Short Story: "Symbols and Signs"

My freshman year at BYU, I had aspirations to graduate with honors, which . . . didn't so much happen, but that first semester I signed up for an Honors class called 203H - Studies in Literature. It was back when we didn't use computers for registration, but a touch-tone phone, and chose classes from the newsprint catalog, and it had no description beyond the Russian last name of the professor. When I walked into the classroom, stadium-style, half-circle tables with chairs attached, it was clear that the 20 or so people in the room were well beyond their freshman year. I didn't really start to freak out until I was sitting and people all around were having conversations in Russian. Dr. Julia Nemirovskaya, in very competent but heavy-accented English, passed out the syllabus and introduced the subject matter, which apparently everyone else had already figured out: the works of Leo Tolstoy.

Needless to say, this was not what I was expecting from a 200-level class, but was way too embarrassed to leave, even though I was horribly out of place. Then I got some arrogance and thought myself totally equal to the task of reading hundreds of pages of War & Peace each night, and stuck it out for the sake of having done it. I will confess that there were 50-page chunks of War & Peace that I clean skipped over, because there are thousands upon thousands of words of war planning inside Napoleon's head, and I wouldn't say I possessed the maturity at age 18 to appreciate it. I know I didn't appreciate her particular expertise in the subject. Despite feeling unnecessarily proud for having done it (I mean, I did get an A), I didn't really enjoy the novels very much (with the exception of Resurrection) and I think it colored my appreciation for all the Russians, who any writer worth anything will tell you have influenced people's good writing for many decades since.

This particular short story is not by Tolstoy, but by Vladimir Nabokov. It was published in the New Yorker in 1948, and somehow the name was changed from "Signs and Symbols" to "Symbols and Signs" but apparently Nabokov was never really happy about that decision. (I learned that from the New Yorker Fiction podcast, where Mary Gaitskill reads the story beautifully.) Whatever its title, this story will most decidedly call you to repentance about not respecting the Russians; it's a marvel.

The characters are an elderly couple with a teenage or young adult son "who was incurably deranged in his mind," and living away from them in a mental institution, a fair distance from their tenement apartment. They are immigrants, living in New York, but dependent on the husband's brother and faced every day with the possibility of receiving the news that their only son has committed suicide because of his extreme paranoia, in a case so severe and perplexing that his doctor had published a paper.

The prose is incredibly spare and tight. Each place the couple goes in the course of the day is described with few details, but they are visceral and piercing, and build together a world generally bleak, gray, and with unpleasant smells. It is raining, the subway malfunctions, the sanatorium is understaffed and confused, and they are told that their child has tried, again, to take his life by a nurse none of them likes. There is a dying bird, the "hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate" worn by the husband, and pale and soft food for supper. The flat is quiet, compared to the cacophony of their previous stops, but it is haunted by the ghosts of their past, pored over in photographs by the wife, and with a looming sense of present failure.

In the course of the few pages, this family is brilliantly, tragically sketched, and the ending is hauntingly ambiguous. We are left not knowing exactly what happened, with a vision of "luminous yellow, green, and red little jars" of jelly they had planned to take to their son, for his birthday.