The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov
D.N.
REVENGE
“Revenge” (Mest’), written in the spring of 1924, appeared in Russkoye Ekho on April 20, 1924, and now in the current collections.
BENEFICENCE
“Beneficence” (Blagost’), written in March 1924, was published in Rul’ on April 28, 1924. Subsequently it appeared in The Return of Chorb, and now in the current collections.
D.N.
DETAILS OF A SUNSET
I doubt very much that I was responsible for the odious title (“Katastrofa”) inflicted upon this story. It was written in June 1924 in Berlin and sold to the Riga emigre daily Segodnya, where it appeared on July 13 of that year. Still under that label, and no doubt with my indolent blessings, it was included in the collection Soglyadatay, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.
I have now given it a new title, one that has the triple advantage of corresponding to the thematic background of the story, of being sure to puzzle such readers as “skip descriptions,” and of infuriating reviewers.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
THE THUNDERSTORM
Thunder is grom in Russian, storm is burya, and thunderstorm is groza, a grand little word, with that blue zigzag in the middle.
“Groza,” written in Berlin sometime in the summer of 1924, was published in August 1924 in the émigré daily Rul’ and collected in the Vozvrashchenie Chorba volume, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
LA VENEZIANA
“La Veneziana” (Venetsianka) was written mainly in September 1924; the manuscript is dated October 5 of that year. The story remained unpublished and untranslated until the current collections, becoming the title story for the French and Italian volumes. The recently completed English version was printed separately in a special edition celebrating the sixtieth birthday of Penguin, England, in 1995.
The painting by Sebastiano (Luciani) del Piombo (ca. 1485–1547) that almost certainly inspired the canvas described in the story is Giovane romana detta Dorotea, ca. 1512. Nabokov may have seen it at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum (now the Staatliche Museen) in Berlin. Possibly the painter’s birthplace—Venice—induced Nabokov to transform the lady from “Romana” to “Veneziana.” And it is almost certainly the same artist’s Ritratto di donna, which is in the Earl of Rador’s collection at Longford Castle, to which Nabokov alludes in his brief mention of “Lord Northwick from London, the owner … of another painting by the same del Piombo.”
D.N.
BACHMANN
“Bakhman” was written in Berlin in October 1924. It was serialized in Rul’, November 2 and 4 of that year, and included in my Vozvrashchenie Chorba collection of short stories, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. I am told that a pianist existed with some of my invented musician’s peculiar traits. In certain other respects he is related to Luzhin, the chess player of The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina, 1930), G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1964.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
THE DRAGON
“The Dragon” (Drakon), written in November 1924, was published in a French translation by Vladimir Sikorsky, and now in the current collections.
D.N.
CHRISTMAS
“Rozhdestvo” was written in Berlin at the end of 1924, published in Rul’ in two installments, January 6 and 8, 1925, and collected in Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. It oddly resembles the type of chess problem called “selfmate.”
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
A LETTER THAT NEVER REACHED RUSSIA
Sometime in 1924, in émigré Berlin, I had begun a novel tentatively entitled Happiness (Schastie), some important elements of which were to be reslanted in Mashen’ka, written in the spring of 1925 (published by Slovo, Berlin, in 1926, translated into English under the title of Mary in 1970, McGraw-Hill, New York, and reprinted in Russian from the original text, by Ardis and McGraw-Hill, in 1974). Around Christmas 1924, I had two chapters of Schastie ready but then, for some forgotten but no doubt excellent reason, I scrapped chapter 1 and most of 2. What I kept was a fragment representing a letter written in Berlin to my heroine who had remained in Russia. This appeared in Rul’ (Berlin, January 29, 1925) as “Pis’mo (Letter) v Rossiyu,” and was collected in Vozvrashchenie Chorba, in Berlin, 1930. A literal rendering of the title would have been ambiguous and therefore had to be changed.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
THE FIGHT
“The Fight” (Draka) appeared in Rul’ on September 26, 1925; in the current collections; in a French translation by Gilles Barbedette; and in my English translation in The New Yorker on February 18, 1985.
D.N.
THE RETURN OF CHORB
First published in two issues of the Russian émigré Rul’ (Berlin), November 12 and 13, 1925. Reprinted in the collection Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.
An English version by Gleb Struve (“The Return of Tchorb” by Vladimir Sirin) appeared in the anthology This Quarter (vol. 4, no. 4, June 1932), published in Paris by Edw. W. Titus. After rereading that version forty years later I was sorry to find it too tame in style and too inaccurate in sense for my present purpose. I have retranslated the story completely in collaboration with my son.
