“RECRUITING”

The brief sketch “Recruiting” (“Nabor”), which was written and published in the summer of 1935, provides a provocative examination of a central issue for Nabokov in the mid-1930s: the relationship of the artistic consciousness to the subject of its creative apprehension. In probing the issue here, Nabokov touches upon one of its most protean facets – the treatment of one's own self as other. The architectonics of the work recalls Chekhov. Nabokov initially orients his focus in one direction, but then shifts the focus over the course of the narrative to end up in quite a different place. The sketch begins with a description of the inner impressions of a certain “Vasiliy Ivanovich,” an elderly émigré who has just attended the funeral of a friend and then sits in a park to reflect upon the past. The narrative mode which prevails in the opening section suggests that the narrator is of the omniscient, extrinsic type. At intervals, however, one detects signs of the presence of an intrinsic narrator, and about two-thirds of the way into the sketch, the work abruptly changes course, leaving Vasiliy Ivanovich to concentrate on a different set of subjects – an autobiographic intrinsic narrator, his relationship with the figure of Vasiliy Ivanovich, and his relationship to his own representative within the narrated world.