Part 42 (1/2)

WINGSTROKE.

”Wingstroke” (Udar krila), written in October 1923, was published in Russkoye Ekho (The Russian Echo), an emigre periodical in Berlin, in January 1924, and now in the current collections. Although the story is set in Zermatt, it refracts the recollection of a brief vacation Nabokov had taken in St. Moritz in December 1921, with his Cambridge friend Bobby de Calry.

We learn from a letter to his mother (who had moved to Prague late in 1923 while Nabokov remained in Berlin, where, in April 1924, he married Vera Slonim) that, in December 1924, he sent her a ”continuation” of ”Wingstroke,” presumably in published form. To date, no trace of this piece has been found. My English translation was published, with one differently worded sentence, under the t.i.tlle ”Wing-beat” in The Yale Review, vol. 80, nos. 1 and 2, April 1992.

D.N.

G.o.dS.

Nabokov wrote ”G.o.ds” (Bogi) in October 1923. The story remained unpublished until the current collections.

Nabokov was working on what is probably his most important play, the five-act Traghediya Gospodina Morna (The Tragedy of Mr. Morn), soon to be published for the first time by Ardis Press.

D.N.

A MATTER OF CHANCE.

”Sluchaynost',” one of my earliest tales, written at the beginning of 1924, in the last afterglow of my bachelor life, was rejected by the Berlin emigre daily Rul' (”We don't print anecdotes about cocainists,” said the editor, in exactly the same tone of voice in which, thirty years later, Ross of The New Yorker was to say, ”We don't print acrostics,” when rejecting ”The Vane Sisters”) and sent, with the a.s.sistance of a good friend, and a remarkable writer, Ivan Lukash, to the Rigan SeG.o.dnya, a more eclectic emigre organ, which published it on June 22, 1924. I would never have traced it again had it not been rediscovered by Andrew Field a few years ago.

V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975

THE SEAPORT.

”The Seaport” (Port), written during the first months of 1924, appeared in Rul' on December 24 of the same year, and now in the current collections. This story was later published, with a handful of minor changes, in Vozvrashchenie Chorba (The Return of Chorb, Slovo, Berlin, 1930), Nabokov's first collection of short stories, which also included twenty-four poems. ”The Seaport” has, in part, an autobiographical genesis: in July 1923, during a visit to Ma.r.s.eilles, Nabokov was fascinated by a Russian restaurant that he visited numerous times and where, among other things, two Russian sailors proposed that he embark for Indochina.

D.N.

REVENGE.

”Revenge” (Mest'), written in the spring of 1924, appeared in Russkoye Ekho on April 20, 1924, and now in the current collections.

BENEFICENCE.

”Beneficence” (Blagost'), written in March 1924, was published in Rul' on April 28, 1924. Subsequently it appeared in The Return of Chorb, and now in the current collections.

D.N.

DETAILS OF A SUNSET.

I doubt very much that I was responsible for the odious t.i.tle (”Katastrofa”) inflicted upon this story. It was written in June 1924 in Berlin and sold to the Riga emigre daily SeG.o.dnya, where it appeared on July 13 of that year. Still under that label, and no doubt with my indolent blessings, it was included in the collection Soglyadatay, Slovo, Berlin, 1930.

I have now given it a new t.i.tle, one that has the triple advantage of corresponding to the thematic background of the story, of being sure to puzzle such readers as ”skip descriptions,” and of infuriating reviewers.

V.N., Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, 1976