It was written not long after my novel Mashen’ka (Mary) was finished and is a good example of my early constructions. The place is a small town in Germany half a century ago. I notice that the road from Nice to Grasse where I imagined poor Mrs. Chorb walking was still unpaved and chalky with dust around 1920. I have skipped her mother’s ponderous name and patronymic “Varvara Klimovna,” which would have meant nothing to my Anglo-American readers.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
A GUIDE TO BERLIN
Written in December 1925 in Berlin, Putevoditel’ po Berlinu was published in Rul’, December 24, 1925, and collected in Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.
Despite its simple appearance, this “Guide” is one of my trickiest pieces. Its translation has caused my son and me a tremendous amount of healthy trouble. Two or three scattered phrases have been added for the sake of factual clarity.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
A NURSERY TALE
“A Nursery Tale” (Skazka) was written in Berlin in late May or early June 1926, and serialized in the émigré daily Rul’ (Berlin), in the issues of June 27 and 29 of that year. It was reprinted in my Vozvrashchenie Chorba collection, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.
A rather artificial affair, composed a little hastily, with more concern for the tricky plot than for imagery and good taste, it required some revamping here and there in the English version. Young Erwin’s harem, however, has remained intact. I had not reread my “Skazka” since 1930 and, when working now at its translation, was eerily startled to meet a somewhat decrepit but unmistakable Humbert escorting his nymphet in the story I wrote almost half a century ago.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
TERROR
“Uzhas” was written in Berlin, around 1926, one of the happiest years of my life. The Sovremennya Zapiski, the Paris émigré magazine, published it in 1927 and it was included in the first of my three collections of Russian stories, Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. It preceded Sartre’s La Nausée, with which it shares certain shades of thought, and none of that novel’s fatal defects, by at least a dozen years.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
RAZOR
“Razor” (Britva) first appeared in Rul’ on September 16, 1926. Mashen’ka (Mary), Nabokov’s first novel, would be published approximately one month later. It was printed, in a French translation by Laurence Doll, in the introductory volume of the Dutch “Nabokov Library” (De Bezige Bij, 1991), and now in the current collections.
D.N.
THE PASSENGER
“Passazhir” was written in early 1927 in Berlin, published in Rul?
The “writer” in the story is not a self-portrait but the generalized image of a middlebrow author. The “critic,” however, is a friendly sketch of a fellow émigré, Yuliy Ayhenvald, the well-known literary critic (1872–1928). Readers of the time recognized his precise, delicate little gestures and his fondness for playing with euphonically twinned phrases in his literary comments. By the end of the story everybody seems to have forgotten about the burnt match in the wineglass—something I would not have allowed to happen today.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
THE DOORBELL
The reader will be sorry to learn that the exact date of the publication of this story [“The Doorbell” (Zvonok)] has not been established. It certainly appeared in Rul’, Berlin, probably in 1927, and was republished in the Vozvrashchenie Chorba collection, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
AN AFFAIR OF HONOR
“An Affair of Honor” appeared under the title “Podlets” (The Cur), in the émigré daily Rul’, Berlin, around 1927, and was included in my first collection, Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. The present translation was published in The New Yorker, September 3, 1966, and was included in Nabokov’s Quartet, Phaedra, New York, 1966.
The story renders in a drab expatriate setting a belated variation on the romantic theme whose decline started with Chekhov’s magnificent novella Single Combat (1891).
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
THE CHRISTMAS STORY
“The Christmas Story” (Rozhdestvenskiy rasskaz) appeared in Rul’, December 25, 1928, and now in the current collections. In September 1928 Nabokov had published Korol’, dama, valet (King, Queen, Knave).
The story mentions several writers: the peasant-born Neverov (the pseudonym of Aleksandr Skobelev, 1886–1923); the “social realist” Maksim Gorky (1868–1936); the “populist” Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921); the “decadent” Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919); and the “neo-realist” Evgeniy Chirikov (1864–1923).
D.N.
THE POTATO ELF
This is the first faithful translation of “Kartofel’nyy el’f,” written in 1929 in Berlin, published there in the émigré daily Rul’ (December 15, 17, 18, and 19, 1929) and included in Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930, a collection of my stories. A very different English version (by Serge Bertenson and Irene Kosinska), full of mistakes and omissions, appeared in Esquire, December 1939, and has been reprinted in an anthology (The Single Voice, Collier, London, 1969).
