They function as "little tragedies," with some mythopoetic, psychological, and metaphysical overtones, as Nabokov offers comments on the paradoxes and complexity of the age of modernity to which he belonged.
Nabokov's preoccupation with the crisis of language, individuality, sexuality, and creativity manifests itself with greater vigor in his short fiction than in some of his novels. In his short stories Nabokov is not so much preoccupied with parody as in his novels, where parody can be seen as the central figure of his narrative structure. Nabokov experimented with the format of shorter fiction in order to express his subjective outlook and his poetic protest against violence, cruelty, humiliation, and vulgarity in a more striking manner than the novel would have allowed him to do.
Some stories express Nabokov's lyrical and philosophical discourses at the expense of plot structure. Thus, for example, his fragmentary stories "Solus Rex" (1940) and "Ultima Thule" (1942) were meant to be a part of Nabokov's unfinished novel "Solus Rex." Zinaida Shakhovskaia, a famous Russian émigré critic, editor, memoirist, and close friend of Nabokov, defined him as Solus Rex, a lonely literary king whose art could be fully appreciated only by fellow writers and critics.
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