The Razor
Formerly a Colonel with the White Russians, Ivanov is now a barber in Berlin. He recognizes his customer is the same man who had sentenced him to death several years before as an officer in the pro-Bolshevik Red Army. Over the course of a shave, Ivanov verbally abuses the customer while paradoxically performing a close shave very gently done.
The Doorbell
A very melancholic story about a son who hasn’t seen his mother for seven years since being separated in the Russian Civil War which broke out shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. Filled with heartbreaking longing to finally catch up with her, everything collapses with the ringing of the doorbell. What he finds behind the door does not just change present circumstances being mother and son, but calls into question everything he had believed about the past.
A Matter of Chance
A very serious candidate for the most irony-laden short story ever written. It involves a man driven to desperation as a result of, among other things, losing his wife. What he doesn’t know is that his wife in on the same train on which he works with plans to reunite in Paris. From there the story becomes a series of incidents determined to keep the man from suicide by revealing the love of his wife, but the timing is off by just enough seconds to keep him from ever knowing she was aboard. Then the ironic last touch: the man fails even to get to choose his manner of departing.
The Potato Elf
Another sad tragedy, only this one is wrapped within what might be termed a love story. Of sorts. The title character is actually a dwarf with the circus with a name that is truly flabbergasting in its ordinariness: Fred Dobson. An act of pity and charity from a husband and wife ultimately leads a night of passion between Fred and the wife. Fred is enchanted and convinces himself that she loves him, but she really only slept with him to get back at her husband. Things don’t end well for that one guy…what’s his name…you know, the dwarf or elf or whatever.
The Aurelian
Paul Pilgram is the titular character. An aurelian is an entomologist specializing in butterflies and moths. Pilgram is quite happy living among butterflies but is bored by his job and his wife. Finally fed up, he decides to steal from a customer and live out his dream of going around the world to see all the places known for their glorious butterflies. The narrator ends by informing the reader that Pilgram is in a place of great happiness and contentment, but there is more than sufficient reason to doubt his assurance.
The Leonardo
Written by Nabokov while he was in Berlin in the summer of 1933, this story is one of the first ever written by a foreign writer exposing the brutality of the Nazi regime just coming into power. It is the tale of two beer-swilling, intellectually-challenged German brothers who decide to pick on a stranger simply because they have determined him to be “different.”
The Passenger
Another train tale, but much more than that. A writer and critic are conversing on the subject of reality versus fiction with the critic insisting that no writer can ever improve on what occurs in real life. The writer relates a true story that poses a question. A man is found crying on a train then comes the news that a man who murdered his wife is also known to be on the train. Was the crying man and the murderer the same man? It turns out that he wasn’t and an explanation for his weeping was never discovered. So why was he crying? The best the critic can come up with a lame ending with none of the creativity or imagination that be required to get the story published.
