The scout

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The Scout ( Russian Соглядатай , Sogljadatai) is a short novel by the exiled Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov .

The novel is about a Russian exile in Berlin who, after attempting suicide , suffers an identity disorder and only observes himself from the outside or perceives himself through the observations of others.

The Scout is one of Nabokov's early works and is his fourth novel, which he wrote in Russian in Berlin and published in Paris in 1930 under the pseudonym W. Sirin .

action

The protagonist of the novel, the roughly 25-year-old Smurow, lived in 1924 as a private tutor with a Russian emigrant family in Berlin. He has an affair with a married woman whose jealous husband Kashmarin comes to see him and beats him with a stick in front of his students. Smurow then tries to shoot himself. When he comes to again, he thinks he is dead and is only imagining all experiences . He finds a job with a Jewish bookseller and is accepted into a group of Russian emigrants who meet in the apartment of the rich businessman Khrushchev. Increasingly obsessively , he researches how the other Russian exiles who frequent the place perceive him and even steals their mail. He falls in love with his daughter Varvara Khrushchev, known as Vanya, who is engaged to Muchin, another regular visitor to the family. After confessing his love to her and trying in vain to kiss her, he flees the apartment. On the street he meets the meanwhile divorced Kashmarin, who is reconciled with him and offers him a job as a car salesman. In the last section of the novel, Smurow praised it as lucky to be an uninvolved observer, a “never twitching eye”, allegedly no longer affected by the iniquity of the world. Nabokov only added the quote to the English translation in 1965. It should justify their title The Eye , which in its homophony with Engl. I - "I" contains a play on words .

shape

In the Russian original, the novel is divided into six chapters. In the English version and the German translation by Dieter E. Zimmer , which is based on this, it is divided into 16 unnumbered sections.

Nabokov linguistically depicts the identity disorder of his protagonist by first introducing him as a first-person narrator , changing the narrative perspective from the moment he wakes up after attempting suicide and speaking of him in the third person . It is soon suggested that Smurow and the first-person narrator watching him are actually one and the same person. But it is only almost at the end of the novel, when in a scene in a flower shop the first-person narrator merges with his reflection in which Smurow can be seen and shortly afterwards Kashmarin addresses him by name, is it explicitly stated. That is what Nabokov's art is, according to Zimmer: as he suggests to the reader. Nabokov's biographer speaks of a “brilliant game with perspective”.

Nabokov makes use of unreliable narration for the first time in the Scout , a stylistic device that would later become typical of him. The ego in the novel is an unreliable narrator insofar as it keeps its identity with the Smurow observed by him secret from the reader. But the opinions of others about who Smurow actually is are also unreliable, contradictory or blatantly wrong. During his research, Smurow learns that he is believed to be a brutal officer in the White Army , a show-off and weakling, a Soviet agent, a homosexual , a kleptomaniac , a poet and a baron ; his beloved Vanya only calls him a good and clever person. Most painful for Smurow is the image that the aged Uncle Pasha has of him, because he confuses him with Muchin and takes him for Vanya's bridegroom, which gives Smurow hope for a short time that his longing will be fulfilled.

As Nabokov explained in an interview in 1966, The Scout is the first of his novels in which two realities compete with one another. In this respect, it is considered to be the forerunner of the great "two-world cosmologies" such as Pale Fire or Ada or The Desire .

Creation and publication

The 30-year-old Nabokov wrote the novel in 1930 in Berlin-Schöneberg , where he in the Luitpoldstraße with his wife Vera two rooms to sublet inhabited. So he was part of the same milieu of Russian emigrants in Berlin that he describes in the novel. In his foreword to the English-language edition of 1965, however, he explains that his real Berlin friends from the 1920s are not the models for the characters in the novel, but rather "favorite characters of his literary youth: Russian emigrants in Berlin, Paris or London".

