Tremendous. It requires attention and it lost me at times, as I was dodging puddles on the back streets, and Künstlerroman is not really my genre and I don't know nearly enough about Russian literature to fully appreciate what Nabokov is up to (and the best thing about that is that he clearly just doesn't care whether I get it or not) but wandering along and getting a bit lost in, especially, Chernyshevsky's life and thinking about other things, I was more than once hauled up and made to pay attention by the clarity, compassion and beauty of some long passage. The butterflies-- oh--

The bit on synaesthesia fairly knocked me over one grey evening. The sibilant S of the sapphires and the sobbing mother will be vividly associated for me with a tight, dirty bottle-neck near the fruit shop lit by candles among the persimmons, where one little hand-built house sticks its dirty concrete elbow out into the road and across from it another of unfinished bricks totters and overhangs in an Ottoman style and threatens to collapse with the first tremor, and the drain covers are long gone and the bicycle Roma squeeze past with their monstrous loads of plastic scavenged from the skips.

Or rather, that corner is now sapphires. Extraordinary. Nabokov can change how you view the world.

Cray fr

Digressioni, pastiche, satira dicace, comicità,un narratore inaffidabile che si sdoppia in io narrante e terza persona, invenzioni linguistiche, un romanzo nel romanzo e un romanzo che si autoadempie, come una profezia: Amis, Wallace e Rushdie gli debbono molto.
(E anche Houdini).

Per leggere Nabokov ti devi immergere tra i flutti del suo oceano narrativo. Parole e frasi che brillano di poesia e complessità. Ogni paragrafo è un gioiello. L'intreccio si perde nella complessità delle parentesi (tonde, quadre, graffe ecc.) che metaforicamente compongono la struttura del testo. In questo caso gli abissi acquatici che il lettore è chiamato a solcare ed esplorare sono quelli della letteratura russa. Un'immersione in piena regola, ti senti a volte quasi spaesato, solo, di fronte a una massa d'acqua che ti sovrasta e che non riesci interamente a decifrare, nonostante la dimestichezza in materia. Uno stupendo intermezzo è rappresentato anche dall'altro grande amore dell'autore: l'entomologia (v. il capitolo 3) e qui pare davvero di sfogliarle certe pagine di Prišvin, ti inerpichi tra i boschi dell'estremo oriente, alla ricerca di nuove specie di lepidotteri...
E' un libro che richiede la matita tra le dita, ti serve per segnare quel che serve, e qui ce n'è parecchio (linee orizzontali, verticali, punti, cerchi...), per evidenziare il marasma di elegantissimi pensieri e di taglienti citazioni che vorresti sempre avere pronte, alla bisogna, sulla punta della lingua ma che - ahimè - sai già che richiedono una padronanza della sintassi che forse non è nelle tue corde...

