The research material in this article is V. Nabokov’s short story A Nursery Tale (1926), which, by virtue of the literary genre signalled in the title, disposes us to consider the author’s communicative intention. The methodological inspiration for the research is M. Bakhtin’s genological reflection and his concept of the genre as “a representative of creative memory in the process of literature development”; W. Propp’s study and J. Derrida’s idea about fairy tales has also proved helpful. Analysis and interpretation of the short story A Fairy Tale has allowed one to distinguish particular elements and devices aimed at the short story genre transformation with special regard to the titular (fairy-tale) form of expression. The special status of the work’s protagonist is demonstrated, his creative activity understood as a kind of game, whose creator and actor is the protagonist himself, while the realisation of his erotic desire is treated as a way of regarding Femininity and of opening to “the other”, precisely connected in Nabokov’s short story with the female figure. On the parabolic/fabulous level the hero’s dream (collecting “a harem of women”) is interpreted as a literary device – an expression of romantic irony revealing the opposing forces governing human existence, a conflict between everyday reality and the world of creative fantasy/imagination. In consequence, Nabokov’s A Nursery Tale is read as an example of a narrative parabolic fairy tale.