In Paris in the late 1930s, Vladimir Nabokov duped a hostile critic, Ales Adamovich, by publishing a poem under the pseudonym Vasiliy Shishkov. Adamovich proclaimed it a masterpiece, then said when the truth came out that Nabokov was "a sufficiently skilful parodist to mimic genius". This judgment, quoted with relish by its subject in a note to a 1975 collection, is both amusing and troubling: Nabokov's stories are built from language that frequently deserves, in my opinion, to be called genius. The stories themselves, however, self-reflexive games which cycle through styles with the restless energy of a child tearing through a dressing-up box, often feel like experiments that, while interesting, are not always successful.
This is partly a problem of the thoroughness with which Nabokov's son Dmitri has swept out the archive, jamming bagatelles written for unexacting émigré journals into the gaps between more substantial works. Another reason is that Nabokov perhaps felt little real affinity for the short story, which he called "a small Alpine form" of the novel. This seems an odd claim to make of a writer whose collected stories runs to nearly 800 pages. But the fact remains that he abandoned the form in 1951, even before Lolita's success freed him of the need to write for his rent. He returned to it later only to (as he put it) "English" untranslated stories, and to retranslate ones he thought poorly rendered.
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