- Mass Market Paperback
- Publisher: Vintage Books (May 1991)
- ISBN-10: 0399500960
- ISBN-13: 978-0399500961
- Product Dimensions: 20.1 x 13 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 408 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
For most of his life, Vladimir Nabokov was quite literally a man without a country. It's a small irony, then, that his career falls so neatly into national phases: Russian, German, French, and American, plus the protracted coda he spend in a Swiss luxury hotel during his final decade. The Gift, which he wrote between 1935 and 1937 in Berlin, is the grand summation of his second phase. It describes, for starters, the sentimental education of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev. This hyphenated creation has more than a few things in common with the author, despite Nabokov's vehement denial in the novel's foreword. Still, only a nitwit would read The Gift for its autobiographical revelations. What this early masterpiece does offer is a wealth of lyrical, witty, heartbreaking prose, beautifully translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell (with an assist from Nabokov himself). Who else would note the way a street rises "at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel"? Who else has ever administered the satirical shiv to his characters with such deadly, almost affectionate aplomb?
Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes--which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot.Of course, only a fraction of The Gift is taken up with this sort of demolition derby. Fyodor's romance with Zina, for example, occasions the most ardent prose of Nabokov's career: "And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them." (Shades of Volodya and Véra? Only the deceased husband and wife, and perhaps Stacy Schiff, know for sure.)
At the same time, The Gift is a brilliant, mesmerizing riff on the history of Russian literature, with elaborate bouquets tossed to Pushkin and Gogol. There's also a hilarious yet somehow tender evisceration of the do-gooding polemicist Nikolai Chernyshevski--which was suppressed, in fact, when the novel was originally serialized by a Russian émigré magazine. As should be clear by now, The Gift defies any attempt at quick-and-dirty summary. But the book plays the most pleasurable kind of havoc with our stuffy notions of narrative structure and linguistic protocol. And as Nabokov repeatedly wraps the reader's consciousness around his little finger, he never holds back on that ultimate literary gift: pleasure. --James Marcus --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Book Description
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write — a book very much like The Gift itself. One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” — John Updike
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
`Give me your hand, dear reader, and let's go into the forest together.',
By J. Cameron-Smith "Expect the Unexpected" (ACT, Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Gift (Paperback)
This is the last book Vladimir Nabokov wrote in what he called his `untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue'. The story of Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a young Russian émigré aristocrat in Berlin, told in this novel is both a personal journey and a reflection of Russia's past. Nabokov provides a brief synopsis in his foreword:`The plot of Chapter One centers 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 Chernyshevsky, 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.' I would need to read this book at least two more times to fully appreciate it. It is not a novel to be devoured quickly, it deserves to be savoured slowly. On this, my first read, I simply enjoyed Nabokov's use of language both as he describes Fyodor's progress and as he lampoons Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) in the `spiral within a sonnet'. It's beautifully done, the way that Nabokov works a biography of Chernyshevsky into his novel, contrasting two quite different Russias but with some shared shortcomings. `Existence is thus an eternal transformation of the future into the past - an essentially phantom process - a mere reflection of the material metamorphosis taking place within us.' And when the novel ends, will Fyodor's success continue? Will he and Zina be happy? Or will his (and their) moment be brief, like the butterflies? We have seen Fyodor evolve for self-indulgent idleness to focussed observer: one of his roles in the book is complete; the other is neatly transferred to the reader. Or so I think, on this reading. `Good-bye, my book!' Jennifer Cameron-Smith
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A complex and beautiful gift indeed...,
By Geoff Puterbaugh (Chiang Mai, T. Suthep, A. Muang Thailand) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Gift (Paperback)
VN loves doubles, and puzzles, and structure. In this book, he finally managed to convince me that he never writes a bad sentence, or utters a silly thought.But what is this book? Or what is it about? It's sort of autobiographical. It sort of describes VN himself, as a newbie Russian exile in Berlin. Certainly, like all imaginative writing, it draws on the writer's own experiences and emotions. But that's only a beginning. At the beginning, the young writer-protagonist (a Russian in Berlin) has just published his first volume of poetry. An older exile, named Chernyshevski, comes to tell him that his book has attracted a very favorable review. So Fyodor (our hero) sinks into a prolong reverie, reviewing his beloved poems with the (anticipated) wise words of praise. Later, he goes to Chernyshevski's house for the evening, and discovers that he has just been the victim of an April-Fool's joke: today is April 1, and there was no review. Fyodor's attention is grabbed by a young male visitor who says nothing. He says nothing because he is a ghost. He is the son of the Chernyshevski couple, who commited suicide, a few years ago, as the result of a love triangle. And so enters the theme of the father grieving endlessly for his son. The father Chernyshevski is mad, much of the time -- because of his loss. In the next chapter, we get a stunning shift of scene, as Fyodor welcomes a visit from his mother and begins drafting a life of his father. This father, a character much larger than life, spent his life chasing butterflies across Asia, making more trips than Marco Polo, and finally was reported dead during WWI. And so enters the theme of the son grieving for his father -- a father of many voyages. Very moving, and obvious parallels to "The Odyssey." In the next chapter, Fyodor moves, and falls in love, and begins drafting his second book, a life of Chernyshevki (the FAMOUS Chernyshevski). And the chapter after that (Chapter IV) is the book that Fyodor wrote. Chapter V presents various idiotic reviews of Fyodor's book, and slowly VN knits all the themes together: the father mourning for his dead son, the son mourning for his dead father, people writing books which other people fail to understand (the ongoing "book review" theme), and the simple, absolute beauty of life here on earth, and love of another human being. I'm sure I will be re-reading this wonderful work of art many times. I think you should regard it as a gift -- to you! Highest possible recommendation!!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nice book,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Gift (Paperback)
This is Nabokov's finest Russian novel. It contains his most detailed description of what he refers to in Speak, Memory as "cosmic synchronization". Also note the contrast between the epigraph of this book and that of Invitation to a Beheading.
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