On "A Matter Of Chance"

     This flash fiction piece of Nabokov's resonates the style of O'Henry. It has multiple unrelated characters that gradually become intertwined in their respective pasts, heading towards indistinct futures.

     The plot follows a russian man, Alek Luzhin, who has taken work on a berlin-to-paris diner train, and the narrative bounces back and forth between this man's actions and the passengers in one of the train cars. His past occupations are detailed, symbolizing the day to day struggle involved in making a living as a commoner. From the start, the text has an existential flavor. Another characteristic of note is the fact that he is addicted to pharmaceutical cocaine, which leads him to spend his evenings after work scribbling out imaginative plans to reunite himself with his wife, lost in the tumult of a recent political upheaval.
     In Alek's present, however, he has lost the hope to find his wife in the throes of his morning come-downs, in which he reviews his writings and regularly finds them distasteful. This hope is replaced by the need to control the final days of his life. The particular method our protagonist chooses is deciding on a day and an hour to end his life. This is the bit of the text's anatomy in which its existential flavor is metabolized.
     We see in Luhzin a classic of the working man with a dream. When the vast improbability of that dream confronts the blight of reality, he is faced with the question of whether or not his life is meaningful. This arc in the character's story is paralleled by the up and down of his cocaine abuse. Nabokov applies lavish imagery to the high, and adopts a tone of neutrality with regards to the down, an accepting of the fate. In between, there are scenes of fiending for the substance, of Alek being distracted from his work by the urge. Thus, his characterization is also a compartmentalized study in the outward and inward appearance of an addict.
     As the protagonist calmly plots his death, a handful of passengers board the international car. One, we soon discover, is Alek's wife, for whom he has all too recently lost hope of finding. On the other hand, she who had written him off as dead has newfound optimism for reunion, as an acquaintance has recently assured her of his wellbeing.
      Very quickly, the story's titular events stack up. By chance, his wife boards with an older woman that was a past family friend of her husband. By chance, her husband bypasses his routine passing-out of dinner slips to the passengers by locking himself in a bathroom with his drug. When he does finally make it past her car, his wife is elsewhere and he cannot place the face of the other woman. On her way to dinner, Ms. Luhzin is sexually harassed by another passenger, causing her to return to her room early – all jarring foreshadows of the inevitable climax.
     The events unfold at an elegant pace, giving literary love to each detail and showcasing each pertinent human trait as either the nastiness it is, or as beautiful tragic hope. The author carefully balances labor and leisure, while also defining the median betwixt the two in the symbolism of drug addiction. Leisure, we see, is the ability to hope. Misguided human nature, however, has lead Alek to look to the drug for his escape, though through crafty context we soon see that this break from routine has become all too routine for our protagonist.
     The true juxtaposition of the piece, of course, remains that between hope and abandon. Besides the unavoidable nature of tragedy, we are left to question moral decisions and where we place importance. The progression of one's life, we are reminded, is always inches away from digression due to the chaotic nature of choice. Though the image of this is a helpless one, it is also implied that one may simply choose to be happy.