“The Doorbell” was first published in 1927, in Russian, as “Zvonok,” in Vozvrashchenie Chorba. It was first published and collected in English in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories (1976). It is currently most readily available in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage).

Vladimir Nabokov was not American-born, nor a native English speaker—Russian-born, he wrote in three languages, with English coming in third after Russian and French—but he considered himself very much an American writer. “I am as American as April in Arizona,” he famously said in a Paris Review interview in 1966; and while some might quibble as to exactly how American April in Arizona might be, in many fittingly modern ways Nabokov epitomizes what it means to be an American writer from a foreign cultural background, an increasingly widespread type today (of which I myself, incidentally, am an example).

“The Doorbell” is an early story, written in Russian and published in 1927 in a small émigré magazine in Berlin, where Nabokov spent most of his exile years after leaving post-revolutionary Russia and before arriving in America in 1941. He wrote some twenty-five stories before the age of thirty, most of which had already begun to explore the themes he would develop at length in his novels—memory, time, loss of one's country, loss of one's beloved—all subjects that seem quite relevant, once again, in today's America of multiculturalism, restlessness, and upheavals. “The Doorbell” was translated into English by Nabokov's son, Dmitri, under Nabokov's own supervision, and included in 1976 in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories.

Standing at a modest nine or ten pages, “The Doorbell” possesses the deeply nostalgic overtones of Nabokov's longer fiction, as well as a surprising wealth of meanings and a sense of playfulness with which it subverts several of the reader's expectations. A man, driven out of Russia by the revolution, has been leading a vagabond life of adventure and occasional soldiering all over the world. Now, having “grown hardier, rougher,” “lost an index finger,” and “learned two languages,” Nikolay Galatov comes to Berlin, more or less on a whim, to find a woman from whom he was parted in Petersburg seven years ago.