Reading Aloud ... and Nabokov's short stories too ...

Prose as performance, I've concluded, is a species of show business – sometimes enjoyable but not as literature, despite Dickens’ fabled readings.

From Anecdotal Evidence.  And here too:

Nabokov’s short fiction, in Russian and English, never seems to get attention. He wrote small masterpieces – “A Guide to Berlin” and “Signs and Symbols,” among others. I don’t want to betray the deft reversal, the breathtaking shift in point of view, at the end of “Perfection.”