The Gift finds among its peers works such as In Search of Lost Time and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Dedalus' scenes in Ulysses (does the root of every novel since inexorably stretch back to Ulysses? I see it everywhere). It even feels like a sequel to Speak, Memory, though Nabokov is careful to dissociate himself from Godunov-Cherdyntsev. Yet the book is woven with Pushkin and Gogol and lepidoptera, musings on chess and time, the deceptive and imitative qualities of the natural world, and the essence of fate and consciousness, all Nabokov's pet subjects. Godunov-Cherdyntsev resides in the same Berlin where Nabokov resided in the same time period (the lee between the world wars), associates with similar coevals as Nabokov kept company with in his Berlin years, and the literary progression of the poet becoming the prose stylist extraordinaire seems to mirror a rather familiar reflection. All in all, it feels like Nabokov's most personal work, outside of the autobiography. It is also a retort to all of those who criticize Nabokov for being all style and no substance, or those who claim his characters are inhuman or that he doesn't understand people or have compassion for them. Martin Amis, in his introduction to Lolita, called him "the laureate of cruelty". Certainly Lolita is a cruelly amusing work, and certainly he has created monsters. But if I can restrain from overstatement: The Gift is overwhelmingly hopeful and rapturous about life. It is an examination of and tribute to the design of fate, an embrace of the idea that the chaos of our lives is simply "the reverse side of a magnificent fabric", and if we strain our eyes out of time and look across the breadth of our memory, we will see the precise workings of a hidden design, even in the obstructions that have checked us along the way. Thus the form of the book takes on a series of biographies, playing out the mechanisms of a succession of lives and probing them for the shadow of the delicate hand of fate. Yasha's life, Fyodor's father's life, Chernyshevski's life (there is much to be said, essays worth to be said, of the duality in his recollection of his father's wanderings and his Life of Chernyshevski), his own life from an idyllic childhood to exile in a foreign city and falling in love with Zina; Nabokov through Godunov-Cherdyntsev transcribes many destinies in the service of splaying providence out on a dissecting table. In this way, Nabovok is skewing the idea that "life imitates art", expressing life as a work of art, that if we look closely we can see the individual brush strokes that together created our masterpiece. The Life of Chernyshevski (given as a whole text within the novel), Godunov-Cherdyntsev's skewering of Russia's "men of the sixties", the materialists whose ideas led to the banal artistic credo of Social Realism and in many ways directly to the Bolsheviks, is, to me, some of Nabokov's most interesting and strong writing. It takes the circular structure of The Gift itself, and is an inversion of Godunov-Cherdyntsev's philosophy and the entire novel.

Great books don't need the ornament of reviews, and this is a great book. As such it should just be read, again and again. The Gift is something like what Fyodor himself at some point offhandedly thinks of writing, "a practical handbook: How to Be Happy".

I read this book in the middle of last summer. I loved it. When I finished, I set about reading the rest of Nabokov's Russian work. None of it equals this book - not even Despair, which comes close, or Invitation to a Beheading, which I've liked since I read it as a teenager.

My enjoyment surprised me. Nabokov receives criticism for preciosity. This is the only book of his that I've read which feels precious all the way through. The sentences trace long paths down the page. The perspective shifts from the third to the first person at the break of a paragraph. That first person takes the perspective of different characters throughout. You come to understand that Fyodor, the main character, is imagining himself in the place of his acquaintances, but the manner starts at the very first sentence. Thrown into the deep end, you have to swim.

It can be hard going. The book delights in its lack of a plot. In part one, a sensitive Russian émigré worries about the reviews of his latest book of poetry. He thinks about the poems in the book. He writes a few poems. In part two, he tries to write a book about his father, a naturalist. This is his attempt to move away from poetry. He fails. He moves from one apartment to another, where, in part three, he falls in love with the landlord's daughter. He writes a satirical biography of a revolutionary writer of the 1860s. That biography is part four. In part five, he contemplates writing a novel about creative genius. It sounds much like The Gift itself. There's more, but the delight is in the details.

As if all that weren't enough, Fyodor springs imaginary events and conversations upon you. He only says they're imaginary once they're over. He pulls this trick pretty often. As usual, Nabokov reminds you of the fourth wall as much as he can. Certain lines - such as the one at the end of part two, where Fyodor "turns from Pushkin Lane onto Gogol Avenue," if memory serves - are too obvious, given the book's already bookish atmosphere.

For all that, the book is a masterpiece. The biography of Chernyshevsky manages to sympathize with the man's conscience, even as it mocks his literary clumsiness. As Fyodor lies in bed, composing a poem, the prose suddenly bounces into iambic pentameter. The metaphors are apt, the imagery striking (especially the fence onto which animals had been painted, only for the boards to be scrambled later), and the themes (particularly the triangle-and-circle theme) well developed. Plus, Nabokov's talent for insult shines: One character is "as blind as Milton, as deaf as Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot."

This book is at least worth a try. If you get there, pay attention at the end of part five. Nabokov drops the curtain before his characters find themselves in a small trouble.

