“University Novel”1 of Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift
George M Cummins IV
The novel is about creativity and gift to perceive it. It has three major plot-concentrations: life and coming-of-age, maturity author, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyncev (cf. Boris Godunov, a play by Pushkin), his mature love, about his childhood with parents, who offered him, similar to Nabokov’s, a beautiful childhood. It contains also an independent novel inside the novel, “The Life of Chernyshevsky” written by F. where the topics of the novel in the individual chapters are to some extend an art-works of certain biographically oriented narrations of our hero. Fyodor (in Russian the name Fyodor means “gift from God”.) is an alter-ego of émigré V. Nabokov himself.
The first chapter
is a vivid descriptions of Berlin’s émigré landscape, odd caricature-like figures of his neighbors and some literary figures, family Chernyshevskys, whose family affairs have certain key elements signifying Pushkin-like allegory to Eugen Onegin, “Russia’s greatest poem”. This chapter is a kind of enchanted, hyper-detailed realism, feels like a Gogolian acquisition. Novel ends very a like a homage to Pushkin, Nabokov’s most beloved Russian poet and writer. The beginning represents an echo to Gogol’s Dead Souls.
In the chapter one besides the mentioned Gogolian realism figures also a Gogol-like anecdote by which the book starts: we observe a lady, and “perhaps her husband” expecting their furniture while they are moving into the building alike to our hero. Those two people we never meet again, both of them so to speak foreshadowing someone to come again in the future novels of V. Nabokov, an anticipating heroes or material for future work. It follows Fyodor’s moving into a new place, same as author’s frequent European apartment-exchange from place to place. Nabokov himself never held an apartment of his own, only rented ones, never dwell upon possessing material objects and focusing merely upon his college life and writing, his son Dmitry and devoted wife, Vera, to whom he dedicated his novels.
During exploration of juvenile verses of Fyodor Ch., we can immerse ourselves into his childhood with Nabokovian topics, like time, theater, distinguished rising up.
It follows by a crystal-clear depiction of Jasha, a fellow student at the university where also studied F. Godunov-Ch. himself, who because of unhappy love, shoots himself. (Here is the Eugen Onegin-like theme of a poetical love-triangle).
The chapter ends by a literary evening parodizing Goethe, where hero is manifesting his literary opinions, culminating into future novel-framed plans.
The second chapter
blends a heroic-romantic motifs with a tone of elegy and memory, almost casting the father as a Romantic wanderer with interest in lepidoptera. Nabokov himself was a renowned lepidopterologist. The hero is immersing us into life of his parents, while living with them, portrayal of his mother as well, corresponding with him, concerning his father, for sending a material to him in order to write about his father, a doctor as well as with an interest in butterflies, not returning from one of his late excursions, because he was killed by Bolsheviks.
Nabokov was never politically active, nor ever expressed much of opinioned, yet in The Gift he expresses in his original way as if sideways certain dislike to his contemporary unappreciation for German nation: “...system of gestures (threatening children not as we do – but with a horizontal digit imitating a waving stick) ;for love of fences, rows, mediocrity; for the cult of the office; for the fact that if you listen to his inner voice (or any conversation on the street) you will inevitably hear figures, money; for the lavatory humor and crude laughter; for the fatness of the backsides of both sexes, even if the rest of the subject is not fat; for the lack of fastidiousness; for the visibility of cleanliness (…) for someone’s live cat, pierced through with wire as revenge on neighbor, and the wire cleverly twisted on one end; for cruelty in everything…”
Nabokov was never sincerely politically oriented, and never paid attention to it, perhaps this books was written in ca 1937, before he left Berlin, so certain echo in an anti-German sentiment we might perhaps observe, yet most of all to the general situation that any shadow of the situation in front of he was escaping as well.
Growing up with his sister Tanya and caring uncle Oleg, this chapter is focus also on other family members of Godunov-Cherdyncevs, like his siter, Tanya.
The third chapter
the hero obtains a new place to live. Nabokov lived all his life in rented apartments. On a scene comes Zina Mertz, a young girl of Jewish origin, who is an inspiration for the protagonist, the chapter is formed in a Byronic-Lermontov like sweep. There is marked author’s passion for chess and chess puzzles. Zina is an semi-inspiration for not only the “Life of Chernyshevsky”, yet also something resembling the plot of The Enchanter, also then the forthcoming Lolita. In fact, in The Gift is the initial first thought ever expressed, while the later once more appears in one later Nabokov’s short story, the Nursery tale.
The fourth chapter
four is a significant part of the novel, which seemingly wasn’t only to parodies Nikolay Gavrilovch Chenysevsky, an Utopian Russian socialist, such a distant theme for Nabokov, to write about as well as for Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyncev. It’s elements represent a key-topics of how Nabokov generally perceives role of art and its purpose, i. g. the entire novel represents a tribute to Russian literature. Nabokov’s dislike to any totalitarian regime or any “ideology”, as well as to philosophical systems” is symbolically marked here.
The fifth chapter
, the final chapter, where Fyodor begins to find his true artistic path and his love for Zina deepens, moves toward a Tolstoyan fullness. It has broad moral reflection, tender human relations, and a sense of synthesis — as if he is emerging from the maze of Russian tradition, he cultivates his art.
Nabokov’s last Russian-written novel is a farewell to his European life as an émigré in Berlin escaping now from Bolshevism, the latter from Nazism to US where is he will become the famous author of Lolita.
The switching from first and the third narration-perspective is carefully crafted to distinguish where the hero’s mind “was and is the particular time before”, and where as if author (either fictional, “later Fyodor” or Nabokov himself) “sees him now” from distance; or did see him at the moment when the “hero was there”, so to speak – in hero’s spiritual development. Via this technique we can return to Nabokov’s own words, “not to mix designer with the design” though, as stated in The Foreword.
The overall texture of Nabokov’s Gift is representing “his personal guide to happiness”, while he illustrates his relationships to literature overall, his own manifesto, so to speak, same as it’s a novel of a maturing artist, it is mapping Fyodor’s growth and being the guide to author’s Berlin, it reminds somewhat Joyce’s famous Ulysses and St. Petersburg by A. Biely. It’s a university poem, a “Berlin Poema” (cf. to Dostoevsky’s Double, a “Petersburg poema”).
His writing in general is a pure poem in prose like any other of his writings, filled with allusions to world literature overall; as if the author was intending to confuse a well-read reader. In the novel are also figuring puns and verbal acrobacy in a frame of modernistic realism of some unique individualistic sort, which is though very difficult to categorize or to be easily labeled.
1Description words of Ivan Bunin about Nabokov’s Gift.