Essay Questions

What is remarkable about the short story "The Leonardo?"

Plenty of post-war writers offered studies of Germans during the Nazi era. Those who had suffered persecution and experienced the death camps for themselves also wrote memoir accounts of what had happened in Germany during Hitler's regime. but Nabokov was the first writer to bring attention to just how brutal the Nazi regime was in its early stages; the story was penned in 1933 whilst Nabokov was living in Berlin. He also drew attention to the mindlessness of those who eagerly followed Hitler and hung on his every word. The story suggests that there was more culpability amongst the ordinary man and woman in the street than was suggested in retrospective writings published after the war.

The ending of "Signs and Symbols" is left largely up to the reader to decide. Why do you think this is, and what do you think happened to the couple's son?

The reader is left hanging at the end of the story; there is a telephone call, and his parents' answer the telephone, but we are not told who is on the other end of the line, or what they want to say. For all we know, it might be a salesman, a cold call, a neighbor returning from a trip, but we assume the caller is a representative of the mental institution housing their troubled son, or their son himself, dramatically improved, and ready to communicate.

The entire story suggests that the son's life is going to end soon; there are so many portents of doom that it is hard to imagine that a happy ending is on the cards for him. As well as this, the mental illness he suffers from seems untreatable; how do you change the mindset of a man who thinks that the clouds in the sky are conspiring against him? It is probable that the telephone call is from the hospital, and that the news is not good; the most likely outcome is that their son has succeeded in his determination to kill himself.