The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Read Free

the story in Leipzig. The Iron Curtain had been raised by then, and he went to check. There it was: a complete set of
Russkoe Ekho
. And now they had Xerox machines.
    Thus “Easter Rain”—first discovered by Svetlana Polsky, though we only learned her name some years later; translated into English in collaboration with Peter Constantine for the Spring 2002 issue of
Conjunctions
—now joins this volume.
    DMITRI NABOKOV
Vevy, Switzerland

May 2002
    A Russian text for “The Word” first came to my attention in the spring of 2005, a story so startlingly emotional that, before I translated it, I had to quell some doubts regarding its authenticity. It was the second story my father published, and the first he published after the assassination of his father in 1922; composed in Berlin, it appeared in a January 1923 issue of
Rul’
, the Russian emigre periodical his father had co-published in Berlin. Like “Ultima Thule” a decade later, “The Word” contains an all-explaining secret we never learn. Like “The Wood-Sprite” and an early poem, “Revolution,” “The Word” projects an idyllic, kindly world against barbarous reality, ominously silhouetted by its pagination in
Rul’:
it appeared next to an unfinished fragment by his father.
    “The Word” is also one of the very few Vladimir Nabokov stories in which angels take part. They are, of course, a very personal embodiment, much more closely related to angels of fable, fantasy, and fresco than to the standard angels of Russian Orthodox religion. It is also true that symbols of religious faith appeared ever less frequently in Nabokov’s fiction after his father’s death (see “Wingstroke” for a very different kind of angel). The ingenuous rapture of “The Word” surfaces in my father’s later works, but only fleetingly, in an otherworld Nabokov could only hint at. He explained, however, that he would be unable to say as much as he did, had he not known more than he said.
    DMITRI NABOKOV
Montreux, Switzerland

January 2006





THE WOOD-SPRITE
    I WAS pensively penning the outline of the inkstand’s circular, quivering shadow. In a distant room a clock struck the hour, while I, dreamer that I am, imagined someone was knocking at the door, softly at first, then louder and louder. He knocked twelve times and paused expectantly.
    “Yes, I’m here, come in.…”
    The doorknob creaked timidly, the flame of the runny candle tilted, and he hopped sidewise out of a rectangle of shadow, hunched, gray, powdered with the pollen of the frosty, starry night.
    I knew his face—oh, how long I had known it!
    His right eye was still in the shadows, the left peered at me timorously, elongated, smoky-green. The pupil glowed like a point of rust.… That mossy-gray tuft on his temple, the pale-silver, scarcely noticeable eyebrow, the comical wrinkle near his whiskerless mouth—how all this teased and vaguely vexed my memory!
    I got up. He stepped forward.
    His shabby little coat seemed to be buttoned wrong—on the female side. In his hand he held a cap—no, a dark-colored, poorly tied bundle, and there was no sign of any cap.…
    Yes, of course I knew him—perhaps had even been fond of him, only I simply could not place the where and the when of our meetings. And we must have met often, otherwise I would not have had such a firm recollection of those cranberry lips, those pointy ears, that amusing Adam’s apple.…
    With a welcoming murmur I shook his light, cold hand, and touched the back of a shabby armchair. He perched like a crow on a tree stump, and began speaking hurriedly.
    “It’s so scary in the streets. So I dropped in. Dropped in to visit you. Do you recognize me? You and I, we used to romp together andhalloo at each other for days at a time. Back in the old country. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”
    His voice literally blinded me. I felt dazzled and dizzy—I remembered the happiness, the echoing, endless, irreplaceable happiness.…
    No, it