A Dozen Notes to Nabokov's Short Stories
by Maxim D. Shrayer
page two of three

5. Locating Darwin's Fiction

The book proved to be remarkable. The pieces were not really short stories-no, they were rather more like tractates, twenty tractates of equal length. The first was called "Corkscrews," and contained a thousand interesting things about corkscrews, their history, beauty, and virtues. Another was on parrots, a third on playing cards, a fourth on infernal machines, a fifth on reflections in water. And there was one on trains, and in it Martin found everything he loved [...] If Martin had even thought of becoming a writer and been tormented by a writer's covetousness [...] perhaps these dissertations on minutiae that were deeply familiar to him might have aroused in him a pang of envy and the desire to write of the same things still better (Glory, 60).

[...t]o portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade (Stories, 157).

6. Émigré Revenge in a Tobacco Store and a Barber Shop

Set in the same milieu of the Russian Berlin, both "Govoriat po-russki" (Russian spoken here, 1923) and "Britva" (Razor, 1926) are stories of émigré revenge against agents of the Soviet secret police. The narrative tone of "Russian Spoken Here" recalls a number of Chekhov's stories in which the first-person narrator discloses a protagonist's secret and speaks to the reader as if he were a dear and trusted friend (cf. "Agaf'ia," 1886; "Moi razgovor s pochtmeisterom" [My Conversation with the Postmaster, 1886]; "Son" [A Dream, 1885]). The ending, too, is open à la Chekhov and invites the reader to project expectations beyond the story's physical closure. And yet something stopped Nabokov from publishing "Russian Spoken Here," something which probably had to do with the story's too overtly feuilletonistic political thrust as well as its unseamless narrative mode.

Some three years later, having already authored several short masterpieces ("Christmas"; "The Return of Chorb"), Nabokov revisited the subject of his earlier story, and the result was qualitatively better. It bears mention that the ending of "Razor," while still technically an open one, now enacted a different scenario of revenge. In "Russian Spoken Here," the revenge is achieved through the agent's arrest and captivity by the émigré family that owns the tobacco shop. By their account, the agent is to remain a prisoner so long as the Bolsheviks continue to rule Russia. The irony of such a revenge is that it is ultimately unclear who is the captor and who the captive. In contrast to "Revenge," the White army officer turned barber punishes his former tormentor not by a torture of captivity, but rather by a torture of memory. Having literally kept his enemy a razor's edge away from death, Ivanov then releases his clean-shaven and shocked client. Such an act of revenge subtextualizes Pushkin's emblematic story "Vystrel" (The Shot, 1831) from The Tales of I.P. Belkin. Compare the following excerpts from the two endings:

Pushkin's:

"I will not," replied Silvio. "I'm satisfied [ia dovolen]. I 've seen your confusion, your dismay; I forced you to fire at me, that will suffice [s menia dovol'no]. You will remember me. I leave you to your conscience."

Ivanov gave the man's face a quick wipe and spat some talcum on him from a pneumatic dispenser. "That will do for you," he said. "I'm satisfied. You may leave" (Stories, 182).

A striking feature of Nabokov's early 1930s is that many of his stories represent beginnings of larger projects, some of which never developed beyond their early stages. Might one regard "Obida" (A Bad Day, 1931) and "Lebeda" (Orache, 1932) as fragments of a projected Bildungsroman? Both feature the same hero, a boy named Putya Shishkov who suffers from being unable to reconcile his rich emotional life with the indifferent or threatening façades of the public world. In fact, in the collection Sogliadatai (The Eye, 1938), "Orache" follows "A Bad Day" and they literally form a textual continuum. Additionally, both were published in the Paris daily Poslednie novosti (The Latest News) in the early 1930s. The young Putya Shishkov in the twin stories seeks an escape into a world of his own-free of pretense and conventions-in which the colors and shapes of people and objects would change according to his imagination. Critics have noted the obvious biographical subtext for the events narrated in "Orache": V. D. Nabokov's 1911 duel with the publisher Mikhail Suvorin. In addition, both stories about Putya Shishkov's childhood, especially "Orache," contain intertextual parallels with the childhood chapters of Nabokov's autobiographies. It is not unlikely that Nabokov planned to write a semiautobiographical novel-a novel akin to Ivan Bunin's Zhizn' Arsen'eva (The Life of Arsen'ev), whose portions were being serialized in The Latest News in the late 1920s and whose first four parts were published in Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals) in 1928-29 (the complete edition came out in New York in 1952). Nabokov's dedication of "A Bad Day" to Bunin, with whose Bildungsroman it shared its intonation, setting, and focus on mapping narrative space, was hardly a gratuitous gesture.

Did Nabokov indeed contemplate composing another émigré Bildungsroman, whose protagonist, unlike Martin of Glory, would be an artist? If so, his last Russian short story "Vasili Shishkov" (1939), seems to belong genetically with "A Bad Day" and "Orache." After all, Nabokov's enigmatic valediction depicts a disappearance of a grown-up Putya Shishkov after he has failed to publish A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity.

8. A Parody of Bunin's Lesser Story

Nabokov, who is known to have devised dazzling pastiches of many of his literary colleagues, conjured up a parodic evocation of Bunin's melodramatic novella Syn (The Son, 1916). In The Son, which Nabokov was not likely to have valued as highly as Bunin's other works, a woman falls in love with a young man half her age. For a while, she tries to block the growing attraction, or, rather, to channel it into maternal feelings for a young man (her own children are female). At one point in the story, her young lover kneels before her in the garden and presses himself against her lap: "And looking at his hair, his white thin neck, she thought with pain and delight": 'Oh, yes, yes, I could have had a son just like that!'" (Ivan Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, 1965-67, 4: 333). In Nabokov's "Kartofel'nyi Él'f" (The Potato Elf, 1924)-one of the longest stories of the early period-we find a mise en scène whose structure parodies the one in Bunin's The Son. Fred Dobson, a circus dwarf, sits at the feet of Nora Shock, the wife of his colleague, and narrates his life. As Nora beholds this little boy-man, his "black jacket, inclined face, fleshy little nose, tawny hair, and that middle parting reaching the back of his head vaguely moved Nora's heart" (in Bunin's The Son, the young man also appears miserable and lonely): "As she looked at him through her lashes she tried to imagine that it was not an adult dwarf sitting there, but her non-existing little son in the act of telling her how his schoolmates bullied him" (Stories, 234).