The Return of Chorb is a short story by Vladimir Nabokov written in Russian under his pen name Vladimir Sirin in Berlin in 1925. In 1929 it became part of a collection of fifteen short stories and twenty-four poems also called Vozvrashchenie Chorba in Russian by "V. Sirin". After its publication in the Russian emigre press the story was translated into English by Gleb Struve as The Return of Tchorb and published in the Paris magazine This Quarter in 1932. More than four decades later Nabokov retranslated the story, as he found Struve's translation "not accurate enough and far removed from my... present use of English", and incorporated the story in the collection Details of a Sunset and Other Stories in 1976. The two English translations are very different and represent an interesting study on Nabokov's theory of translation. The Kellers are a bourgeois couple living in a smaller German town whose daughter has married the Russian emigre writer Chorb. The distrust between Chorb and his father-in-law is deepened when Chorb and his bride escape from the formality of their wedding to spend their first night at a local seedy hotel.
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