The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage International)

This volume of Nabokov's complete stories has been put together by the man's son, who also did most of the translations of the older, Russian ones. Most of these stories were previously published in volumes of 'dozens', except the earliest ones, which are new to the light of day.I have previously read most, if not all of them in the excellent German edition by Dieter Zimmer with Rowohlt. Coming back to the stories after many years, and in a new, English shape, gives me the same great pleasure that hooked me on Nabokov long ago.(Long ago I made the frivolous pledge to learn Russian at age 60, so that I could read Nabokov and others in the original. Alas.)I enjoy VN's prose sentence by sentence. The short story was a form that suited him well. While he over-constructed at times in his longer works (think of Ada!), few of the short stories deserve any blame. They are perfect. The time span of their writing is 1921 to 1958, if I am not mistaken. The very first story is a gem of the genre: a forest ghost, a wood-sprite, presumably something like a leprechaun, tells our narrator, a student in English exile, late at night, how he ran from the Bolshevist revolution... Don't even think of assuming that hints at Poe's Raven are accidental. Even Lolita is essentially a Poe reference.The stories have many subjects, but many are in some way related to the experience of exile. Even when they go back to memories of the old days, the political context is always there, under the surface. Example: 'Sounds' deals with a nostalgic memory of an adulterous summer love. Our narrator addresses his lover, a married neighbor, as if he were telling her the story how all was perfect until it broke. If you are an inattentive reader, you might even miss the reason. World War 1 has started (we get just one hint at this, when she asks him, while she reads the newspaper: where is Sarajewo? The also present schoolmaster says: in Serbia.)In consequence of the unspoken, her officer husband sends her a message that he must come home earlier because plans have changed...Teju Cole just said in a New York Times interview, that the novel is much overrated as a literary form. Right he is.Short stories never get better than this.

I bought this book to bore myself to sleep, and it worked.

I recently read "Lolita" & loved it. That led me to this. A lot of short stories from Nabokov. Wonderful for fans of this literary great.

There is undeniable value in having the complete stories of Vladimir Nabokov collected in one volume, but there are far too many to be tasted, let alone digested, in a few days. This is a book to be sampled, then set aside for something else, then sampled again.This collection contains all the stories previously published in NABOKOV'S DOZEN and the three volumes that followed it, a round dozen in each. To these about have been added about enough for a further volume, making 68 stories in all. One thing that surprised me (not being a Nabokov scholar) is that the stories do not evenly cover the writer's career. Roughly half his novels were written in English, but the great majority of the stories, though published in his American period, are translations from earlier works in Russian, mostly by his son Dmitri, who also edits this volume. There is comparatively little, for instance, that matches his extraordinary vision of America as seen in LOLITA. Mostly they deal with the rootless lives of émigrés in the twenties and thirties, or memories of pre-revolutionary Russia. All are well-written; that goes without saying; quite a few are politically incisive. But having sampled about a quarter of the stories in the book, selecting from all periods, I have to say I have been left with an almost physical depression. I am sure I will return to read others, but I have no desire to do so soon.Still, let me give some examples of things that I did enjoy. There is "Music," in which a man with no ear for music goes to a salon recital, and sees his ex-wife there, the music providing a capsule of suspended time in which he can ponder their changed relations. "Mademoiselle O" is essentially a memoir of his privileged childhood and the triple-chinned French-Swiss governess who stayed with them for seven years; a hitherto unpublished story, "Easter Rain," is a sad extension of the governess character into old age, treasuring memories of Russia that nobody will share.One interesting thing about the governess story is its metafictional frame. Nabokov enters the memoir mode as giving back their life to real characters that he had pilfered for his fiction. This theme occurs again in "Recruiting." An impoverished elderly émigré attends a Russian funeral in Berlin, then sits on a bench in a public park. A man comes to sit next to him, who turns out to be the author, who has "recruited" this old man (who may not even be Russian at all) as a character in his fiction. A similar trick is also seen in "Terra Incognita," whose narrator, a butterfly hunter in the remote tropics, is feverish with malaria. But it is not clear whether he is hallucinating about his living room in the jungle, or if the whole jungle sequence is an hallucination from some illness he suffers at home.Perhaps the most striking story I read was "The Vane Sisters." It begins with a description of thaw in a New England college town, wonderfully detailed even in its depiction of garbage cans in the alleys between clapboard houses:"I remarked for the first time the humble fluting -- last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns -- ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid -- circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters."The story goes on to contain one of the most brilliant suicide notes on record, then segues to an account of the narrator's old relationship with the suicide's sister, abandoned by him when he could no longer keep up with her interest in spiritualism and the occult. And so the story ends -- or does it? For the final paragraph, another piece of colorful description, is in fact an acrostic, the first letters of its words spelling out a message from beyond the grave that ties back to that opening description and mocks the narrator's skepticism. I did not notice this myself -- few people would -- but had to have it pointed out to me. But I am not in bad company; apparently the New Yorker also rejected the story until Nabokov wrote to the editor explaining the trick. The whole story has become emblematic for me: brilliant writing, even more brilliant cleverness, but also self-regarding -- the story as art rather than story as simply story.

