Cloud, Castle, Lake

“Cloud, Castle, Lake,” Nabokov gives us a tale of peculiar horror wrapped up in fairy-tale whimsy.

“Cloud, Castle, Lake” is a parable on the plight of the individual who is swallowed against his will into the maw of the all-powerful Group. Vasili Ivanovich, a mild bachelor living in Germany, wins a pleasure trip at a charity ball. He hopes the trip will bring him “some wonderful, tremulous happiness,” but gets his first intimation that all will not go well when, on the train, he is requested to put down his book and join the group. From then on the trip is a nightmare of enforced jollification that becomes progressively more sinister and even violent.

At the most remote point of their itinerary, Vasili Ivanovich glimpses a landscape of such perfection that he wants to lose himself in it forever.

It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one—in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had, my love! my obedient one!— was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder that Vasili Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away.
But of course Vasili Ivanovich is not allowed to linger within his ideal. The triumphant Group tears the dreamer from the dreamscape and forcibly reinserts him into the baneful social entity.
Nabokov continued to express his detestation of totalitarianism in every form throughout the Forties: his story “Conversation