Time and Ebb

'Time and Ebb' (August 1944) reflects Nabokov's enthusiasm for his newly adopted America in a manner similar to that which his earliest stories of the 1920s showed his enjoyment of the material world of Berlin - his first place of permanent exile. The piece toys with his long term interest in time and memory, but hardly even pretends to be a story: it is not much more than an exercise in his increasingly complex prose style dressed up as a memoir.

In it an unnamed ninety year old narrator thinks back from some time in the twenty-first century to his arrival in America from Europe in the mid 1940s. His topics are soda parlours, trains, aeroplanes, skyscrapers, and anything which presents a novelty to the European. (This positive appreciation of what is new is undoubtedly one of the characteristics which helped Nabokov to survive an entire adult life spent in exile.) But the lack of any narrative impulse is reflected in some of the extreme contortions of syntax and prose rhythm:

'The trees had their latin binomials displayed upon their trunks, just as the drivers of the squat, gaudy, scaraboid motor-cabs (generically allied in my mind to certain equally gaudy automatic machines upon the musical constipation of which the insertion of a small coin used to act as a miraculous laxative) had their stale photographic pictures affixed to their backs' (ND,p.163)

This has all the hallmarks of the style which would eventually produce the rococo constructions of Look at the Harlequins! and Ada - the insistent use of alliteration and assonance, the complex syntax, long periods with huge subordinate clauses and parentheses, the rich vocabulary dotted with recondite and semi-technical terms, and the twinning and parallelism. When these devices were held in restraint by the structural and narrational demands of a story-to-be-told, the result could be the creation of masterpieces such as Lolita, but even his warmest supporters would probably concede that at times this mannerism can become inflated and tiresome.

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Collected Stories is a collection of sixty-five stories drawn from Nabokov's entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to his later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness. Edited by his son, Dmitri Nabokov, who keeps the family torch aflame.





Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the technical terms you will need when making a study of prose fiction. It shows you how to apply the elements of literary analysis by explaining them one at a time, and then showing them at work in a series of short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens.





In this captivating interpretation of Nabokov's career through the prism of his shorter fiction, Maxim Shrayer explores how Nabokov eclipsed the achievements of the great Russian masters of the short story. Even as he became - in exile from Russia and his native tradition - an American writer, Nabokov maintained a dialogic relationship with Anton Chekhov, Ivan Bunin, and other masters of the short story form. This is VN the radical traditionalist.