Vladimir Nabokov's story "Cloud, Castle, Lake" is about the assault on true feelings, true happiness, by the forced and artificial vision of happiness advocated by totalitarian regimes. Although the story is primarily concerned with Nazi Germany and Nazism, it is also about totalitarianism, more generally; there are a few references to the Soviet Union. In his preface to his novel Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov says that he saw both the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes "in terms of one dull beastly farce" (p. 5).
The story also reflects Nabokov's prejudice against Germans. (In VN, The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, the biographer Andrew Field refers to "Cloud, Castle, Lake" as "one of [Nabokov's] very sharp satires on the German character" [p. 157].)
Nabokov is satirizing the Nazi ideal of happiness, and totalitarian ideals of happiness, by contrasting them with real happiness, and showing how Vasiliy Ivanovich, the protagonist, is tortured when he finds it. Vasiliy Ivanovich's happiness is individual and spontaneous; it is not exactly what anyone else feels, and it cannot be commanded, produced on demand, but is elusive, sudden, and comes when it "wants" to.
The false Nazi happiness is expected of everyone, all the time; everyone is expected to feel the same things as everyone else, with no variation, and all at the same time; the only variations in mood are to be felt on demand, by everyone together. The people are supposed to respond to the special stimulator's stimulations; that the Bureau of Pleasantrips finds it necessary to send one demonstrates the artificiality of the false happiness, their enthusiasm, their pleasure, the entire trip, everything except Vasiliy Ivanovich's feelings and desires.
It is obvious that the story concerns Germany, as it is set there and all the characters are German except for Vasiliy Ivanovich and one old Russian (who runs an inn next to the lake). The connection to Nazism is not very subtle either. Images related to Nazi propaganda appear in the story frequently - the Germans represent these images of Nazi propaganda, but caricaturized, satirized.
For example, the leader of the group, a "lanky young man in Tyrolese garb" is "burned the color of a cockscomb," with "huge brick-red knees ... and his nose look[s] lacquered" [emphasis mine]--i.e., he has overdone the outdoorsy, suntanned look that the healthy, hearty Aryan male is supposed to have. Everything about him is like a Nazi poster, except for his overdone exposure to the sun, which has turned him red. "... huge brick red knees"--this is a caricature of the muscularity and physical development that the "Aryan male" is supposed to have, turning it into something ugly, gawky, and a little grotesque.
The story is full of somewhat subtle suggestions of violence, unsubtle suggestions of violence, and blatant examples of it, especially towards the end. The atmosphere of threat and coercion is quite visible, although some of the means of portraying it, making it felt, are quite subtle (i.e., "they climbed out of the train"). The violence starts out somewhat subtle, and suggested, and becomes more and more blatant throughout the story. The elderly clerk's wife "sketched out in the air the outline of a backhand box on the ear" (p. 431).
The narrator refers to "all the absurdity and horror of the situation" (p. 432). The song which everyone has to sing (p. 432-33) contains the phrases "knotted stick"; "tramping" and then "tramp"; "Kill the hermit and his trouble"; "Where the field mouse screams and dies." The leader makes Vasiliy Ivanovich sing solo: an example of, not violence--that comes later--but coercion (p. 433).
On the same page, the party (except for Vasiliy Ivanovich) "merge[s] together, forming one collective, wobbly, many-handed being, from which one could not escape": this strongly increases the feeling of threat in the story, and makes the train seem more like a prison, adding an element of claustrophobia. When Vasiliy Ivanovich is put in the same room as the elderly clerk at the inn, the clerk is described as "a great bully of a man" (p. 434).
Vasiliy Ivanovich is forced to eat a cigarette butt (the whole game with the benches is also incredibly vulgar and lecherous - this part seems also to express Nabokov's prejudice against German culture). The most obvious reference, and the severest and most intense, to the violence of Nazi Germany is when Vasiliy Ivanovich is tortured by the rest of the party on the train, after he tries desperately to stay by the cloud, castle, and lake (p. 437).
One paragraph before that, there is a less blatant and intense reference, but perhaps more sinister, to the violence: "I am responsible for each of you," the leader says, "and shall bring back each of you, alive or dead." This is only an implied verbal threat, not an act of physical violence like the many such acts in the following paragraph, but it is more sinister, in a way, as it suggests both fanaticism and, possibly, murder.
