"The Vane Sisters" is a short story by Vladimir Nabokov, written in March 1951. [1] It is famous for providing one of the most extreme examples of an unreliable narrator. It was first published in the Winter 1958 issue of The Hudson Review and then reprinted in Encounter during 1959. The story was included in Nabokov's Quartet (1966), Nabokov's Congeries (1968; reprinted as The Portable Nabokov, 1971), Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (1975), and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1995).
The narrator, a professor, recounts his experiences with the two sisters, and meditates upon the possibility of intervention by ghosts into his reality.
On his usual Sunday afternoon stroll, the narrator, a French literature professor at a women's college, watches icicles dripping from a nearby eave with intense meditation. He walks on, and is distracted by the reddish shadows cast by a parking meter and restaurant sign. He runs into D., a former colleague who casually informs him that Cynthia Vane, with whom the narrator had formerly had a short relationship, has died.
The narrator recounts his memories of Cynthia and her younger sister Sybil. The married D. had an affair with the narrator's student Sybil. Cynthia first approaches the narrator in hopes of recruiting him to end the affair, instructing the narrator to tell D. that he should either divorce his wife or resign. He confronts D., who tells the narrator that he and his wife are moving to Albany, ending the affair.
The following day, the narrator gives his French literature class, which includes Sybil, an examination. When marking Sybil's exam that night, he finds a suicide note. He calls Cynthia only to find that Sybil has committed suicide.
After Sybil's death, the narrator begins seeing Cynthia and immerses himself in her philosophies of spiritualism and the occult. He attends parties along with Cynthia's circle of believers, and listens keenly to her theory that the dead control events great and small. Unconvinced, the narrator ridicules Cynthia's searches for acrostics, and playfully criticizes her party guests, to which Cynthia fiercely reacts by calling him a "prig" and "snob." This ends their relationship.
The story returns to the narrator's encounter with D. Having learnt of Cynthia's death, he is suddenly frantic, fearful, and incapable of sleep, preoccupied with the idea of Cynthia's ghost returning to haunt him as her philosophies suggested. He tries to fight her spirit by searching for acrostics in Shakespeare. His search fruitless, he falls asleep and awakens to find everything seemingly in order. He scoffs at the "disappointing" show, and the final paragraph reads:
I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
At one point, the narrator alludes to a "novel or short story (by some contemporary writer, I believe) in which, unknown to the author, the first letters of the words in its last paragraph formed, as "Deciphered by Cynthia, a message from his dead mother."
When the final paragraph of the story is subjected to this technique, the result is as follows: Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me Sybil. The icicles and meter are references to the story's beginning where the narrator, who prides himself on his careful attention to detail, is transfixed by the minute effects of dripping icicles and shadows cast by a parking meter. Thus, this is the Nabokovian twist: at the end of the short story, the reader learns that the narrator is being unconsciously and mockingly influenced in both his writing and the events surrounding him by the dead sisters.
The very name of Sybil hints at the trick of the final paragraph, as the word acrostic was first applied to the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves always formed a word. Sybil Vane is also a character in Oscar Wilde's only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). She is an actress who commits suicide when Dorian rejects her, first causing the portrait to change and Dorian to notice the connection between him and the portrait.
The apparent uniqueness of this narrative approach has created fame for this story, and Nabokov himself described this device as something that 'can only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction'. The trick ending of "The Vane Sisters" originally went unnoticed when the New Yorker rejected the story, and it was only revealed when Nabokov wrote a letter to the fiction editor, Katharine A. White, explaining the foundation of the story. [2]
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical fiction and gothic horror novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The novel-length version was published in April 1891.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.
An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the first letter of each new line spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The term comes from the French acrostiche from post-classical Latin acrostichis, from Koine Greek ἀκροστιχίς, from Ancient Greek ἄκρος "highest, topmost" and στίχος "verse". As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. When the last letter of each new line forms a word it is called a telestich; the combination of an acrostic and a telestich in the same composition is called a double acrostic.
