Nabokov presents the narrator’s struggles with his wife against the background of the German occupation of France during World War II. Thus, domestic horror is likened to national horror; the bureaucratic problems the narrator has with the “consuls and commissaires” in obtaining the necessary papers to leave France are likened to the marital problems he faces upon learning of his wife’s possible infidelity. The narrator is married in 1940, the same year when the “gentle Germans roared into Paris.” As the Nazis bring suffering to everyone in their path, the narrator’s wife inflicts tremendous emotional and mental pain upon her husband.
While describing their flight from France, the narrator explains, ‘the farther we fled, the clearer it became that what was driving us on was something more than a booted and buckled fool with his assortment of variously propelled junk—something of which he was a mere symbol, something monstrous and impalpable, a timeless and faceless mass of immemorial horror that still keeps coming at me from behind even here, in the green vacuum of Central Park.’
Here, Hitler (the “booted and buckled fool”) is a symbol of death. All humans are conscious of their inevitable ends, but many are able to keep this thought at bay during their day-to-day lives. Death, however, haunts the narrator even in the pastoral setting of Central Park, which is supposed to be, as he calls it, a vacuum where such thoughts of destruction never occur. Because the narrator is fearful of his own death by suicide, the Nazis are presented as a force whose power extends beyond the reach of both space and time. While the narrator once penned that Germany would “remain for ever and ever the laughing stock of the world,” he is now the laughing stock, humiliated by his wife’s possible infidelity.
The story’s title is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello. Othello’s wife, Desdemona, is free from corruption, yet Othello, provoked by the words of lago, comes to believe that she has been unfaithful to him. At the end of the play, Othello murders Desdemona, learns that lago has duped him, and then kills himself out of grief and shame. Before killing himself, however, Othello addresses the nobles who have rushed to the chamber where Desdemona lays strangled by his own hands: ‘Set you down this; And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog And smote him—thus. He stabs himself.’
Like the narrator, Othello asks others to tell his story; also like the narrator, he has felt the burden of immeasurable jealousy. Unlike Desdemona, however, the narrator’s wife is, perhaps, not wholly innocent. Othello’s story about the “malignant” and “turbaned Turk” is a metaphor for himself: a man who hurt a Venetian (Desdemona) and “traduced the state.” By killing himself, Othello seeks the punishment he deserves for behaving like a “circumcised dog.” At the end of his letter, the narrator writes,”It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful.” He fears that he, too, will kill himself out of remorse, if his wife is innocent and he left her to her fate with the Germans. Although the narrator begs V. not to allude to Othello in his title, Nabokov’s doing so implies that the narrator will meet the same fate as Shakespeare’s tragic hero. As Stephen Jan Parker writes in Understanding Vladimir Nabokov (1987), “The serious point of these games of parody and allusion” is that they set Nabokov’s works “within a line of literary antecedents” which add depth to the works at hand. Thus, “That in Aleppo Once …” is enriched greatly by a reader’s understanding of Othello.
Nabokov also has his narrator allude to the marriage of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin: “She was much younger than I—not as much younger as was Natalie of the lovely bare shoulders and long ear-rings in relation to swarthy Pushkin,” but young enough to allow “a sufficient margin for that kind of retrospective romanticism which finds pleasure in imitating the destiny of a unique genius.” Like Pushkin, the narrator is a Russian poet with a younger wife. More significant is the fact that Pushkin was betrayed by his wife as the narrator fears he has been. The narrator states that Natalie “yawned” whenever Pushkin’s verse “happened to exceed the length of a sonnet,” but that his own wife was “attracted by the obscurity” of his poetry. The narrator’s wife’s fascination with his verse, however, proves ephemeral, since she eventually “tore a hole through its veil and saw a stranger’s unlovable face.”
The narrator makes another allusion when he tells V., “I come to you like that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described.” The lady in question here is the title character of Anton Chekhov’s story, “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (1899). Chekhov’s story concerns Anna Sergeyevna, a young woman in an unhappy marriage who eventually betrays her husband with Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, a married man whom she meets while on holiday. The narrator’s comparison of himself to Anna Sergeyevna is significant, for in Chekhov’s story she is a confused person who cannot reconcile her desires with her duty, just as the narrator cannot reconcile his love for his wife with what he thought was his duty to himself in forsaking her.
While describing to V. the first time he kissed his wife, the narrator compares the moment to “that blinding blast” caused when a soldier picks up “a small doll from the floor of a carefully abandoned house.” In the context of World War II, the doll is meant to be viewed as a booby-trap containing an explosive detonated by the unwitting soldier; in the context of their marriage, the soldier and the doll symbolize the narrator and his wife. Like a doll, the narrator’s wife seems innocent and harmless, but, like this particular doll, she is capable of destruction. Like the soldier, the narrator is attracted to the doll but fails to realize that the house has been “carefully abandoned”: the doll is part of a larger set-up meant to destroy such unsuspecting fools. Death lurks in unlikely places, such as the abandoned house or the “vacuum” of Central Park, where the narrator composes the letter intimating his suicidal thoughts.
A second symbol is the dog mentioned by the narrator’s wife to him at the train station and to Anna Vladimirovna in Nice. Although the dog does not exist, the narrator’s wife becomes distraught at the mere thought of such an animal being abandoned and “whining behind a locked door.” Similarly, at the end of the story, the narrator feels remorse for abandoning his wife to the Germans in Marseilles.
Carol Ullmann (Editor) Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 15, Vladimir Nabokov, Published by Gale, 2002.