A Dozen Notes to Nabokov's Short Stories*
by Maxim D. Shrayer

1. The Metamorphosis in One Uninterpreted Dream

The question of Vladimir Nabokov's literary debt to Franz Kafka is a puzzling one, clouded as it is by Nabokov's own obfuscatory remarks denying genetic ties with the German-Jewish modernist from Prague (Nabokov's principal statements on Kafka are found in Lectures on Literature, 249-93; Strong Opinions, 57; 151-2; Foreword, Invitation to a Beheading, 6). Between 1923 and 1937, Nabokov made six trips to Prague: in December-January 1923, July 1924, August 1925, May 1930, April 1932, and May 1937 (see Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 196; 220-21; 232; 235; 243; 271; 354; 378-9). While he apparently was less fond of Prague than most of its visitors, the westernmost capital of Slavdom -which was also the academic capital of Russia Abroad between the two world wars-did leave a mark in Nabokov's life and art. Prague was the place where Nabokov visited his family (Nabokov's mother died in Prague in 1939 and is buried there at Olsánske Hrbitovy; the family of Vladimir Petkevic, grandson of Nabokov's sister Olga, still lives in Prague). There he met Marina Tsvetaeva and gave poetry readings.

Franz Kafka left Prague in July 1923 to stay at Müritz; in August 1923 he went to Berlin, and, after a brief visit to Prague, returned to Schelesen. In September of 1923 Kafka settled with Dora Dymant in Berlin-Steglitz. In March 1924 Kafka traveled to Prague for the last time, and he left Prague in April 1924 for a sanatorium in the Wienerwald, where he died in June 1924. If Nabokov had indeed known of Kafka prior to the French translations of the late 1920s and 1930s-and contrary to his own refutations-Prague would have been a rather likely place for Nabokov to experience Kafka's presence in the air of culture.

In the short story "Mest'" (Revenge, 1924)-originally published in the Berlin newspaper Russkoe čkho-a stereotypically British university professor devises a scheme of punishing his innocent wife for her spectral infidelity. Might the anti-Freudian (or Freudian?) overtones of the professor's conversation with his doomed young wife have overshadowed Nabokov's allusion to Kafka's most famous work? Consider these excerpts from the professor's remarks about his trip to the continent in light of The Metamorphosis (1915):

You know something [...] you and your friends are playing with fire. There can be really terrifying occurrences. One Viennese doctor told me about some incredible metamorphoses [o neveroiatnykh perevoploshcheniiakh] the other day. Some woman [...] when the doctor undressed her [...] was stunned at the sight of her body; it was entirely covered with a reddish sheen, was soft and slimy to the touch, and upon closer examination, he realized that this plump, taut cadaver consisted entirely of narrow, circular bands of skin, as if it were all bound evenly and tightly by invisible strings [...]. And, as the doctor watched, the corpse gradually began to unwind like a huge ball of yarn....Her body was a thin, endless worm [eë telo bylo tonkim, beskonechno dlinnym chervëm], which was disentangling itself and crawling, slithering out through the crack under the door while, on the bed, there remained a naked, white, still humid skeleton. Yet this woman had a husband, who had once kissed her-kissed that worm (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov 71; hereafter Stories).

A critic's judgment about a literary influence largely depends on the notion of literary dynamics to which one adheres. If one regards the Prague of the 1920s as a cultural palimpsest, where German and Czech letters were mixing and mingling with Russian émigré ones, and where a direct textual contact was not a prerequisite for a literary impact, Kafka's trace in Nabokov's "Revenge" would seem plausible. I therefore concur with John Burt Foster Jr., who recently asked "[whether Nabokov's] conviction that he once saw Kafka on a Berlin streetcar in 1923 [...could ] actually mask some very early, unavowed and fleeting, yet still decisive contact with his writings."

2. Of Canine Angels and Latter-Day Dragons

During the exceptionally prolific year 1924, Nabokov, like an alchemist, mixed elements of Judeo-Christian mythopoetics with the supernatural, pagan, and fairy-tale elements. "Udar kryla" (Wingstroke, 1924), Nabokov's fourth short fiction, culminates in a long sequence with an angel taking part. The scene follows a conversation between the psychologically tormented protagonist, an Englishman named Kern, and a homosexual philosopher of death and dying, an Italian by the name of Monfiori. The conversation is set in an Alpine lodge in Switzerland, and the story seems to have been informed by Nabokov's vacation in the Swiss Alps in 1922 in the company of his Cambridge classmate, the half-Italian Bobby de Calry (Boyd, The Russian Years, 188). Prior to his encounter with the angel, Kern rejects the Biblical God by calling him "gazoobraznoe pozvonochnoe" (gaseous vertebrate), following Monfiori's suggestion that "there is God, after all" (Stories, 36; ms. VN Berg). After his conversation with Monfiori (in whom he confides his decision to die), Kern returns to his room. He is disturbed by barking which emanates from behind the wall. There, in the room next door, lives Isabel, a stunning young Englishwoman and an object of Kern's desire (her image anticipates that of Iris in Look at the Harlequins!). When Kern storms into Isabel's room, he discovers a furry doglike angel who has apparently been making love to her. Kern struggles with the angelic beast and violently overpowers him. Towards the end of the story, Isabel, a fine athlete-whom Kern characterizes as "letuchaia" (literally: airy with all the subtleties of this word's connotations)-jumps in a skiing competition only to die in midflight. The angel's revenge "crucifie[s Isabel] in midair (Stories, 42; "raspiataia v vozdukhe" in the Russian).

