Nabokov’s son Dmitri has assembled the 52 stories published in English before Nabokov died in 1977, and translated another 13 written in Russian between 1920 or ‘21 and 1924. (Nabokov wrote directly in English after moving to the United States in 1940.) It’s human nature to dread a writer’s long-lost juvenilia, but after the 21-year-old Nabokov’s debut story (a heavy-handed anti-Soviet fancy called “The Wood-Sprite”) things pick up in a hurry. The second story, “Russian Spoken Here,” wastes little motion in telling of a Soviet agent permanently imprisoned in the bathroom of a Russian emigre family’s apartment in Berlin. The third, “Sounds,” has the first recognizably Nabokovian narrator, enchanted by his own mystical thoughts as he jilts the married woman who loves him. By mid-1924, Nabokov could pull off such whiz-bang first paragraphs as that of “Details of a Sunset,” in which a “crackling and quivering” spark speeds along a streetcar’s wire “like a blue star.” He’d also quit ending his stories with those damned ellipses . . .
Not one reader in a hundred will really use the book’s chronological arrangement to trace Nabokov’s development. That’s fine: almost from the first he was, if not fully evolved, wholly mature. Only after 1940, of course, do we find his close observation of (and Martian distance from) such American folkways as the “barbaric, unhygienic and adulterous” custom of heaping guests’ coats on the bed. But he always had his visionary affinity for extreme states of mind: the cocaine addict in “A Matter of Chance” (1924) considers suicide but reflects that “it would be a pity to cut short the effect of the enchanting poison.” No imaginable revisionist perversity could wish to undo Nabokov’s decision, in the mid-’50s, to give up short stories and concentrate on his novels. But this volume’s many pleasures show there’s still room for regret.
