Frank, Siggy. Narrative Surveillance and Omniscience: Traces of Historiographic Metafiction in Nabokov's Work. 2026

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 struc-

tures 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.