"Spring in Fialta": 7.25

A precursor to Ada, but teasing only, rather than actual ~engagment

references the same song that both Ada and Lucette parrot to Van, this time Victor to himself abt his repeated losses of Nina

like some autocrat who surrounds himself with hunchbacks and dwarfs, he would become attached to this or that hideous object; this infatuation might last from five minutes to several days or even longer if the thing happened to be animate

and

Now, frankly speaking, I have always been irritated by the complacent conviction that a ripple of stream consciousness, a few healthy obscenities, and a dash of communism in any old slop pail will alchemically and automatically produce ultramodern literature; and I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.

"A Forgotten Poet": 6

"First Love": 5.5

I don’t care. describing love between children is played out for nabokov at this point in his writing career

"Signs and Symbols": 6.5

A Septimus Warren Smith character who is confined to a sanitorium, as described by his Russian Jewish parents who try to visit him, fail, and then try to withdraw him from

"The Assistant Producer": 6.25

Character sketch of a Russian singer named Plevitskaya and husband/kidnapper/triple agent General Golubkov of the White army.

There is also too much historical and political information given on the Whites for the demands of restraint and understatement made by the genre in its modern form. This information may be necessary to explain the plot... There is also a sense in which the story seems to have been written as a memoir of the place and period

(lol at one critic who mentions that Nabokov's still getting his English sea legs in this novel, having to re-establish himself since he left his reputation behind in Berlin/Paris, and his English is a bit shaky. He made Graduation gtfo)

"The Aurelian": 6

entomologist (butterfly scientist) named Pilgram is unable to afford any vacation despite his moderate success, he gips a customer and then dies of a second stroke. His wife assumes he abandoned her till she finds him “his livid face knocked out of shape by death”

"Cloud, Castle, Lake": 6.75

Vasili Ivanovich, a mild-mannered Russian living in Berlin, hesitantly participates in a charity ball, where he unexpectedly wins a leisure trip with 4 german couples that are weird. They lure him into all their activities at his expense. He escapes to a picturesque inn and decides to stay there indefinitely. He returns to the rest of the pleasntrip goers who receive this news as a betrayal. They beat him and drag him back to the train. Upon returning, he pleads to be released from his job (from his employer, the narrator) and, symbolically, from the constraints of human society.

mfw I've been invited to a beheading:

“Oh, but this is nothing less than an invitation to a beheading”

"Conversation Piece, 1945": 7.75

The premise is “a person whose name I did not even know, had been talking sympathetically about the German people to a group of silly old women in a private house.”

Not sure if I'm fading the critics here, but I found this hilarious despite the contradictory nature of the overt political discussion which Nabokov himself despised. Additionally, he catches flack for never once generously describing a german character (or really most women) in any of his literature, and this is no exception – yet I find it hilarious and lighthearted.

It's Nabokov being a hater in this pseudoaudo-biographical presentation of shared namesake with someone who’s fuckin lame, and getting invited to stuff meant for him (namely, a guest lecturer for women about German apologist and antisemite)

“At last he said, with a little catch in his voice, “First of all, I will play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

Feeling that this was more than I could stand—in fact, having reached a point where I was beginning to feel physically sick—I got up and hurriedly left the room.”

"That in Aleppo Once...": 6.75

In which a poet escapes France during Case Anton with his wife who may or may not even exist (edited)

upon learning about his wife’s infidelity while they were separated in transit and inquiring about every little detail:

I crushing and crushing the mad molar till my jaw almost burst with pain, a flaming pain which seemed somehow preferable to the dull, humming ache of humble endurance.

again, the passive misogyny of his female characters is simultaneously problematic and hilarious:

“You will think me crazy,” she said with a vehemence that, for a second, almost made a real person of her, “but I didn’t—I swear that I didn’t. Perhaps I live several lives at once. Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps this bench is a dream and we are in Saratov or on some star.

After she continues to run off and abandon him, he concludes that she never existed:

Viewing the past graphically, I see our mangled romance engulfed in a deep valley of mist between the crags of two matter-of-fact mountains: life had been real before, life will be real from now on, I hope. Not tomorrow, though. Perhaps after tomorrow.

"Time and Ebb": 5.75

Old man recalls various memories from his past, but none of them are of consequence?

"Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster": 8.5

Something that e.g. Wallace does far better than Nabokov is employ a tone fit to the character whereas Nabokov is permanently bound to his trilingual, aristocratically educated, inexplicable voice. For example, in this story, the narrator is a poor, conjoined twin, product of rape and maternal death, and yet describes things like:

With a dreamy smile of scientific delectation he stroked the fleshy cartilaginous band uniting us

which is just not fitting for someone with the background Nabokov is describing. Something something Dunning-Kreuger (edited)

"Mademoiselle O": 7.25

a somber, autobiographical musing on the notion of capturing relics of the past in the amber of fiction:

“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it”

but then applied to the fond figure of his pseudo-nanny Mademoiselle O:

She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity. Have I really salvaged her from fiction? Just before the rhythm I hear falters and fades, I catch myself wondering whether, during the years I knew her, I had not kept utterly missing something in her that was far more she than her chins or her ways or even her French—something perhaps akin to that last glimpse of her, to the radiant deceit she had used in order to have me depart pleased with my own kindness, or to that swan whose agony was so much closer to artistic truth than a drooping dancer’s pale arms; something, in short, that I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart

"Lance" 6

kk I don't think I have anything t osay about this one at the object level. Reading it between segments of Look at the Harlequins, particularly where the projection of Nabokov's autobiographical self is shitting on Dostoevsky with the same language he used without "hiding" behind a pen name and I'm just wondering if this guy even liked literature.

Inset in the middle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote “on a dare”: this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski, whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ’s conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age. The next chapter deals with the rage and bewilderment of émigré reviewers, all of them priests of the Dostoyevskian persuasion;

In this story, he spends the first couple pages pre-emptively delineating the forthcomign story from science fiction:

Inset in the middle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote “on a dare”: this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski, whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ’s conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age. The next chapter deals with the rage and bewilderment of émigré reviewers, all of them priests of the Dostoyevskian persuasion; and in the last pages my young hero accepts a flirt’s challenge and accomplishes a final gratuitous feat by walking through a perilous forest into Soviet territory and as casually strolling back.

I am giving this summary to exemplify what even the poorest reader of my Dare must surely retain, unless electrolysis destroys some essential cells soon after he closes the book.

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