Here and there history shows through artistry. In the days I worked on this book, I did not have the knack of recreating Berlin and its colony of expatriates as radically and ruthlessly as I have done in regard to certain environments in my later, English, fiction. In fact, it is rather in Koncheyev, as well as in another incidental character, the novelist Vladimirov, that I distinguish odds and ends of myself as I was circa 1925.

I am not, and never was, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev my father is not the explorer of Central Asia that I still may become some day I never wooed Zina Mertz, and never worried about the poet Koncheyev or any other writer. I had been living in Berlin since 1922, thus synchronously with the young man of the book but neither this fact, nor my sharing some of his interests, such as literature and lepidoptera, should make one say “aha” and identify the designer with the design. It is fascinating to imagine the regime under which Dar may be read in Russia. Only in 1952, almost twenty years after it was begun, did there appear an entire edition of the novel brought out by that Samaritan organization, the Chekhov Publishing House, New York.

The leading émigré magazine Sovremennye Zapiski, conducted in Paris by a group of former members of the Social Revolutionary party, published the novel serially (63–67, 1937–8), omitting, however, Chapter Four, which was rejected for the same reasons that the biography it contains was rejected by Vasiliev in Chapter Three: a pretty example of life finding itself obliged to imitate the very art it condemns. THE greater part of The Gift (in Russian, Dar) was written in 1935–1937, in Berlin its last chapter was completed in 1937 on the French Riviera.

The gift nabokov novel