Reading Nabokov is to understand precisely what the art of writing and storytelling should be, but frequently isn't. There is an unparalleled poignancy and flow of imagination to his work that most writers are never able to achieve in a lifetime, yet he pulls it off flawlessly, with nearly every story. There is nothing of this quality being published today.Nabokov not only had a mastery of language that makes reading him almost like reading poetry, but also a skill in crafting unique plots that often stole my breath upon coming to the end of each. Sometimes heartbreaking, occasionally darkly humorous, practically everything in this book exceeded my expectations and left me in awe of the author's talent. This is as worthwhile a read as I can imagine.

About halfway through this collection, you will encounter a story called "Perfection." Read it carefully. It introduces the mature writing of this master craftsman of poetic imagery and what can only be called shimmering, gorgeous nightmares. Nabokov does not build stories or plots. He wills them into existence with a playful murderousness. He examines his creations -- and the processes with which he creates them -- from a variety of perspectives, seemingly holding back nothing, disclosing all, yet finally disclosing nothing but the fact that the story is over and the reader is left with the very real responsiblity to examine his own psyche for signs of damage or inspiration.One sentence of Nabokov is worth a library of DeLillos or Murakamis...

This year I read "Speak, Memory" by Vladimir Nabokov, because the Dutch writer Bernlef had been asked to write his memoirs and was looking for examples. He referred to the French writer Patrick Modiano and to Nabokov. I was so impressed by Nabokov's style and by the story of his life and the way he modeled his chapters according to a specific theme or person, that I wanted to go on reading. After that, I read "Pnin", which was very funny and again, very well written. Also, I bought his Stories. The 68 stories are about turning points in the lives of Russian exiles, mainly living in Berlin after the Great War. It shows how many people were at a loss at the time, and how much they had lost from their former lives. I find that interesting for historical reasons, too. The first half of the 20th century has my particular interest. In Holland nothing happened, and our history books were strictly limited to our national story while the rest of Europe was in turmoil. Literature brings you into the heart of what it did to people who had nothing to do with politics, but happened to be on the scene, and were the victims. Nabokov, by the way, has a keen eye for the fact that not all exiled people were just pitiful victims, but remained the scoundrels they used to be."Lolita" I read about 30 years ago. I found it's theme so disgusting, that I had decided: so far for Nabokov. I am glad I now thought otherwise.

This book is very biographical given the way the stories are presented to the reader. The stories were written by Vladimir Nabokov between the 1920s and the 1950s and follow the path of his life as a Russian emigre in Berlin, then to France and finally to the United States. I read the stories in the order that they appear since there is a note from Nabokov's son, Dmitri, which states that he had tried to maintain a chronological order to the stories as much as possible. As you read through these stories, you can see Nabokov maturing as a writer and also follow him as he makes his way further and further from the beloved Russia of his childhood, both temporally and geographically, fleeing first from the stupidity and barbarity of the Bolsheviks and then from the Nazis and their own brands of stupidity and barbarity.Nabokov's writing can be difficult to follow and the reader is as much a participant in his stories as is the writer. The rewards are great, however. There are magnificent butterflies painted with humour, nostalgia, wonderment and anger which spread their wings in the pages of this book; all Nabokov asks is that we meet him halfway and he will show us life.The stories were translated to English by Nabokov and his son, some were written in English. The book itself is well made and contains notes on each of the sixty-eight stories from either Nabokov or his son.

J'ai adoré ! Nabokov était mon auteur préféré et le reste.LN

Nabokov is a master. His words sparkle and dance across the page with an ease that will leave the reader breathless. Wonderfully unexpected stories.

good