DIVINITY IN THE DETAILS

By R.Z. Sheppard

VLADIMIR NABOKOV DIED IN 1977 to mixed reviews. Not everyone was captivated by his erudition, multilingual wordplay and narrative frolics. But those who tuned to his wavelength came to appreciate that the style and gamesmanship so intimidating to his competition disguised the author's larger task: to heighten the pleasures of the natural world and the gratifications of personal creativity.

Sensuality is an underappreciated quality in Nabokov's writing, and with good reason. Sinfully rich novels like The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pale Fire and even that great American road novel Lolita are cleverly defended against casual entry. Nabokov's short fictions, on the other hand, are thresholds to his themes and some of the most nape-tingling prose and devilish inventions in 20th century letters. So better late than never, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf; 659 pages; $35) is a welcome edition to the shelves of old admirers and a chance for entry-level fans to sample the author's delights.

Edited by Nabokov's son Dmitri, the omnibus brings together 65 tales and sketches. Most have appeared at least once in previous collections. Many are translations of originals written during the 1920s and '30s for Russian emigre publications in Berlin and Paris. Eleven have recently been translated into English for the first time, among them The Wood-Sprite, written in 1921 and listed as the author's first published story.

The collection's stunning opener, The Wood-Sprite is a tale in whose mere three pages Nabokov concentrates the essence of heartache and playfulness that distinguishes the best of his work. A Russian writer who has fled the terrors of his revolutionary homeland imagines a visit from a forest elf ("hunched, gray, powdered with pollen") who explains why he too had to leave the new Soviet state: "Once, toward evening, I skipped out into a glade, and what do I see? People lying around, some on their backs, some on their bellies. Well, I think, I'll wake them up, I'll get them moving! And I went to work shaking boughs, bombarding with cones, rustling, hooting...Then I took a closer look, and I was horror-struck. Here's a man with his head hanging by one flimsy crimson thread, there's one with a heap of thick worms for stomach...I could not endure it. I let out a howl, jumped in the air, and off I ran."

Although he belonged to a distinguished St. Petersburg family with medieval roots and country estates, Nabokov never sentimentalized the old regime. Not for him the romance of serf and turf. He was above all a cultural and intellectual aristocrat, part of the Russian liberal class whose hopes for democracy were crushed by triumphant Bolshevism. Scorn for tyrants is etched on many of the pre-World War II Berlin stories, as well as others written during the '40s and '50s after he immigrated to the U.S. And woe to the poseur whose influence is based solely on personality. From Spring in Fialta: "Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents."

Until Lolita ("light of my life, fire of my loins") scorched the best-seller list in 1955, Nabokov was a popular instructor of literature at Cornell, a productive but obscure author of exotic fiction and chess problems, and an even lesser known authority on butterflies. His genius for transforming sensory impressions into language may always remain elusive, but his descriptive powers owe much to training in natural science.

The precision can be too clinical, as in the depiction of a character from The Vane Sisters: "The interval between her thick black eyebrows was always shiny, and shiny too were the fleshy volutes of her nostrils." But elsewhere there is divinity in the details: "The roofs blaze like oblique, sunblinded mirrors. A winged woman stands on a windowsill washing the panes. She bends over, pouts, brushes a strand of flaming hair from her face. The air is faintly redolent of gasoline and lindens."

Nabokov liked to shock as well as enchant. A biology professor who suspects his wife of adultery frightens her to death by putting a skeleton in her bed. There is a boyish cruelty similar to Alfred Hitchcock's in many of Nabokov's mock-gothic tales. He was an ardent hunter of clichas and kitsch, and a mischievous parodist of traditional literary forms. The familiar 1952 story Lance sends up science fiction whose "Star tsars, directors of Galactic Unions, are practically replicas of those peppy, red-haired executives in earthy earth jobs." The little-known 1924 tale The Dragon turns mythology into satiric social commentary by casting a fabled fire-breathing monster as the dupe in a tobacco-advertising campaign.

The collection contains "much, much more," to echo the last words of Nabokov's novel Ada. There are madmen, romantics, nymphets and those enduring symbols of the 20th century, melancholy exiles whose portable lives are light on possessions but heavy with memories. That Nabokov gave wings to his own past is reaffirmed by the publication of this long-overdue volume, an authentic literary event and, even at $35, the reading bargain of the year.