I started this over a month ago. After about a week of reading, I needed a break. I decided break time was over and finished it all up. Nabokov is always playful and difficult and charming. He's the perfect first date: flirty and filthy. That being said, this isn't one of Nabokov's I would take out after a second or third date.

а я думаю это действительно лучшая книжка на русском после онегина. да.

Vladimir Nabokov has the unique position of being one of the most revered 20th century writers in both Russian- and English-language literature. This was his final book in Russian, before he gave up writing in his mother tongue completely. The Gift has so much of the inventive, fluid prose, wordplay, and humour in it which later made him famous through his works in English.

The actual story, however, is a bit meandering and personally I felt a little lost at times. For the person who understands every nuance of Russian literature, I’m sure there are a tonne of in-jokes and references that the average reader misses, but in the end I was left craving for less of that and more of Fyodor’s story, particularly his relationship with Zina.

Nonetheless, a beautiful and worthwhile read, with an interesting satirical view of the lives of Russian emigres in 1920s Berlin.

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Please see website for the full review

Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art: Vladimir Nabokov
The Gift is Nabokov’s greatest and most important work-it is Nabokov’s most poetic novel, in which he develops the themes central to his work and philosophy; the ability of art to capture and recreate the miracle of consciousness, of parental, romantic and platonic love, of the wonders of childhood and the importance of individuality and the ephemerality in comparison to the endless void of death. The Gift is the clearest distillation of Nabokov’s humanist philosophy, of his aesthetic preferences and acts as a kind of guide book on happiness; it teaches us about the wonders of a sunbeam on a desolate park bench, to incandescent blueness of the eyes of a person we love, the beauty of a verse by Pushkin and shows us that life is miraculous beyond any words if only we would open our eyes and see. It is Nabokov’s gift to the world.
BEAUTY
The Miracle of Conciousness
The novel begins with the description of an everyday scene; a couple are moving into a new flat and the narrator quips, “Someday, I must use that scene to start a good old fashioned novel.” The reason as to why the narrator would use this scene is explained further down the page, “Lined with lindens of medium size, with hanging droplets of rain distributed among their intricate black twigs according to the future arrangements of leaves (tomorrow each drop would contain a green pupil; complete with a smooth tarred surface some thirty feet across and variegated sidewalks (hand-built and flattering to the feet) it rose at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with the post office and ending with the church, like an epistolary novel.” Nabokov is attempting to reveal the quiddity of the most quotidian things; he is drawing our eyes to the beauty beneath the most everyday scenes and objects, the budding of a leaf and the reflection of the sky in a dusty mirror: “As he crossed towards the pharmacy at the corner he involuntary turned his head because a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van-a dresser with mirror across which, as across a cinema screen passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs sliding and swaying, not arboreally, but with human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying the sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.”
Nabokov’s musings on the beauty of the world and the wonders of life reach their crescendo in his lyrical evocations towards the end of the book; “The sun played on various objects along he right side of the street, like a magpie picking out the tiny things that glittered: and at the end of it, where it was crossed by the wide ravine of a railroad, a cloud of locomotive steam suddenly appeared from the right of the bridge, disintegrated against its iron ribs, then immediately loomed white again on the other side and wavily streamed away through the gaps in the trees.” Via his lyrical language and charming solecisms Nabokov is able to pay homage to life and consciousness and that most ephemeral of things: the present, forever trapped between the inexorable walls of the future and the past, whose fleetingness can only be captured via the…
The intransigence of memory
