‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

This must be one of the most-chosen stories in the archives of A Personal Anthology and I didn’t want to choose it for the sake of variety. But in the weeks that I was re-reading my possible selections and mulling them over, I taught this story and when I re-read it, remembered how much I love it and felt that I couldn’t leave it out.

An elderly couple, Russian-Jewish emigres in New York, are visiting their son on his birthday. He is confined to a psychiatric hospital on account of his “referential mania”, a rare condition that causes the patient to imagine “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence”. Upon arriving, they learn that their son has tried again to take his own life and are sent home, disappointed. While her husband tries to sleep, the boy’s mother examines some old photographs and a second story briefly overtakes the first, the story of their emigration from Revolutionary Russia to Germany, and from Nazi Germany to America, but this story is interrupted when the father emerges, crying in pain and full of resolve to rescue their son from the hospital. Then comes the enigmatic conclusion. The phone rings and the mother answers to a girl asking for Charlie. She has the wrong number. It rings again, and the elderly woman dismisses the girl, telling her that she is dialling ‘o’ instead of zero. Then the phone rings for a third time and the story ends. Surely, it can only be the girl, once again dialling the wrong number, and yet somehow, we believe that this time, it must be the hospital calling to tell the boy’s parents that he has escaped – from this life, from the hospital. There is no logical reason but in the overdetermined circumstances of the story, it seems to make a kind of intuitive, aesthetic sense, and so we are exposed as sharing something of the boy’s referential mania, examining a random event as though it must be full of meaning. Somehow – I’ve never quite understood why – this is extremely moving.

First published as ‘Symbols and Signs’ in The New Yorker, 1948, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958

‘The Enchanter’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I fell in love with Lolita because of the way Nabokov uses language (This later developed into a full-blown fixation on multilingual authors and a particular use of English described as ‘native and foreign both’.) and also because obsession interests me greatly. When, many years later, the novel was included on a reading list for a creative writing master’s I was studying, I was genuinely surprised at people’s shock. Not that I didn’t notice the abuse, just that, to me, it wasn’t what most struck me about the novel. ‘The Enchanter’ preceded Lolita and they share the same brilliant, twisted premise: marry the ailing widowed mother of a young girl in order to later become her sole guardian. But what initially really fascinated me about this story, was how it came about. In Author’s Note One of ‘The Enchanter’, Nabokov writes: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” That this was where the idea for ‘The Enchanter’ and Lolita began, both makes a lot of sense and no sense, which is how the writing process feels a lot of the time, and also how the best ideas are born.

Included in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Penguin, 1975

‘Terra Incognita’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by the author and his son, Dmitri Nabokov

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

‘Wingstroke’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov

‘Wingstroke’ is a fabulously strange and over-looked piece of weird fiction. It concerns a man named Kern who, reeling from the suicide of his wife, finds himself at a European ski resort where everything appears to be loaded with meaning and coincidence. There is also a touch of the fantastical about his surroundings, as well as with his fellow skiers. Marooned in the hotel, he notices himself being watched by “some pale girl with pink eyebrows”, and at dinner he encounters a “man with goat eyes”; whilst his creepy acquaintance, Monfiori, is described as having “pointed ears, packed with canary-coloured dust, with reddish fluff on their tips.” Kern appears to have entered a new reality, one where when it snows the hotel seems to “float upwards”. The perfect setting then for a supernatural encounter.

Also at the hotel is Isabel – known about the resort as ‘Airborne Isabel’ – an attractive and popular young woman whom Kern befriends and quickly becomes obsessed with. She inhabits the room next door to Kern’s. Much to Kern’s disbelief, Isabel likes to stay out on the slopes after dark, leaping, as she says, “right up to the stars” and encountering who-knows-what in the snowy darkness.

