The Vane Sisters

"The Vane Sisters" is the second to last short story by Vladimir Nabokov, written in March of 1951; it is famous for providing one of the most extreme examples of an unreliable narrator. It was first published in "The Hudson Review" and "Encounter" in 1959, later in "Nabokov's Quartet" (1966), "Nabokov's Congeries" (1968; reprinted as "The Portable Nabokov", 1971), "Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories" (1975), and "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov" (1995). In the story, the author tells the reader something that he does not himself know.

The story involves a professor and his scandalous past with the two Vane sisters, Cynthia and Sybil. Early in the story, the author ridicules the misguided searches for acrostics by the paranoid, and refers to a "novel or short story (by some contemporary writer, I believe) in which, unknown to the author, the first letters of the words in its last paragraph formed, as deciphered by Cynthia, a message from his dead mother".

The final paragraph of the story is as follows: "I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost."

When the final paragraph of the story is subjected to this technique, the result is as follows: "Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me Sybil." So, in other words, at the end of the story the reader learns that the author is not actually the author of the piece, but rather his words are being influenced without his knowledge by the dead sisters.

The very name of Sybil hints at the trick of the final paragraph, as the word "acrostic" was first applied to the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves always formed a word.

Since acrostics play a prominent role in this short story, Italian Nabokovian scholar Matteo Baccani points out that the sisters’ surname, Vane, hints at the author’s initials, as its pronunciation (/"vein"/) sounds quite like the name of "v" and "n" in Cyrillic alphabet ("ve" and "en"). This is even more evident in the novel "" (1969), in which the protagonist’s surname is patently "Veen".

The apparent uniqueness of this narrative approach has created fame for this story, and Nabokov himself described this device as something that 'can only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction'. However, it may be that several other of Nabokov's works have similar riddles inside them yet to be discovered. The trick ending of "The Vane Sisters" originally went unnoticed when the "New Yorker" rejected the story, and it was only revealed when Nabokov wrote a letter to the chief editor, Katharine A. White, explaining the foundation of the story.

External links

* [http://esposito.typepad.com/con_read/2004/11/nabokovs_the_va.html Summary of story]
* [http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dolinin.htm Description of rejection of The Vane Sisters]
* [http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/a319/nab-048.htm Tutorial on The Vane Sisters]