But again a buzzing noise passed through the crowd: Rodrig and Roman, stumbling, shoving against each other, puffing and grunting, clumsily carried the heavy case up the steps and plunked it down on the board floor. M’sieur Pierre threw off his jacket remaining clad in a singlet. A turquoise woman was tattooed on his white biceps, while, in one of the first rows of the crowd, which was pressing around the very scaffold (regardless of the firemen’s entreaties), stood the same woman in the flesh, and also her two sisters, as well as the little old man with the fishing rod, and the tanned flower woman, and the youth with his staff, and one of Cincinnatus’s brothers-in-law, and the librarian, reading a newspaper, and that stout fellow Nikita Lukich the engineer—and Cincinnatus also noticed a man whom he used to meet every morning on the way to the kindergarten, but whose name he did not know. Beyond these first rows there followed other rows where eyes and mouths were not so clearly drawn; and beyond them, there were layers of very hazy, and, in their haziness, identical faces, and then—the furthest ones were really quite badly daubed on the backdrop. Another poplar fell.
Suddenly the band stopped—or rather, now that it stopped, one realized that it had been playing all this time. One of the musicians, plump and placid, taking apart his instrument, shook the saliva out of its shiny joints. Beyond the orchestra was a limp, green, allegorical prospect: a portico, cliffs, a soapy cascade.
Nimbly and energetically (so that Cincinnatus involuntarily recoiled) the deputy city director jumped up on the platform, and casually placing one high-raised foot on the block (he was a master of relaxed eloquence) proclaimed in a loud voice:
“Townspeople! One brief remark. Lately in our streets a tendency has been observed on the part of certain individuals of the younger generation to walk so fast that we oldsters must move aside and step into puddles. I would also like to say that after tomorrow a furniture exhibit will open at the corner of First Boulevard and Brigadier Street and I sincerely hope to see all of you there. I also remind you that tonight, there will be given with sensational success the new comic opera Socrates Must Decrease. I have also been asked to tell you that the Kifer Distributing Center has received a large selection of ladies’ belts, and the offer may not be repeated. Now I make way for other performers and hope, townspeople, that you are all in good health and lack nothing.”
Sliding with the same nimbleness between the cross-pieces of the railing, he jumped down from the platform to the accompaniment of an approbatory murmur. M’sieur Pierre, who had already put on a white apron (from under which his jack boot showed) was carefully wiping his hands on a towel, and calmly, benevolently looking around. As soon as the deputy director had finished, he tossed the towel to his assistants and stepped over to Cincinnatus.
(The square black snouts of the photographers swayed and froze still.)
“No excitement, no fuss, please,” said M’sieur Pierre. “We shall first of all remove our little shirt.”
“By myself,” said Cincinnatus.
“That’s the boy. Take the little shirt away, men. Now I shall show you how to lie down.”
M’sieur Pierre dropped onto the block. The audience buzzed.
“Is this clear?” asked M’sieur Pierre, springing up and straightening his apron (it had come apart at the back, Rodrig helped tie it). “Good. Let’s begin. The light is a bit harsh … Perhaps you could … There, that’s fine. Thank you. Perhaps just a wee bit more … Excellent! Now I shall ask you to lie down.”
“By myself, by myself,” said Cincinnatus and lay face down as he had been shown, but at once he covered the back of his neck with his hands.
“What a silly boy,” said M’sieur Pierre from above. “If you do that how can I… (yes, give it here; then, immediately after, the bucket). And anyway why all this contraction of muscles? There must be no tension at all. Perfectly at ease. Remove your hands, please … (give it to me now). Be quite at ease and count aloud.”
“To ten,” said Cincinnatus.
“What was that, my friend?” said M’sieur Pierre as if asking him to repeat, and softly added, already beginning to heave, “Step back a little, gentlemen.”
“To ten,” repeated Cincinnatus, spreading out his arms.