The narrator states, “It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age –strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.” For Nabokov our memory, like nature, could be deceitful and has to power to deceive us, to trick us into believing something is more beautiful than it actually was or vice versa, the only way to overcome this is via art and its ability to recapture the wonders of consciousness, the beauty behind a sunset or the smile of a woman we love, and, unlike Proust, Nabokov felt that we could only reconstruct the past via conscious effort, not involuntarily. “The theory that I find most tempting-that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance outside our blindness.” For Nabokov memory and the imagination were intertwined-every time we remember something we go about imagining it too, because our memory is merely us consciously reimagining the past in accordance to the innumerable flights of our imagination. Great art, or in this case literature, is the purest and most distilled form of imagination possible, which leads us to…
The power of art
Despite the inability of the imagination to truly recapture the past, the imitation which Fyodor is able to conjure up is a thing of wondrous beauty; “Each of his poems iridesces with harlequin colours”. Fyodor ponders whether any readers will notice the boundless beauty which lay within his work, the secret messages which were disguised via the words , images and metaphors that made up his poems, as he observes, “While he had been musing over his poems, rain had lacquered the street from end to end. The van had gone and in the spot where its tractor had recently stood, there remained next to the sidewalk a rainbow of oil, with the purple predominant and prune-like twist. Asphalt’s parakeet.” Fyodor has several imaginary conversations with the artists Koncheyev and Vladimirov (both stand ins for Nabokov circa 1925) in which they discuss Russian literature and art in general. Fyodor has very definite tastes in literature, though Koncheyev points out that even supposedly worthless writers such as Dostoevsky have worthwhile elements and passages that Fyodor is too myopic in his literary tastes and myopia is the most inartistic of human qualities. And yet how to describe the joy which art brings is-that tell-tale tinge along the spine-or in its innate ability to, like magic, recapture and relive memories and emotions. For Fyodor, the question as to whether words can truly capture emotions drives him when he is writing his poetry (“models of your future novels” according to Koncheyev), Fyodor feels it can and it is one of his artistic purposes to do so; “The oft repeated complaints of poets that, alas, no words are available, that words are incapable of expressing our thingummy-bob feelings (and to prove it a torrent of trochaic hexameters is let loose) seemed to him just as senseless as the staid conviction of the eldest inhabitant of a mountain hamlet that yonder mountain has never been climbed by anyone and never will be.” Fyodor, like Humbert Humbert, may only have words to play with, but those words are Fyodor’s gateway in capturing…
The wonders of childhood
The narrator then thinks about the joy brought about the publication of his poetry, poems about childhood, about finding a lost ball or the drive to the dentists, yet the true importance of the poetry doesn’t lie in the subject matter, which is merely the vehicle by which the narrator is able to express, “The strategy of inspiration and the tactics of the mind, the flesh of poetry and the spectre of translucent prose.” Further than the narrator is celebrating the wonders of childhood and the insatiable curiosity it brings, of the uniqueness of every childhood and of how art is able to transmute our individual perceptions of the world into something tangible and universal; “the author ought on the one hand to generalize reminisces by selecting elements typical of any successful childhood-hence their seeming obviousness; and on the other hand he has allowed only his genuine quiddity to penetrate into his poems-hence their seeming fastidiousness.” For the narrator, in documenting the events of his own childhood he is able to both celebrate the uniqueness of his own experiences but also of others-after all which one of didn’t, as a child, felt disconsolate about a lost ball or desultorous about the dreaded trip to the dentist? The true artist is able to capture both the particular and the universal-in many ways this is Nabokov’s rejoinder to old fraud Freud, who chose to cloak childhood behind a phalanx of meaningless symbols and banal sexual theories, whereas Freud wished to fashion human consciousness according to his own neuroses, Nabokov wanted to celebrate the uniqueness of each individual existence and the ability of art to capture this. Another major Nabokovian theme is…
The beauty of the natural world
