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.

The best stories here travel into peculiarly transcendental realms where consciousness lingers, souls stretch their mothy wings, and death loses its sting…. ["The Return of Chorb" is] one of the funniest versions of the Romantic Idealist fable—the exorcism of mortal taint—and interestingly anticipates Humbert and a number of other unhappy lovers to come. In "The Passenger" a novelist listens all night to the wracking sobs of a mysterious passenger in an upper berth. The train is halted and searched for a man who killed his wife and her lover. To his delight, the novelist learns that the man in the upper berth is not the murderer: life does not imitate the clichés of art. But a critic who listens to the writer's tale argues that the first ending is better. Make the passenger into a murderer, he says, because words are "given the sublime right to enhance chance and to make of the transcendental something that is not accidental." Nabokov has followed that logic ever since. In "A Busy Man" a thirty-three year old hack writer becomes obsessed with his own death and begins to find omens of it in everything he does. His only relief from this referential mania (cf. "Signs and Symbols," 1948) comes in writing … certain foolish couplets. When he survives the fateful year, however, his life empties of all meaning and he becomes one "whose soul has gone to sleep like a leg." Nabokov points a moral here that he would later learn to hide: that the proper business of a "busy man" is with his own soul:

We are discussing the air holes of life, a dropped heartbeat, pity, the irruptions of past things—what fragrance is that? What does it remind me of? And why does no one notice that on the dullest street every house is different, and what a profusion there is … on every object, of seemingly useless ornaments—yes, useless, but full of disinterested, sacrificial enchantment.

This is what Humbert noticed too, in the margins of his journey across America, "inutile loveliness," and that is what Nabokov creates at his romantic best. (pp. 279-81)