The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage International) by Vladimir Nabokov (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐There is undeniable value in having the complete stories of Vladimir Nabokov collected in one volume, but there are far too many to be tasted, let alone digested, in a few days. This is a book to be sampled, then set aside for something else, then sampled again.This collection contains all the stories previously published in NABOKOV’S DOZEN and the three volumes that followed it, a round dozen in each. To these about have been added about enough for a further volume, making 68 stories in all. One thing that surprised me (not being a Nabokov scholar) is that the stories do not evenly cover the writer’s career. Roughly half his novels were written in English, but the great majority of the stories, though published in his American period, are translations from earlier works in Russian, mostly by his son Dmitri, who also edits this volume. There is comparatively little, for instance, that matches his extraordinary vision of America as seen in LOLITA. Mostly they deal with the rootless lives of émigrés in the twenties and thirties, or memories of pre-revolutionary Russia. All are well-written; that goes without saying; quite a few are politically incisive. But having sampled about a quarter of the stories in the book, selecting from all periods, I have to say I have been left with an almost physical depression. I am sure I will return to read others, but I have no desire to do so soon.Still, let me give some examples of things that I did enjoy. There is “Music,” in which a man with no ear for music goes to a salon recital, and sees his ex-wife there, the music providing a capsule of suspended time in which he can ponder their changed relations. “Mademoiselle O” is essentially a memoir of his privileged childhood and the triple-chinned French-Swiss governess who stayed with them for seven years; a hitherto unpublished story, “Easter Rain,” is a sad extension of the governess character into old age, treasuring memories of Russia that nobody will share.One interesting thing about the governess story is its metafictional frame. Nabokov enters the memoir mode as giving back their life to real characters that he had pilfered for his fiction. This theme occurs again in “Recruiting.” An impoverished elderly émigré attends a Russian funeral in Berlin, then sits on a bench in a public park. A man comes to sit next to him, who turns out to be the author, who has “recruited” this old man (who may not even be Russian at all) as a character in his fiction. A similar trick is also seen in “Terra Incognita,” whose narrator, a butterfly hunter in the remote tropics, is feverish with malaria. But it is not clear whether he is hallucinating about his living room in the jungle, or if the whole jungle sequence is an hallucination from some illness he suffers at home.Perhaps the most striking story I read was “The Vane Sisters.” It begins with a description of thaw in a New England college town, wonderfully detailed even in its depiction of garbage cans in the alleys between clapboard houses:”I remarked for the first time the humble fluting — last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns — ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid — circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.”The story goes on to contain one of the most brilliant suicide notes on record, then segues to an account of the narrator’s old relationship with the suicide’s sister, abandoned by him when he could no longer keep up with her interest in spiritualism and the occult. And so the story ends — or does it? For the final paragraph, another piece of colorful description, is in fact an acrostic, the first letters of its words spelling out a message from beyond the grave that ties back to that opening description and mocks the narrator’s skepticism. I did not notice this myself — few people would — but had to have it pointed out to me. But I am not in bad company; apparently the New Yorker also rejected the story until Nabokov wrote to the editor explaining the trick. The whole story has become emblematic for me: brilliant writing, even more brilliant cleverness, but also self-regarding — the story as art rather than story as simply story.

