Nabokov is a master storyteller and wordsmith. The most incredible thing is that he’s a Russian and English is his third or maybe even fourth language, yet the choice of his words is so flowing, rich, and engaging for the reader. No doubt, these stories are inspired by real people and events, my inspiration for reading the stories is to improve my own storytelling skills.
I think the biggest lesson is that against Hollywood advice, many of his stories are lacking any happy ending. They are simply human. He’s not feeling obligated to find the positive in a story and magnify it, quite the opposite. It’s very refreshing, different and real. Not fake.
The result is that more than half of the stories are actually with Wikipedia pages :)
The story of Feldman, the scientist… this one is my favorite. This is a character whose mind is constantly trained to look for alternative 360-degree views on any given statement or question directed at him. I guess it took Nabokov a lot of effort to create this character and then proof-reading must have been quite complicated.
The story with the dragon & the guy who branded it with his company logo… that was hilarious! It’s such a lesson, take every opportunity or event and find the POSITIVE in it. Rationalize it and use it for your benefit!
Not a bad birth house, right? His family was aristocrats who had to escape from Russia.
In one of the stories, the young husband catches his wife in bed with another man. He’s challenging him for a duel, but he doesn’t know how to shoot. Nabokov masterfully writes about the young husband’s doubts, about his fears and regrets. How he feels alone, how his friends are only there for the show… and then while his mind is engaged in these thoughts, full of self-doubt, the super confident bully who slept with his wife and who was the odds on favorite to win the duel – he runs away! This brings such a relief to the young husband, but still, the internal pain from the regrets and doubts are present, they have taken a backstage role, but they’re still alive and present. Waiting to hunt him… till the rest of his life.
The doubts, the internal struggles, the thought processes… Nabokov is capable of making you imagining them in such detail, that you feel like you’re one with the character. You either have such fears and doubts or have had them in the past. I guess Nabokov was very good at watching and interpreting behavior. No doubt he was super in tune and in the moment. It takes a lot of mental capacity and discipline to be in a social situation and then also empathize with the other people to such a deep extent and on top of it, recall everything in minute detail. Obviously, his imagination was helping him, but it’s still quite remarkable for me. May be I’m capable of such feats in certain moments, but they aren’t many in my life. It’s such a wide range of characters that he has written about. Such a wide range of emotions.
Yeah, OK, many are Russian and have an aristocratic background like him, but still – it’s a lot. Sadly, the majority are men, not many are women. He’s been famously not very keen on their intelligence, it was the time when women were revolting against their oppression. I guess it’s just conservatism and ego at play for him. But certainly, women in terms of numbers are not equally represented in his stories.
Certainly, once again repeating this affirmation, I need to take on reading more modern literature. It’s still quite hard for me to think about what goes through the mind of characters that are living in quite a different world. We take our peace as granted, but at the time people took the large possibility of going at war for granted and this makes it very difficult for us to understand the characters as well as we can characters from modern literature.
Anyways, I want to be able to write like this well(who wouldn’t huh?), roughly similar on the go… I can do this when I’m passionate about something. I mean true passion without any grain of frustration or any negative feelings. Like when you’re very honest and probably your serotonin levels are thru the roof, you are somehow finding the correct winding sequence of words that can paint a rich picture of what makes your heartbeat in passion. It seems like Nabokov was writing his stories in similar states. They are clearly on matters that were close to his heart. Most of the stories are containing post-Bolshevik revolution Russian emigrants. There was a story where a German Doctor is trying to find the humane reasons why the German nation made the mistake to follow Hitler, but naturally, they all seemed like a bunch of made up excuses to Nabokov’s centerpiece Russian born character. The same applies to all the Bolshevik characters, there’s a lot of talk about agents, spying, etc. These were the talks, the fears, and tribulations of Nabokov’s time.
I still don’t know if I’m mature enough to read such literature. Yes, I know I’m probably too critical of myself. But for some reason, in our society, we seem to believe that understanding literature is easy and normal for a kid. May be to understand the events, but feel and empathize with them? I don’t think so! In high school, kids are given War and Peace, besides self-discipline to read this complicated art piece… I don’t think kids are taking anything else. It’s just a pure exercise to develop the self-discipline to read something that you don’t fully understand or can understand at that impressionable age.
Clearly, minds like Nabokov or Tolstoy write in ways that many normal people do understand their books. But I’m afraid, very few understand them fully. First of all, I live in my time. The authors of such books have lived in a completely different time. I guess I can understand 80%, but the final and decisive 20% are missing due to my lack of experience in their period of life.
It’s like with Hollywood movies, often they are up to 80% truthful to the original story, but the last 20% make the whole situation completely different. Everything changes. I might think I understand the story, but it might be a fake understanding thru the lenses of my knowledge of history, their morality, social norms, and psychology. It’s only anecdotal. You need to be a person with a very large soul, open-mindedness, flair, life knowledge and have supreme control over yourself to explore a variety of different viewpoints on the events. Am I at this stage? I don’t think so. It’s such a pleasure to read them though… It’s way better than watching a movie because you can stop, think, go back and indulge in the book. Ah, pleasure! I hope I will have more time for you.
Ivan On Racing 