“I am not doing anything yet,” said M’sieur Pierre with an extraneous note of gasping effort, and the shadow of his swing was already running along the boards, when Cincinnatus began counting loudly and firmly: one Cincinnatus was counting, but the other Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before—at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around.
All around there was a strange confusion. Through the headsman’s still swinging hips the railing showed. On the steps the pale librarian sat doubled up, vomiting. The spectators were quite transparent, and quite useless, and they all kept surging and moving away—only the back rows, being painted rows, remained in place. Cincinnatus slowly descended from the platform and walked off through the shifting debris. He was overtaken by Roman, who was now many times smaller and who was at the same time Rodrig: “What are you doing!” he croaked, jumping up and down. “You can’t, you can’t! It’s dishonest toward him, toward everybody … Come back, lie down—after all, you were lying down, everything was ready, everything was finished!” Cincinnatus brushed him aside and, he, with a bleak cry, ran off, already thinking only of his own safety.
Little was left of the square. The platform had long since collapsed in a cloud of reddish dust. The last to rush past was a woman in a black shawl, carrying the tiny executioner like a larva in her arms. The fallen trees lay flat and reliefless, while those that were still standing, also two-dimensional, with a lateral shading of the trunk to suggest roundness, barely held on with their branches to the ripping mesh of the sky. Everything was coming apart. Everything was falling. A spinning wind was picking up and whirling: dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gilded plaster, pasteboard bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted; and amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to the Crimea in 1917, during the Bolshevik Revolution, then went into exile in Europe. Nabokov studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, earning a degree in French and Russian literature in 1922, and lived in Berlin and Paris for the next two decades, writing prolifically, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, memoirist, critic, and translator) while teaching Russian, creative writing, and literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of the master prose stylists of the century in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including Lolita—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL is a bold new line of trade paperback books devoted to publishing the best writing of the twentieth century from the world over. Offering both classic and contemporary fiction and literary nonfiction, in stylishly elegant editions, VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL aims to introduce to a new generation of readers world-class writing that has stood the test of time and essential works by the preeminent international authors of today.
BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
ADA, OR ARDOR
Ada, or Ardor tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of
the novel, and erotic catalogue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0
BEND SINISTER
While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9
DESPAIR
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication, Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1
THE ENCHANTER
The Enchanter is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3
THE EYE
The Eye is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1
THE GIFT
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5
GLORY
Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil” project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING
Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2
KING, QUEEN, KNAVE
Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72340-0
LOLITA
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72316-5
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!
Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899). Focusing on the central figures of his life, the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72728-6
THE LUZHIN DEFENSE
As a young boy, Luzhin is unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen—an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge, and rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72722-4
PALE FIRE
Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreward and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72342-4
PNIN
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72341-7
THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT
Many knew of Sebastian Knight, distinguished novelist, but few knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with clues found in the novelist’s private papers.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72726-2
SPEAK, MEMORY
Speak, Memory is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works.
Autobiography/Literature/978-0-679-72339-4
ALSO AVAILABLE
The Annotated Lolita, 978-0-679-72729-3
Laughter in the Dark, 978-0-679-72450-6
Lolita: A Screenplay, 978-0-679-77255-2
Mary, 978-0-679-72620-3
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, 978-0-679-72997-6
Strong Opinions, 978-0-679-72609-8
Transparent Things, 978-0-679-72541-1
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available from your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
A PUBLISHING EVENT
The final, unfinished novel from
Vladimir Nabokov
The Original of Laura
After years of controversy surrounding the fate of Nabokov’s final manuscript, Knopf will publish the last work by one of the 20th century’s acknowledged masters of literature. An essential part of Nabokov’s oeuvre, The Original of Laura blurs the line between the author’s life and fiction. This edition, uniquely designed by Chip Kidd, includes facsimiles of the 138 note cards on which it was written.
Available November 2009 in hardcover from Knopf
$35.00 • 304 pages • 978-0-307-27189-1
Please visit www.aaknopf.com
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