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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
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Publisher's summary
From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur’s samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master’s genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.
This edition includes the newly discovered story “Natasha.”
Critic reviews
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Death is often the point of life's joke
- By Darwin8u on 05-19-13
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Despair
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Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
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Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
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Ada, or Ardor
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Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
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Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
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Pale Fire
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A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
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An amazing feat for such a unique novel
- By AmazonCustomer on 03-27-12
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Bend Sinister
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The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.
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A fantastic fairytale of fascism
- By Darwin8u on 12-12-13
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Invitation to a Beheading
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Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.
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Nabokov's Strange Violin Playing in the Void
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Laughter in the Dark
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Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
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Death is often the point of life's joke
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Despair
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Overall
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Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
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Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
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Ada, or Ardor
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
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Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
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Pale Fire
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
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An amazing feat for such a unique novel
- By AmazonCustomer on 03-27-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Bend Sinister
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.
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A fantastic fairytale of fascism
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Invitation to a Beheading
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The Enchanter
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The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.
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Nabokov's black salad devouring a green rabbit
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Speak Memory
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Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
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Speak, Mnemosyne!
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Pnin
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
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The Gift
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- Unabridged
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The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
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A complex and rich Künstlerroman
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The Luzhin Defense
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
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- Unabridged
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Nabokov’s third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen — an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster — but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
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Life and chess are such lonely battles
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King, Queen, Knave
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This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the thin, awkward, myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle’s condescension in his aunt’s bed.
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A non-Euclidean German love triangle.
- By Darwin8u on 04-01-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Eye
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
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- Unabridged
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Nabokov’s fourth novel, The Eye, is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov, a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in pre-war Berlin, commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife as he searches for proof of his existence among fellow émigrés who are too distracted to pay him any heed.
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Ego vero, ergo sum
- By Darwin8u on 12-18-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Mary
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
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- Unabridged
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In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of serio-comic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin’s, who, he discovers, is Mary’s husband....
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There IS something about Mary!
- By Darwin8u on 12-22-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
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- Unabridged
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
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A dry run at big, complex themes
- By Darwin8u on 12-08-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Look at the Harlequins!
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899), whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, though the two are not to be confused (?).
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Peek, Memory!
- By Darwin8u on 09-11-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Transparent Things
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 3 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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" Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland.... As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride.... Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past...." (Martin Amis)
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Moments of absolute and immortal genius
- By Darwin8u on 10-15-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Andrea Pitzer
- Narrated by: Susan Boyce
- Length: 15 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics?
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difficult to listen to
- By anna on 08-10-19
By: Andrea Pitzer
What listeners say about The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dana Smith
- 05-12-23
More time between stories, please!
The stories are excellent, a great listen. The reader is talented and does a great job portraying a wide range of character voices. But please, more time, just a second or two, between stories! The pauses between sentences within stories is often much longer that the time between stories, making it impossible to take in an ending, linger over what was meant, prepare for a new story… Also, the are no titles listed, no way to really know where you are. So, the writing is fantastic and performance great, but presentation is terrible and a disservice to the material.
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- Robert Crosman
- 03-18-16
A CRUEL DISAPPOINTMENT
Is there anything you would change about this book?
This book tries to be a complete collection of Nabokov's short fiction, and thus includes quite a few of his early stories that are beautifully written, but that otherwise are not very good - undramatic, with flat, uninteresting characters, and perfunctory plots. Until he got to America in 1939 and started writing in English (he was forty) his stories are not very good, and a few years later he stopped writing short stories.
Has The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov turned you off from other books in this genre?
No. It has simply left me with a diminished sense of his greatness as a writer.
Would you listen to another book narrated by Arthur Morey?
I don't know Russian, and so can't judge his pronunciation of words and names in that language, but I do know German. Since most of these stories are set in Berlin, where Nabokov lived when he was writing most of them, they have many words and names in German, and Arthur Morey mispronounces many of them. A better reader would have been one who knew both Russian and German, and could pronounce them correctly.
Could you see The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
No movies, please.
Any additional comments?