For Nabokov, books whose descriptions of nature were static and clichéd were completely inartistic. He frequently railed against books such as Don Quixote or eighteenth century literature (“the most inartistic of centuries”), because as a result of their picaresque and one-dimensional renderings of the natural world they failed to recapture or recreate the limitless bounty which nature, and thus life, has to offer. For Nabokov truly great art opens our eyes to the limitless beauty of the world, the inexhaustible potential of an existence, in which spider-webs are transformed into a shimmering rainbow as in Chekhov or pink hawthorns into a bridal train as in Proust, where clouds are not white but pink, snow is blue and the sea and sky coalesce into one as in a Turner painting. Everybody sees the world in different ways, the very concept of ‘realist’ literature or ‘objective reality’ was abhorrent to Nabokov, who valued the individual and particular and the artists ability to render their own unique outlooks on life and the world. Few writers were able to render nature as beautifully and completely as Nabokov; “Farther on it became very nice: the pines had come into their own, and beneath their pinkish, scaly trunks the feathery foliage of the low rowans and vigorous greenery of oaks broke the stripiness of the pinewood sun into an animated dapple.” And “…after being made transparent by the strength of the light, it was now assimilated to the shimmering of the summer forest with its satiny pine needles and heavenly-green leaves, with its ants running over the transfigured, most radiant-hued wool of the laprobe, with its birds, smells, hot breath of nettles and spermy odour of sun-warmed grass, with its blue sky where droned a high-flying plane that seemed filmed over with blue dust, the blue essence of the firmament.” And yet whilst nature is beautiful, without people its beauty is inherently empty-after all even Nabokov’s most poignant depictions of nature are still populated with people (however insignificant) and with people comes…
The wonders of love
Fyodor reminisces about his first love, a pale, pathetic and gentle woman, whose chestnut hair and black eyes still haunt him until he meets Zina Mertz, whose philistine family he lodges with. At first they hardly talk, as he cautiously observe her over the breakfast table; “She hardly spoke to him, although by certain signs-not so much by the pupils of her eyes as by their lustre that seemed slanted at him-he felt that she was noticing every glance of his and that all her movements were restricted by the lightest shrouds of that very impression she was producing on him; and because it seemed completely impossible to him that he should have any part in her life, he suffered when he detected anything particularly enchanting in her and was glad and relieved when he glimpsed some flaw in her beauty. Her pale hair which radiantly and imperceptibly merged into the sunny air around her head, the light blue vein on her temple, another on her long, tender neck, her delicate hand, her sharp elbow, the narrowness of her hips, the weakness of her shoulders and peculiar forward slant of her graceful body, as if he floor over which, gathering speed like a skater, she hastened was always sloping away towards the haven of the chair or table on which lay the object she sought-all this was perceived by him with agonize distinctness. ” She knocks on his door and insouciantly asks him to sign her copy of his poetry book, her impertinence driven perhaps by her attraction to him and her desire to keep this attraction a secret from her family. Gradually they meet in secret and their relationship develops and blossoms beautifully as Fyodor imbues every glance, every look, from the imperceptible bristles of hair on her forearm to the limpidity of her eyes or their shared love of literature and outlooks on life. They are finally able to be together without any kind of interruption from her parents, who conveniently relocate to Copenhagen and he is able to bask in the gentle warmth her presence brings to him, a salve to the loneliness which had punctuated his life before her met her; “As they walked down the street he felt a quick tremor along his spine, and again that emotional constraint, but now in a different languorous form. It was a twenty minutes slow walk to the house, and the air, the darkness and the honeyed scent of blooming lindens caused a suckling ache at the base of his chest. The scent evanesced in the stretch from linden to linden, being replaced there by a black freshness, and then again, beneath the next canopy, and oppressive and heavy cloud would accumulate, and Zina would say, tensing her nostrils, ‘Ah, smell it’”.
There is also the love Fyodor feels for his parents. His parents are intrinsically linked to his love of art-for example his father’s love of Pushkin; and the serene, happy and almost conversationless walks with his mother, which inspires him to write a book on Pushkin, a book which he never finishes and in fact never really begins. Fyodor has a deep love for his father, whose individuality, indifference to public opinions and love of freedom, art and nature he hopes to emulate. He imagines what it must have been like on the trips his father took when he was exploring China; “Only in China is the early mist so enchanting…as into any abyss, the river runs into the murk of prematutinal twilight that still hangs in the gorges, while higher up, along flowing waters, all glimmers and scintillates, and quite a company of blue magpies has already awakened in the willows by the mill.” He thinks about his last farewell to his father, gradually his reminiscences coalesce with his present as he notes the fauna surrounding him as his father, who was a great naturalist, would; he puts his fist on a tree and bursts into tears, as he realises his father is irrevocably lost to him and all he has left of him is the memories of their time together, a precious gift, but shallow in comparison to the gift of hearing his father’s voice or hear him talking about his expeditions.