Pnin is Vladimir Nabokov's 13th novel and his fourth written in English; it was published in 1957. The success of Pnin in the United States launched Nabokov's career into literary prominence. Its eponymous protagonist, Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, is a Russian-born assistant professor in his 50s living in the United States, whose character is believed to be based partially on the life of both Nabokov's colleague Marc Szeftel as well as on Nabokov himself. Exiled by the Russian Revolution and what he calls the "Hitler war", Pnin teaches Russian at the fictional Waindell College, loosely inspired by Cornell University and Wellesley College—places where Nabokov himself taught.
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1969.
Nabokov's Congeries was a collection of work by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1968 and reprinted in 1971 as The Portable Nabokov. Because Nabokov supervised its production less than a decade before he died, it is useful in attempting to identify which works Nabokov considered to be his best, especially among his short stories.
"Signs and Symbols" is a short story by Vladimir Nabokov, written in English and first published, May 15, 1948 in The New Yorker and then in Nabokov's Dozen.
The Eye, written in 1930, is Vladimir Nabokov's fourth novel. It was translated into English by the author's son Dmitri Nabokov in 1965.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, op. 45, is an American opera in two acts and 12 scenes, with libretto and music by Lowell Liebermann, based on the 1890 novel of the same name by Oscar Wilde.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a 1945 American supernatural horror-drama film based on Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel of the same name. Released in June 1945 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film was directed by Albert Lewin, and stars George Sanders as Lord Henry Wotton and Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray. Shot primarily in black-and-white, the film features four colour inserts in three-strip Technicolor of Dorian's portrait; these are a special effect, the first two inserts picturing a youthful Dorian and the second two a degenerate one.
"A Guide to Berlin" is a 1925 short text by Vladimir Nabokov. Rather than a guide to the city, it is a partly fictional, partly autobiographical text documenting a series of anecdotal images that serve as metaphors. It was later translated by the author and his son, Dmitri Nabokov, into English and included in the collection Details of a Sunset and Other Stories (1976).
"Spring in Fialta" is a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1936, originally as Весна в Фиальте in Russian, during his exile in Berlin. The English translation was performed by Nabokov and Peter Pertzov. Spring in Fialta is included in Nine Stories and Nabokov's Dozen.
"Bachmann" is a short story written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov under his pen name, Vladimir Sirin, in Berlin in 1924. The story details a three-year love affair between the titular Bachmann, a celebrated pianist, and Mme. Perov, a married woman.
"The Leonardo" is a short story written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin in the summer of 1933. It was first published as Korolyyok in Posledniye Novosti in Paris the same year, and in 1956 as part of the collection Vesna v Fialte. After its translation into English by the author and his son Dmitri Nabokov it was incorporated into the collection A Russian Beauty and Other Stories and published in 1971.
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov that addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. The protagonist is a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He describes his obsession with a 12-year-old "nymphet", Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish diminutive for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
Dorian Gray, also known as The Sins of Dorian Gray and The Secret of Dorian Gray, is a 1970 film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray starring Helmut Berger.
"Sounds" is a short story by Russian American author Vladimir Nabokov originally written in Russian in September 1923.
"The Wood-Sprite" is a short story by Vladimir Nabokov, originally published in Russian in 1921. It was his first published story.
Pact with the Devil, known in Canada as Dorian, is a 2004 Canadian-British drama film directed by Allan A. Goldstein and starring Ethan Erickson, Malcolm McDowell and Christoph Waltz. It is a modern retelling of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was filmed in 2002 in Canada.
"That in Aleppo Once..." is a short story written by Russian-born author Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). First published in Atlantic Monthly in 1943, the story takes epistolary form, with an unnamed narrator describing his recollections of himself and his wife's deteriorating relationship while fleeing German occupation during Case Anton. The narrator reveals to his correspondent the likelihood his wife was not real, examining this premise during the account of events.