Narrative Surveillance and Omniscience: Traces of Historiographic Metafiction in Nabokov's Work

This essay repositions Vladimir Nabokov within the genealogy of historiographic metafiction. Through close readings of stories from his Berlin period and the later "Double Talk" and Pnin , the essay shows that Nabokov's fiction absorbs the surveillance culture of 1930s Germany in narrative structures that link omniscient narration with authoritarianism, suggesting the complicity of realist conventions with political repression. Pnin develops this critique further by exposing the ethical and narrative paradox of omniscient narration in the context of the Holocaust. By revealing the historicist impulse underlying Nabokov's ostensibly apolitical aesthetics, the essay suggests that the antecedents of historiographic metafiction reach back to Nabokov's early writing.