The Gift Nabokov

The Gift Nabokov - Our editors review your submissions and determine whether to review the article. Our editors review your submissions and determine whether to review the article. The Gift, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, was first produced (in the stripped-down Russian language) as Dar in 1937–38. It was published in its full form as a book in 1952. The gift was prepared in post-war Berlin, where Nabokov himself was an emigre.

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The Gift Nabokov

Steeped in satirical details about the Russian émigré community, the novel tells the same story of the main character Fyodor's upbringing as a talented young writer and his romance with Zina, another immigrant. Nabokov despised clichés, but his life easily accepts them. Gift, his last book in Russia (the last one is Other Shores), is proof that money doesn't buy happiness.

It was written in the dark, in Berlin, when Nabokov was living in boarding houses and earning a living as an English teacher. The same bad life is shared by the protagonist of The Gift, but he is surprisingly free from it. His inner world gives him an escape.

In Pale Fire, a quarter of a century later, it only leads to a more restrictive prison. Like Nabokov, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is a young writer living in Berlin, where his family had taken refuge after the Russian Revolution. Cherdyntsev has great roots, it is seen in his hyphenated surname, and his childhood was spent in a place of refined refinement: he remembers "the house of Godunov-Cherdyntsev on the English quay of the Neva" in St.

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of silk sofas, in the closet... from where the waiter could be seen slowly passing by unseen[.]” (21) His current life in Berlin is one of respectable, but sad poverty. Like Nabokov, he works as a private tutor and in his spare time experiments with different types of literature, although his audience may have dwindled to "a few hundred book lovers who had left St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev" (16) some of whom are still trying to maintain a free form

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the beauty of "literary parties" in "small, cramped, poorly lit" houses (37-38). Indeed, in Nabokov, the ugly furniture belongs to the person of its owners, showing their imperfection as human beings. Five chapters of The Gift chronicle the development of Cherdyntsev's writing and his forays into everyday life.

In chapter I, he publishes a short collection of poems about his happy childhood. These poems are scattered throughout the text of the chapter, showing how they move against what their author usually does. In Chapter II, Cherdyntsev thinks about writing a biography of his father, a famous explorer who disappeared in Asia during the Revolution.

He delves into his memories of his father and the last published and unpublished writing, but the book never happened. However, the idea of ​​writing a biography remains, and it takes an unexpected turn in Chapter III, when Cherdyntsev decides that his subject should be Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a 19th-century publicist adored by liberals and socialists.

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The work (which ends at this point) takes an independent view of Chernyshevsky, with a complete sense of the comedy of the complexity of thinking, but it is also not a simple satire or criticism. Its text forms the entire chapter IV. Finally, in chapter V, Cherdyntsev deals with the results of the publication of the book (the analysis of different parts of the unconscious) and begins to look for new ideas.

This time, he has fallen in love with a young woman named Zina Mertz, whom he first met in Chapter III, and he feels their new life together will be the foundation of his next work. Gift closes on a note of happy anticipation. Western readers and critics tend to approach The Gift as a complex, methodological test, perhaps because they feel they have no other way to make sense of Chapter IV.

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Even at the height of his popularity, Chernyshevsky had little directness or importance outside of Russia, for reasons that can be seen from Cherdyntsev's work. A Western reader can look him up in an encyclopedia, but even then it's hard to see why he should be the focus of a novel written in the 1930s.

So the reader can imagine that the Gift is meant to be some kind of modern story; it might even be tempting to think that Chernyshevsky might be one of Nabokov's many creations, with Chapter IV a forgery. In Russia, Chernyshevsky's influence used to be great: Lenin is said to have said (according to one time comrade) that he "cultivated my whole body", and often referred to Chernyshevsky as an authority and inspiration, writing, for example, "He was also a public figure. revolutionary, he knew how to influence every political event

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of his time in a revolutionary way, carrying all the obstacles and censorship blocking the idea of ​​peasant revolution, the idea of ​​a mass struggle to overthrow the old authority. In the Soviet Union, Chernyshevsky was included in the group of revolutionary heroes, and his main work, the new book What is to be done?, was taught in schools. Mayakovsky was

a psychologist, but it is surprising that his poetry continues to live, although perhaps with new and unexpected ideas. Mayakovsky showed the uncharacteristic aggression, the aggressiveness of the youth of the Revolution, and through these violent words the announcement of the futility is also felt, the fatigue of the destruction of blindness.

In the same way, Gorky can still be read, if not the way he wanted, or the story Zola, Hemingway, Tolstoy and many other thoughtful writers, would have liked. But no one can read Chernyshevsky: his writing was so useless that it never had a life of its own.

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But, in one sense, Chernyshevsky is still with us. My American readers, if there are any, know him well, under a different name. In that body he already has the ability to write, but he is worshiped more. You see, Chernyshevsky is the originator of the term "rational egoism."

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Now my children, I want you to put your hands on the TV and start speaking in tongues." You may wonder how Chernyshevsky was able to combine philosophy with utopian socialism. It is very simple, to be honest: one of his characters says: "The time will come, when every need of everyone will be fully satisfied, you and I know this;

but we all equally know that this time has not yet come," as one of the reasons for imagining why it is good to sleep with his friend's wife. Thus freed, the lucky one dreams in which a goddess-like figure shows him around the earthly paradise, whose inhabitants gather in a beautiful palace for an evening of Olympic joy: "Their evenings, the regular, daily evenings.

they spend every evening in dancing with such joy; but when have I ever seen such a power of pleasure? ... They have been working hard since morning. He who has not worked enough has not prepared the nerve to feel the fullness of pleasure.

And here there is no memory, no fear of want or suffering; here there is only the memory of free and voluntary work, of abundance, of beauty and pleasure, and the hope of the same things to come. At the same time. . the style of his time as well as the pleasures of the flesh... now, at the age of twenty-two, he had become a man of extraordinary learning.

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