While I was trying to understand, in his words, why Nabokov chose to celebrate his birthday on April 23, instead of April 22, this short-story came to my attention following a curiously tortuous way. Its chief character is Josefine, a former governess, who lived in Russia for 12 years before returning to Switzerland. There's a clumsy swan in it, like the dying one, in Mademoiselle, but it's absent from V's report in RLSK. However, the thread I'm following also departs from Nabokov's early childhood as collected in Speak,Memory.

1. It is Summer in Vyra and fifteen-years old Vladimir is dominated by "the dumb fury of verse-making." He believes that all he needs is "to visualize a certain pavilion" where he took shelter during thunrderstorms."I dream of my pavilion at least twice a year.It hangs around, so to speak, with the unobtrusiveness of an artist's signature...At times, however, it seems to be suspended in the middle distance, a trifle baroque, and yet in tone with the handsome trees, dark fir and bright birch, whose sap once ran through its timber. Wine-red and bottle-green and dark-blue losenges of stained glass lend a chapel-like touch to the latticework of its casements."** ..."...part of the rainbow went across it, and that section of the forest edge shimmered most magically through the pale green and pink of the iridescent veil drwan before it....A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing the sheer weight of a raindrop. shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quick-silver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat,*** which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes..." (SM,ch 11, I, p.216 Vintage) A few paragraphs later VN will write about "cosmic synchronization."

2."A wet branch stretched across the windowpane, and at its very end a leaf kept shuddering beneath the patter of the rain. The leaf leaned forward and let a large drop fall from the tip of its green blade. The leaf shuddered again, and again a moist ray rolled downward, then a long, bright earring dangled and dropped. //And it seemed to Josephine as if the rainy coolness were flowing through her veins. She could not take her eyes off the streaming sky, and the pulsating, enraptured rain was so pleasant, the leaf shuddered so touchingly, that she wanted to laugh; the laughter filled her, though it was still soundless, coursing through her body, tickling her palate...// Seeing Mademoiselle Finard's black hair, her squirming legs, her button boots, Josephine broke out in peals of laughter, shaking as she gasped and cooed beneath her down comforter, feeling that she was resurrected, that she had returned from faraway mists of happiness, wonder, and Easter splendor." (Easter Rain)*

3. "My father's first marriage had not been happy...His was a constant quest which changed its object only after having attained it. Hers was a half-hearted pursuit, capricious and rambling, now swerving wide off the mark, now forgetting it midway... She was fond of my father after a fashion, a fitful fashion to say the least, and when one day it occurred to her that she might be in love with another..., she left husband and child as suddenly as a raindrop starts to slide tipwards down a syringa leaf. That upward jerk of the forsaken leaf, which had been heavy with its bright burden, must have caused my father fierce pain; and I do not like to dwell in mind upon that day in a Paris hotel, with Sebastian aged about four, poorly attended by a puzzled nurse, and my father locked up in his room" RLSK

4. "One’s eyes could not follow the rapid butterfly in the sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and flashed again, with an almost frightening imitation of conscious play..,and we saw it next moment sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banisters on his birthday. Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels, and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved in it." Pale Fire

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* -Dmitri Nabokov's Preface to The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov ( a previous note mentions that: "Easter Rain" ")
"We had published the stories without "Easter Rain" when he heard rumors that a scholar residing in Sweden had found the story in Leipzig. The Iron Curtain had been raised by then, and he went to check. There it was: a complete set of Russkoe Ekho. And now they had Xerox machines. Thus "Easter Rain"—first discovered by Svetlana Polsky, though we only learned her name some years later; translated into English in collaboration with Peter Constantine for the Spring 2002 issue of Conjunctions—now joins this volume."
            DMITRI NABOKOV
            Vevey, Switzerland May 2002
            A note from Georg Heepe, editorial director of Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, traces the discovery of "Easter Rain," now appended to this edition. It reads in part: When we were preparing the first German edition of the complete stories in 1987-88, Nabokov scholar Dieter Zimmer searched all the accessible libraries, likely and unlikely, for the April 1925 issue of the Russian emigre magazine Russkoe Ekho that he knew in-cluded "Easter Rain." He went even into what was then East Berlin on a day's permit, and thought of the Deutsche Buecherei in Leipzig as well. But the chance seemed too slight, the bureaucratic procedures too forbidding. And there was one more consideration. There would have been no copy machines.

** A kind of Kinbotean intervention: colored marbles and stained-glass played an important part in my tropical childhood and, here, a favorite line by Keats came to my mind: "Full on the casement shone the wintry moon/ and threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast/ As down she knelt..." - "The Eve of Saint Agnes"). At the time I learned how to pronounce "gules" like "jewels". What a disappointment it was, decades later, to learn about its trite use in heraldry. (Jansy Mello)