Vladimir Nabakov's Lost Short Story on Boxing, Found, and Published

We can thank the Times Literary Supplement for that.

From the intro...


Nabokov was a devotee of sports and games, ranging from boxing, football and tennis, through chess and cryptic crosswords, to the play of thought, language, desire, art, and the divine universe – those more abstract forms of play that he invokes at the beginning of “Breitensträter– Paolino”, sounding, for all the world, like a Presocratic philosopher, only one come to declare not that all is air, water, earth, or fire, but that all is play. Never again would he express so openly and nakedly this vision of life and art as play, which would govern his work for the next fifty years; no wonder that Nabokov, who later said an artist is lost when he seeks to define art, should have let the piece lie hidden in the archives of the emigration. 

As a young man Nabokov had taken boxing lessons from a “wonderful rubbery Frenchman, Monsieur Loustatot”, fondly remembered in his autobiography, Speak, Memory; he boxed competitively as an undergraduate at Cambridge; and in Berlin he and his friend George Hessen staged a number of bouts. In 1924, he published a poem called “The Boxer’s Girlfriend”, and in his first major work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (see below), the protagonist, Morn, talks about a fist fight with expert attention to specific punches: a hook is a “comma”, a jab a “full stop”. 

Of all the sports Nabokov could have chosen to focus on, he took in boxing the one that concentrates as no other the pain and violence he always saw in play. But “Breitensträter–Paolino” is a very literary and verbal account of boxing – the author’s red ink seeping across a skein of metaphor into the blood on the referee’s vest – and is punctuated according to the varying rhythms and geometries of the sport: its quick flurries, its wary circlings, its duelling antitheses.