A summary of Vladimir Nabokov’s "Byg and Wax"

This book is a collection of fourteen stories, published in 1958. The author had to make the linguistic transition from Russian to English. The texts depict different stages of an émigré’s life, resonating with themes of lost homeland, nostalgia, madness, and love. Most of the works were translated from English and French by Gennady Barabtarlo in 2001.

European motives

The narrator arrives in the town of Fialta and meets Nina, whom he has known for fifteen years. Nina is married to the cynical writer Ferdinand, but the narrator recalls their own rare, vibrant encounters in various European cities. Nina always appears suddenly and disappears quickly, evoking in the narrator a complex mixture of attraction and pity. In Fialta, they take a walk together for the last time. Soon, the narrator learns from the newspaper the terrible news of a car accident. Ferdinand survived the collision with a circus wagon, but Nina died.

A memorial evening for the poet Konstantin Perov, who allegedly drowned half a century ago, is taking place in St. Petersburg. Suddenly, an old man appears on stage, claims to be Perov, and demands the money collected for the monument. The press sensationalizes this literary apocrypha — a fictitious story of miraculous rescue — and a wealthy merchant takes the old man into his home. The old man later disappears, having received the ransom, and after the revolution, an ancient guard appears at the Perov Museum, dying on a bench.

In 1909, the hero traveled with his family to Paris and Biarritz, where ten-year-old Colette captured his heart at the French resort, leading him to make failed plans for a secret escape to Spain or America. Sometime later, the hero met Colette again in an autumnal Parisian park, when she gave his brother a box of sweets and ran off to play with a hula hoop, forever remaining a fond childhood memory.

Berlin shop owner Pilgram is passionate about entomology. He has studied all species of butterflies, but has never left his homeland due to a lack of money. One day, a wealthy collector buys his rare collection of glasswings, and Pilgram receives a large sum. Unbeknownst to his wife, he packs his suitcase and prepares to board a train to Spain. His wife returns home at night, finds a note announcing her departure, and in the morning discovers her husband dead on the shop floor.

A modest bachelor, Vasily Ivanovich, wins a pleasure trip and travels out of town with a group of rough-and-tumble people. His companions mock him, forcing him to sing in chorus and play silly games. While hiking, Vasily Ivanovich sees a beautiful place where a lake, a cloud, and an old tower merge into a perfect scene. He decides to stay at the local inn permanently and announces this to the group. The leader forbids him to leave the excursion. Vasily Ivanovich is forced onto a train, beaten on the way back, and upon his return, he asks to be released from work.

The writer recalls his Swiss governess, who arrived in Russia in the winter, knew no Russian, and suffered greatly from loneliness in a foreign country. The obese and slightly deaf mademoiselle often quarreled with the other residents of the house, but in the summer she enchantingly read French novels aloud to the children. Many years later, the grown-up hero visited the old woman in Lausanne, bought her a hearing aid, listened to her warm memories of life in Russia, and soon learned of her death.

Military and emigrant realities

In Paris, White Russian émigrés have created a Military Union, where General Golubkov secretly works for Soviet intelligence. His wife is a former singer known as "Slavska." Golubkov wants to become the leader of the union and eliminates his rivals. The first two leaders die under mysterious circumstances, and Golubkov lures the third, the respected General Fedchenko, into a trap and arranges for his kidnapping right on a Parisian street. Golubkov is betrayed by a forgotten note from Fedchenko, after which the French police arrest Slavska, and the general himself disappears.

The narrator is often confused with his namesake, a rude and uncultured man. One day, he is invited to a dinner party where the German professor Tufling gives a long speech justifying the actions of the Germans during the war and dismissing reports of crimes as propaganda. The narrator loses it, calls the ladies present and the lecturer idiots, leaves, and mistakenly takes Tufling’s hat. The next day, the professor comes to claim it, and soon after, the narrator receives a threatening letter from his double demanding a modest sum of money.

A Russian émigré writes a letter to a friend, sharing the strange story of his marriage. He married a young woman just before the fall of Paris, but while fleeing to the south of France, he missed his train. After a long search, he found his wife in Nice, where she confessed to an affair with a fellow passenger, then changed her story and accused her husband of cruelty. Soon, his wife disappeared again forever. On the ship en route to America, he learns that his wife had been seen in Marseille, and begins to doubt whether she ever existed.

American stories and fantasies

An elderly couple plans to visit their son in a psychiatric hospital. The young man suffers from referential delusions, a rare mental disorder in which the patient believes that all natural phenomena transmit secret messages about him. At the hospital, the couple is told that the boy attempted suicide, and the visit is canceled. They return home with heavy hearts. That night, the husband is unable to sleep from grief and decides to take their son home the next day. Suddenly, the phone rings, and a girl’s voice asks for a stranger, Charlie, and the repeated call intensifies the couple’s anxiety.

A ninety-year-old scientist indulges in a retrospective — a mental glimpse into the past — describing the lives of people in the mid-twentieth century from the twenty-first century. Born in Paris, the scientist moved to America as a child, where he remembers heavy clothing, strange rules of decorum, New York skyscrapers, and pharmacies selling soda. His most vivid memories remain of airplanes. The hero sadly realizes that that era is gone forever, and the past seems like a distant, beautiful dream.

Conjoined twins Lloyd and Floyd recall their childhood on their grandfather’s farm in Turkey. They suffered from omphalopagia — a fusion of the chest and abdomen — so relatives would show the boys off to onlookers for money. The brothers learned to coordinate their movements, rarely spoke to each other, but sometimes their thoughts would completely coincide. One day, the children tried to escape the farm, hiding under a shepherd’s cloak. There, their cunning Uncle Novus was waiting for them in a tarantass, kidnapping the boys to transport them around the world and profit from their deformities.

A young man named Lance is preparing for an interplanetary expedition, while his parents grieve their son’s departure, hiding their fear behind mundane conversations. Lance leaves behind his tame chinchillas. After his departure, the elderly couple gaze at the night sky from their balcony, trying to imagine their son’s path among the stars. The anticipation drives them crazy. This anticipation is excruciating. A month later, the expedition returns with losses. Lance survives and is in the hospital, where he appears tired to his visiting parents, but plans to fly into space again in the fall.

A literature professor learns of the death of his acquaintance, Cynthia Vane, whose younger sister, Sybil, committed suicide several years earlier due to unrequited love. Cynthia was passionately interested in spiritualism, believing that the souls of the dead controlled the minor events of life, and often threw riotous parties. Upon learning of her death, the professor is unable to sleep, searching for hidden signs around him, analyzing his dreams, but fails to notice that the first letters of the words in his thoughts form an acrostic — an encrypted, secret phrase.