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El Ojo

Name: El Ojo
Author: Nabokov, Vladimir
ISBN: 9788433966278

by Nabokov, Vladimir

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Synopsis

Una extraña historia situada en el ambiente típico de las primeras novelas de Nabokov, el universo cerrado de la emigración rusa en la Alemania prehitleriana. En medio de esta burguesía ilustrada y expatriada, Smurov, el protagonista de la historia y suicida frustrado, es unas veces espía bolchevique y otras héroe de la guerra civil; enamorado sin fortuna un día y homosexual al día siguiente. De modo que, sobre una base de novela de misterio (en la que sobresalen dos escenas memorables, excelsamente nabokovianas: la del librero Weinstock invocando a los espíritus de Mahoma, César, Pushkin y Lenin, y el desgarrador y sospechoso relato de Smurov acerca de su huida de Rusia), Nabokov constituye una narración que va mucho más lejos, porque el enigma a desvelar es el de una identidad capaz de mudar de color con la misma frecuencia que un camaleón. Orgía de la confusión, baile de las identidades, celebración del guiño, "El ojo" es una inquietante y deliciosa novela corta de Nabokov.

About the Author, Nabokov, Vladimir

Vladimir Nabokov

Readers of Vladimir Nabokov's books might be slightly uncomfortable with them, were they not so awe-inspiring. Nabokov had a penchant for writing about the tragic and the taboo; but his erudite, inventive approach to narration -- buttressed by his formidable academic and cultural intellect -- made him a literary legend.

Biography

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.

Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.