My rating:
add to my books
Loading...
The Gift
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he...more
Paperback, 384 pages
Published
February 16th 2011
by Vintage
(first published 1938)
There is a good chance some of your friends read this book. Sign in to see!
sign in »
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
This book is currently not featured on any Listopia lists.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
1,361)
Though less than 400 pages this seemed like a long book, or several books. Possibly because it moves from a book about a book of poems, to a memoir of Fyodor's father, to a biography-of-sorts of Chernyshevskii, with literary criticism and imagined conversations and many lines of poetry throughout. I couldn't quite find the thread, the plait, the tide, though many wavelets were mordant, bilingually punning, or finely wrought.
VN even puts a foretaste of Lolita in the mouth of one of h...more
VN even puts a foretaste of Lolita in the mouth of one of h...more
John
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
anyone who reads with their spine
Recommended to John by:
maybe John Updike -- in print, that is
Shelves:
fine-strange-foreign
Nabokov looms as one of the navigational stars, glimmering against a novelist's horizon just when things seem darkest. THE GIFT makes my Goodreads list because it's the book I came to most recently, maybe 30 years after PALE FIRE & his other American novels rewired my makeup for good. This one is his European masterpiece, a transcendent reimagining of himself & his small family as they shuttled between apartments in central Europe, vagabond souls with a more-than-half-mad notion of keeping the...more
view 2 comments
‘Give me your hand, dear reader, and let’s go into the forest together.’
This is the last book Vladimir Nabokov wrote in what he called his ‘untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue’. The story of Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a young Russian émigré aristocrat in Berlin, told in this novel is both a personal journey and a reflection of Russia’s past. Nabokov provides a brief synopsis in his foreword:
‘The plot of Chapter One centers in Fyodor’s p...more
This is the last book Vladimir Nabokov wrote in what he called his ‘untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue’. The story of Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a young Russian émigré aristocrat in Berlin, told in this novel is both a personal journey and a reflection of Russia’s past. Nabokov provides a brief synopsis in his foreword:
‘The plot of Chapter One centers in Fyodor’s p...more
This book is incredibly quotable, so this post is going to be pretty disastrous. I liked this book a lot, but of course it was difficult (it was, after all, Nabokov). I love his writing, though, and I love the way his brain works, and I love that in parts of this book he was anticipating so many other masterful things, like Lolita and other plots that appear randomly. I love that he loves his art so much, and that love comes through with the main character, and so many others. And I loved that t...more
The Gift has been endlessly summarized and abstracted elsewhere, so I won't even bother. What I love most about it is Nabokov's gift for transforming the most mundane childhood memories and commonplace experiences into pure magic.
And, of course, it's funny. Nabokov is hilarious and The Gift is no exception. The character sketches of Godunov-Cherdyntsev's fellow emigre writers (actual and would-be) are simultaneously heart-breaking and laugh-out-loud funny. Mme. Chernyshevski's inter...more
And, of course, it's funny. Nabokov is hilarious and The Gift is no exception. The character sketches of Godunov-Cherdyntsev's fellow emigre writers (actual and would-be) are simultaneously heart-breaking and laugh-out-loud funny. Mme. Chernyshevski's inter...more
Brilliant, layered - the best for me is the contrast between the idyllic remembered childhood (a sensual memory like no other), and the historical sort-of novel within the novel, about Chernyshevsky. Of course it's Nabokov's way of confronting the Soviet Russia that had mysteriously replaced the land of his memory. Maybe the pinnacle of Nabokov.
Perhaps it was because I was forced to speed read through this book, (as in many college courses) I was never able to get into it. It has the potential to be very good, if you have the time to really sit down and consider it. I called it "the Inception of books" because you simply go deeper and deeper into the books. It is, in essence, a book by a real author, but meant to be the book that the fictional character, Fyodor, has written, regarding himself and the writing of his book. (Whi...more
Copincollo un luuungo commento che avevo scritto tempo addietro per un siti di libri e letteratura...
