THE EYE

First UK edition, first printing. Original navy paper-covered boards with gilt lettering to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by George Mayhew. A very good or better copy, the binding square and firm, the boards clean, the bottom corner of the upper board slightly bumped. There is a little faint spotting to the top edge of the closed text-block and small marks to the margins of a few later pages, the contents are otherwise clean throughout and without stamps or inscriptions. In the rubbed, nicked and creased dustwrapper which has a few short closed tears at the edges. Not price-clipped (18s net to the front flap).

Translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. The novel was written in 1930 while Nabokov and his wife, Véra (to whom the novel is dedicated), were living in Berlin, where the novel is set among the expatriate community there during the late 1920s. "The theme of 'The Eye' is the pursuit of an investigation which leads the protagonist [Smurov] through a hell of mirrors and ends in the merging of twin images" (from the author's enigmatic foreword to the English translation). (Field 0695).