Product Description

The Gift is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapestry of literature and butterflies tells the story of Fyodor's pursuits as a writer. Its heroine is not Fyodor's elusive and beloved Zina, however, but Russian prose and poetry themselves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70918 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-05
• Original language: Russian
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author
Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 in St Petersburg. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English, most famously, Lolita. Between 1923 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems and translations in the Russian language and established himself as one of the most outstanding Russian émigré writers. He died in 1977.

Customer Reviews

Nabokov's difficult art
In my opinion, Nabokov is one of those writers who have been ill-served by his admirers, who risk creating an unachievable sense of expectation. For example, the back cover of my edition of `The Gift' quotes John Updike stating that Nabokov brought 'paradise wherever he alighted'. This would not describe my experience of Nabokov's last novel written in Russian and subsequently translated into English. Nonetheless, some of the writing, even in translation, achieves a shimmering, impressionistic intensity, somewhere between dream story and realism.

In comparison, other parts of the novel appear to be little more than clever exercises in parody and to appreciate these you need to know your Russian literature. Nabokov would have probably expected no less of his readers; he once stated in an interview:

`I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn-- so much the better. Art is difficult.'

I was able to recognise the impersonation of Dostoyevsky's writing in the scene where a self-important group of émigré writers are arguing over membership of their irrelevant committee, but other acts of literary ventriloquism passed me by. The purported biography of a real writer Chernyshevsky, by an imaginary writer, the protagonist of the novel, Fyodor, would have been of contemporary relevance in the period the novel was written as his work `What is to done?', influenced the revolutionary movement in Russia. Nabokov had personal cause to excoriate the revolution as it resulted in the upheaval of his family and the subsequent assassination of his father, but the character dismemberment of Lenin's favourite author seems overly esoteric today.

The real interest lies in the evocation of the émigré life, and the impetus this gives to Fyodor in terms of the his literary development, as well as his relationship with his muse, Zina. Devotees of the modernist novel will ponder on the ways in which the imaginary and the real are intertwined as these themes are explored. Nevertheless, whilst 'The Gift' is a book with many attractions, overall it is perhaps one for the specialist, even academic, reader, rather than someone looking for further immersion in Nabokov's world after the experience of `Lolita'.