Creation on earth

“A Russian Beauty” is yet another installment from Nabokov's past lives, perhaps the last, for the book composed essentially of odds and ends: some inconclusive stories from his Berlin period, a striking dream fable, “Terra Incognita,” and two chapters from an unfinished novel, the last he attempted before converting to the English language. Nabokov's recent book, “Transparent Things,” was a farewell to literature, as some critics haye guessed, then “A Russian Beauty” is a bit of tidying up.

Only a few of the stories perform the Nabokovian magic with any consistency, though all of them display flashes of it—vignettes of pure style filigreed around moments that seem hardly able to sustain them because they are so frail: a mood piece about an exiled beauty who marries badly (“A Russian Beauty”); the ridiculous murder of an odd little man who might be a poet, but turns out to be a counterfeiter (“The Leopardo”); a peculiarly heartless tale of a businessman who wants to be a Paul Zweig is author of writer, but commits the unpardonable Nabokovian sin of having talent (“Lips to Lips”); an unpleasant story about a blubbery husband who humiliates himself by refusing to duel with an elegant and adulterous killer (“An Affair of Honor”).