Forgive a lengthy response. I think Mr. Stadlen has found the heart of the S &S
story. Often our terminology, when we cannot speak face-to-face, obscures our
meanings, but the tenacity of discussion wins. I hope my extensive quotation
isn't too tedious, but it helps me respond without losing place.

"the narrator ... merely reporting, accurately, that the parents were
"confronted with the
problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged
in his mind"."

Exactly. Sometimes this requires us to follow narratives based on premises we
would generally dislike. I've found reading Dickens today requires me to
practically throw away everything I know about life. Martin Amis has related
how his father would read the books of certain authors while continously saying
aloud, "Oh no they didn't," or, "No she did not say that," or "That certainly
was not the case,"  as he faced down example after example of presumption, bad
faith, or ignorance from an unskilled author. The opposite is the case with VN,
with whom, if we are not seeing eye-to-eye, we generally need to look upwards.

As a professional, Mr. Stadlen can see why parents could not or should not act
as have these parents. I empathise with them because, although I know much less
about their ethnicity and religion than many readers who have posted here, their

dignity and heroism as aging, financially-dependent people in a nation not of
their birth, speaking a language less flexible and soul-centered as that of
their culture, their persistance in a tough alien world, command my respect.

The father's -- "To the devil with doctors!" -- is defiant and courageous. This
story takes place in a time in which elderly persons were often overwhelmed and
overpowered by a vast health care machine blandly staffed by doctors whose word
was more or less law. For many poor people, not much has changed. What Mr.
Stadlen says about the father's exercise of "faith" and being "responsible" are
right on target.

so if one regards "mere possibilities of improvement" as trivial. They may
appear less dramatic and absolute than a  hypothetical other-worldly afterlife
love-in of father, mother, and son. But is it not at least arguable that it is
precisely such a happy-ever-after afterlife solution that trivialises the
tragedy?

Absolutely. VN would never posit a view of greeting card sentimentality.
Consider his own share of history: blood-in-the-streets revolution witnessed as
a child, exile, world war, holocaust, exile ... One undoubted victim of the 20th
century who cannot be rehabilitated, resurrected, or reborn is the literary
"happy ending." This is why my childhood favorite Dickens now reads as somehow
more distant than Francois Villlon, who, in comparison, reads as familiarly as
Eminem.

"... my proposal that the boy himself may be making the third telephone call is
a kind
of deus ex machina appeal to miracles, whereas Dolinin's afterlife hypothesis
is no more than sound common sense."

I will have to look back in my undeleted mail for Dolinin's hypothesis, it
sounds intriguing. My tendency is to hew firmly to the theory that readers must
strictly confine their analysis to the material provided.  In this forum, others
have uncovered enormously more "material" in Nabokov's work than I was able to
initially perceive. VN is an author of such technique and dimension of mind
that, like an immensely gifted illusionist, he can manipulate fictional reality
to produce more active stimula, more adeptly, than many excellent minds can
process. Hence his teasing: "Oh, careless reader!"

My guess regarding the caller is one of the possibilities Stadlen mentions, that
of the girl who called twice before. It would be in keeping with the banal evils
this family has faced: faltering memory (the wife's mistakenly leaving the man
without the house key) the unpredictability of public transportation, a
dependency on assistance from another family member -- a situation that,
regardless of how generous, uncritical, or unquestioning the "prince" may or
may not be, is not as desirable as being in control of finances sufficient to
provide some buffer against the demands of life.

So, I see a stranger, not too bright or attentive but not malicious, simply
making the same annoying mistake time after time. Prosaic and inconsequential,
but I don't think VN needs us to believe that the forces arrayed against our
protagonists are larger than life. Simple dimwittedness, as relentless as a
buzzing fly, can sap our energy and deflate our hope. The last straw can be
merely the incensing sounds of someone nearby in a restaurant clearing their
sinuses or endlessly recapitulating their golf game.

"And even if the doctors were right ... why would that preclude "possibilities
of improvement", such as
... deciding he would like to come home again and his parents'deciding they
would like him home, even if advised against this by the doctors?"

True, and part of the uncaring professional ignorance that enchains the family.
I must apologize for discussing my unfortunate friend in an earlier post. The
personal anecdote gambit in literary discussion may be considered trivializing,
and certainly is a way of swinging the discussion onto tricky ground. In
addition, I wouldn't want that anecdote to be taken as my "last word" on the
resources of medicine. I inadvertantly stacked the deck when I neglected to
mention that my friend, several weeks earlier, had argued his primary physician
into letting him stop the lithium treatment that had stabilized him for at least
eight or nine months. Valium, too, is I think contraindicated for
schizophrenics, and may have helped triggered the disaster. In any event, an
unusual case with little to offer this context. Today, I would not deem any
psychiatric condition "incurable." And living with one's family whenever
possible is a better alternative.

Is it not believable that Vladimir Nabokov would enjoy setting this "chess
problem" in which readers, as it were, lose their "life current" between the
"two stations"

The phrase "life current" is a brilliant example of the gifts VN lays out for
the reader -- and which I missed entirely.

"... supremely intelligent human agency of Nabokov in preparing this trap for
readers to fall into and then learn from?"

More than almost any other author, VN prepared his stories and novels with a
complete sense of what one might call the "chemical properties" of each
character. It is doubly unusual for a writer who was so alert to the
"scientific" aspect of creating a story, so skilled at using time and the
ingredients of humanity and the world, to be simultaneously so extraordinarily
poetic. His descriptions of the weather in S&S have been aptly quoted in this
forum. I was entranced by S &S from the moment the narrator described how the
wife "waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his arm. He
kept clearing his throat in a special resonant way he had when he was upset."
And then, at the bus shelter, "a tiny half-dead unfledged bird was helplessly
twitching in a puddle."

The patient wife, the man's resonant clearing of his throat, a man of dignity,
hurt, exerting control over his pain, and then the image that encapsulates the
story, the bird. These words, these moments convey all the strength, and all
the fragility of a world.