===============================
“Il vero scrittore dovrebbe infischiarsene di tutti i lettori, salvo uno: il lettore futuro”: questo viene detto ne Il dono di Nabokov, a pagina 421, quando soltanto un’altra cinquantina ci separano dalla conclusione. Una frase che è quasi un piccolo premio proprio per il lettore futuro, cioè, contemporaneo (Il dono è stato scritto negli anni...more
===============================
“Il vero scrittore dovrebbe infischiarsene di tutti i lettori, salvo uno: il lettore futuro”: questo viene detto ne Il dono di Nabokov, a pagina 421, quando soltanto un’altra cinquantina ci separano dalla conclusione. Una frase che è quasi un piccolo premio proprio per il lettore futuro, cioè, contemporaneo (Il dono è stato scritto negli anni...more
I'm not ashamed to admit that Nabakov simply writes better than I read (or at least better than I feel like reading). This is a difficult book, one that you shouldn't read unless you are a literature critic/professor, a Russian scholar, or a somnologist working on an new insomnia cure. That said, the parts I was able to stay focused for (like the relationship between Fyodor and Zina) were really quite/extraordinarily good.
One really needs a deep understanding of Russia literature t...more
One really needs a deep understanding of Russia literature t...more
In my humble opinion, one of the best books by Nabokov: exceptional style, enchanting poems and a biting satire on the revolutionary movement in the mid-19th century Russia.
One of the most difficult and challenging books I have ever read. Yet, extremely rewarding once you get past the long sentences and paragraphs filled with imagery. I only had a few weeks to read this book for a Russian lit. course which made it hard to completely enjoy and take in the novel. I would definitely like to re-read it for a second time at a slower pace.
There are quite a few paragraphs in this book with imagery and word choice so beautiful you can't help but over look some ...more
There are quite a few paragraphs in this book with imagery and word choice so beautiful you can't help but over look some ...more
Just one sentence on only the 2nd page:
"With a practiced eye he searched it for something that would become a daily sore spot, a daily torture for his senses, but there seemed to be nothing of that sort in the offing, and the diffuse light of the gray spring day was not only above suspicion but even promised to mollify any trifle that in more brilliant weather would not fail to crop up; this could be anything: the color of a building, for instance, that immediately provoked an ...more
"With a practiced eye he searched it for something that would become a daily sore spot, a daily torture for his senses, but there seemed to be nothing of that sort in the offing, and the diffuse light of the gray spring day was not only above suspicion but even promised to mollify any trifle that in more brilliant weather would not fail to crop up; this could be anything: the color of a building, for instance, that immediately provoked an ...more
The Gift finds among its peers works such as In Search of Lost Time and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Dedalus' scenes in Ulysses (does the root of every novel since inexorably stretch back to Ulysses? I see it everywhere). It even feels like a sequel to Speak, Memory, though Nabokov is careful to dissociate himself from Godunov-Cherdyntsev. Yet the book is woven with Pushkin and Gogol and lepidoptera, musings on chess and time, the deceptive and imitative qualities of the natura...more
Katie Muffett
rated it
Recommends it for:
Those who are scared off of Russian writing by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy et al.
Considering the fact that Russian literature scares the crap out of me, I very tentatively followed my sister's recommendation of Nabokov after she read 'Lolita'. I am also fascinated by synesthesia, so 'The Gift' was a logical choice. So far, so beautiful. And only one miserable git longing after a bandy-legged female. Fyodor is cool and his longing is not of the Dostoevskian sort, which generally consists of a socially outcast dude with tall black hair, a dog at his feet (slowly succumbing to ...more
The most difficult, I'm sure, of Nabokov's Russian novels. Certainly the most Russian of them. And second only to Ada or Ardor A Family Chronicle in his, er, oeuvre for both page count and complexity. And while I'm getting catagorical and even possibly (pardon my neologism) elistical, let me add that it is, in my opinion, his sweetest novel (one sugary step above Pnin). And before you cock a brow, Mr. Spock, the answer is no, I don't feel the slightest bit corny in writing that because I am a ma...more
As always, what excites me about Nabokov is the beauty of prose and almost poetic rendition of his reflections on details. Loved it till the 3rd chapter, 4th is a little difficult as Nabokov the critic is talking in place of Nabokov the poet (the critic is usually only lurking in the background) also I am not aware of literary/social developments in Russia in the second half of 19th century.