⭐Along with a great many of my favorite writers, including John Updike and Jeffrey Eugenides, I am a lover of Nabokov’s work, especially his later novels -The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire – and perhaps best of all his superb autobiography, Speak Memory. This makes it hard to understand why his collected stories stood on my shelf practically unread for many years, until I bought the Audible version and started listening to them, while consulting the print version from time to time. But now I know why I didn’t read them: it’s because I don’t like most of them. First off, the collection is complete, or nearly so, and arranged chronologically, so that his early efforts – from his mid-twenties on – are encountered first. These were of course written in Russian, and though they have been carefully translated by Nabokov himself in some instances, and by his son Dmitri in others, they lose some of the stylistic brilliance they probably had in the original. A stylist plays delightfully with words, and such wordplay is often untranslatable, as puns and other verbal effects are lost when translated into a different language with different homonyms, etc.Secondly, they were written in a depressed period of Nabokov’s life, when he was a poor refugee living in a Berlin that was itself struggling to regain its prosperity after the loss of WW I, and was preparing for Hitler’s takeover. A dispossessed, homesick stateless person, he saw the sorry state of Berlin, and the sorrier state of the Russian emigres, in whose circle he moved, and recorded them accurately, at least in some of his stories. Joyce’s Dubliners takes a similar view of sad existences, but Joyce was steeped in the history of his unhappy land, while Nabokov was merely a visitor. He sees many kinds of failure and discouragement in his fellow Russians, but is rarely compassionate. Rather, in the tradition, perhaps, of Gogol, a writer Nabokov greatly admired, he satirizes them. But satire works best when its targets are the well-fed and complacent. These characters of Nabokov’s are more down-and-out than he himself was, and his ridicule of them is unkind and unnecessary. Even when his protagonist is not Russian, as in “The Potato Elf,” he can’t resist making fun of deformity – always a weakness in his fiction (Laughter In The Dark, for instance, recounts the sexual humiliation of a blind man).This leads us to my final and greatest criticism.: Nabokov is cruel. Strikingly, his son in an introduction goes out of his way to argue that his father was inveterately compassionate, and never cruel. This I think must be in anticipation of the kind of criticism I am making, for Nabokov may have been kind as a person, but his imagination was invariably cruel. Time after time these stories create a character in order to steer him or her to some sort of failure or comeuppance, sometimes with a shrug of the shoulders – “what did you expect?” – sometimes with a surprise ending like those in de Maupassant and O. Henry – The Potato Elf ends with a heart attack that is merciful compared to the shock of further discoveries that awaited the midget had he lived.There are brilliant passages of descriptive writing, in these stories, as one would expect of someone who at this time in his life was principally a lyric poet, but fiction depends on plot and character, not on lovely description. Eventually, after he came to America and started writing in English (his first English novel was Sebastian Knight in 1940) his stories take on more of the manner of his American novels, which are better than the Russian ones, if only because Nabokov continued to grow and get better as a writer of fiction. Also he became happier, and more secure. A late story, “The Vane Sisters” is a puzzle-story with a hidden meaning that the reader will probably miss unless he works over it like the Sunday crossword, but has a consoling message when solved. Nabokov eventually discovered how to create and mock unreliable narrators who embody his own flaws of cruelty, superiority, and detachment. He started satirizing himself, in other words, and this was a more fitting object of satire than the sad sacks who inhabit his earlier fiction. But then he gave up writing short stories, except as memoir pieces that he gathered together as Speak, Memory, which may come to seem, even more than Lolita or Pale Fire, his masterpiece. One of these pieces, a portrait of his French governess back in Russia, is probably the best story in this entire collection, though it is not properly speaking a story at all, and is even better when read as a chapter of his autobiography.

⭐This book is very biographical given the way the stories are presented to the reader. The stories were written by Vladimir Nabokov between the 1920s and the 1950s and follow the path of his life as a Russian emigre in Berlin, then to France and finally to the United States. I read the stories in the order that they appear since there is a note from Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, which states that he had tried to maintain a chronological order to the stories as much as possible. As you read through these stories, you can see Nabokov maturing as a writer and also follow him as he makes his way further and further from the beloved Russia of his childhood, both temporally and geographically, fleeing first from the stupidity and barbarity of the Bolsheviks and then from the Nazis and their own brands of stupidity and barbarity.Nabokov’s writing can be difficult to follow and the reader is as much a participant in his stories as is the writer. The rewards are great, however. There are magnificent butterflies painted with humour, nostalgia, wonderment and anger which spread their wings in the pages of this book; all Nabokov asks is that we meet him halfway and he will show us life.The stories were translated to English by Nabokov and his son, some were written in English. The book itself is well made and contains notes on each of the sixty-eight stories from either Nabokov or his son.

⭐This year I read “Speak, Memory” by Vladimir Nabokov, because the Dutch writer Bernlef had been asked to write his memoirs and was looking for examples. He referred to the French writer Patrick Modiano and to Nabokov. I was so impressed by Nabokov’s style and by the story of his life and the way he modeled his chapters according to a specific theme or person, that I wanted to go on reading. After that, I read “Pnin”, which was very funny and again, very well written. Also, I bought his Stories. The 68 stories are about turning points in the lives of Russian exiles, mainly living in Berlin after the Great War. It shows how many people were at a loss at the time, and how much they had lost from their former lives. I find that interesting for historical reasons, too. The first half of the 20th century has my particular interest. In Holland nothing happened, and our history books were strictly limited to our national story while the rest of Europe was in turmoil. Literature brings you into the heart of what it did to people who had nothing to do with politics, but happened to be on the scene, and were the victims. Nabokov, by the way, has a keen eye for the fact that not all exiled people were just pitiful victims, but remained the scoundrels they used to be.”Lolita” I read about 30 years ago. I found it’s theme so disgusting, that I had decided: so far for Nabokov. I am glad I now thought otherwise.

⭐good

⭐Nabokov is a master. His words sparkle and dance across the page with an ease that will leave the reader breathless. Wonderfully unexpected stories.

⭐J’ai adoré ! Nabokov était mon auteur préféré et le reste.LN

⭐

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