Nabokov's Dozen: Thirteen Stories Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Nabokov's

  Dozen

  “[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

  NABOKOV'S

  Dozen

  Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899; he took his degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. For several years, he wrote novels in Russian that established him as one of the leading Russian writers of his generation, although the books were published and circulated only in the West. In 1940, he came to the United States and began to write in English. His works in English include the novels PNIN, also available in a Bard edition, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pale Fire, Invitation to a Beheading, King, Queen, Knave, Mary, Laughter in the Dark, Ada, Glory: A Novel, and Transparent Things. He has also written plays, including The Waltz Invention; many short stories and poems; Gogol, a biography; the four-volume annotated translation Eugene Onegin in Verse; and Speak, Memory, an autobiography.

  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 DOUBLEDAY EDITION, JANUARY 1958

  Copyright © 1958, 1995, 2002, 2006 by Vladimir 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]

  Nabokov's Dozen.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-380-01352-5

  1. Manners and customs—Fiction. 1. Title.

  PS3527 .A15A6 1959, 1995

  813′.54—dc20 95-23466

  The Stories, “Conversation Piece,” “First Love,” “Sings and Symbols,” and “Lance” originally appeared in The New Yorker. www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Barbara de Wilde

  Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

  v3.1

  To Véra

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  SPRING IN FIALTA

  A FORGOTTEN POET

  FIRST LOVE

  SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

  THE ASSISTANT PRODUCER

  THE AURELIAN

  CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE

  CONVERSATION PIECE, 1945

  “THAT IN ALEPPO ONCE …”

  TIME AND EBB

  SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF A DOUBLE MONSTER

  MADEMOISELLE O

  LANCE

  Additional Stories

  THE VISIT TO THE MUSEUM

  LIK

  ULTIMA THULE

  A GUIDE TO BERLIN

  THE VANE SISTERS

  Notes

  Appendix

  Books by Vladimir
Nabokov

  SPRING IN FIALTA

  SPRING in Fialta is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp: the piebald trunks of the plane trees, the juniper shrubs, the railings, the gravel. Far away, in a watery vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses, which have tottered up from their knees to climb the slope (a cypress indicating the way), the blurred Mount St. George is more than ever remote from its likeness on the picture postcards which since 1910, say (those straw hats, those youthful cabmen), have been courting the tourist from the sorry-go-round of their prop, among amethyst-toothed lumps of rock and the mantelpiece dreams of seashells. The air is windless and warm, with a faint tang of burning. The sea, its salt drowned in a solution of rain, is less glaucous than gray with waves too sluggish to break into foam.

  It was on such a day in the early thirties that I found myself, all my senses wide open, on one of Fialta’s steep little streets, taking in everything at once, that marine rococo on the stand, and the coral crucifixes in a shop window, and the dejected poster of a visiting circus, one corner of its drenched paper detached from the wall, and a yellow bit of unripe orange peel on the old, slate-blue sidewalk, which retained here and there a fading memory of ancient mosaic design. I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola; and also because there is something in the very somnolence of its humid Lent that especially anoints one’s soul. So I was happy to be there again, to trudge uphill in inverse direction to the rivulet of the gutter, hatless, my head wet, my skin already suffused with warmth although I wore only a light mackintosh over my shirt.

  I had come on the Capparabella express, which, with that reckless gusto peculiar to trains in mountainous country, had done its thundering best to collect throughout the night as many tunnels as possible. A day or two, just as long as a breathing spell in the midst of a business trip would allow me, was all I expected to stay. I had left my wife and children at home, and that was an island of happiness always present in the clear north of my being, always floating beside me, and even through me, I dare say, but yet keeping on the outside of me most of the time.

  A pantless infant of the male sex, with a taut mud-gray little belly, jerkily stepped down from a doorstep and waddled off, bowlegged, trying to carry three oranges at once, but continuously dropping the variable third, until he fell himself, and then a girl of twelve or so, with a string of heavy beads around her dusky neck and wearing a skirt as long as that of a Gypsy, promptly took away the whole lot with her more nimble and more numerous hands. Nearby, on the wet terrace of a café, a waiter was wiping the slabs of tables; a melancholy brigand hawking local lollipops, elaborate-looking things with a lunar gloss, had placed a hopelessly full basket on the cracked balustrade, over which the two were conversing. Either the drizzle had stopped or Fialta had got so used to it that she herself did not know whether she was breathing moist air or warm rain. Thumb-filling his pipe from a rubber pouch as he walked, a plus-foured Englishman of the solid exportable sort came from under an arch and entered a pharmacy, where large pale sponges in a blue vase were dying a thirsty death behind their glass. What luscious elation I felt rippling through my veins, how gratefully my whole being responded to the flutters and effluvia of that gray day saturated with a vernal essence which itself it seemed slow in perceiving! My nerves were unusually receptive after a sleepless night; I assimilated everything: the whistling of a thrush in the almond trees beyond the chapel, the peace of the crumbling houses, the pulse of the distant sea, panting in the mist, all this together with the jealous green of bottle glass bristling along the top of a wall and the fast colors of a circus advertisement featuring a feathered Indian on a rearing horse in the act of lassoing a boldly endemic zebra, while some thoroughly fooled elephants sat brooding upon their star-spangled thrones.

  Presently the same Englishman overtook me. As I absorbed him along with the rest, I happened to notice the sudden side-roll of his big blue eye straining at its crimson canthus, and the way he rapidly moistened his lips—because of the dryness of those sponges, I thought; but then I followed the direction of his glance, and saw Nina.

