Every short story that Nabokov ever wrote is included in this collection, apart from The Enchanter. The collection was published after Nabokov's death and none had been previously published. As a tribute to his later father, the author's son, Dmitri Nabokov, translated the fifty four stories that had originally been written in Russian into English. Ten were already penned in English, and one, Mademoiselle O, was originally written in French.
Nabokov is one of Russia's most notable novelists although he was actually educated in Britain, attending the University of Cambridge; he is most famous for writing the novel Lolita. The book's subject matter and plot were so controversial that even people who have never read a book in English before (never mind one that was translated from its original Russian) are still aware of the author, the novel and the furore its publication created. Despite chronicling the obsession that a middle aged literature professor has with a twelve year old girl, the novel is often considered to be the greatest of the twentieth century.
Nabokov himself had little love for the short story genre, which partly explains why most of the stories in the collection were previously unpublished. He considered them "a small Alpine form of the novel', and he really only wrote short stories to pay the rent; once he achieved international success with the publication of Lolita he abandoned short story writing all together and did not return to it until much later when he became offended by his own poor translation of his Russian works into English, and was compelled to re-translate the ones he felt were most poorly done.
Between World Wars One and Two, Nabokov lived a nomadic existence, living in Cambridge as a student before relocating to Berlin, and finally settling in Paris; the stories he wrote during this time are predominantly written in grief over his father's death (he was shot in Berlin in 1922) and they are also shadowed by his homesickness for his motherland. Several stories show the corporeal world and the afterlife to be intertwined, a principle he was captivated with as he wrestled with his feelings about his father. In contrast to the freedom that Nabokov felt when writing full-length novels, short story writing evoked a feeling of emotional claustrophobia within him and consequently the majority of the stories in the collection are sombre and overly reflective.
In the 1950s, Nabokov became a lecturer at Cornell University, one of his students a young Thomas Pynchon, who alluded to some of Nabokov's work, including his short stories, in his own. Similarly, John Hawkes was greatly inspired by Nabokov; when he became a professor himself, lecturing at Brown University, Nabokov's short story Signs and Symbols was always on the reading list given to his students.
