"Breaking the News" appeared under the t.i.tle "Opoveshchenie" (Notification) in an emigre periodical around 1935 and was included in my collection Soglyadatay (Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, 1938).
The milieu and the theme both correspond to those of "Signs and Symbols," written ten years later in English (see The New Yorker, May 15, 1948, and Nabokov"s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958).
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
TORPID SMOKE.
"Torpid Smoke" (Tyazhyolyy dym) appeared in the daily Poslednie Novosti, Paris, March 3, 1935, and was reprinted in Vesna v Fialte, New York, 1956. The present translation has been published in Triquarterly, no. 27, Spring 1973. In two or three pa.s.sages brief phrases have been introduced to elucidate points of habitus and locale, unfamiliar today not only to foreign readers but to the incurious grandchildren of the Russians who fled to western Europe in the first three or four years after the Bolshevist Revolution; otherwise the translation is acrobatically faithful-beginning with the t.i.tle, which in a coa.r.s.e lexical rendering that did not take familiar a.s.sociations into account would read "Heavy Smoke."
The story belongs to that portion of my short fiction which refers to emigre, life in Berlin between 1920 and the late thirties. Seekers of biographical tidbits should be warned that my main delight in composing those things was to invent ruthlessly a.s.sortments of exiles who in character, cla.s.s, exterior features, and so forth were utterly unlike any of the Nabokovs. The only two affinities here between author and hero are that both wrote Russian verse and that I had lived at one time or another in the same kind of lugubrious Berlin apartment as he. Only very poor readers (or perhaps some exceptionally good ones) will scold me for not letting them into its parlor.
V.N., A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973
RECRUITING.
"Nabor" was written in the summer of 1935 in Berlin. It appeared on August 18 of that year in Poslednie Novosti, Paris, and was included twenty-one years later in my Vesna v Fialte collection, published by the Chekhov Publishing House in New York.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
A SLICE OF LIFE.
The original t.i.tle of this entertaining tale is "Sluchay in zhizni." The first word means "occurrence," or "case," and the last two "from life." The combination has a deliberately commonplace, newspaper nuance in Russian which is lost in a lexical version. The present formula is truer in English tone, especially as it fits so well my man"s primitive jargon (hear his barroom maunder just before the fracas).
What was your purpose, sir, in penning this story, forty years ago in Berlin? Well, I did pen it (for I never learned to type and the long reign of the 3B pencil, capped with an eraser, was to start much later-in parked motorcars and motels); but I had never any "purpose" in mind when writing stories-for myself, my wife, and half a dozen dear dead chuckling friends. It was first published in Poslednie Novosti, an emigre daily in Paris, on September 22, 1935, and collected three years later in Soglyadatay, Russkiya Zapiski (Annales Russes, 51, rue de Turbigo, Paris, a legendary address).
V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976
SPRING IN FIALTA.
"Spring in Fialta" is from Nabokov"s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE.
"Cloud, Castle, Lake" is from Nabokov"s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
TYRANTS DESTROYED.
"Istreblenie tiranov" was written in Mentone in spring or early summer 1938. It appeared in the Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, August 1938, and in my Vesna v Fialte collection of short stories, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956. Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin dispute my tyrant"s throne in this story-and meet again in Bend Sinister, 1947, with a fifth toad. The destruction is thus complete.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
LIK.
"Lik" was published in the emigre review Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, February 1939, and in my third Russian collection (Vesna v Fialtre, Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1956). "Lik" reflects the miragy Riviera surroundings among which I composed it and attempts to create the impression of a stage performance engulfing a neurotic performer, though not quite in the way that the trapped actor expected when dreaming of such an experience.
The present English translation appeared first in The New Yorker, October 10, 1964, and was included in Nabokov"s Quartet, Phaedra Publishers, New York, 1966.
V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975
MADEMOISELLE O.
"Mademoiselle O" is from Nabokov"s Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).
VASILIY SHISHKOV.
To relieve the dreariness of life in Paris at the end of 1939 (about six months later I was to migrate to America) I decided one day to play an innocent joke on the most famous of emigre critics, George Adamovich (who used to condemn my stuff as regularly as I did the verse of his disciples) by publishing in one of the two leading magazines a poem signed with a new pen name, so as to see what he would say, about that freshly emerged author, in the weekly literary column he contributed to the Paris emigre daily Poslednie Novosti. Here is the poem, as translated by me in 1970 (Poems and Problems, McGraw-Hill, New York): THE POETS.
From room to hallway a candle pa.s.ses
and is extinguished. Its imprint swims in one"s eyes,
until, among the blue-black branches,
a starless night its contours finds.
It is time, we are going away: still youthful,
with a list of dreams not yet dreamt,
with the last, hardly visible radiance of Russia
on the phosph.o.r.ent rhymes of our last verse.
And yet we did know-didn"t we?-inspiration,
we would live, it seemed, and our books would grow
but the kithless muses at last have destroyed us,