While generally overshadowed by towering works such as Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, "That in Aleppo Once . . ." has piqued the curiosity of several Nabokov scholars. In his 1995 study The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, Michael Wood places the story in the context of several Nabokov works featuring "ordered but unsympathetic" worlds "run by a heavy-handed deity"—in this case, V., who is certainly unsympathetic when he uses the title, "That in Aleppo Once . . ." as he does. While Wood explains that "[t]his is not the way the world is, for Nabokov or for us," he does state that this is "the way it may feel" to people in times of crisis. Writing in The Garland
Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (1995), Gennady Barabtarlo praises the story as "a concentrated.....
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