Premise: A Matter of Chance is a short story by Vladimir Nabokov written in Russian under his pen name Vladimir Sirin in Berlin in 1924. It was rejected by the newspaper "Rul" and first published by the emigre magazine "Segodnya" in Riga. In 1974 it became part of a collection of thirteen stories called "Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories" published by McGraw-Hill.
Hypothesis: Nabokov was dead in 1974 when the story was published as part of a collection.