Generally I’d say one should read Nabokov to experience language as a release of birds but my relationship to ‘Razor’ is not really representative of this. I had been reading pieces of his thick, lush prose and feeling heady with the sheer exhilaration of it—thank god for short stories, where you can sustain momentary whiplash from a plot or sentence and pretend it’s giddiness. This story centres on the chance encounter of two old acquaintances, and a shift of power that occurs in front of a mirror and beneath a lathered brush.
Reading ‘Razor’ is to feel the testing of metal across your throat.
First published, in Russian, as ‘Britva’ in 1926. Read in Collected Stories as part of Penguin Modern Classics in 2001. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov, the writer’s son, in 1995
A Personal Anthology 