The Eye

by Vladimir Nabokov

  BOOKS BY Vladimir Nabokov

  NOVELS

  Mary

  King, Queen, Knave

  The Defense

  The Eye

  Glory

  Laughter in the Dark

  Despair

  Invitation to a Beheading

  The Gift

  The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

  Bend Sinister

  Lolita

  Pnin

  Pale Fire

  Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

  Transparent Things

  Look at the Harlequins!

  SHORT FICTION

  Nabokov’s Dozen

  A Russian Beauty and Other Stories

  Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories

  Details of a Sunset and Other Stories

  The Enchanter

  DRAMA

  The Waltz Invention

  Lolita: A Screenplay

  The Man from the USSR and Other Plays

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS

  Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

  Strong Opinions

  BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

  Nikolai Gogol

  Lectures on Literature

  Lectures on Russian Literature

  Lectures on Don Quixote

  TRANSLATIONS

  Three Russian Poets: Translations of Pushkin,

  Lermontov, and Tiutchev

  A Hero of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)

  The Song of Igor’s Campaign (Anon.)

  Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

  LETTERS

  Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:

  The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971

  Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977

  MISCELLANEOUS

  Poems and Problems

  The Annotated Lolita

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1990

  Copyright © 1965 by Vladimir Nabokov

  All rights reserved under international and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

  Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Originally published in hardcover by Phaedra Publishers, Inc.,

  in 1965. This edition published by arrangement with the Estate

  of Vladimir Nabokov.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimorovich, 1899–1977.

  The eye / by Vladimir Nabokov—1st Vintage international ed.

  p. cm.—(Vintage international)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78756-9

  I. Title.

  PS3527.A15E9 1990

  813′.54—dc20 90-50265

  Cover art by John Gall

  Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

  v3.1

  Translated by Dmitri Nabokov

  in collaboration with the author

  To Véra

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  First Page

  About the Author

  Books by Vladimir Nabokov

  foreword

  The Russian title of this little novel is SOGLYADATAY (in traditional transliteration), pronounced phonetically “Sugly-dart-eye,” with the accent on the penultimate. It is an ancient military term meaning “spy” or “watcher,” neither of which extends as flexibly as the Russian word. After toying with “emissary” and “gladiator,” I gave up trying to blend sound and sense, and contented myself with matching the “eye” at the end of the long stalk. Under that title the story weaved its pleasant way through three installments of PLAYBOY in the first months of 1965.

  I composed the original text in 1930, in Berlin—where my wife and I rented two rooms from a German family on quiet Luitpoldstrasse—and at the end of that year it appeared in the Russian emigré review “SOVREMENNYYA ZAPISKI” in Paris. The people in the book are the favorite characters of my literary youth: Russian expatriates living in Berlin, Paris, or London. Actually, of course, they might just as well have been Norwegians in Naples or Ambracians in Ambridge: I have always been indifferent to social problems, merely using the material that happened to be near, as a voluble diner pencils a street corner on the table cloth or arranges a crumb and two olives in a diagrammatic position between menu and salt cellar. One amusing result of this indifference to community life and to the intrusions of history is that the social group casually swept into artistic focus acquires a falsely permanent air; it is taken for granted at a certain time in a certain place, by the emigré writer and his emigré readers. The Ivan Ivanovich and Lev Osipovich of 1930 have long been replaced by non-Russian readers who are puzzled and irritated today by having to imagine a society they know nothing about; for I do not mind repeating again and again that bunches of pages have been torn out of the past by the destroyers of freedom ever since Soviet propaganda, almost half a century ago, misled foreign opinion into ignoring or denigrating the importance of Russian emigration (which still awaits its chronicler).

  The time of the story is 1924–5. Civil War in Russia has ended some four years ago. Lenin has just died but his tyranny continues to flourish. Twenty German marks are not quite five dollars. The expatriates in the Berlin of the book range from paupers to successful businessmen. Examples of the latter are Kashmarin, Matilda’s cauchemaresque husband (who evidently escaped from Russia by the southern route, via Constantinople), and the father of Evgenia and Vanya, an elderly gentleman (who judiciously directs the London branch of a German firm, and keeps a dancing girl). Kashmarin is probably what the English call “middleclass,” but the two young ladies at 5 Peacock Street obviously belong to the Russian nobility, titled or untitled, which does not prevent them from having Philistine reading tastes. Evgenia’s fat-faced husband, whose name sounds rather comic today, works in a Berlin bank. Colonel Mukhin, a nasty prig, fought in 1919 under Denikin, and in 1920 under Wrangel, speaks four languages, affects a cool, worldly air, and will probably do very well in the soft job into which his future father-in-law is steering him. Good Roman Bogdanovich is a Balt imbued with German, rather than Russian, culture. The eccentric Jew Weinstock, the pacifist woman doctor Marianna Nikolaevna, and the classless narrator himself are representatives of the many-faceted Russian intelligentsia. These tips should make things a little easier for the kind of reader who (like myself) is wary of novels that deal with spectral characters in unfamiliar surroundings, such as translations from the Magyar or the Chinese.

