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A Jeweler's Eye

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A Jeweler's Eye A Jeweler's Eye Date: October 29, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By John Updike; Lead: THE STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV Edited by Dmitri Nabokov. 659 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $35. Text: RETURN trips to Paradise are risky. The prose of Vladimir Nabokov did loom as a paradise for me when I began to read, in The New Yorker more than 40 years ago, the reminiscences that became chapters of "Speak, Memory" (1951) and the short stories about the touching Russian emigre professor Timofey Pnin, eventually collected in the quasi novel "Pnin" (1957). What startling beauty of phrase, twists of thought, depths of sorrow and bursts of wit! -- this was a rainbow prose that made most others look flat and gray. "Lolita" sensationally followed in 1958, and I settled into an enraptured readership as, capitalizing upon this breakthrough into best- sellerdom, the exquisite but industrious author mingled new productions in his adopted English with lovingly supervised translations from his large oeuvre in his native Russian. The publication now, 18 years after Nabokov's death, of his collected stories, under the editorship of his son and favorite translator, Dmitri Nabokov, offered a threat as well as a treat: a threat, that is, to dull and dampen a faithful reader's old ardor with a ponderous assembly of short fiction originally consumed in the four handy collections, of 13 items each, which the senior Nabokov had issued while alive. And, in truth, "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov" is not an easy read -- hard to hold, and rather dense and rich for systematic, consecutive perusal. For those who stay with it, though, the volume recapitulates a brave career. Dmitri, faithful to his father's numerical superstitions, has found an additional, uncollected 13 stories, bringing the total to 65. Of these, only nine were written in English; one was written in French, in Paris, while the Nabokovs were in transit to America, and the rest in Russian, between 1920 and 1940, within the diaspora that had besprinkled Europe with refugees from the Communist revolution. Berlin, with more than a hundred thousand emigres, was the capital of this floating world, and here Nabokov lived from 1923 to 1937. The stories written in this period mostly deal with a remembered, enchanted Russia or an observed population of expatriates, heavy on forlorn eccentrics whose behavior partakes of the provisional nature of their citizenship. Aleksey Lvovich Luzhin (a family name Nabokov would use again) is, in "A Matter of Chance," a waiter on a German train who takes cocaine and for five years has been out of touch with his beloved wife; Captain Ivanov, in "Razor," has found employment as a barber, into whose shop one day strays his Soviet torturer; Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kru zhevnitsyn, in "Lik," wanders France as an actor playing a Russian in a French play, and aptly represents the typical exile, going through the motions on the rickety stage of a borrowed country. There is something charming in the way that Nabokov, an aristocratic scion and autocratic artist, so sympathetically, even gaily, lent his imagination to the raffish, boardinghouse milieu of impecunious exile. His stories appeared in emigre dailies like Rul, in Berlin, and Poslednie Novosti, in Paris, for compensation that but modestly augmented his earnings as a tutor and tennis coach. Yet, surprisingly, happiness is a recurrent theme. The very oldest tale here, "The Wood-Sprite," recalls "the happiness, the echoing, endless, irreplaceable happiness." In "A Matter of Chance," an aged princess knows "that happy things can only be spoken of in a happy way, without grieving because they have vanished." The narrator of "Beneficence" becomes aware of "the world's tenderness" -- "the world does not represent a struggle at all . but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated." The hero of "Details of a Sunset" muses, "Oh, how happy I am . how everything around celebrates my happiness," and that of "The Thunderstorm" falls asleep "exhausted by the happiness of my day." All this from a writer who had recently lost his homeland, his fortune and his father, shot on a Berlin stage when Vladimir was 22 years old. Yet the blissful undercurrent continues to run strong in the later fiction: the narrator of "Ultima Thule," a fragment of the last novel Nabokov attempted in Russian, relates that "in moments of happiness, of rapture, when my soul is laid bare, I suddenly feel that there is no extinction beyond the grave." A strictly nonsectarian fascination with a possible afterlife, and with the precise anatomy of the moment when life becomes death, figures in a novella like "The Eye" and infuses with a queasy transcendence such creations in English as "Pale Fire" and "Ada." Nabokov was a kind of late Wordsworthian romantic, ascribing a metaphysical meaning to the bliss that nature inspired in him. Or less nature