Vladimir Nabokov's recent novels in English have not won him many converts nor have they discouraged the view that his art is mere artificial gamesmanship of a wholly self-congratulating type. Yet that view is at best deficient, as any reader of Lolita knows at once, and therefore it's good to have another example now to prove it. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories is Nabokov's last volume to be translated from the Russian, a process he began fourteen books ago with Invitation to a Beheading (1959). Eight of these thirteen stories were first published in Germany between 1924 and 1927 and only one is as recent as 1935, but the remarkable thing about them all is their closeness to his later work. Even if we allow for the transforming effects of his mature English style, with its precise verbs (stridulate) and its vibrant clarity of color and line (details penciled and gilt-edged), these tales still seem uncannily recent. When "paradisal lozenges" of stained glass appear here, in stories of 1924 and 1931, it is as if they were calculated anticipations of the same motif in Ada (1969) and Look at the Harlequins (1974). The truth is much simpler: Nabokov recognized his special themes early and remained obsessed by them. The dislocations of exile, memory's graceful powers, the solipsist's prison, death as metamorphosis, the artifice of Fate—all of Nabokov's familiar concerns are here, in a series of deft, unpretentious sketches.
Several are unabashedly romantic. "A Letter that Never Reached Russia" is an ecstatic outpouring of happiness from one surrounded by reminders of death and despair, who yet glories in the magic of the quotidian. Another story offers an elegant compliment to a thunderstorm. Anticipating the "nostalgia for the present" of a 1945 story, "A Guide to Berlin" is bathed in childlike wonder, as deliberately naive as Sherwood Anderson or W. C. Williams. It does no more than "portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirror of future times." Such stories are a useful reminder of how much energy Nabokov devotes not to fictive strategem but to the simple unexpected beauty of homely things—asphalt, puddles, stacks of pipe—things we fail really to see.
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