The Gift (Nabokov Novel) - Foreword 1962

Foreword 1962

The Gift is the last novel written by Nabokov in his native language. In the 1962 foreword, he indicates that it was written between 1935 and 1937 in Berlin, with the last chapter completed on the French Riviera in 1937. The novel was first published serially in the Parisian émigré magazine Sovremennye Zapiski; however, Chapter Four was rejected: ”a pretty example of life finding itself obliged to imitate the very art it condemns.” The complete novel was not published until 1952. Despite the many parallels Nabokov tells the reader not to confuse “the designer with the design” insisting he is not Fyodor, his father not an explorer of Asia, and he “never wooed Zina Mertz“. Fyodor’s disdain for Germany may have been influenced by the “nauseous dictatorship” Nabokov experienced when writing. The novel evokes the close-knit and short-lived world of Russian émigré writers in post WWI Europe, notably Berlin, a “phantasm” when Nabokov wrote his foreword where he indicates

(The Gift's) heroine is not Zina, but Russian literature. The plot of Chapter One centres 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 Chernyshevski, 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.

— Vladimir Nabokov, from the Foreword