The Gift (Nabokov novel)
Content
The young Russian writer, Fyodor Godunov - Tscherdynzev emigrated as a result of the October Revolution to Berlin and lived there in the large colony of Russian emigrants. He pursued two particularly literary projects: a biography of his father, a lost explorer, he breaks off and a critical biography of the Russian literary and revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky Gawrilowitsch that it performs. Fyodor falls in love with the young Russian Sina Merz; at the end of the story they find together.
Background
Creation and editorial history
Nabokov conceived the novel 1933 and finished it in 1938, it is his last completed novel in Russian. ; afterwards he wrote in English. The gift appeared from 1937 to 1938 in various numbers of the Paris emigre magazine Sowremennyje sapiski, but without the fourth chapter. Complete the book was published only in 1952 by a Russian publishing house in New York. The translation into English, The Gift, 1963, was conducted by Nabokov's son Dmitri and Michael Scammell and monitored by Nabokov. A translation into German, angels of Annelore - Brown Schmidt, was not published until 1993.
Book within a book
A special feature of the novel is that it is reported by the literary works of the hero not only, but that Nabokov executing it. The biography of Chernyshevsky comprises around 140 printed pages throughout the fourth of five chapters. In the fifth chapter, Nabokov also writes a fictional meeting of the biography - a slating what extent was prophetic, as the editor of the first publication of the biography against Nabokov omitting resistance.
Germany image
Germany's image of the hero is extremely negative. Nabokov explained later, though the book play in 1928, but was written in the mood of 1938, when he was with his Jewish wife Véra on the run from the Nazis. Dieter E. Zimmer also submits that grew up in an opulent youth Nabokov faced was in Berlin for the first time with material difficulties and " the vulgus ".