The Eye

Nabokov began writing “The Looker” in Berlin in 1929, and the following year the work was published in a magazine. However, it took eight years to wait for a book publication. Initially, together with the novella, Nabokov planned to include twenty-one short stories in the book, selected so that they would stylistically and thematically match the title work. But the volume of the resulting edition was financially unprofitable for the publisher, and from the original twenty-one stories Nabokov left thirteen, which are printed in this book in the sequence the author arranged them. These stories allow for a deeper understanding of the main idea of “The Looker” and a closer look at some of the author’s key themes: the theme of the transparency of the world and of life after death—both within the text and beyond it.