The Gift (Nabokov novel)

The Gift

First complete edition (1952)
Author	Vladimir Nabokov
Original title	Дар
Translator	Dmitri Nabokov, Michael Scammell, Vladimir Nabokov
Language	Russian
Publisher	G. P. Putnam's Sons (1963)
Publication date	1938 (serially, except Chapter Four), 1952 complete
Published in English	1963

The Gift (Russian: Дар, Dar; ) is Vladimir Nabokov's final Russian novel, and is considered to be his farewell to the world he was leaving behind. Nabokov wrote it between 1935 and 1937 while living in Berlin, and it was published in serial form under his nom de plume, Vladimir Sirin.

The Gift's fourth chapter, a pseudo-biography of the Russian writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky, was censored from publication in the Russian émigré journal that published the book's four other chapters.

The story's apparent protagonist is Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a Russian writer living in Berlin after his family fled the Bolshevik Revolution. Fyodor's literary ambitions and his development as a writer shape the book. In the fifth and final chapter, Fyodor states his ambition to write a book that in description is very similar to The Gift. In an interview to BBC2, Nabokov cited Fyodor as an example that not all the lives of his characters are grotesque or tragic; he said that Fyodor "is blessed with a faithful love and an early recognition of his genius."

It is possible to interpret the book as metafiction, and imagine that the book was actually written by Fyodor later in his life, though this is not the only possible interpretation.

Nabokov's son, Dmitri, translated the book's first chapter into English; Michael Scammell completed the rest. Nabokov then revised the translations of all five chapters in 1961.

Fyodor Konstantinovitch Cherdyntsev is a Russian émigré living in Berlin in the 1920s, and the chapter starts with him moving to a boarding-house on Seven Tannenberg Street. He has recently published a book of poems, and receives a call from Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski congratulating him on the poems and inviting him to come over to a party to read a favorable critique in a newspaper. The poems reach back to Fyodor’s childhood, which he spent with his sister Tanya in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and the Leshino manor, the country estate of the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs. Fyodor arrives at the party only to learn that he has fallen victim to a crude April fool’s joke; his book has not received any attention at all in the press. The Chernyshevskis had a son, Yasha, who looked like Fyodor and loved poetry. Yasha took his own life when he was caught in a tragic love triangle. Yasha's mother wants Fyodor to use Yasha's tragic end in his writings, but he declines. As a result of Yasha’s death, his father suffers episodes of insanity. When Fyodor returns to his “new hole” he realises he has brought the wrong keys with him, but after he waits a while a visitor comes out and Fyodor gets back in. Fyodor dawdles away the summer. In the fall he attends a literary meeting of Russian émigrés and there he meets Koncheyev, whom he considers a rival. A reading of a new play bores the audience. When Fyodor is about to leave he and Koncheyev discuss Russian literature at length and with great animation, but their discussion turns out to have been largely fictitious.