Wow, what an incredibly tough book to read! Definitely Nabokov's most challenging, I just finished this after what may have been months reading it. I came so close to putting it down a couple of times and quitting, but I knew that if I just plowed through, it would be rewarding in the end. It totally was. I didn't get a lot of the pay-off until the final chapter (page 300), but all the way through, even through the densest writing and weirdest turns, it had a lot of value. Nabokov has no pe...more
A meandering tale of an immigrant Russian writer living in Germany. The realtively banal plot achieves salvation through a typically expansive and transcendent Nabokovian tutorial on the essence of writing. This doesn't measure up to Lolita, but the character and quality of description is every bit as present in this as his tour de force.
Very dense and very Russian, with a oddly lumpy structure, but providing a wonderful window into Nabokov's life in Berlin, his communicating with his dead father, and the primary value he places on the lepidopteral freedom of art. There's a wonderful bit where he puts Marx into blank verse "so it would be less boring."
I need to re-read this someday, when I am ready. It is written with such a quality that I feel as if it must be a great book but I was lost and aloof for much of the story. Some background knowledge of Nabokov and Russian lit might be necessary to really connect with this book.
This is my favorite Nabokov book. It's a melancholy story about exiled Russian nobles living in Berlin after the Revolution. The narrator is an exile who is also a novelist. Most of the book slips effortlessly between his childhood memories in Russia, his creative reveries, and his life in dreary Berlin. His thoghts eventually become so jumbles that it becomes impossible to tell what is real and what is memory. There is some remarkable writing here. One chapter begins with the narrator's vivid d...more
I don't think I know enough about Russian literature to properly get this book, but it did have some great moments. One in particular that I'm often reminded of whenever people on either side of the religion/skepticism debate start saying that things are "obvious". A character is in the middle of an atheist rant. "There's no God!" he exclaims. "It's as obvious as the fact that it's raining right now!" Then Nabokov's camera moves back, and you see that the pers...more
Eric
rated it
This book--the last, longest and greatest of Nabokov's Russian novels, and a project that in some form occupied him for much of the 1930s--is always compared to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I think it's better, and more ambitious (a rival for Ulysses, actually). Nabokov focuses not so much on Fyodor's childhood and youth (although they are powerfully present in the first chapter) as much as on his growth and expansion as a quickly maturing writer, and on his impassioned relation to...more
Read my review at: http://tbdeluxe.blogspot.com/2011/03/nab...
Read this in Russian, can't find it on GR.
this is no Lolita.. had a hard time following
one of the best books I have ever read
A bildunsgroman of a gifted Russian poet living in Germany, which includes the character's biography of a real Russian author, Chernyshevski. The politics of the whole Chernyshevski stuff was over my head, and I think I might enjoy it more in a few years when I know more about Russian literature. It's not my favorite Nabokov novel, but I've only read it once.
"he had long since realized that he was incapable of giving his entire soul to anyone or anything: its working capital was ...more
"he had long since realized that he was incapable of giving his entire soul to anyone or anything: its working capital was ...more
BEST
The man certainly has one, and he knows it. VN's last novel in Russian and as a prof of mine said, his farewell love letter to Russian lit. Full of intertextuality, shimmering prose, clues and chess designs, the knock on this novel might be just sheer virtuosity to perhaps an annoying degree. But nobody captures the imaginative consciousness quite like our man. A perfect book of sorts, but not one I want to read everyday.
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
Readers Also Enjoyed
Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery and had an interest in chess problems.
Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptiv...more
More about Vladimir Nabokov...
Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptiv...more
Share This Book
1 trivia question
More quizzes & trivia...
“Thus it transpired that even Berlin could be mysterious. Within the linden's bloom the streetlight winks. A dark and honeyed hush envelops us. Across the curb one's passing shadow slinks: across a stump a sable ripples thus. The night sky melts to peach beyond that gate. There water gleams, there Venice vaguely shows. Look at that street--it runs to China straight, and yonder star above the Volga glows! Oh, swear to me to put in dreams your trust, and to believe in fantasy alone, and never let your soul in prison rust, nor stretch your arm and say: a wall of stone.”
—
6 people liked it
“Have you ever happened, reader, to feel that subtle sorrow of parting with an unloved abode? The heart does not break, as it does in parting with dear objects. The humid gaze does not wander around holding back a tear, as if it wished to carry away in it a trembling reflection of the abandoned spot; but in the best corner of our hearts we feel pity for the things which we did not bring to life with our breath, which we hardly noticed and are now leaving forever. This already dead iventory will not be resurrected in one's memory..”
—
5 people liked it
More quotes…
