The Vane sisters

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The sisters Vane ( english The Vane Sisters ) is a short story of the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). It was written in 1951 but not published until eight years later. It is Nabokov's last short story and is considered a prime example of unreliable storytelling .

content

The anonymous first-person narrator , a French professor at a girls' college on the American east coast, takes a walk on a sunny late winter day and enjoys the shadows that thawing icicles and the water that drips down from them cast on the walls. Later he notices the reddish shadow that a parking meter casts on the asphalt in front of an illuminated advertisement. During this walk he meets a friend named D., who informs him that Diana (in the English original: Cynthia) Vane died of heart failure. The first-person narrator was friends with her for a long time and remembers the shared experiences. Both D. and Diana's younger sister Sibyl, who had an adulterous love affair, broke up, whereupon Sibyl killed herself. She was one of the students of the first-person narrator and announced her suicide on an exam she wrote with him. Diana is a painter and spiritualist and advocates a "theory of intervening aurae ", according to which the spirits of the deceased make themselves known to the living who loved them through seemingly random events. As an example, secret messages are given, which are composed acrostically from the first letters of the words of a random text. The narrator takes part in several seances and parties that Diana throws in her New York apartment, but falls out with her because he made fun of her guests. After receiving the news of her death, he hopes, half-doubtfully, that the message will be appropriate and searches in vain for hidden messages in William Shakespeare's sonnets . During the night he has a dream that he cannot interpret and is frustrated. He does not notice that the first letters of the words in the last paragraph of the story make up the message: “Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me. Sybil "(German:" Icicles from Diana, parking meter from me. Sibyl ").

Unreliable narration

The first-person narrator in the sisters Vane is an unreliable narrator : he knows less than the attentive reader and does not notice that the dead sisters are communicating with him - even though he is looking for signs for this. According to the American literary scholar Wayne C. Booth , Nabokov drives "the pleasure of secret communication [between author and reader] as far as possible in the direction of sheer cryptography ". However, it is not made easy for the reader to see through him as unreliable, because Nabokov goes to great lengths to present him, on the contrary, as intelligent and attentive. Nabokov's fundamental concern, to strip the narrator of his apparently unassailable authority, was evident to the Vane sisters in The Scout of 1930 and then in Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962).

intertextuality

Like many of Nabokov's texts, the story contains numerous literary allusions. These can be found in the names of the two sisters: Sibyl Vane is the name of the friend of the protagonist in Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray , who is driven to suicide by his cold-heartedness. At the same time, the Sibyl of Erythrai is an ancient prophetess who announces the Last Judgment after the Dies irae of the Latin funeral mass . Cynthia is the name of the mistress of the Roman poet Properz , whose ghostly appearance after her death he describes at the beginning of the 7th Elegy of Book IV. According to the literary scholar Maria Rybakova, the title of one of her pictures, which is described in the short story, also points to an afterlife : Seen Through a Windshield , " Seen through a windshield ", is an allusion to the "mirror" through which According to 1 Cor 13.12  EU we all only look indistinctly during our lifetime. The literary scholar Dean Flower points out that the sonnets, which the first-person narrator works through at the end of the story according to hidden messages, deal with selfish love deceit on the surface of the text. The American literary scholar Harold Bloom sees the difficult-to-understand description of the dream, which contains the message from the spirit world, as a self-parody of Nabokov's own style.

interpretation

According to Maria Rybakova, the dead sisters wanted to show the first-person narrator how callous he had treated both of them: the older sister wanted to show him the cold shine of melting surfaces, the younger one wanted to remind him of the shadows of the Last Judgment, when each for his own Deeds to pay for.

Creation and publication

Nabokov remembered the story The Vane Sisters in his bathroom in Ithaca on February 8, 1951 , when he was thinking of a recently deceased friend. The writing dragged on until March 11th because he had teaching duties at Cornell University . He submitted it to The New Yorker magazine , which had already published several of his stories. Because the responsible editor Katharine White had not noticed the punch line , she refused to print it, which is why Nabokov had to explain the structure of the story to her in a letter. In 1959 it was finally printed for the first time in The Hudson Review , combined with the note for "readers interested in riddles" that there was a coded message on the last page. It was first printed in book form in 1966 in Nabokov's Quartet, along with three other stories, in 1968 it appeared in the Nabokov's Congeries collection and in 1975 in the Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories collection . Here Nabokov preceded her with a remark in which he referred to the secret acrostic message in the last paragraph that the first-person narrator does not notice - “a trick that can only be tried once in a thousand years of fictional prose. Whether it works is another question ”. In 1966 the German translation by Dieter E. Zimmer appeared in the volume Frühling in Fialta .

reception

Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd thinks The Vane Sisters are one of his best stories. She summarizes the author's art: meticulous attention to the outside world, exact observation of the inner world and at the same time an urgent longing for something that lies beyond it; a brilliant mastery of the current techniques of fictional literature, but at the same time a promise of something that lies behind the words and indirect hints that let the reader himself find the solution to the riddle posed by the story. Harold Bloom calls it “excellent”, the “baroque rich text” contradicts Nabokov's repeated complaint that he cannot express himself as well in English as in his native Russian .

literature

  • Maria Rybakova: Darkness of Absence and Darkness of Sleep: A Love Lesson in Nabokov's The Vane Sisters . In: Toronto Slavic Quarterly 45 (2013), pp. 60-74

Single receipts

  1. ↑ “'The Vane Sisters' carries the pleasure of secret communication [between author and reader] about as far as it can go in the direction of what might be called mere cryptography”. Wayne C. Booth: The Rhetoric of Fiction . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1961, p. 301.
  2. ↑ Gennady Barabtarlo: English Short Stories . In: Vladimir E. Alexandrov (ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov . Routledge, New York 2014, pp. 101–116, here p. 112.
  3. ↑ Maria Rybakova: Darkness of Absence and Darkness of Sleep: A Love Lesson in Nabokov's The Vane Sisters . In: Toronto Slavic Quarterly 45 (2013), pp. 60–74, here pp. 61–66.
  4. ↑ Dean Flower: Nabokov's Personae . In: The Hudson Review 38 , No. 1 (1985), pp. 147-156, here pp. 154 f.
  5. ↑ Harold Bloom: The Art of Reading. How and why we should read . C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2000, p. 53.
  6. ↑ Maria Rybakova: Darkness of Absence and Darkness of Sleep: A Love Lesson in Nabokov's The Vane Sisters . In: Toronto Slavic Quarterly 45 (2013), pp. 60–74, here pp. 60 and 74.
  7. ^ Brian Boyd : Vladimir Nabokov. The American Years . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1991, ISBN 069106797X , pp. 190 ff. (Accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  8. ^ Brian Boyd: Vladimir Nabokov. The American Years . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1991, ISBN 069106797X , pp. 194 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  9. ↑ Dean Flower: Nabokov's Personae . In: The Hudson Review 38, No. 1 (1985), pp. 147–156, here p. 155, note 6.
  10. ↑ Bibliographical references . In: Vladimir Nabokov: The Vane Sisters. Stories 1943–1951 . German by Renate Gerhardt and Dieter E. Zimmer . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1999, p. 196 f.
  11. ^ Brian Boyd: Vladimir Nabokov. The American Years . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1991, ISBN 069106797X , pp. 194 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  12. ↑ Harold Bloom: The Art of Reading. How and why we should read . C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2000, p. 53.