The Gift (Dar) was serialised in the Paris-based émigré journal Sovremennye Zapiski in 1937–38, though Chapter Four — a scathing biography of the radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky — was rejected by the journal’s editors as potentially offensive to their readership. The complete novel was first published in book form by the Chekhov Publishing House, New York, in 1952. The English translation, by Michael Scammell with Nabokov’s collaboration, was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1963. It is universally regarded as the finest of Nabokov’s Russian novels and one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
The Novel
Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is a young Russian émigré poet living in Berlin in the late 1920s. The novel follows his artistic development, his literary ambitions, his growing love for Zina Mertz (the stepdaughter of his landlord), and his attempts to write a biography of his father, a famous explorer and lepidopterist who vanished in Central Asia. The narrative is structured around Fyodor’s literary projects: his early poems (presented and critiqued within the novel), his abandoned biography of his father, his completed biography of Chernyshevsky, and the novel we are reading — which may be the masterwork Fyodor has been preparing to write all along.
The Chernyshevsky chapter (Chapter Four) is a brilliantly destructive literary biography that demolishes the utilitarian aesthetics of Russia’s radical tradition with wit, erudition, and merciless precision. It is both a genuine work of literary criticism and a satire of the biographical form itself — Nabokov ventriloquising his protagonist’s most ambitious prose while simultaneously demonstrating the kind of literature that the Chernyshevsky tradition could never produce.
The love story between Fyodor and Zina unfolds with extraordinary delicacy — partly because much of it occurs offstage, in the gaps between chapters, and partly because Nabokov communicates their growing intimacy through shared literary sensibility rather than through conventional romantic scenes. The novel’s final line — a sonnet hidden in the prose — enacts the interpenetration of art and life that is the book’s deepest theme.
Themes and Literary Significance
The Gift is Nabokov’s most sustained meditation on the nature of artistic creation. It is a Künstlerroman — a portrait of the artist — that is also a critique of the Künstlerroman form: self-aware, parodic, and genuinely moving. Fyodor’s development as a writer is inseparable from his reading (Pushkin, Gogol, the great tradition of Russian literature) and from his rejection of what he considers the false aesthetics of social utility championed by Chernyshevsky and his heirs.
The novel is also Nabokov’s farewell to the Russian language as a medium for fiction. After The Gift, he wrote exclusively in English. The novel’s density of allusion, its linguistic play, and its celebration of Russian literary tradition give it an elegiac quality that was surely deliberate — Nabokov was writing his testament to the language he was about to abandon.
Publication History
- Serialisation: Sovremennye Zapiski, Paris, 1937–38 (without Chapter Four)
- Russian first edition in book form: Chekhov Publishing House, New York, 1952 (complete text)
- English translation: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1963
Is The Gift a Good Investment? Collecting and Market Values
The complex publication history creates multiple collecting targets.
Russian first edition (Chekhov Publishing House, 1952):
- Fine in wrappers: $1,000–$3,000
- Signed copies: $5,000–$15,000 (rare)
English first edition (Putnam, 1963):
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $400–$1,200
- Near Fine in jacket: $200–$500
- Signed copies: $2,000–$6,000
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 2.5x. The novel’s reputation has grown steadily as scholars engage with it as Nabokov’s most complex achievement in Russian.
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation expected. The Russian first edition is effectively irreplaceable — the Chekhov Publishing House printings were tiny, and survivors in good condition are extremely scarce.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this autobiographical? Substantially. Fyodor’s Berlin — the boarding houses, the émigré literary scene, the poverty — is drawn directly from Nabokov’s own experience. But Nabokov insisted that the novel was fiction, not autobiography, and the distinction matters: The Gift transforms lived experience into a self-conscious literary artifact in ways that memoir cannot.
Do I need to read this in Russian? The English translation, supervised by Nabokov, is authoritative. But scholars acknowledge that The Gift’s wordplay, allusions, and prosodic effects are impossible to reproduce fully in translation. For readers with Russian, the original is a significantly richer experience.
Why is Chapter Four about Chernyshevsky? Nabokov regarded the utilitarian tradition in Russian criticism — the idea that art should serve social purposes — as a catastrophe for Russian literature. The Chernyshevsky biography is both a demonstration of what brilliant prose can accomplish and a demolition of the aesthetic philosophy that would deny prose that freedom.