The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov: Vanya’s Answer
While a room darkens, a tutor reads Chekhov’s The Double-Bass Romance to two boys who know the price of electricity and are waiting to see whether he can last until a light appears in the house across the street.
His chosen comedy turns romantic overconfidence into public exposure: a musician admires a woman he does not know, leaves her flowers, loses his clothes, and eventually loses track of the woman who has entered his instrument case. Just as the tutor reaches what he calls the funniest passage, the telephone rings. The caller is the husband of the tutor’s lover, Matilda.
With the boys stationed on either side of the doorway, the husband rejects the tutor’s handshake and raises his cane. Nabokov holds the children, the light, and the two men in an almost motionless arrangement, then lets the narrator question the picture he has made: “perhaps my memory is stylized at this point.” What appeared to be continuous attention breaks into a series of impressions to which memory has given false permanence. Even the humiliation is revised with exactness. In flight, the tutor remembers striking one of the boys with his elbow, so the scene records two injuries at once: the beating he suffers and the child he hurts.
Spoiler warning: The rest of this essay discusses The Eye in full, including its ending.
The narrator’s divided identity in The Eye
After shooting himself in the chest, the narrator decides that his mind has continued beyond death.
He treats the hospital and its doctor as inventions of his surviving mind. The doctor confirms that the bullet caused only a light wound; the narrator takes this ordinary explanation as further proof of his power to invent. When the bookseller Weinstock appears without his usual mustache, the omission becomes evidence that he had made the world around him: “My fancy had not finished him in time.” Nabokov makes this reasoning pleasurable enough for us to follow, while the doctor’s diagnosis and the narrator’s bodily recovery contradict his belief that he has died.
The apparently disembodied observer soon fixes his attention on a young man named Smurov, who is the observer himself. Once the identity is disclosed, the book’s pleasure lies in hearing the adjustments by which a man turns an unbearable life into something he can inspect from a distance. The opening pages register an awareness so relentless that sleep gives him no relief; later, he deliberately revises the beating, the hospital, and other people’s estimates of him.
Sleep takes up his defense as well: after stealing a letter, he dreams himself pleading his innocence on a staircase while Vanya, the young woman he desires, is said to be inside the missing box. In the 1965 foreword, Nabokov mocks Freudian explanations; the novella establishes a narrower achievement, as Smurov’s conscious intelligence invents a whole arrangement of worlds to keep revising what has happened to him.
Nabokov expresses this method most exactly through a butterfly. Smurov imagines investigators describing the local races of a species until its original form seems to have disappeared; eventually, they designate a faded specimen collected by Linnaeus as the type.
He therefore seeks the original Smurov among the versions preserved by his acquaintances, noting how a cold or glowing soul changes the coloration of the man it remembers. The comparison is exact and comic because its classifier cannot stand outside the classification: the creature hunting its own type is Smurov, and scientific detachment becomes one more observed version of him.
Read beside Borges’s Evaristo Carriego, The Eye lets us compare two ways of composing a life from scattered evidence. Both works first appeared in 1930—Borges’s as a book, Nabokov’s in a journal.
Borges composes a poet and a neighborhood into a written life; Nabokov makes the biographer and his subject the same man, dependent on reports and refusals from the people around him.
Smurov, Vanya, and the cropped photograph
Beside Vanya and Mukhin, a photograph leaves only Smurov’s black elbow. Searching her room without permission for traces of her feelings, he finds the picture near her bed and treats the crop as devastating evidence. Soon he supplies another account: perhaps the missing portion was cut away so that it could be framed separately. Without any alteration to the photograph, an unbearable first reading yields to a consoling second one. From his almost absent body, Smurov constructs an elaborate interior life for Vanya.
Uncle Pasha then says that Vanya loves Smurov, and Smurov takes the statement as the photograph’s withheld answer.
With joy as his new premise, he reads her lowered eyelashes and small movements as declarations. In the crowded room the uncle offers congratulations, Vanya runs out, and her sister Evgenia restores the omitted fact: Pasha has confused Smurov with Mukhin, the man she intends to marry. Because Pasha has mistaken the men, the name that sounds like public confirmation supplies only another error for Smurov to interpret.