itself, perhaps, than its conscious apprehension: he is a poet of consciousness -- of, as he put it in "A Busy Man," "the burden and pressure of human consciousness, that ominous and ludicrous luxury." The mind in its shimmering workings provided his topic and permeated his narrative manner. His stories bubble with asides on their progress or unraveling. "The Reunion" holds a wonderful description of the mental process of recalling a forgotten word. "Parting with consciousness," he tells us in "Mademoiselle O," was "unspeakably repulsive to me." His youthful passions for lepidopterology, chess and poetry fused to form a prose of unique intensity and trickiness. The visual pursuit of butterflies, in the field and under the examining light, trained his eye to a supernatural acuity; eyes in these short stories are themselves observed microscopically. The heroine of "Sounds" (his first fully achieved story, from 1923) is told, "Your eyes were limpid, as if a pellicle of silken paper had fluttered off them -- the kind that sheathes illustrations in precious books." In "Wingstroke," another lady's eyes "sparkled as if they were dusted with frost," and a male angel's are "elongated, myopic-looking . pale-green like predawn air." In "Revenge," we find "wonderful eyes indeed, with pupils like glossy inkdrops on dove-gray satin." And so on, up to the English-language "Vane Sisters," of whom Cynthia has "wide-spaced eyes very much like her sister's, of a frank, frightened blue with dark points in a radial arrangement." In "Recruiting," we learn that self-portraits are difficult "because of a certain tension that always remains in the expression of the eyes." This tension generated an unfailing cascade of bejeweled details, expressed in a language inventively straining at the limits of the expressible. Sensory minutiae -- bicycle tracks in the sandy path of a manorial estate, reflections in a Berlin puddle -- encode the mingled miracles of being and perception. HIS love of chess and his invention of chess problems encouraged a taste for "combinational" complexity that can be wearisome. "Ultima Thule" and "Solus Rex," pieces of an abandoned novel rather than stories in any case, seemed tedious on this reading, symbolizations of grief and lost kingdoms too remote from their autobiographical referents. When Nabokov too successfully suppressed the personal note, his deceptive designs could seem merely cruel. Of Ivanov, a weakhearted tutor in "Perfection," we are told that "his thought fluttered and walked up and down the glass pane which for as long as he lived would prevent him from having direct contact with the world." That glass pane sometimes masks with its reflective brightness the display case holding Nabokov's human specimens. Yet he can be movingly empathetic and direct, as in "An Affair of Honor" and "A Slice of Life," so limpidly free of combinational tricks as to feel Chekhovian. When he began to write stories in English, he sacrificed nothing of verbal ingenuity but addressed his American audience in distinctly emigre accents -- that floating world, swallowed in Hitler's Europe, had to be explained. "The Assistant Producer" and "A Forgotten Poet" have the voice, like his little book on Gogol, of an essay, with an impudent, madcap accent. "The Vane Sisters," with its purely American characters, is too spookily clever for words, but "Scenes From the Life of a Double Monster" and "Lance" show that, had he chosen, he could have tweaked and deepened the shorter form as impressively as he did the novel in his amazing imported English. "Sirin," his Russian pen-name, means "bird of paradise"; it was Nabokov's preening gift to bring Paradise wherever he alighted. The Silence of Madness in "Signs and Symbols" by Vladimir Nabokov by Jacqueline Hamrit March 19, 2006 abstract In this paper, I try to wonder about the way madness and literature can be linked and/or separated, through the analysis of a short story by the Russian American writer Vladimir Nabokov entitled "Signs and Symbols" as both literature and madness are linked to the issue of reference as well as meaning.. The short story narrates the case of a deranged young man for whom "everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme" and shows how madness, unlike literature, fails in the quest of meaning and is therefore associated to silence, as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida suggested, whereas literature, although sometimes verging on madness, is characterized by the desire to live and to move away from the silence of death. article Madness has always fascinated writers and has a privileged relationship with literature, being sometimes more than a mere metaphor and rather corresponding to a thematic network underlying a text. It has even been compared to the reading and/or writing activity of literature. I intend in this paper, to make a comparison between madness and literature, to wonder about the way they can be linked and/or separated, through the analysis of a short story by Vladimir Nabokov entitled "Signs and Symbols" which was written in 1948.
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