One night, unable to sleep, Kern hears guitar music, laughter and strange barks coming from Isabel’s room. The next night – drunk, half-crazed, and suicidal himself – Kern notices that Isabel’s key has been left in the door. What Kern does next, bursting into the room and telling Isabel that he needs her love, sets off the chain of bizarre and unexplained events which reach their sad conclusion the next day when Isabel takes part in a skiing competition.

The sudden intrusion of the supernatural into this story is what, for me, makes it such a great read. There’s a chance, obviously, that what Kern encounters in Isabel’s room could be a figment of his increasingly unhinged mind. Told in vivid and descriptive prose and packed with unsettling imagery, ‘Wingstroke’ is one of the finest weird fiction tales I’ve read. We’re left feeling as if the ending hasn’t been adequately explained, whilst at the same time secretly understanding everything. What hasn’t happened is that what we understand about the ending hasn’t been confirmed, which is of course what makes it so memorable.

First published in Russian, as ‘Udar krïla’ in Russkoye Ekh, 1924, and then in English in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf, 1995

‘Breaking the News’ by Vladimir Nabokov

In the Nabokov story ‘Breaking the News’, Eugenia Isakovna is an elderly widow, rather deaf, living alone in exile in Berlin. She has an only son, working in Paris. At least, she thinks she has: in fact the second and third sentences of the story are: “Her only son had died on the previous day. She had not yet been told.” He had fallen down a lift shaft. The story relates how her friends the Chernobyskis hear of this first. They distractedly debate how to break the news, whether to tell her somehow “by degrees”, suggesting first that he is very ill. A group of emigré friends assemble for tea at the widow’s house, getting more and more agitated as they fail to break the news. Finally, in anguish, as she pushes her hearing aid toward her visitors fearfully, “sobbing Chernobyski roared from a distant corner: ‘What’s there to explain – dead, dead, dead!’ but she was already afraid to look in his direction”. The metaphorical aspect of her literal deafness is terrifying; though Nabokov almost over-does the effect with the letter from the son recently received by the widow, which speaks of his being “plunged up to the neck in work and when evening comes I literally fall off my feet, and I never go anywhere.” The twisting of “literally” to mean “metaphorically”, but as it turns out, horribly literally, is shocking.

First published in Russian in 1935. Published in translation by Nabokov and his son Dmitri Nabokov, in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, McGraw-Hill, 1973. Collected in The Collected Stories, Penguin, 2016.

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I need to read this story at least once every few months and it never fails to move me each time. ‘Signs and Symbols’ is about an elderly Russian couple who have emigrated to America and live in straitened circumstances. They visit their mentally unstable son in a sanatorium and return without seeing him. They take him a modest birthday gift, a selection of jams. At first glance, the story seems a quiet meditation on old age, parental love and the sorrow of the exiled, but it has so many layers and depth to it. We learn that the son suffers from a rare mental illness that makes him hallucinate. He has attempted to take his life a few times. The elderly parents live a frugal life, Nabokov lingers over the details of their straitened circumstances, the mother looking through the photograph albums, longing for the home she’s left behind, and the father’s embittered gratitude towards his more successful brother who has brought them over.

Hanging over their nightly rituals is a sense of impending foreboding and doom. Yet this is not a sentimental story. The ‘signs’ and ‘symbols’ of their predicament are presented in carefully crafted sentences, without a single superfluous image or sentence.

That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The subway train lost its life current between two stations… During the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did not exchange a word, and every time she glanced at his old hands, clasped and twitching upon the handle of his umbrella, and saw their swollen veins and brown-spotted skin, she felt the mounting pressure of tears.

The ending is deliberately ambiguous. The couple receive two misdialled phone calls from a girl who is looking for someone called Charlie and the story ends when the phone rings for a third time. The reader never knows whether it is another wrong call or whether it is the hospital, ringing to say their son had succeeded in committing suicide.

