A Matter of Chance
Encyclopedia
A Matter of Chance is a short story
by Vladimir Nabokov
written in Russian under his pen name Vladimir Sirin in Berlin in 1924. It was rejected by the newspaper Rul and first published by the emigre magazine Segodnya in Riga. In 1974 it became part of a collection of thirteen stories called Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories published by McGraw-Hill.
Unknown to him, his wife gets on the train to join him in Paris and meets an elderly princess who is a family friend of her husband. Luzhin just fails to put out the dining car reservation slips (and thus recognise his wife’s name), and he cannot remember who the princess is when he sees her. His wife just fails to enter the dining car and loses her wedding ring instead. When the dining car is disconnected for cleaning Luzhin just fails to discover the ring, descends from the carriage to commit his fatal act, and is run down instead by a passing express.
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
by Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
written in Russian under his pen name Vladimir Sirin in Berlin in 1924. It was rejected by the newspaper Rul and first published by the emigre magazine Segodnya in Riga. In 1974 it became part of a collection of thirteen stories called Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories published by McGraw-Hill.
Plot summary
A Russian émigré, Aleksey Luzhin is working as a dining car attendant on the Berlin-Paris express. In a state of terminal despair, he dreams of a lost St. Petersburg and a lost wife Lena. He has become a cocaine addict, and he plans to commit suicide by putting his head between the buffers of two coupling carriages.Unknown to him, his wife gets on the train to join him in Paris and meets an elderly princess who is a family friend of her husband. Luzhin just fails to put out the dining car reservation slips (and thus recognise his wife’s name), and he cannot remember who the princess is when he sees her. His wife just fails to enter the dining car and loses her wedding ring instead. When the dining car is disconnected for cleaning Luzhin just fails to discover the ring, descends from the carriage to commit his fatal act, and is run down instead by a passing express.