"A Guide to Berlin" (original title "Путеводитель по Берлину") is a 1925

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest ...

by Vladimir Nabokov. It was later translated by him and his son, Dmitri Nabokov, into English and included in the collection ''

Details of a Sunset and Other Stories ''Details of a Sunset and Other Stories'' is a collection of thirteen short stories by Vladimir Nabokov. All were written in Russian by Nabokov between 1924 and 1935 as an expatriate in Berlin, Paris, and Riga and published individually in the é ...

'' (1976).

Plot summary

In the story the narrator recounts to a friend his visit to the

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

zoo. In the short sections--"The Pipes," "The Streetcar," "Work," "Eden," and "The Pub"—he describes everyday aspects of life in the city in vivid, typically Nabokovian, detail. In "The Streetcar," he adumbrates his vision of the purpose of "literary creation": "To portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade." His "pot companion" (drinking buddy) in the pub pronounces the guide to be a poor one of a "boring, expensive city," and does not understand the narrator’s preoccupation with streetcars, tortoises, or the publican's young son’s view from the rear annex. The last aspect is the salient one; the narrator believes that the child will always have some manner of dim recollection of this childhood view and time, impregnated by details that will seem to him unique or special. This is exactly how the narrator feels about his own experiences around Berlin that day. He derives great pleasure from the aesthetics and social mechanisms, though others may not. It is the possibility of having experienced objects which might interest, entertain or mould others that so fascinates him.

External links

Original Russian text
1925 short stories Short stories by Vladimir Nabokov Short stories set in Berlin {{1920s-story-stub