First published – as ‘Symbols and Signs’ – in The New Yorker, May 15, 1948, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958 and Collected Short Stories, Knopf, 1995. Also in the Penguin 70 Cloud Castle Lake, 2005

‘The Vane Sisters’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I started getting to know more Nabokov after reading W. G. Sebald’s essay ‘Dream Textures’: a brief note on Nabokov in Campo Santo, his posthumous collection of essays. It’s more about ghosts and shadows rather than nocturnal sojourns and lead to me seeing ‘The Vane Sisters’ from a previously unknown angle.

The story is well known for its hidden acrostic, the ending that Nabokov said “can only be tried in a thousand years of fiction”. I like it more for showing VN’s skill as a topographical writer and there is an awful depth, something else Sebald wrote about, to the environment his narrator observes. He sees “icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house.” Where he’s “sure the shadows of the falling drops [will] be visible too.” And the “elongated umbra cast by the parking meter upon some damp snow”. Everything is infused with the spooky sisters of the title without the narrator even being aware of it. There is a wonderful phrase in Nabokov’s Transparent Things: “the secret life of detritus” and here we see the inanimate animated with full force.

First published in the Hudson Review, New York, Winter 1959, and then in Encounter, London, March 1959. Collected in Nabokov’s Quartet, Nabokov’s Congeries, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

‘Razor’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov

“Chin like an elbow” is, I think, as good a description of a face as you can get. This is nasty, brutish and short, but written with such clarity that the character of Razor leaps from the page, while remaining entirely, properly inscrutable. Nabokov does amazing things with the short story, clever things, but I think he’s never better than when actually telling a story, and in this case, telling one that seems very close to the classic, simple genre stories of the thirties.

First published in Russian as ‘Britva’ in Rul, 1926. Available in English in Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, 1995

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov is a favourite writer of mine and his stories are slices of perfection. This story, on the surface, is very slight – an elderly couple return from visiting their son in a sanatorium on his birthday, after he has attempted to take his own life, and they sit at their table at midnight and eat some jam – and yet not one word is wasted. Small details devastate (their son’s unopened birthday present on the table, the realisation that knives need to be kept in a locked drawer if he returned home) During the story, the couple receive two apparently misdialled telephone calls from a girl asking for Charlie; and the story ends abruptly when the phone rings for a third time. It is, frustratingly, never answered and the delicious ambiguity of it means that, whenever I re-read it, I’m always slightly hopeful that this time the father will pick up the phone.

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I’m fascinated by the notion of the “story behind the story” in fiction – the great and terrible truth being revealed piece by piece as the surface narrative unfolds. ‘Signs and Symbols’ feels like a near-perfect example of this. The surface narrative concerns an aged couple who attempt to visit their mentally ill son, but cannot, because he has tried to kill himself (again). They are Jews who have lived through the first half of the Twentieth Century; and it is this terrible story that we as readers are directed through, again and again – the true signified of all the signs. My favourite interpretation is that the son is not truly mad. In the context of the persecution to which the family has been exposed, the “referential mania” that plagues him is not a pathology but in fact a logical reaction to the world in which they live. In the context of genocide, it is reasonable to corelate the “invisible giants” persecuting the son and the same monstrous forces that have thrown the family across Europe and around the world.

‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov

His complete surrender to his own merriment would prove irresistible…with abrupt barks of clockwork hilarity coming from Charles, and a dazzling flow of unsuspected lovely laughter transfiguring Josephine, who was not pretty, while Eileen, who was, dissolved in a jelly of unbecoming giggles.

These lines, in their richness, flow and descriptive sleight of hand, the laughter, along with the prettiness of one girl conservatively used to describe the lack-of of the other, became something to aspire to in the realm of imagery and description. The story as a whole presents a challenge to the usual narrative construction, in that the collusive ‘we’ narration at the beginning, becomes an ‘I’ around halfway through the story. This is discussed in the podcast.

