First published in Atlantic Monthly in 1943, the story takes epistolary form, with an unnamed narrator describing his recollections of himself and his wife's deteriorating relationship while fleeing German occupation during Case Anton.
[2] Denoting such events within the confines of this story as "the gentle Germans roared into Paris" Nabokov foregrounds the conflict between the unnamed narrator against the heightened backdrop of the contemporary warfare of World War II during the time.
[3]: 560 The title of Nabokov's short story is borrowed from Shakespeare's Othello in which the titular character is driven out of misguided jealousy and despair to murder his wife and lover with his own hands.
With a self-awareness of his ill-fate Othello closes out the play with the following lines before he commits suicide, "...Set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him thus."
Through other contacts, the narrator reveals he was able secure passage towards Paris to await the necessary papers for full departure to the United States.
After arriving in Nice the narrator receives little help from police as he reflects on his misfortune in comparison to the stories he hears concerning people of Jewish descent from his fellow Russian immigrants.
A mixture of references have been observed within "That in Aleppo Once..." including Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Nabokov's narrator as perceiving themselves to be like the woman in Anton Chekov's short story "The Lady with the Dog," Shakespeare's Othello, and writer Alexander Pushkin's relationship with his wife Nathalia[5] of whom Nabokov's narrator references as "Nalthalie" in certain situational likeness to his marriage with his young unnamed wife.
Pushkin believed his wife to be in an affair with a Cassio-like man, Georges d' Anthes, by including theses references Nabokov provides a sense of connection between reality and imagination.
[5] Professor Brian Quinn of Kyushu University connects Russian Literary Tradition being evoked by Nabokov as a part of subverting art's highest recognitions against the harsh realities of poverty, death, and exile that surreally form an 'other' or as recognized, 'virtual reality' departure understood of twentieth century experience.