Chekhov’s double-bass case echoes in Smurov’s missing snuffbox, a connection traced in a study of Nabokov’s Russian subtexts. Chekhov’s princess chooses to curl inside the case when the naked musician offers it as a screen between them; Smurov’s dream assigns Vanya to the missing box through a declaration by Evgenia’s husband, Khrushchov, without granting her a choice.
Uncle Pasha’s confusion briefly feeds that fantasy; Evgenia corrects his name, and Vanya later refuses Smurov herself. Chekhov’s flowers, too, await a harsher use near the novella’s close.
Alone with Smurov on the balcony, Vanya answers him herself.
She calls him good and intelligent, later praising his kindness, imagination, and charm; during the same exchange, she asks him to release her hand. To his question about hope, she replies, “Absolutely none.” Smurov hears the word good as if it could change the status of the refusal. He disparages Mukhin, then embraces Vanya as she tries to leave; she has to free herself. Nabokov makes him preserve what defeats his preferred reading: he can reproduce her tears, lowered eyelid, and careful movements yet ranks his desire above her words.
Vanya’s balcony scene complicates an account tracing Smurov’s division to an absence of offered love and tenderness: she gives him a generous description of his character and refuses a romance.
Her kindness creates no obligation to return his desire or repair him. Her thoughts remain inaccessible through Smurov’s partial voice, which nevertheless preserves her explicit refusal, repeated requests, and physical withdrawal as evidence against the hope he wants to construct.
The Eye’s ending: the hand and the eye
Leaving the balcony, Smurov buys lilies of the valley. A side mirror in the flower shop briefly produces a second young man approaching with the bouquet, and the two figures join as he passes the glass. With the heavy flowers in hand, he rushes to his former address, thrusts them at the landlady, and asks to see his old room. She says it is rented; he slips past her and finds the plastered bullet mark, which briefly supports his account of death.
On the way out he quietly retrieves the bouquet she had gratefully accepted. His account of himself as a disembodied eye depends here on bodily acts: pushing past a protest, seeking one marked wall, and taking back the flowers.
The rejected handshake returns when Kashmarin, the man who beat him, catches up. Along with the offered hand come an apology, news of his divorce from Matilda, and the proposal of a better-paid job.
Trying to preserve his injured dignity, Smurov admits that he is touched and hides his pleasure in the flowers. The job could materially alter his life, and the scene gives practical weight to the comfort of being sought out and treated kindly by the man whose cane began his humiliation.
Against these concrete consolations, Smurov’s final insistence on happiness sounds both triumphant and needy. He swears that observation has made him invulnerable, speaks of Vanya possessively, and asks his audience to believe him, even as the imaginative power behind his self-description remains real.
Nabokov’s foreword calls the book a painfully humiliating love story and warns against reducing it to that account, keeping imagination among Smurov’s resources. We have already watched that imagination give the same photograph two meanings and turn a hospital into a private invention.
The coldness comes when the same power recruits Vanya into his happiness after her refusal has placed her beyond his authority. The ending makes the contradiction audible, then closes before Vanya’s cost receives the attention granted to Smurov’s humiliation.
Kashmarin offers the hand once withheld from Smurov; Vanya has had to pull hers free. Nabokov places three gestures in the same compressed space, each carrying a different history—the refused hand, the offered hand, and the escaped hand.
Smurov retells all three and ends by asking an imagined audience to believe him, the last request made by a man who calls himself invulnerable.
Sources
Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye, translated by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (Vintage International, 1990); includes Nabokov’s 1965 foreword.
Anton Chekhov, “Romance with a Double Bass”, translated by Michele A. Berdy. In The Eye the story is titled The Double-Bass Romance.
Penguin Random House’s Evaristo Carriego record dates Borges’s original book to 1930; Michael Juliar’s descriptive Nabokov bibliography identifies the complete Eye journal appearance in 1930 and its first book issue in 1938.
Pekka Tammi, Russian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Fiction: Four Essays (Tampere University Press, 1999), “Reading in Three Dimensions,” identifies the Chekhov instrument-case / Eye snuffbox connection and a further Gogol echo.
J. Morris, “The Gliding Eye: Nabokov’s Marvelous Terror”, The Southern Review 35, no. 1 (1999), argues that Smurov’s division is sustained by the lack of offered love and tenderness.
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