Cloud, Castle, Lake (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Vladimir Nabokov
- First Published: 1937
- Type of Plot: Fable
- Time of Work: 1936 or 1937
- Setting: Berlin and surrounding countryside
- Principal Characters: Vasili Ivanovich, The narrator, German members of a tour group, The tour leader, Schramm
- Genres: Fable, Short fiction
- Subjects: Traveling or travelers, Nature, Oppression, Nazism or Nazis, Torture, Horror
- Locales: Berlin, Germany
The Story
Vasili Ivanovich, a mild-mannered Russian emigre living in Berlin, wins a pleasure trip at a charity ball. Although Vasili is reluctant to travel anywhere, he finally decides to go when he discovers that getting out of the trip would involve cutting through all sorts of red tape in the bureaucracy. The tour group gathered at the railway station consists of four women and four men, each a kind of double of the other. The group leader is assisted by a sinister man called Schramm, from the Bureau of Pleasantrips. After their train departs, it soon becomes obvious that...
[The entire page is 1536 words long]
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