Nabokov's Russians in Berlin, from a less modern world, are struck by the bright lights and vulgarity of the big Western city. From the same 1925 Letter: "A cinema ripples in diamonds...farther on, a stout prostitute in black fur slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the shiny silk of her peach-coloured stockings...I am so light-hearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local café, Many fellow exiles of mine denounce indignantly...fashionable abominations, including current dances. But fashion is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a new form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about." Visually and socially this is the same Berlin as Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) but what these two writers do with it defines their distinctiveness: one political, the other a fabulist. 

Five of Nabokov's early stories (A Guide to Berlin, The Aurelian, Cloud, Castle, Lake, Spring in Fialta and Lance) recently appeared in a classic Reklam edition as Nabokov's Berlin Erzählungen. Compare their themes with mid-1920s posters in the city's national gallery and you can see how topical stories featuring variety shows, fun-loving girls and cinema were. But Nabokov gave the Berlin vignette additional spin with the gift of seeing everything symbolically. He was a Russian poet, influenced by the pre-revolutionary Blok. His mournful-magical imagery seems to me comparable with some of his contemporary Mandelstam's. What tipped him back towards realism was a fascination with vulgarity. His later Berlin was awash with advertisements for consumer goods. Billboards and neon signs decorated the streets. The vices of modern culture fascinated Nabokov and would later almost overwhelm him in the US. His macabre and dramatic preoccupation with films and the cinema, outed in the short novel Laughter in the Dark, began in Berlin and finally ended in America when Hollywood cast Sue Lyon as Lolita.

As consumerism and Hitler rose together so Nabokov treated totalitarian politics principally as aesthetically repugnant. It was "another beastliness starting to megaphone" in Germany which in 1937 drove him and his half-Jewish wife Vera to leave Berlin for France and the US. It was almost too late. Berlin suited him. The anti-totalitarian novels Bend Sinister (1947) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938) which followed were remarkable, particularly the latter, for not insisting that totalitarianism's victims were moral heroes, only men of taste. Nabokov, who saw in art the possibility of redemption, was tempted to think taste ruled out evil. 

The shorter fiction of the 1920s and 1930s contains many passing reflections on the art he was already practising and the ways of those who fell short of his ideal. Errancy from paradise preoccupied him. He found lapses from perfection in all the material that came his way and treated criminality and insanity, but above all sexual perversity, in those terms. The writer in him understood how cleverly these deviations from a good world could disguise themselves, and how they might seduce a reader. Hence the rampant narcissism of Despair's Hermann Hermann who, when he makes a street tramp his double, thinks he can "cheat Nemesis by helping his shadow out of the brook". Hence the perversion of the seducer and murderer Humbert Humbert, who, after all, desired only the downy legs of the child, not the hairy limbs of her mother. Nabokov's most famous protagonists are fastidious criminals who know how to spin golden fictions out of their guilty dreams. With wit and imagery he makes us feel we are in paradise too, though our entertainer is the devil.