Although I never intended the story to suggest a screenplay or to fire a scriptwriter’s fancy, its structure and recurrent pictorial details do have a cinematic slant. Its deliberate introduction results in certain conventional rhythms—or in a pastiche of such rhythms. I do not believe, however, that my little man can move even the most lachrymose human-interest fiend, and this redeems the matter.
Another aspect separating “The Potato Elf” from the rest of my short stories is its British setting. One cannot rule out thematic automatism in such cases, yet on the other hand this curious exoticism (as being different from the more familiar Berlin background of my other stories) gives the thing an artificial brightness which is none too displeasing; but all in all it is not my favorite piece, and if I include it in this collection it is only because the act of retranslating it properly is a precious personal victory that seldom falls to a betrayed author’s lot.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973 The story was actually first published in Russkoye Ekho in April, 1924. It was reprinted in Rul’ in 1929.
D.N.
THE AURELIAN
“The Aurelian” (1930) is from Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
A DASHING FELLOW
“A Dashing Fellow,” “Khvat” in Russian, was first published in the early 1930s. The two leading émigré papers, Rul’ (Berlin) and Poslednie Novosti (Paris), rejected it as improper and brutal. It appeared in Segodnya (Riga), exact date to be settled, and in 1938 was included in my collection of short stories Soglyadatay (Russkiya Zapiski, Paris). The present translation appeared in Playboy for December 1971.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
A BAD DAY
“A Bad Day” (entitled in Russian “Obida,” the lexical meaning of which is “offense,” “mortification,” etc.) was written in Berlin in the summer of 1931. It appeared in the émigré daily Poslednie Novosti (Paris, July 12, 1931) and was included in my collection Soglyadatay (Paris, 1938), with a dedication to Ivan Bunin. The little boy of the story, though living in much the same surroundings as those of my own childhood, differs in several ways from my remembered self, which is really split here among three lads, Peter, Vladimir, and Vasiliy.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
THE VISIT TO THE MUSEUM
“The Visit to the Museum” (Poseshchenie muzeya) appeared in the émigré review Sovremennyya Zapiski, LXVIII, Paris, 1939, and in my collection Vesna v Fialte, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1959. The present English translation came out in Esquire, March 1963, and was included in Nabokov’s Quartet, Phaedra, New York, 1966.
One explanatory note may be welcomed by non-Russian readers. At one point the unfortunate narrator notices a shop sign and realizes he is not in the Russia of his past, but in the Russia of the Soviets. What gives that shop sign away is the absence of the letter that used to decorate the end of a word after a consonant in old Russia but is omitted in the reformed orthography adopted by the Soviets today.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
A BUSY MAN
The Russian original (“Zanyatoy chelovek”), written in Berlin between September 17 and 26, 1931, appeared on October 20 in the émigré daily Poslednie Novosti, Paris, and was included in the collection Soglyadatay, Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, 1938.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
TERRA INCOGNITA
The Russian original of “Terra Incognita” appeared under the same title in Poslednie Novosti, Paris, November 22, 1931, and was reprinted in my collection Soglyadatay, Paris, 1938. The present English translation was published in The New Yorker, May 18, 1963.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
THE REUNION
Written in Berlin in December 1931, published in January 1932 under the title “Vstrecha” (Meeting) in the émigré daily Poslednie Novosti, Paris, and collected in Soglyadatay, Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, 1938.
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
LIPS TO LIPS
Mark Aldanov, who was closer than I to the Poslednie Novosti (with which I conducted a lively feud throughout the 1930s), informed me, sometime in 1931 or 1932, that at the last moment, this story, “Lips to Lips” (Usta k ustam), which finally had been accepted for publication, would not be printed after all. “Razbili nabor” (“They broke up the type”), my friend muttered gloomily. It was published only in 1956, by the Chekhov Publishing House, New York, in my collection Vesna v Fialte, by which time everybody who might have been suspected of remotely resembling the characters in the story was safely and heirlessly dead. Esquire published the present translation in its September 1971 issue.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
ORACHE
“Lebeda” was first published in Pos
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
MUSIC
“Muzyka,” a trifle singularly popular with translators, was written at the beginning of 1932, in Berlin. It appeared in the Paris émigré daily Poslednie Novosti (March 27, 1932) and in the collection of my stories Soglyadatay, published by the Russkiya Zapiski firm, in Paris, 1938.