Along with a great many of my favorite writers, including John Updike and Jeffrey Eugenides, I am a lover of Nabokov's work, especially his later novels, written in English -The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire - and perhaps best of all his superb autobiography, Speak Memory. This makes it hard to understand why his collected stories stood on my shelf practically unread for many years, until I bought the Audible version and started listening to them, while consulting the print version from time to time. But now I know why I didn't read them: it's because I don't like most of them. First off, the collection is complete, or nearly so, and arranged chronologically, so that his early efforts - from his mid-twenties on - are encountered first. These were of course written in Russian, and though they have been carefully translated by Nabokov himself in some instances, and by his son Dmitri in others, they lose some of the stylistic brilliance they probably had in the original. A stylist plays delightfully with words, and such wordplay is often untranslatable, as puns and other verbal effects are lost when translated into a different language with different homonyms, etc.
Secondly, they were written in a depressed period of Nabokov's life, when he was a poor refugee living in a Berlin that was itself struggling to regain its prosperity after the loss of WW I, and was preparing for Hitler's takeover. A dispossessed, homesick stateless person, he saw the sorry state of Berlin, and the sorrier state of the Russian emigres, in whose circle he moved, and recorded them accurately, at least in some of his stories. Joyce's Dubliners takes a similar view of sad existences, but Joyce was steeped in the history of his unhappy land, while Nabokov was merely a visitor. He sees many kinds of failure and discouragement in his fellow Russians, but is rarely compassionate. Rather, in the tradition, perhaps, of Gogol, a writer Nabokov greatly admired, he satirizes them. But satire works best when its targets are the well-fed and complacent. These characters of Nabokov's are more down-and-out than he himself was, and his ridicule of them is unkind and unnecessary. Even when his protagonist is not Russian, as in "The Potato Elf," he can't resist making fun of deformity - always a weakness in his fiction (Laughter In The Dark, for instance, recounts the sexual humiliation of a blind man).
This leads us to my final and greatest criticism.: Nabokov is cruel. Strikingly, his son in an introduction goes out of his way to argue that his father was inveterately compassionate, and never cruel. This I think must be in anticipation of the kind of criticism I am making, for Nabokov may have been kind as a person, but his imagination was invariably cruel. Time after time these stories create a character in order to steer him or her to some sort of failure or comeuppance, sometimes with a shrug of the shoulders - "what did you expect?" - sometimes with a surprise ending like those in de Maupassant and O. Henry - The Potato Elf ends with a heart attack that is merciful compared to the shock of further discoveries that awaited the midget had he lived.
There are brilliant passages of descriptive writing, in these stories, as one would expect of someone who at this time in his life was principally a lyric poet, but fiction depends on plot and character, not on lovely description. Eventually, after he came to America and started writing in English (his first English novel was Sebastian Knight in 1940) his stories take on more of the manner of his American novels, which are better than the Russian ones, if only because Nabokov continued to grow and get better as a writer of fiction. Also he became happier, and more secure. A late story, "The Vane Sisters" is a puzzle-story with a hidden meaning that the reader will probably miss unless he works over it like the Sunday crossword, but has a consoling message when solved. Nabokov eventually discovered how to create and mock unreliable narrators who embody his own flaws of cruelty, superiority, and detachment. He started satirizing himself, in other words, and this was a more fitting object of satire than the sad sacks who inhabit his earlier fiction. But then he gave up writing short stories, except as memoir pieces that he gathered together as Speak, Memory, which may come to seem, even more than Lolita or Pale Fire, his masterpiece. One of these pieces, a portrait of his French governess back in Russia, is probably the best story in this entire collection, though it is not properly speaking a story at all, and is even better when read as a chapter of his autobiography.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Dunja
- 03-12-12
Stories that can make one's day
There are about forty stories filled with sounds, colors, wit, and enchantment in this audiobook. I love Nabokov's style of writing and had already read all his stories. Now I enjoy them in audible form and Arthur Morey's narration. It suffices to listen one story and the whole day will turn up brighter. This stories bring beauty and charm in everyday life.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Madelaine
- 01-22-12
No discernable beginning or end to the stories.
I love Nabokov, especially his short stories, but this production stinks. You can't tell when one story ends and another begins, and I kept on finding myself zoning out while I was listening. For me, a very bad sign with an audiobook. I would happily try this again with another narrator and another production company.
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32 people found this helpful
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- Ann
- 03-24-14
Need an index to stories
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
It's hard to find particular titles in the numbered sections which can be whole stories or parts. The narrator has a pleasant voice. I'm happy to see all of these Nabokov stories in an audible form.
