The collected stories of Vladimir Nabokov
Alfred A. Knopf 
659 pages $35
REVIEWED BY RODNEY WELCH
I do have a story for you," wrote Vladimir Nabokov one New Year's Day
50 years ago to Katherine White, his editor at The New Yorker, "but
it is still in my head; quite complete however; the pattern showing
through the wing-cases of the pupa."
The image was perfectly apt, and not just because this lifelong
butterfly chaser was pulling double duty as a Wellesley lit teacher and a
research fellow at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
The story turned out to have less to do with pupae than patterns, the
kind discerned by a paranoid mental patient and the aging Russian emigre
parents who attempt to visit him on his birthday. The son 
beset by a world
where trees, bodies of water and objects in general are secretly plotting
his doom has attempted suicide; the parents are told to come back later.
Late that night, they resolve to bring their boy home. They are having tea
when the phone rings. Wrong number. It rings again; same caller. It rings
again. End of story.
Like a number of Nabokov's stories and novels, "Signs and Symbols" is
beautifully written, meticulously imagined and suddenly, spontaneously
confounding. Will this third call heart-stopping as all midnight calls
are be just another wrong number? Or the hospital, saying the son has
died? Has the parents' lucid world turned into the son's mad one is that
telephone one more threatening object, poised to attack? Or are the three
calls part of some larger, vexing pattern we can't understand?
Questions, questions. As anyone who has discovered such masterpieces
as Pale Fire, Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading already
knows, Nabokov fully intended his books to be taken apart brick by brick.
As he told his students at Cornell and Wellesley in the 1950s, that's the
way books are:
Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart,
squashed then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at
its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come
together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which
you have contributed something of your own blood.
Besides "Signs and Symbols," there are a few other stories in this
long-overdue volume where it is worth bearing these words in mind.
In "The Vane Sisters," an arrogant French teacher recalls a pair of
dead siblings, and his fruitless search for their ghosts. What he doesn't
know and what only readers alerted by Nabokov's prefatory note will likely
find out is that the last paragraph of his story is an acrostic message
from the two, who have gamely penetrated his narrative from the next world
to let him know that they have guided his search from the beginning.
Stories like this fairly bolster Nabokov's standard claim repeated by
every Nabokolatrist since that he was influenced by no one and wrote like
no one else. But such stories aren't typical, and this collection with its
whims of fate, its ghosts, out-of-body experiences, furry angels and toady
devils doesn't seem all that far from the Russian tradition of Gogol and
Chekhov. Even geniuses are shaped by predecessors; Vladimir, who has long
since joined Nikolai and Anton at the heavenly poker table, has likely
already conceded as much.
Nabokov wrote most of these stories in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s
and 1930s, between fleeing the newly revolutionized Russia and coming to
America. It was a productive, if penurious, time; he also wrote nine
novels, a few collections of poetry and two plays, few of which brought
him any real money. It was also a period of exile; the sense of alienation
worked its way over and over into his books, and it's there in his first
story, "The Wood-Sprite."
A forest elf visits a dozing emigre writer to announce that he, too,
has left the old country for good. The last time he tried bombarding
unsuspecting forest visitors with pinecones brought no response
whatsoever:
"I toiled away for a whole hour, all to no avail. Then I took a closer
look, and I was horror-struck. Here's a man with his head hanging by one
flimsy crimson thread, there's one with a heap of thick worms for a
stomach."
Clearly, Soviet Russia was no place for either wood sprites or
imaginative artists. In this three-page story which combines a ghostly
Puck with a writer who may or may not be the author himself, Nabokov
kisses off what was and suggests the prose magician to come.
The transformation was not immediate. The early stories, collected
here for the first time, are spotty in the way first efforts usually are.
They veer between swoony self-absorption, overwrought aestheticism, and
expansive, surprisingly muscular works with real imaginative vigor.
Nabokov never really lost his taste for precious little scenes or
labored exercises in style - they appear late in the book, too - but the
stories that don't really work are often partly redeemed by something: a
phrase, a sense of character or just his ease with abnormality.
No one had a greater, more refined talent than this devout
anti-Freudian for mapping out all the heavens and hells the mind can forge
when it's up against the wall.
The delirious jungle explorer of "Terra Incognita" keeps seeing
mirages of a bedroom the kind where someone like him just might be having
a fever dream of a lost expedition.
The unfortunate tourist of "Cloud, Castle, Lake" takes a "pleasure
trip" with a group of like-faced, like-minded vulgarians, who nearly
torture him to death after he tries escaping to the castle he dreamed of
the night before.
The porter in "A Matter of Chance" commits suicide in despair over his
missing wife, unaware she's a passenger on his train.
And, almost always, there's that intoxicating style, those deep-focus
observations that turn the ordinary and banal into the strange and unique.
Look at the attention he pays to faces, always showing an artist's
admiration for the creative process, both his and God's:
His face was ill-shaven, yellowish and long, and all of him looked
clumsy, emaciated and lugubrious, as if nature had suffered from toothache
when creating him.
"An Affair of Honor"
His face looked as if it had been fashioned of buttery modeling clay,
with its slimy mustache and unexpected furrows.
"Sounds"
Her mien was airy and impetuous, her mouth so red it seemed the
Creator had scooped up some torrid carmine and slapped a handful on the
nether part of her face.
"Wingstroke"
Other descriptions, like this one of the mother in "Signs and Symbols," can simply break the heart. Note the exquisite parallel:
Her drab gray dress was done anyhow. She wore cheap black
dresses. Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their
next-door neighbor, whose face was pink and mauve with paint and
whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a naked
white countenance to the fault-finding light of spring days.
We also have the pathetic Luzhin in "A Matter of Chance," who dreams
of ending it all by putting his cocaine-soaked head between connecting
trains: "It would burst like a soap bubble and turn into iridescent air."
Ivanov's impending heart-attack in "Perfection" turns his body into an
"asymmetrical archipelago of pain."
One of Nabokov's favorite words is palpate, to examine by touch; a
good description of his own Flaubertian passion for le mot juste.
There are a lot of perfect words in these 650-odd pages, although I
admit a number fell on imperfect ears. Just what kind of instrument is a
"soubrette"? What is a "harsh chitinous crust"? Or "elementary
allobiotic phenomena"? Ditto "araucaria," "furunculosis," "cinerous,"
"frass," "calvities," "mastic," "fa ence," "gules," "purpure," "voilette,"
"elytra," "merds" and "cacological."
Whatever these words mean, (and I forgot 10 minutes after I looked
them up) they reveal an artist who knows that the illusion won't work
without attention to exacting details. It's this very sense of detail of
the working parts behind the surface of the world that lets Nabokov reign
over his fictive worlds like Prospero on his island.
For all its forgiveable flaws, this unique, variegated collection
proves he can still out-conjure all the magical realists who have appeared
in his wake.
Rodney Welch is a frequent contributor of film and book reviews for
POINT.
No one had a greater, more refined talent than this devout anti-Freudian for mapping out all the heavens and hells the mind can forge when it's up against the wall.