He thinks back to his mother’s visit the previous year after a 3 year absence ; “powdered to a deathly pallor, wearing black gloves and black stockings and an old seal-skin coat thrown open, she had descended the iron steps of the coach, glancing with equal quickness first at him and then what was underfoot, and the next moment, her face twisted with the pain of happiness, was clinging to him…it had seemed to him that the beauty of which he had been so proud had faded, but as his vision adjusted itself to the twilight of the present, so different at first from the distantly receding light of memory, he once again recognized in her everything he had loved .” Nevertheless the spectre of his father’s death haunts the both of them, a grief too sad to put in words punctuated by the naïve hope that he may in fact still be alive somewhere, that maybe one day he will turn up again in Berlin or Paris or Petersburg or anywhere and come back into their lives, to fill in the endless chasm which his death has opened up in their lives, which leads us on to…
PITY and
The irrevocability of death
Memory, art, the powers of the imagination and sacredness of childhood are all important themes within Nabokov’s work, yet as Nabokov stated, art is beauty plus pity and we are about to feel pity for the pathetic Chernyshevskis. Fyodor is introduced to them after Mrs Chernyshevski noticed a passing resemblance between him and her dead son. Fyodor thinks any such resemblance is purely superficial, however is touched by their melancholy, by their anguish over the death of their son, the victim of a suicide in a banal love affair, Mr Chernyshevski, half crazed with grief, still sees an apparition of his son wondering around the flat. Before Fyodor leaves the flat he experiences a kind of epiphany, “And now they began gradually to grow less distinct, to ripple with the random agitation of a fog, and then to vanish altogether; their outlines, weaving in figure-eight patterns, were evaporating though here and there a bright point still glowed-the cordial glint in an eye, the gleam of a bracelet…and at the very last there was a floating glimpse of pistachio-coloured straw, decorated with silk roses and now everything was gone, and into the smoky parlour, without sound, in his bedroom slippers, came Yasha, thinking his father had already retired, and with a magic tinkling, by the light of crimson lanterns, dim beings were repairing the corner of the pavement…” This coalescment of life with death and the ability of art to, if not wholly overcome than to at least traverse the spectre of death are further developed in the relationship between Fyodor and his father, who went missing whilst exploring and is presumed dead.
Fyodor’s forlorn hope, that his father is still alive and that he will perhaps one day meet him again, links him to lachrymose Chernyshevski who, like Fyodor is followed be the ghost of a loved one, though, unlike Fyodor, Chernyshevski is unable to differentiate between reality and his imagination. Yet, Fyodor ponders upon an aura his father had about him, as if he knew a profound secret, a secret known to very few people, the secret of consciousness and the ability of the mind to cheat and overcome the purely physical sensation of dying. Fyodor later ponders whether this is merely a flight of fancy, a sentimental embellishment of his father’s aura, after all just before Chernyshevski passes away (and who in the novel was closer to the world of dead than him?) he confirms that after death there is nothing. Yet a feeling still lingers on, that perhaps his father did know how to cheat death, on a spiritual if not physical level, and perhaps Fyodor himself has or is able to develop this gift via his literature. Perhaps his sharing of this knowledge via his art is his gift to the world, yet it is a gift which only few will ever know, appreciate or take pleasure in as he undergoes the
The feeling that his art will be forever unappreciated or misunderstood
More than this, however, Fyodor is disappointed that his art will never be known, that he will forever remain obscure, doubly obscure even, his homeland would be forever closed to him and his sole audience would consist of the Russian émigré community, most of whom, as Koncheyev points out, will never truly understand him. The only fame he will ever have is a kind of local literary fame, hard to gain and easy to lose. And yet beyond this Fyodor deeply feels…
The loneliness of exile
And it’s utter displacement-Fyodor can never revisit the places he writes about in his poems, they only exist within his memory, which will only ever be a pale imitation of his past life, the fact that the garden of his past will be forever closed to him via the unsurmountable gate of political exile-he imagines one day revisiting Leshino;

