Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigrée; living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater...
Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigrée; living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years la...
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
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… I had no shell of that kind… (查看原文)
Bland plot yet well structured. Typical Nabokovian semantic tricks can be traced everywhere— the narratorial “I” confounds the reader with the “eye”. The main motif/theme are mirrors and reflective im...Bland plot yet well structured. Typical Nabokovian semantic tricks can be traced everywhere— the narratorial “I” confounds the reader with the “eye”. The main motif/theme are mirrors and reflective images — a twisted version of the Doppelgänger tale and looking-glass self theory. VB’s first attempt of using the unreliable first person narrator.(展开)
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弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫 作者
柯艾
上海译文出版社2008版
淡痕
上海译文出版社2008版
王毛毛
上海译文出版社2020版
0 有用 rachel 2019-08-29 13:45:50
这是俄罗斯版穆赫兰道吗？？？
0 有用 ada 2023-05-27 22:50:03 中国香港
Bland plot yet well structured. Typical Nabokovian semantic tricks can be traced everywhere— the narratorial “I” confounds the reader with the “eye”. The main motif/theme are mirrors and reflective im... Bland plot yet well structured. Typical Nabokovian semantic tricks can be traced everywhere— the narratorial “I” confounds the reader with the “eye”. The main motif/theme are mirrors and reflective images — a twisted version of the Doppelgänger tale and looking-glass self theory. VB’s first attempt of using the unreliable first person narrator. (展开)
0 有用 Hecate_ 2011-09-21 22:00:03
Yet another psycho novel.
0 有用 Polyommatinae 2018-10-10 11:33:44
brief yet tricky, intricate and playful.
2 有用 silhouette 2022-11-03 15:46:47 北京
讨厌陀思妥耶夫斯基的纳博科夫，居然塑造了一个几乎像地下室人的兄弟般的“眼睛”。可以感受到他的自作聪明，但是故事写得很有趣，让我讨厌不起来。虽然原文是俄语，这版是他儿子翻译的，但已经可以感受到为什么他被称为master of prose，或许他从来没有过“词语的局限性”之类的困扰吧。