The Penguin Classics edition of Nabokov’s Collected Short Stories was the first book that made me want to give up writing. I was 16 and had only just started. In fact, I’d really only started reading novels that weren’t for children, emerging from a few years filled with comics, Diabolo II forums, and Magic: the Gathering cards. I’d also just met the friend that would come to be the closest of all, and we’d read, lend books to each other, listen to records, get high, and talk about either escaping or dying in our Yorkshire mill town, whichever seemed easiest. Against this, the shock of reading ‘Terra Incognita’ is still with me. It is a narrative about a tropical expedition in a fictional country, Zonraki, with a narrator hallucinating and succumbing to some strange fever, caught between two worlds neither of which quite seems like the “real” one, written in (what was for me) difficult, showily eloquent language. Nothing could have been more alien to the experience of my own life. And yet, it got close to something inside me, a sensation I didn’t really understand and probably still don’t, manifesting like an opening in the stomach or something trapped in the roof of the mouth. This thing now seemed like it was the most important thing in the world to search for, but which I was hopelessly unequipped to ever find. If, as a remark from Angela Davis a couple of years ago so succinctly put it, “art can make us feel what we cannot yet think”, then this was my first feeling of literature.
First published in Posledniya Novosti, Paris 1931, English translation published in The New Yorker, May 1963; collected in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, McGraw-Hill, 1973 and the Collected Stories, Penguin, 1997
A Personal Anthology 