copyright © 1995, 2002, 2006 by Dmitri Nabokov
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995, in slightly different form.
The Library of Congress has cataloged
the Knopf edition as follows:
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977.
[Short stories]
The stories of Vladimir Nabokov.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78809-2
1. Manners and customs—Fiction. 1. Title.
PS3527 .A15A6 1995
813′.54—dc20 95-23466
Cover design by Barbara de Wilde
Cover photograph by Alison Gootee
v3.1
To Véra
Preface
H
AVING APPEARED
individually in periodicals and in various assortments in previous volumes, fifty-two of Vladimir Nabokov’s stories were eventually published, during his lifetime, in four definitive English collections:
Nabokov’s Dozen
and three other thirteen-story “dozens”
—A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
, and
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
.
Nabokov had long expressed the intention of issuing a final batch, but was not sure whether there were enough stories that met his standard to make up a fifth Nabokovian—or numerical—dozen. His creative life was too full, and was truncated too suddenly, for him to make a final selection. He had penciled a brief list of stories he considered worthy of publication and labeled it “bottom of the barrel.” He was referring, he explained to me, not to their quality, but to the fact that, among the materials available for consultation at the moment, they were the final ones worthy of publication. Nonetheless, after our archive had been organized and thoroughly checked, Véra Nabokov and I came up with a happy total of thirteen, all of which, in our circumspect estimation, Nabokov might have deemed suitable. Hence Nabokov’s “bottom of the barrel” list, reproduced following this preface, should be considered partial and preliminary; it contains only eight of the thirteen newly collected stories, and also includes
The Enchanter
, which does not appear in the present collection but has been published in English as a separate short novel (New York, Putnam’s, 1986; New York, Vintage International, 1991). Nor do the author’s working titles correspond in every case to those decided upon for this volume.