Vladimir Nabokov - The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

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The Stories of
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

[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 worlds 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 Nabokovs ability to charm and inspire.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

They offer a startling, cloudless view of a writers development. The effect of such felicities en masse is not only addictive; they point to the finesse of Nabokovs ear [and] to the extreme and unembarrassable weirdness of his invention, the plain flights of his fancy.

The New Yorker

Glorious. Should please Nabokovs 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 fates wicked irony. Redemption shimmers in Nabokovs 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 ones experience and thereby understand and endure it.

Washington Times

The Stories of

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (19231937) and Paris (19371940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this centurys master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English worksincluding Lolitainto Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

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

Nabokovs 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 Igors Campaign (Anon.)
Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

LETTERS

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:
The NabokovWilson Letters, 19401971
Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 19401977

MISCELLANEOUS

Poems and Problems
The Annotated Lolita

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1997

Copyright 1995, 2002, 2006 by Dmitri 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, 18991977.
[Short stories]
The stories of Vladimir Nabokov.1st American ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78809-2
1. Manners and customsFiction. 1. Title.
PS3527 .A15A6 1995
813.54dc20 95-23466

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design by Barbara de Wilde
Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

v3.1

To Vra

H AVING APPEARED individually in periodicals and in various assortments in previous volumes, fifty-two of Vladimir Nabokovs stories were eventually published, during his lifetime, in four definitive English collections: Nabokovs Dozen and three other thirteen-story dozensA Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, and Details of a Sunset and Other Stories.

Nabokov had long expressed the intention of issuing a final batch, but was not sure whether there were enough stories that met his standard to make up a fifth Nabokovianor numericaldozen. His creative life was too full, and was truncated too suddenly, for him to make a final selection. He had penciled a brief list of stories he considered worthy of publication and labeled it bottom of the barrel. He was referring, he explained to me, not to their quality, but to the fact that, among the materials available for consultation at the moment, they were the final ones worthy of publication. Nonetheless, after our archive had been organized and thoroughly checked, Vra Nabokov and I came up with a happy total of thirteen, all of which, in our circumspect estimation, Nabokov might have deemed suitable. Hence Nabokovs bottom of the barrel list, reproduced following this preface, should be considered partial and preliminary; it contains only eight of the thirteen newly collected stories, and also includes