At the end of the year the novel was published in the Russian-language magazine Sowremennyje sapiski in Paris, and a Russian-language book edition followed in 1938 in an anthology with twelve short stories by Nabokov, also in Paris. In 1935 a French-language edition was published. An English translation made by his son Dmitri Nabokov appeared in the first three issues of the men's magazine Playboy in 1965 . It is the textual basis of the translation into German that Dieter E. Zimmer presented in 1985 as part of his work edition.

expenditure

  • Соглядатай. In: Современные записки ( Sowremennye Sapiski , Paris) XLIV, November 1930, pp. 91–152.
    • Book edition: Соглядатай. In: Соглядатай (together with twelve short stories by Nabokov), Russkija Sapiski, Paris 1938.
  • L'Aguet . French by Denis Roche. In: Les Oeuvres 164 (1935), pp. 313-381.
  • The Eye . English by Dmitri Nabokov. In: Playboy January – March 1965
    • Book edition: The Eye . English by Dmitri Nabokov. Phaedra, New York 1965.
  • The scout . German by Dieter E. Zimmer. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1985.
    • Paperback edition: The Scout . German by Dieter E. Zimmer. rororo, Reinbek near Hamburg 2008.

Research literature

  • D. Barton Johnson: Eyeing Nabokov's Eye . In: Canadian-American Slavic Studies , 19/3 (1985), pp. 328-350.
  • Olga Skonechnaia: “People of the Moonlight: Silver Age Parodies in Nabokov's The Eye and The Gift ”, in: Nabokov Studies , 1993, Issue 3, pp. 33–52.
  • D. Barton Johnson: "The Eye" , in: Vladimir E. Alexandrov (Ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov , Routledge, New York 1995, ISBN 0-8153-0354-8 , pp. 130-135.
  • Julian W. Connolly: "Metamorphosis of a Dreamer: From Dostoevskii's White Nights to Nabokov's The Eye ", in: Robert A. Maguire, Alan Timberlake (Eds.): American Contributions to the 13th International Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, August 2003, Volume 2: Literature. , Slavica, Bloomington 2003, pp. 31-38.
  • Corinne Scheiner: "In Search of the 'Real' Smurov: Doubling and the Dialogic Construction of Identity in Nabokov's Sogliadatai (The Eye) ", in: Catherine O'Neil, Nicole Boudreau, Sarah Krive (eds.): Poetics. Self. Place: Essays in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone. Slavica, Bloomington 2007, pp. 601-613.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer : Afterword by the editor . In: Vladimir Nabokov: The Scout . German by Dieter E. Zimmer. rororo, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008, pp. 116 and 134.
  2. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: Afterword by the editor . In: Vladimir Nabokov: The Scout . German by Dieter E. Zimmer. rororo, Reinbek near Hamburg 2008, p. 122.
  3. ^ A b Dieter E. Zimmer: Afterword by the editor . In: Vladimir Nabokov: The Scout . German by Dieter E. Zimmer. rororo, Reinbek near Hamburg 2008, p. 117.
  4. ^ Donald F. Morton: Vladimir Nabokov with self-testimonials and picture documents . rororo, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1992, p. 40
  5. ↑ Natalia Stagl: Muse and Antimuse. The poetics of Vladimir Nabokov . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2006, p. 39.
  6. ↑ D. Barton Johnson: Eyeing Nabokov's Eye . In: Canadian-American Slavic Studies , 19/3 (1985), pp. 328-350, quoted in Dieter E. Zimmer: Afterword of the editor . In: Vladimir Nabokov: The Scout . German by Dieter E. Zimmer. rororo, Reinbek near Hamburg 2008, p. 118.
  7. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov: Foreword by the author to the English language edition. In: Vladimir Nabokov: The Scout . German by Dieter E. Zimmer. rororo, Reinbek near Hamburg 2008, p. 109.
  8. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov: Foreword by the author to the English language edition. In: Vladimir Nabokov: The Scout . German by Dieter E. Zimmer. rororo, Reinbek near Hamburg 2008, p. 109.