  Every time I had met her during the fifteen years of our—well, I fail to find the precise term for our kind of relationship—she had not seemed to recognize me at once; and this time too she remained quite still for a moment, on the opposite sidewalk, half turning toward me in sympathetic incertitude mixed with curiosity, only her yellow scarf already on the move like those dogs that recognize you before their owners do—and then she uttered a cry, her hands up, all her ten fingers dancing, and in the middle of the street, with merely the frank impulsiveness of an old friendship (just as she would rapidly make the sign of the cross over me every time we parted), she kissed me thrice with more mouth than meaning, and then walked beside me, hanging on to me, adjusting her stride to mine, hampered by her narrow brown skirt perfunctorily slit down the side.

  “Oh, yes, Ferdie is here too,” she replied and immediately in her turn inquired nicely after Elena.

  “Must be loafing somewhere around with Segur,” she went on in reference to her husband. “And I have some shopping to do; we leave after lunch. Wait a moment, where are you leading me, Victor dear?”

  Back into the past, back into the past, as I did every time I met her, repeating the whole accumulation of the plot from the very beginning up to the last increment—thus in Russian fairy tales the already told is bunched up again at every new turn of the story. This time we had met in warm and misty Fialta, and I could not have celebrated the occasion with greater art, could not have adorned with brighter vignettes the list of fate’s former services, even if I had known that this was to be the last one; the last one, I maintain, for I cannot imagine any heavenly firm of brokers that might consent to arrange me a meeting with her beyond the grave.

  My introductory scene with Nina had been laid in Russia quite a long time ago, around 1917 I should say, judging by certain left-wing theater rumblings backstage. It was at some birthday party at my aunt’s on her country estate, near Luga, in the deepest folds of winter (how well I remember the first sign of nearing the place: a red barn in a white wilderness). I had just graduated from the Imperial Lyceum; Nina was already engaged: although she was of my age and of that of the century, she looked twenty at least, and this in spite or perhaps because of her neat slender build, whereas at thirty-two that very slightness of hers made her look younger. Her fiancé was a guardsman on leave from the front, a handsome heavy fellow, incredibly well tyred and stolid, who weighed every word on the scales of the most exact common sense and spoke in a velvety baritone, which grew even smoother when he addressed her; his decency and devotion probably got on her nerves; and he is now a successful if somewhat lonesome engineer in a most distant tropical country.

  Windows light up and stretch their luminous lengths upon the dark billowy snow, making room for the reflection of the fan-shaped light above the front door between them. Each of the two side pillars is fluffily fringed with white, which rather spoils the lines of what might have been a perfect ex libris for the book of our two lives. I cannot recall why we had all wandered out of the sonorous hall into the still darkness, peopled only with firs, snow-swollen to twice their size; did the watchmen invite us to look at a sullen red glow in the sky, portent of nearing arson? Possibly. Did we go to admire an equestrian statue of ice sculptured near the pond by the Swiss tutor of my cousins? Quite as likely. My memory revives only on the way back to the brightly symmetrical mansion toward which we tramped in single file along a narrow furrow between snowbanks, with that crunch-crunch-crunch which is the only comment that a taciturn winter night makes upon humans. I walked last; three singing steps ahead of me walked a small bent shape; the firs gravely showed their burdened paws. I slipped and dropped the dead flashlight someone had forced upon me; it was devilishly hard to retrieve; an
d instantly attracted by my curses, with an eager, low laugh in anticipation of fun, Nina dimly veered toward me. I call her Nina, but I could hardly have known her name yet, hardly could we have had time, she and I, for any preliminary; “Who’s that?” she asked with interest—and I was already kissing her neck, smooth and quite fiery hot from the long fox fur of her coat collar, which kept getting into my way until she clasped my shoulder, and with the candor so peculiar to her gently fitted her generous, dutiful lips to mine.

  But suddenly parting us by its explosion of gaiety, the theme of a snowball fight started in the dark, and someone, fleeing, falling, crunching, laughing, and panting, climbed a drift, tried to run, and uttered a horrible groan: deep snow had performed the amputation of an arctic. And soon after, we all dispersed to our respective homes, without my having talked with Nina, nor made any plans about the future, about those fifteen itinerant years that had already set out toward the dim horizon, loaded with the parts of our unassembled meetings; and as I watched her in the maze of gestures and shadows of gestures of which the rest of that evening consisted (probably parlor games—with Nina persistently in the other camp), I was astonished, I remember, not so much by her inattention to me after that warmth in the snow as by the innocent naturalness of that inattention, for I did not yet know that had I said a word it would have changed at once into a wonderful sunburst of kindness, a cheerful, compassionate attitude with all possible cooperation, as if woman’s love were springwater containing salubrious salts which at the least notice she ever so willingly gave anyone to drink.

  “Let me see, where did we last meet,” I began (addressing the Fialta version of Nina) in order to bring to her small face with prominent cheekbones and dark-red lips a certain expression I knew; and sure enough, the shake of her head and the puckered brow seemed less to imply forgetfulness than to deplore the flatness of an old joke; or to be more exact, it was as if all those cities where fate had fixed our various rendezvous without ever attending them personally, all those platforms and stairs and three-walled rooms and dark back alleys, were trite settings remaining after some other lives all brought to a close long before and were so little related to the acting out of our own aimless destiny that it was almost bad taste to mention them.