Reviews for Old Indian Days

The average rating for Old Indian Days based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-12-26 00:00:00 Kristen Kern When I feel utterly overwhelmed by meaninglessness of life there are only two things I turn to: weed and Nabokov. We're all lovers of literature here, but don't you often feel like what's the point of it all? That it's all just bullshit? I do, all the time. So maybe I'm a misanthrope, I do actively hope for the end of the human race on a regular basis, and it's not just all literature I often think is a worthless meaningless sham but whole of art, science, and every other human attempt to make sense of it all. And then I read Nabokov and I think maybe I'm wrong? If, by chance, the existence of our universe turns out to be some sort of comic competition amongst numberless universes produced by endlessly cascading big bangs, all competing for some unnamed cosmic prize, then I nominate this book, The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, to serve as our entry to that contest, not just as a representative Earth, but as the single representation of the pinnacle of comic evolution in our universe. I don't think I'm overstating the case. Vladimir Nabokov justifies the existence of, not only the human race, but all life that exists in our universe. If 14.5 billion years ago the big bang happened simply so 8 billion years later a planet would form in an arm of an ordinary galaxies amongst billions of identical galaxies, so that life might evolve, eventually followed by language, simply so that a boy would be born in Russia who would one day write this very book, then that is as much meaning in life as one could ever possibly hope for. This book is miraculous, and the closest to a religious worldview as I will ever come, and that's more than enough for me. Now I hope I'm not overselling this book, and I don't think I am, but I just wanted to make clear that the reason I took 2 years (yes two years) to finish it was because I wanted to savory every bit of it, some of these stories I've reread a half dozen times. And now that it's finally finished I feel a sense of sadness that this book, which has sat on my nightstand for years yellowing before my eyes, and has had no fewer than a hundred joints rolled on its cover, and has talked me down from three separate panic attacks, will now be placed in a bookshelf next to regular undeserving books, yet on the other hand if I were to die now, I could feel like I accomplished at least one thing in my life and it wasn't all a waste. A Letter That Never Reached Russia My charming, dear, distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray haired, azure-liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvorov Museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox. How ardently we kissed behind a waxen grenadier's back! And later, when we came out of that antique dust, how dazzled we were by the silvery blaze of the Tavricheski Park, and how odd it was to hear the cheery, avid, deep-fetched grunts of soldiers, lunging on command, slithering across the icy ground, plunging a bayonet into the straw-bellied German-helmeted dummy in the middle of a Petersburg street. Yes, I know that I had sworn, in my previous letter to you, not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to possess a lofty pudicity of expression, and yet, here I am, from the very first lines, disdaining that right to sublime imperfection, and defeating with epithets the recollection on which you touched with such lightness and grace. Not of the past, my love, do I wish to speak to you. It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects'the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one's desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nestling in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A glass column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop, and, for some reason, I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty. Through its windows one can clearly see the rows of brightly lit brown seats between which a lone ticket collector with a black satchel at his side makes his way, reeling a bit and thus looking a little tight'as he moves against the direction of the car's travel. As I wander along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the glass pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute. A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow passes under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted-except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she passes under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply. And beyond the bend, above the sidewalk'how unexpectedly!'the front of a cinema ripples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-pale screen you can watch more-or-less skillfully trained mimes: the huge face of a girl with gray, shimmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, shining tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) there appears real life, unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright waters, a noiselessly but visibly rustling tree. Farther on, at the corner of a square, a stout prostitute in black furs slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the shiny silk of her peach-colored stockings. I like to observe this placid middle-aged whore, as she is approached by an elderly man with a mustache, who came on business that morning from Papenburg (first he passes her and takes two backward glances). She will conduct him unhurriedly to a room in a nearby building, which, in the daytime, is quite undistinguishable from other, equally ordinary buildings. A polite and impassive old porter keeps an all-night vigil in the unlighted front hall. At the top of a steep staircase an equally impassive old woman will unlock with sage unconcern an unoccupied room and receive payment for it. And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music that I cannot help imagining the sunny lands toward which I shall depart as soon as I have procured those extra hundred marks for which I long so blandly, so lightheartedly. I am so lighthearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local café. Many fellow exiles of mind denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about. And of course these so-called modern dances of ours are actually anything but modern: the craze goes back to the days of the Directoire, for then as now women's dresses were worn next to the skin, and the musicians were Negroes. Fashion breathes thought the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fashion's breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances. Our dances, after all, are very natural and pretty innocent, and sometimes'in London ballrooms'perfectly graceful in their monotony. We all remember what Pushkin wrote about the waltz: "monotonous and mad." It's all the same thing. As for the deterioration of morals... Here's what I found in D'Agricourt's memoirs: "I know nothing more depraved than the minuet, which they see fit to dance in our cities." And so I enjoy watching, in the cafés dansants here, how "pair after pair flick by," to quote Pushkin again. Amusingly made-up eyes sparkle with simple human merriment. Black-trousered and light-stockinged legs touch. Feet turn this way and that. And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night with its moist reflections, hooting cars, and gusts of high-blowing wind. On that kind of of night, at the Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city, an old lady of seventy committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. I happened to go there the next morning, and the watchman, a badly crippled veteran of the Denikin campaign, moving on crutches that creaked with every swing of his body, showed me the white cross on which she hanged herself, and the yellow strands still adhering where the rope ("brand new one," he said gently) had chafed. Most mysterious and enchanting of all, though, were the crescent-shaped prints left by her heels, tiny as a child's, on the damp soil by the plinth. "She trampled the ground a bit, poor thing, but apart from that there's no mess at all," observed the watchman calmly, and, glancing at those yellow strands and at those little depressions, I suddenly realized that one can distinguish a naive smile even in death. Possibly, dear, my main reason for writing this letter is to tell you of that easy, gentle end. Thus the Berlin night resolved itself. Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-14 00:00:00 Daniel Oakley "The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong." ― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov In someways reading/listening to Nabokov's stories is like swimming in a turbulent river of all his great themes (doppelgängers, the creative process, loss, nostalgia for Russia, the individual, obsession, dreams/reality, etc*). While there were some stories that were masterpieces, the strength of this book really is the ability it gives the Nabokov enthusiast to see the development of a brilliant writer from the early 20s (egg) to the late 50s (imago). One only needs to read 'Terra Incognita' to see the seeds of his novel 'Ada: or Ardor' or read 'Tyrants Destroyed' to see the seeds of 'Invitation to Beheading'. This collection is a must for those who adore Nabokov, but also an interesting introduction to Nabokov for those whose only exposure may be "Lolita'. * I am certain I am leaving out a major theme. Each time I change,, update the review it peeks out at me but disappears as soon as my eyes focus and my fingers start to type.