Would you recommend The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov to your friends? Why or why not?
I'm not sure. I'm taking a class where we need to find particular titles. It's a hassle.
What does Arthur Morey bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I'd rate him as good.
Was The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov worth the listening time?
Not yet. I may be forced to buy the book. Not every story in this unabridged work is interesting to me, although some are wonderful.
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- Aida B
- 08-01-20
Brilliantly written stories
Really bad read, but, worth enduring it, for these are really strong modern literature pieces, that must not be missed.
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- Darwin8u
- 01-11-15
A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
In someways reading/listening to Nabokov's stories is like swimming in a turbulent river of all his great themes (doppelgängers, the creative process, loss, nostalgia for Russia, the individual, obsession, dreams/reality, etc).
While there were some stories that were masterpieces, the strength of this book really is the ability it gives the Nabokov enthusiast to easily see the development of a great writer from the early 20s to the late 50s.
One only needs to read 'Terra Incognita' to see the seeds of his novel 'Ada: or Ardor'. This collection is a must for those who adore Nabokov, but also an interesting introduction to Nabokov for those whose only exposure may be "Lolita'.
Here are the stories as they appear in this collection:
IN RUSSIAN
"The Wood-Sprite"
"Russian Spoken Here"
"Sounds"
"Wingstroke"
"Gods"
"A Matter of Chance"
"The Seaport"
"Revenge"
"Beneficence"
"Details of a Sunset"
"The Thunderstorm"
"La Veneziana"
"Bachmann"
"The Dragon"
"Christmas"
"A Letter That Never Reached Russia"
"The Fight"
"The Return of Chorb"
"A Guide to Berlin"
"A Nursery Tale"
"Terror"
"Razor"
"The Passenger"
"The Doorbell"
"An Affair of Honor"
"The Christmas Story"
"The Potato Elf"
"The Aurelian"
"A Dashing Fellow"
"A Bad Day"
"The Visit to the Museum"
"A Busy Man"
"Terra Incognita"
"The Reunion"
"Lips to Lips"
"Orache"
"Music"
"Perfection"
"The Admiralty Spire"
"The Leonardo"
"In Memory of L. I. Shigaev"
"The Circle"
"A Russian Beauty"
"Breaking the News"
"Torpid Smoke"
"Recruiting"
"A Slice of Life"
"Spring in Fialta"
"Cloud, Castle, Lake"
"Tyrants Destroyed"
"Lik"
"Vasiliy Shishkov"
"Ultima Thule"
"Solus Rex"
IN FRENCH:
"Mademoiselle O"
IN ENGLISH:
"The Assistant Producer"
"That in Aleppo Once…"
"A Forgotten Poet"
"Time and Ebb"
"Conversation Piece, 1945"
"Signs and Symbols"
"First Love"
"Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster"
"The Vane Sisters"
"Lance"
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35 people found this helpful
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- Scot
- 12-16-12
I highly enjoyed this
I usually read nonfiction, but I also like some fiction. I read Lolita and loved it.
At first I did not like this for some of the reasons other reviewers stated: the narrator does not pause very much between stories; he just ends one story, announces the next title, and starts reading again. (But see my comments on the narrator below.)
But I stayed with it; and I'm very glad I did. There really is not so much time or reason to pause very long between stories. And soon it is not too difficult to notice when a story ends. Try to keep an open mind when reading this. Some of the stories are very short and often end abruptly. But once you get into it, you start to open your mind to the idea that many of the stories are just brilliant snippets of events, emotions, feeling, and deep and perceptive observations. They range from events which could have possibly happened to outright fantasy involving dragons and she-devils. But the characters are never conventional, and nothing in his stories is ever predictable.
This is some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read or heard. Nabakov has a deep and keen understanding of the human condition, and his mastery of the English language feels like great art. His observations of people, environment, place, and human fears, wishes, doubts, dreams, and fantasies are profound.
But I would not have enjoyed this as much, if at all, had not the narrator been up to the task of reading Nabakov. I discovered this narrator, Author Morey, from Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (which I also highly recommend). Author Morey is one of the best narrators on Audible.
I highly recommend this download.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-12-18
Only half the book
You only put on half of the book? Not even half. Waste of time for a novel of short stories
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