Nabokov in Berlin, 1930's

This is slow, but good stuff. As I work through Nabokov‘s novels, this was easily the weighty-est so far. There is a lot in here, like everything - poetry, Pushkin, Gogol, a complete biography of Chernyshevsky (!), literary commentary, critics, death, love, language, commentary on Nazi Germany - all here. It was also his last Russian language novel.

The novel is about a young Russian émigré author who just published his first book in Germany, a book of Russian poetry that sells a few dozen copies. He works as a language tutor, mostly for Germans learning English, which gives him just enough money, when he's responsible, to rent a room. As our book progresses, he interacts with literary émigrés in Berlin, meets a girl, Zina, who loves his book of poetry and falls for him and helps him write a biography Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. What? You haven't heard of Chernyshevsky? He was part of the Russia intellectual community in the 1860's, an era of reform in Russian, and when all that great Russian literature was appearing. Chernyshevsky was a proto-Communist, noted by Marx, and highly regarded by Lenin. Despite his caution, he was arrested, given a mock execution and sent to life-long exile in different parts of Siberia. Our protagonist is maybe less than reverential of his subject, making for some curious reading (the entire biography of Chernyshevsky is contained within), and ruffling many features throughout the fictional émigré community. His sales go up.

But this is just the surface. This book itself becomes an introspective look at misunderstood poetry, and at language, a love letter to certain era and mentality in a lost Russia, and a love story - all this with parallels to Nabokov's own life, even if he strongly denies the resemblance in his introduction. The opening chapter, a long musing on poetry, is some work for the reader to hack through. But then he switches to the narrator's lost father, a disconnected obsessive butterfly collector. This is also slow, but beautifully written and rewarding as his admiration pores out. Later the love story makes for simply great reading. Nabokov, in his translation introduction, claims a heavy influence from the Russian greats. He calls one chapter "a surge toward Pushkin", another a "shift to Gogol", and he claims the book's "heroine is not Zina, but Russian Literature." (with a capital 'L').

When one his favorite older émigré acquaintances dies, Nabokov goes uncharacteristically almost spiritual talking about death and life. On death:

"Fear gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relationship to man‘s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game."

And on life:

"...the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life is a kind of journey) is a stupid allusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes through the cracks."

This book mostly closes the chapter on Nabokov's Russian literary output, and it seems to know that, as it practically seems to take everything he neglected to put into his previous novels and collect it all in place here, a document of writer's life to this point (if not his protagonist's). Highly recommended for Nabokov enthusiasts, but for others I can only recommend this to the brave and those willing to hack through the slow stuff to find the beauty within. But it really does reward. I enjoyed this.

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62. The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov
Translation: from Russian, by Michael Scammell, with the author, 1963
published: 1937
format: 391-page paperback
acquired: June
read: Nov 25 – Dec 23
time reading: 17 hr 45 min, 2.9 min/page
rating: 4½
locations: Berlin
about the author: 1899 – 1977. Russia born, educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, 1922. Lived in Berlin (1922-1937), Paris, the US (1941-1961) and Montreux, Switzerland (1961-1977).

As someone who is admittedly in love with Nabokov (or at least Lolita & Invitation to a Beheading), I really wanted to like this book. And maybe one day I will. But that day is not today. Today (and for the foreseeable future), this book just makes me want to bang my head against a wall. Repeatedly.