Well, I’m definitely on a roll this week with books from my stacks! Another author I’m always looking for an excuse to read is Vladimir Nabokov; and for our last club in April (1936) I managed to find three stories by the great man from that year. 1976 is much later in his career, but I discovered that in that year a collection of his earlier stories was released. The book is called “Details of A Sunset and Other Stories”, and it gathers together thirteen of his short works, all written in Russian between 1924 and 1935. At the time, Nabokov was living in Berlin, Paris and Riga as an expat, and the stories were published individually in various emigre publications. Later, the stories were translated into English by the author and his son, Dmitri, and published in this collection in 1976. Although I don’t have that volume, I *do* have his Collected Stories so I was able to read the individual stories in the order he collected them – and it was, as usual, pure joy to interact with his wonderful prose.

In case you have the same Collected edition as me, the stories from “Details…” are these:

“Details of a Sunset”
“A Bad Day”
“Orache”
“The Return of Chorb”
“The Passenger”
“A Letter that Never Reached Russia”
“A Guide to Berlin”
“The Doorbell”
“The Thunderstorm”
“The Reunion”
“A Slice of Life”
“Christmas”
“A Busy Man”

I’ve commented before on Nabokov’s prose, and indeed he’s considered one of the last century’s major literary stylists; and I find that the writing on display in his short stories often takes the breath away. The ones featured in this volume are no exception, and the settings range from the emigre cities to his homeland of Russia, with several taking the reader back in time or exploring the fates and emotions of those in exile. There are glimpses of emigre life, with all its hardships, and nostalgic looks back to life in Russia pre-revolution, for example in “A Bad Day”, where the protagonist struggles to fit in with other young people at a birthday party. “The Doorbell” tells of the reuniting of a mother and son in Berlin which leads to disillusion for both; similarly, “The Reunion” finds two brothers meeting after a huge gap and finding themselves on different sides of the political divide and with nothing in common.

It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects – the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one’s desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nesting in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A glass column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop…

Other stories veer off into different territory, with Nabokov exploring multiple layers and meanings. The title story is a tour-de-force where a young man, Mark Standfuss, is abandoned by his fiance and meets his fate without even knowing what has happened to him, all filled with allusions to colours, giving it an almost painterly feel. “A Slice of Life” and “The Return of Chorb” both concern lost loves and the different ways people deal with that loss. “Christmas” deals with a different kind of loss, that of a son, with the father attempting to come to terms with his grief on Christmas eve. And “The Busy Man” is a kind of fable which almost made me think of the work of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, where the protagonist, Grafitski, has convinced himself that a prediction of his death is true and then wastes his life making preparations to try to avoid the prediction coming to pass.

The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century , wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor’s uniform.

By Walter Mori (Mondadori Publishers) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The stories in themselves are inventive, clever and unforgettable, but it’s Nabokov’s style which often lifts them above the norm. His prose is precise, beautifully constructed and conjures his settings and characters quite brilliantly. Witty, clever and atmospheric, these are tales which linger in the mind, leaving you wondering about the protagonists, their lives before and after the events related, and their eventual fates. Many of the stories were from the start of Nabokov’s writing career and demonstrate just how much he’d defined his style at that early time. He really was a marvellous writer, and I’m so glad the #1976Club gave me the chance to read more of his short stories! 😀