Nabokov's Dozen: Thirteen Stories

For anyone, like me, more familiar with Nabokov's more famous English work (in my case Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire), the first Russian stories in this collection might come as something of a shock. Inevitably, being translated, they lose what was presumably their magic in Russian; and as the joy of Nabokov is language (what he does with it; how he expresses meaning through his manipulation of it, rather than ideas or narrative; how he is its most beautiful exponent of the century), one is left with a feeling of frustration adn dissatisfaction. There is little of the callous burlesque which invade his most delicate artifacts. 'The Aurelian' could almost have been written by Simenon. Others have the nostalgic melancholy of Turgenev. This is all very nice, but it's not Nabokov.And yet, it is. 'Cloud, Castle, Lake', for example, combines the familiar Nabokovian disjunction between elegance of style and content of the most horrific viciousness. There is a definite increase in pleasure when one gets to the English stories - the tone, created through language, in unmistakably Nab - narrators, resembling Nabokov in suavity, taste and intelligence, are actually feckless idiots, with their creator smiling behind them.There is, though, very little to smile about in these stories. Spanning (in composition)the period of Stalinism, Nazism, World War II and McCarthy era USA, they detail the complete derailment of the Enlightenment project in our century. Each time rationality, the power of the intellect or the artist is asserted, it is always denied by exile, totalitarianism, madness, deformity, conformity, self-destructive urges, unknowable terrors, but most importantly, by knowledge of the deception inherent in writing. Each story begins with an assertion, and the confident possibility of giving expression to the world, and ends with these values rigorously distorted, fragmented, smashed and broken by that world.And yet it is only through the mind that we can escape this evil, through nostalgia, recreation, possibility, artistry, transcendence. 'Lance' is an extraordinary, baffling, ambivalent parable highlighting this. Is its vision of the sublime delusive? Does this matter if we can fumble towards imagining it? Almost every character in these stories languishes in some kind of prison, trying to escape, seek epiphany in some way connected with the mind, whether it's a simple, sensual appreciation of beauty (a fluttering butterfly; a reflection of a cloud on a lake), or a quiet kindness to someone else, helping us escape our crushing solipsism. 'Signs and Symbols' is the key story, its deceptive simplicity masking untold anguish.I would be lying if I said I didn't miss the astonishment of watching Nabokov in full flight, but there is so much wealth in these stories, which require untold rereading - not just to extract meaning, but to savour again, and again, their remarkable beauty, their deadpan comed