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Details of a SunsetDeath by vehicular locomotion is also introduced at the crux of 'Details of a Sunset' (June 1924), written shortly after Nabokov's first story. Mark Standfuss, a young sales clerk, is radiantly happy about now being engaged to Klara, who has previously been involved with a dubious and handsome lodger at her mother's house. Whilst he is en route to visit her, Mark's happiness makes him more than usually conscious of the world around him:
These architectural observations act as realistic details of the material world in which the narrative is set, but at the same time they form a significant element of its later plot development.
What Nabokov introduces here for the first time, trying out something he was to use extensively in his later work as a novelist, is one variation on the notion of 'the double'. It is something he was aware of in Gogol (one of his favourite Russian writers) and Dostoyevski (not one of his favourites, but an influence nevertheless as later stories will show). He makes clever use of the device by having one 'version' of Mark, the happy Mark who wished to live, comment on what he hoped would happen in returning to Klara - though the reader is alerted to the dubious status of the account when Mark is amazed by some of the very details he had noticed earlier: 'Mark could not understand how he had never noticed before those galleries, those temples suspended on high' (p.23). But in fact the narrative had been signalling Mark's accident almost from the outset by skilfully planted images of extinction and death: 'Several moving vans stood there like enormous coffins...the heavy skeleton of a double bed' (p.18). And he also keeps missing his footing - once on arriving home, when moving along the tram, and of course getting off it. These details combine the functions of both poetic leitmotifs within the story and subtle hints concerning its outcome. Yet at the same time Nabokov teases the reader with ambiguous clues related to what will happen. Just after we have learned that Klara in fact never wants to see Mark again, Nabokov as narrator remarks 'He had such a young face, had Mark...One would think that fate might have spared him' (p.22) which someone reading the story for the first time is almost bound to interpret as a comment upon his romantic disappointment, but which is actually related more fatefully to his death. But as Nabokov himself suggests 'one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.' That is, only on second, third, or subsequent readings of a text can the reader appreciate all the subtleties and the artistry of its composition. Nabokov also deals rather cleverly with the difficult moment of Mark's fatal slip from the tram. The reader is given a fair chance: all the impressionistic details of an accident are offered: 'the shining asphalt swept upward like the seat of a swing; a roaring mass hit Mark from behind' (p.23). But then comes the literary sleight of hand - 'and then nothing. He was standing alone on the glossy asphalt' (p.23). We are given every reason to think that Mark has survived the fall, especially when he says to himself 'That was stupid. Almost got run over' (p.23).
Although Nabokov had not yet followed the practice of other modernist short story writers in eliminating any sense of plot or dramatic incident from his work (as Woolf and Mansfield had done by this time) he had, like them, realised that the careful organisation of detail - the harmonisation of motifs, the use of parallelism and poetic repetition as well as relating individual images to the theme - would have the effect of increasing what might be called the aesthetic density of the short story. Here for instance the colour black is used to describe a number of everyday details (shadows, a fence, a wet roof, figures in the street) linking them to Mark's imminent death; and the descriptive details of Klara at the outset 'the red blaze of her hair' (p.17) are echoed in Mark's death-fantasy as 'The russet tufts of her armpits' (p.24). It is also interesting to note, in connection with Mansfield and Woolf, that Nabokov was interested at this early phase in what they called 'Moments of Being' - those specially charged passages of experience in which the participant's senses seem unusually heightened in such a way as to create a sense of spiritual euphoria. Nabokov went on to develop these notions - especially the frisson of the largely aesthetic moment - but here in slightly comic form Mark's ill-fated joy takes the form of a rapturous identification with the everyday objects around him:
© Roy Johnson 2001
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