"Terra Incognita" is a short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

 that was first published in the émigré journal Posledniya Novosti in Paris in 1931. Translated by the author and his son

Dmitri Nabokov

Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov is an American opera singer and translator. He is the only child of writer Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera Nabokov, and is currently executor of his father's literary estate.-Background:...

, the story was published in English in The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

in May, 1963, and later added to A Russian Beauty and Other Stories

A Russian Beauty and Other Stories

A Russian Beauty and Other Stories is a collection of thirteen short stories by Vladimir Nabokov. All were written in Russian by Nabokov between 1923 and 1940 as an expatriate in Berlin, Paris, and other places in western Europe. They appeared individually in the Russian émigré press...

.

Plot summary

Vallière who is also the narrator, his friend Gregson, and Cook - "reminiscent of a Shakespearean clown" - are escaping from Zonraki, trying to cross the yet unknown country to reach the Gurano Hills. The mission is ill-fated. Vallière is sick and febrile. Cook takes off with the Badonian porters, the supplies, and the collections. Gregson and Vallière decide to move on, but are soon joined again by the contrite Cook who apparently was left behind by the Badonians. The narrator is experiencing hallucinations as the journey winds down to its end. He sees at times in "ambiguous transparency" a wardrobe, a ceiling, wallpaper, an armchair, a tumbler with a teaspoon, a pillow, but these images on closer inspection dissolve into the surroundings of the expedition. Gregson and Cook start to quarrel, and end up killing each other. The narrator is alone, his reality is the tropical world with the two corpses; he is getting weaker, fading away. "As a last motion" he tries to write something down, but the notebook has slipped. Groping along the blanket, he cannot find it.

Analysis

Nabokov who would later build more elaborate fantasy worlds with Zembla

Pale Fire

Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the poet. Together these elements form a narrative in which both authors are...

 and Zoolandia

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1969.Ada began to materialize in 1959, when Nabokov was flirting with two projects: "The Texture of Time" and "Letters from Terra." In 1965, he began to see a link between the two ideas, finally composing a unified novel...

 takes the reader into the tropical hell of Badonia located between the mysterious land of Zonraki and the elusive Gurano Hills, where the fragrance of Vallieria mirifica meets the smell of ipecacuanha (the active ingredient in ipecac, an emetic). Valliere seems to die at the end of the doomed journey, but remains present as an albeit unreliable narrator

Unreliable narrator

An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...

. The accoutrements of a room of a sick person break from time to time into the story, and may at the very end - in the form of the blanket - take over suggesting the tropical episode to be the hallucination of a febrile mind. Alternatively the tropical experience may be the real one, and the sickbed interjections just the imaginations of a fading mind. The two worlds are juxtaposed and the reader is challenged on how to perceive reality.