 Brilliant's audio presents the unabridged recording of The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov. Performed by Fred Stella. Tuvera. Forward. The Russian title of this little novel is Suglidartai. It is an ancient military term, meaning spy or watcher, neither of which extends as flexibly as the Russian word. After toying with emissary and gladiator, I gave up trying to blend sound and sense and contended myself with matching The Eye at the end of the long stalk. Under that title, the story weaved its pleasant way through three installments of Playboy in the first months of 1965. I composed the original text in 1930 in Berlin where my wife and I rented two rooms from a German family on quite Louis-Pulstase. And at the end of that year, it appeared in the Russian Emigre Review, Sovramenya Zapisky, in Paris. The people in the book are the favorite characters of my literary youth. Russian expatriates living in Berlin, Paris or London. Actually, of course, they might just as well have been Norwegians in Naples or Ambrations in Ambridge. I've always been indifferent to social problems, merely using the material that happens to be near, as a voluble diner pencils a street corner on a tablecloth or arranges a crumb and two olives in a diagrammatic position between menu and salt-seller. One amusing result of this indifference to community life and to the intrusions of history is that the social group casually swept into artistic focus acquires a falsely permanent heir. It is taken for granted at a certain time in a certain place by the Emigre writer and his Emigre readers. The Ivan Ivanovich and Lev Osipovich of 1930 have long been replaced by non-Russian readers who are puzzled and irritated today by having to imagine a society they know nothing about. For I do not mind repeating again and again that bunches of pages have been torn out of the past by the destroyers of freedom ever since Soviet propaganda almost half a century ago misled foreign opinion into ignoring or denigrating the importance of Russian emigration which still awaits its chronicler. The time of the story is 1924 to 25. Civil war in Russia has ended some four years ago. Lenin has just died but his tyranny continues to flourish. Twenty German marks are not quite five dollars. The expatriates in the Berlin of the book change from paupers to successful businessmen.