  As is well known (to employ a famous Russian phrase), my books are not only blessed by a total lack of social significance, but are also mythproof: Freudians flutter around them avidly, approach with itching oviducts, stop, sniff, and recoil. A serious psychologist, on the other hand, may distinguish through my rain-sparkling crystograms a world of soul dissolution where poor Smurov only exists insofar as he is reflected in other brains, which in their turn are placed in the same strange, specular predicament as his. The texture of the tale mimics that of detective fiction but actually the author disclaims all intention to trick, puzzle, fool, or otherwise deceive the reader. In fact, only that reader who catches on at once will derive genuine satisfaction from THE EYE. It is unlikely that even the most credulous peruser of this twinkling tale will take long to realize who Smurov is. I tried it on an old English lady, two graduate students, an ice-hockey coach, a doctor, and the twelve-year-old child of a neighbor. The child was the quickest, the neighbor, the slowest.

  The theme of THE EYE is the pursuit of an investigation which leads the protagonist through a hell of mirrors and ends in the merging of twin images. I do not know if the keen pleasure I derived thirty-five ye
ars ago from adjusting in a certain mysterious pattern the various phases of the narrators quest will be shared by modern readers, but in any case the stress is not on the mystery but on the pattern. Tracking down Smurov remains, I believe, excellent sport despite the passing of time and books, and the shift from the mirage of one language to the oasis of another. The plot will not be reducible in the reader’s mind—if I read that mind correctly—to a dreadfully painful love story in which a writhing heart is not only spurned, but humiliated and punished. The forces of imagination which, in the long run, are the forces of good remain steadfastly on Smurov’s side, and the very bitterness of tortured love proves to be as intoxicating and bracing as would be its most ecstatic requital.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Montreux, April 19, 1965.

  I MET THAT WOMAN, THAT MATILDA, during my first autumn of émigré existence in Berlin, in the early twenties of two spans of time, this century and my foul life. Someone had just found me a house tutor’s job in a Russian family that had not yet had time to grow poor, and still subsisted on the phantasmata of its old St. Petersburg habits. I had had no previous experience in bringing up children—had not the least idea how to comport myself and what to talk about with them. There were two of them, both boys. In their presence I felt a humiliating constraint.

  They kept count of my smokes, and this bland curiosity made me hold my cigarette at an odd, awkward angle, as if I were smoking for the first time; I kept spilling ashes in my lap, and then their clear gaze would pass attentively from my hand to the pale-gray pollen gradually rubbed into the wool.

  Matilda, a friend of their parents, often visited them and stayed on for dinner. One night, as she was leaving, and there was a noisy downpour, they lent her an umbrella, and she said: “How nice, thank you very much, the young man will see me home and bring it back.” From that time on, walking her home was one of my duties. I suppose she rather appealed to me, this plump, uninhibited, cow-eyed lady with her large mouth, which would gather into a crimson pucker, a would-be rosebud, when she looked in her pocket mirror to powder her face. She had slender ankles and a graceful gait, which made up for many things. She exuded a generous warmth; as soon as she appeared, I would have the feeling that the heat in the room had been turned up, and when, after disposing of this large live furnace by seeing her home, I would be walking back alone amid the liquid sounds and quicksilver gloss of the pitiless night, I would feel cold, cold to the point of nausea.

  Later her husband arrived from Paris and would come to dinner with her; he was a husband like any other, and I did not pay much attention to him, except to notice the habit he had before speaking of clearing his throat into his fist with a rapid rumble; and the heavy bright-knobbed black cane with which he would tap on the floor while Matilda transformed the parting with her hostess into a buoyant soliloquy. After a month her husband left, and, the very first night I was seeing her home, Matilda invited me to come up to take a book she had been persuading me to read for a long time, something in French called Ariane, Jeune Fille Russe. It was raining as usual, and there were tremulous halos around the street lamps; my right hand was immersed in the hot fur of her moleskin coat; with my left I held an open umbrella, drummed upon by the night. This umbrella—later, in Matilda’s apartment—lay expanded near a steam radiator, and kept dripping, dripping, shedding a tear every half-minute, and so managed to run up a large puddle. As for the book, I forgot to take it.

  Matilda was not my first mistress. Before her, I was loved by a seamstress in St. Petersburg. She too was plump, and she too kept advising me to read a certain novelette (Murochka, the Story of a Woman’s Life). Both of these ample ladies would emit, during the sexual storm, a shrill, astonished, infantile peep, and sometimes it seemed to me that it had been a waste of effort, everything I had gone through when escaping from Bolshevist Russia, by crossing, frightened to death, the Finnish border (even if it was by express train and with a prosaic permit), only to pass from one embrace to another almost identical one. Furthermore, Matilda soon began to bore me. She had one constant and, to me, depressing subject of conversation—her husband. This man, she would say, was a noble brute. He would kill her on the spot if he found out. He worshiped her and was savagely jealous. Once in Constantinople he had grabbed an enterprising Frenchman and slapped him several times against the floor, like a rag. He was so passionate, it frightened you. But he was beautiful in his cruelty. I would try to change the subject, but this was Matilda’s hobbyhorse, which she straddled with her strong fat thighs. The image she created of her husband was hard to reconcile with the appearance of the man I had hardly noticed; at the same time I found it highly unpleasant to conjecture that perhaps it was not her fantasy at all, and at that moment a jealous fiend in Paris, sensing his predicament, was acting the banal role assigned to him by his wife: gnashing his teeth, rolling his eyes, and breathing heavily through the nose.