In the case of "Drakon" (The Dragon), which, like "Wingstroke," never appeared during the writer's life, Nabokov parodied the medieval topos of dragon-slaying in the setting of a modern industrial society. In this modern fairy-tale, a dragon wakes up hungry in his cave and comes to a big city where two major tobacco companies are at war. One of them uses the dragon to advertise its cigarettes. The other tobacco company literalizes the dragon-slaying metaphor by building a giant knight whose armor is pasted over with the ads of its products. Terrified, the poor dragon flees to die in his cave (Stories, 130; ms. VN Berg). Why were "Wingstroke" and "The Dragon" never published at the time of their completion? Nabokov probably found both stories too artistically schematic, too revealing of their various sources in myth and folklore, and therefore unoriginal. Toward the end of 1924, Nabokov's search for unparalleled metaphysical themes and plots began to lead him away from traditional religious and mythological topoi.

3. Entering the Otherspace

"Venetsianka" ("La Veneziana," 1924) deserves special attention by the students of Nabokov's early works because it employs elements of the fantastical in order to explore the connections among desire, painting, and the otherworld as sources of artistic inspiration and expression. The longest among the early stories and only recently published in the original, "La Veneziana," like its coevals "The Potato Elf" and "Revenge," is set in England. The main triangle of desire entails one McGore, an old art dealer and an adviser to a rich art collector known as the Colonel, McGore's young wife Maureen, and the Colonel's son Frank. McGore has located a rare fifteenth-century Italian canvas and sold it to the Colonel . The presumed author of the painting, Sebastiano Luciani, called Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), was a major Renaissance painter of the Venetian School, and Nabokov might have seen del Piombo's famous canvas, Ritratto Femminile ("Dorotea"), in Berlin (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin-Dahlem; the painting appears on the cover of the French edition of Nabokov's early stories to which "La Veneziana" gave its title; see La Vénitienne et autres nouvelles, Paris, 1990). The landscape vista in the background of del Piombo's portrait symbolizes an alluring otherspace, that is a space with a dissimilar set of parameters.

While Maureen and Frank are in the midst of a tempestuous affair in the story, Frank's college roommate, one Simpson, also feels an irresistible attraction to Maureen. More so, after looking at the Colonel's new painting, Simpson notices an uncanny resemblance between Maureen and the woman on the canvas. To add to Simpson's fascination, McGore shares a "secret": years of dealing with paintings have taught him that through an act of concentrated will one can enter the space of a given painting and explore it from within. Simpson is equally drawn to Maureen and the Venetian woman in the painting. At night, literalizing McGore's supernatural metaphor, Simpson walks into the space of the portrait where the beautiful Maureen/La Veneziana offers him a lemon. Simpson "grows" into the canvas, becomes part of its painted space. The story's fantastical spring has now almost unwound itself.

"La Veneziana" embodies several key elements to become central to Nabokov's poetics. Afloat in the story's enchanting and elegant syntax, and never fully synthesized and harmonized, these elements call for scrutiny. One should start paying increasing attention to Nabokov's concern with the problem of entering a space whose parameters differ from the regular space enveloping a character. In addition, Nabokov constructs this otherspace to host visually perfect images. In the case of La Veneziana's portrait, the pictorial space of the canvas becomes charged with the features of the stunning and sensuous Maureen. Frank endows his creation with extraordinary perfection to further his love for the original and thereby not repeat Pygmalion's tragic mistake. In contrast to Frank, his friend Simpson falls in love with an image of idealized feminine beauty which appears to him even better than the possessor of this beauty in flesh and blood. Simpson succumbs to the magnetism of the otherworldly pictorial space, which gleams through an opening in his mundane reality. In his consciousness, the image of beauty wins over beauty itself. To put it differently, when Simpson reads the text of the otherspace within the story by gazing deeply at the portrait, he is compelled to become part of that text. During the act of reading, the reader who follows Simpson in his lunatic exploration thus experiences a textual simulacrum of the pictorial space which Simpson transgresses in the story. What we have then is a story, a verbal text, which frames another text-the pictorial text of the otherspace rendered by a linguistic medium-and thereby foregrounds a specific model of its reading.