First published as a short story in The New Yorker, 1953. Later published as the first chapter of the novel, Pnin. You can listen to the short story on The New Yorker podcast here

‘The Fight’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov

‘The Fight’ is a story from Nabokov’s Berlin period. Oddly structured, it begins with a lengthy description by the first-person narrator—an émigré in Berlin, presumably someone like Nabokov himself—of the excursions he regularly makes to a lake near the city, where he swims and lolls in the sun. There the narrator regularly sees an older man, with whom he can only haltingly converse, but who seems genial and pleasantly anarchic. Later, while strolling through an unfamiliar neighbourhood, he stops at a bar which, it turns out, the man, one Krause, owns. The narrator becomes a regular, and takes pleasure in watching the developing romance between Krause’s daughter and a young electrician named Otto. On a sultry day, with a storm about to break, the narrator watches as Krause and Otto argue over whether the latter, who thinks of himself as one of the family, should have to pay for his drinks. Matters escalate and in a matter of a sentence or two the men are fighting with bare fists on the street, to the glee of a crowd that has gathered from nowhere. Krause knocks the electrician out. The narrator vainly, rather heartlessly, attempts to comfort the girl with a kiss. And that’s it. The story’s over.

For me, ‘The Fight’ is a parody of the chart known to every high school student, Freytag’s Pyramid, the one that details initial exposition followed by gradually rising action leading to climax and descending to resolution. Instead of these hoary conventions, this story asks instead: In what way does a climactic action need to be prepared for? What happens if that action isn’t resolved?

There’s delight, too, in Nabokov’s language, nicely apparent in his son Dmitri’s translation: as a class, we always linger in wonder over the narrator’s description of a barfly with “appetizing folds of fat on his nape” and his offhanded revelation that the fight reminds him of “a splendid scuffle I had once had in a seaport-dive with a beetle-black Italian, during which my hand had somehow got into his mouth and I had fiercely tried to squeeze, to tear, the wet skin inside his cheek.” Beetle-black. Somehow. Decorous, mandarin Nabokov is, as always, unsettling and sordid.

First published in Russian in 1925. Published in English in The New Yorker, February 10, 1985. Collected in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf 1995

‘First Love’ by Vladimir Nabokov

A stand-alone short story, but also a chapter later incorporated into the autobiographical Speak, Memory, this is a brilliant and knowingly Proustian evocation of adolescent love in Paris. The narrator recalls his ten-year-old self, so no middle-aged Humbert here. The innocence is two-fold: one related to young love, the other an unstated prelapsarian sense of the world set to experience the trauma of the Russian Revolution and the First World War. As always with Nabokov, it’s the details that make the story a success. The ending is precisely observed, its recollections accelerating in a cinematic montage. As a treatment of piercing memory, it echoes MacNeice’s poem ‘Soap Suds’ and the coda to Lytton Strachey’s memoir of Queen Victoria. Achingly beautiful.

First published in The New Yorker as ‘Colette’, July 1948. First collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958. Most recently collected in Collected Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2017. Read it online here

‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ by Vladimir Nabokov

This story, written in 1937 and set in a parallel Germany of enforced leisure and institutional bullying, might easily be passed over as a straightforward political allegory, were it not for the fact that it’s by Nabokov, and is therefore studded with precise observations that remind us of his greatness as a comic writer: the cigarette butt Vasili is made to eat, for instance, or the lacquered nose of the trip’s leader. Vasili, the somewhat Pnin-like central character who’s clearly an authorial avatar – he’s introduced at the beginning as “my representative”, and at the tale’s end, “of course, I let him go” – is obliged to take a tiresomely upbeat journey with a bunch of grotesques who first won’t let him read in silence, then chuck his prized cucumber out of the train’s window. On the trip, Vasili sees the scene of the story’s title, which looks, in the mind’s eye, a little like a Claude landscape, whose transcendent beauty is the source of the story’s spring of joy and horror. The title’s cadence and rhythm captures that imprinting of a sight upon the memory. It stays with you as though it’s your own.

First published in The Atlantic, June 1941, and collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 and Collected Short Stories, 1995, and available online here