  Often, as I trudged home, my cigarette case empty, my face burning in the auroral breeze as if I had just removed theatrical make-up, every step sending a throb of pain echoing through my head, I would inspect my puny little bliss from this side and that, and marvel, and pity myself, and feel despondent and afraid. The summit of lovemaking was for me but a bleak knoll with a relentless view. After all, in order to live happily, a man must know now and then a few moments of perfect blankness. Yet I was always exposed, always wide-eyed; even in sleep I did not cease to watch over myself, understanding nothing of my existence, growing crazy at the thought of not being able to stop being aware of myself, and envying all those simple people—clerks, revolutionaries, shopkeepers—who, with confidence and concentration, go about their little jobs. I had no shell of that kind; and on those terrible, pastel-blue mornings, as my heels tapped across the wilderness of the city, I would imagine somebody who goes mad because he begins to perceive clearly the motion of the terrestrial sphere: there he is, staggering, trying to keep his balance, clutching at the furniture; or else settling down in a window seat with an excited grin, like that of the stranger on a train who turns to you with the words: “Really burning up the track, isn’t she!” But soon, all the swaying and rocking would make him sick; he would start sucking on a lemon or an ice cube, and lie down flat on the floor, but all in vain. The motion cannot be stopped, the driver is blind, the brakes are nowhere to be found—and his heart would burst when the speed became intolerable.

  And how lonely I was! Matilda, who would inquire coyly if I wrote poetry; Matilda, who on the stairs or at the door would artfully incite me to kiss her, only for the opportunity to give a sham shiver and passionately whisper, “You insane boy …”; Matilda, of course, did not count. And whom else did I know in Berlin? The secretary of an organization for the assistance of émigrés; the family that employed me as tutor; Mr. Weinstock, the owner of a Russian bookshop; the little old German lady from whom I had formerly rented a room—a meager list. Thus, my whole defenseless being invited calamity. One evening the invitation was accepted.

  IT was around six. The air indoors was growing heavy with the fall of dusk, and I was barely able to make out the lines of the humorous Chekhov story that I was reading in a stumbling voice to my charges; but I did not dare turn on the lights: those boys had a strange, unchildlike bent for thriftiness, a certain odious housekeeping instinct; they knew the exact prices of sausage, butter, electricity, various makes of cars. As I read aloud The Double-Bass Romance, trying vainly to entertain them, and feeling ashamed for myself and for the poor author, I knew they realized my struggle with the blurring dusk and were coolly waiting to see if I would last until the first light came on in the house across the street to set the example. I made it, and light was my reward.

  I was just preparing to put greater animation in my voice (at the approach of the most hilarious passage in the story) when suddenly the telephone rang in the hall. We were alone in the flat, and the boys immediately jumped up and raced each other toward the jangling. I remained with the open book in my lap,
smiling tenderly at the interrupted line. The call, it turned out, was for me. I sat down in a crackling wicker armchair and put the receiver to my ear. My pupils stood by, one on my right, the other on my left, imperturbably watching me.

  “I’m on my way over,” said a male voice. “You will be home, I trust?”

  “Your trust shall not be betrayed,” I answered cheerfully. “But who are you?”

  “You don’t recognize me? So much the better—it’ll be a surprise,” said the voice.

  “But I’d like to know who is speaking,” I insisted, laughing. (Afterward it was only with horror and shame that I could recall the arch playfulness of my tone.)

  “In due time,” said the voice tersely.

  Here I really started to frolic. “But why? Why?” I asked. “What an amusing way to …” I realized that I was talking to a vacuum, shrugged, and hung up.

  We returned to the parlor. I said, “Now then, where were we?” and, having found the place, resumed reading.

  Nevertheless, I felt an odd restlessness. As I read aloud mechanically, I kept wondering who this guest might be. A new arrival from Russia? I vaguely went through the faces and voices I knew—alas, they were not many—and I stopped for some reason at a student named Ushakov. The memory of my single university year in Russia, and of my loneliness there, hoarded this Ushakov like a treasure. When, during a conversation, I would assume a knowing, faintly dreamy expression at the mention of the festive song “Gaudeamus igitur” and reckless student days, it meant I was thinking of Ushakov, even though, God knows, I had had only a couple of chats with him (about political or other trifles, I forget what). It was hardly likely, though, that he would be so mysterious over the telephone. I lost myself in conjecture, imagining now a Communist agent, now an eccentric millionaire in need of a secretary.

  The doorbell. Again the boys dashed headlong into the hall. I put down my book and strolled after them. With great gusto and dexterity they drew the little steel bolt, fiddled with some additional gadget, and the door opened.