The Man From the U. S. S. R. & Other Plays

The Pole is a one-act play in blank verse. It was written in 1923, when Nabokov was working as a farm labourer in France, and was first published on August 14 and 16 in Rul’ (The Rudder), a Russian newspaper of which Nabokov’s father had become editor in 1920. It was a response to Scott’s diaries, which Nabokov had seen in the British Museum some years earlier. It depicts the deaths of last four members of Scott’s crew, on their 1911/1912 expedition to the South Pole.