The Gift was Vladimir Nabokov's final Russian novel, and is considered to be his farewell to the world he was leaving behind. He wrote it between 1935 and 1937 while living in Berlin.
The main characters is Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a writer living in Berlin, and the story concerns his attempts to someday be worthy of and able to create the book of his dreams, to be entitled "The Gift". 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.
"Its heroine is not Zina, but Russian literature. The plot of Chapter One centres in Fyodor's poems. Chapter Two is a surge toward Pushkin in Fyodor's literary progress and contains his attempt to describe his father's zoological explorations. Chapter Three shifts to Gogol, but its real hub is the love poem dedicated to Zina. Fyodor's book on Chernyshevski, a spiral within a sonnet, takes care of Chapter Four. The last chapter combines all the preceding themes and adumbrates the book Fyodor dreams of writing someday: The Gift." --- Nabokov, from the foreword
Although Nabokov did not perform the translation from Russian into English by himself (it was done by Michael Scammell), he did assist and supervise the process, so the English version can be considered more authoritative than most translations.
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Last updated: 05-21-2005 19:35:36
