Ironic, Isn’t It?
Nabokov’s characters inhabit a world of profound irony. More often than not it is of rather cruel nature. Like the guy who plans to kill himself because his wife has lost him who keeps missing out on finding she has boarded the same train on which he works. And then he doesn’t even get to kill himself. Or a certain Mr. Chorb who nightmare begins on his honeymoon when his beloved bride is accidentally electrocuted to death. The irony can sometimes take less depraved courses, of course. There is the story about a woman whose search for hidden messages secretly encoded as acrostics in literature, for instance. Ridiculed she may be by academics for this belief, but once she dies, a former lover is haunted by belief that she may try to revisit him as a ghost. There must be something ironic about the fact that the story itself ends with a secret message hidden in the final paragraph. And if not, then that would be even more ironic.
Germany
One of the major ironies of Nabokov’s career is that though he is considered to rank among that long list of greatest Russian writers, very little of is fiction actually takes place there. In fact, it may very well be the greater majority of his short stories take place in Germany which makes sense since that is exactly where he was when he wrote many of them. Another ironic element to Nabokov’s career is that a reader can learn much more about Germany from this Russian author than they can about Russia by diving into his short stories. What is especially striking is that even though he was living in Berlin after being driven into exile by the arrival of the Soviet Union, he was not afraid to directly confront the growing threat of Nazi ideology in stories like “The Leonardo.”
Fun with Writing
A very pervasive theme running throughout the entire canon of Nabokov is his interest in codes, secret messages, language games and examining the very act of writing fiction. For instance, there is that secret message to be found at the end of “The Vane Sisters” by following his character’s lead in looking for communication in acrostics. “The Passenger” is essentially a dialogue between a writer and critic over which is the more fruitful path for fiction: plagiarizing reality or creating new realities. This debate reaches a head in the form of a true story with a mystery that the writer relates to the critics before asking him to hypothesize a solution to that lingering mystery. The critics answers this challenge with a pathetic display of lameness of creativity and imagination.
Another story deals with a diagnosis of referential mania which is a condition in which the sufferer relates literally everything happening around him as a veiled reference to him. Nabokov really shows off his passion for having fun with writing here as each individual detail can be related to the meaning of the whole from several different perspectives. Thus, it can be effectively said that anyone attempting to connect these details and create a meaning is suffering from a mild case of referential mania. Not coincidentally, this story is actually titled “Signs and Symbols.”