D. Barton Johnson has drawn attention to Nabokov's remark from a 1967 interview: "I think that what I would welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, suspended afar like a picture in a picture: The Artist's Studio by Van Bock" (Strong Opinions, 72-3). Johnson saw in Nabokov's formulation, based on a painting by a fictitious Flemish artist, a model of his "aesthetic cosmology." The real pictorial subtext behind Nabokov's alleged painting is Jan Van Eyck's Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride (aka Wedding Portrait; The National Gallery, London). Johnson concluded that "the two paintings, [...], one imaginary and one real, constitute a concise paradigm of Nabokov's art: ut pictura poesis." Nabokov's lifelong interest in painting might in part be explained by the parallels he saw between the acts of reading a literary text and a pictorial text. In his Cornell lectures, Nabokov discussed this subject: When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting (Lectures on Literature, 3).

An experience very similar to what Nabokov described in his lecture takes place during the act of reading "La Veneziana."

4. Bachman Defictionalized

In March of 1925, following the publication of "Bachman" in the Berlin Russian newspaper Rul' (The Rudder), Nabokov received a peculiar request from one Dr. Bernhard Hirschberg of Frankfurt a/M. Taking Nabokov's short story to be a memoiristic essay or obituary, Hirschberg asked for the permission to translate it into German to be published in "one of the local newspapers." Written in stilted Russian, in one instance bordering on being ungrammatical, the letter to Nabokov follows in a literal English translation:

Dr. med. Bernard Hirscheberg
Frankfurt a/M
Körnerwiese 13

8 March 1928

Dear Sir!
Having read your interesting article "Bachman," published in The Rudder, I would like to translate it and print in one of the local newspapers. As far as I know, the German press has published virtually nothing about the late Bachman.
If you do not have anything against the request to translate your article, please let me know at your earliest convenience.
I remain sincerely yours,

Dr. med. Bernard Hirschberg

One day Nabokov's reply might turn up in a German's archive-attached to a time-yellowed translation of "Bachman" and clipped from a culture section of a regional German newspaper.

* I wish to thank the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies for facilitating my research with a Short-Term Grant during the summer of 1996. I record my gratitude to Mr. Dmitri Nabokov for the permission to access and quote from Nabokov's papers at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (hereafter VN Berg) and the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter VN LC). The unpublished materials by Vladimir Nabokov are © copyright by The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Unless a source of an English translation from the Russian is provided, the translation is mine and literal.

I gratefully acknowledge the help of Vladimir and Pavla Petkevic during my research trip to Prague in April-May 1993, and especially as concerns Nabokov's equivocal relationship with his sister Olga. I take full responsibility for the speculative link between Olga in the story "A Russian Beauty" and Olga Petkevic (née Nabokov).

Several works of biography and criticism, listed below in the order of their appearance, have contributed to the making of this piece: V. Stark, "Nabokov-Tsvetaeva: zaochnye dialogi i 'gornie' vstrechi," Zvezda 11 (1996): 150-56; Nikolai Raevskii, "Vospominaniia o Vladimire Nabokove," Prostor 2 (1989): 112-17; Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, New York, 1995; Ronald Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, London, 1996; Gennady Barabtarlo, "Prizrak iz pervogo akta," Zvezda 11 (1996): 140-45; Alan C. Elms, "Nabokov Contra Freud," Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology, New York, 1994, 162-83; 277-9; Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré, Paris, 1982; Michael Sims, "The Metamorphosis of Franz K.," Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts, New York, 1997, 399-400; John Burt Foster, Jr., "Nabokov and Kafka," Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed., The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, New York, 1995, 444-51; D. Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression, Ann Arbor, 1985; Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures, Ithaca, 1988, 93-94; Charles Nicol, "'Ghastly Rich Glass': A Double Essay on 'Spring in Fialta'," Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (1991): 173-84; Maks Fasmer [Max Vasmer], Etimologicheskii slovar' russkogo iazyka, 4 vols., Moscow, 1964-73; O.A. Kuznetsova, "Don Aminado," P.A. Nikolaev, ed., Russkie pisateli 1800-1917. Biograficheskii slovar', 2, Moscow, 1992, 156-57; Boris Tomashevskii, "Literatura i biografiia," Kniga i revoliutsiia, 4 (1923): 6-9; Iu [rii]. N. Tynianov, "Literaturnyi fakt," Počtika. Istoriia literatury. Kino, Moscow, 1977, 255-70.