“Ding-dawn”

Vladimir Nabokov, “An Affair of Honor.” In The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1997).

Nabokov’s note on this story:

“An Affair of Honor” appeared under the title “Podlets” (The Cur), in the émigré daily Rul’, Berlin, around 1927, and was included in my first collection, Vazvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. The present translation was published in The New Yorker, September 3, 1966, and was included in Nabokov’s Quartet, Phaedra, New York, 1966.

The story renders in a drab expatriate setting a belated variation on the romantic theme whose decline started with Chekhov’s magnificent novella Single Combat (1891).

V.N., A Rusian Beauty and Other Stories, 1973

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[Please notice the time of this post. I had to do it.]