A Son of the Rock

Penguin Modern Classics, 2001, 407 p, plus iii p Foreword. Translated from the Russian, Дар (Dar), by Michael Scammell and Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov, with a new Addendum translated by Dmitri Nabokov. First published in English in 1952.

This novel is an odd one to try to review. Its structure is not conventional, five – very long -chapters, one of which was not published in The Gift’s first appearance in print (in a Russian émigré journal,) and an addendum labelled here as the second such but in this edition there isn’t a first (unless it is that originally unpublished chapter.) Its narration slides between first and third person with no apparent reason for it (unless our protagonist is merely contemplating or remembering doing things.)

It is the last novel Nabokov wrote in Russian before switching to English and illustrates the author’s passion for poetry. (There is an extensive discussion of the use of different kinds of metrical feet and stresses in lines of verse.) In his foreword Nabokov says his novel’s heroine is Russian literature. The chapters are apparently written in the styles of different Russian literary figures.

What story there is is set among the Russian émigré community in Berlin in the 1920s where Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a poet, is trying to make a name for himself with his first book of poetry. He takes lodgings with fellow émigrés the Shchyogolevs. For Marianna, Mrs Shchyogolev, this is a second marriage, her daughter, Zina Mertz, was the product of her first, to a Jew – a fact which her second husband obviously resents. Shchyogolev throws about the words ‘kike’ and ‘yid’ unthinkingly and is obviously anti-semitic. Zina has no time for him, possibly because he is too interested in her. A friendship develops between Fyodor and Zina but they never converse in the apartment, only in parks and cafés.

The uncertain life of an émigré is illustrated by Fyodor’s thought on boarding a tram that “The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist but nonetheless he was seized with a trembling.”

Fyodor’s father was a lepidopterist who made several trips to Siberian and Asia before and during the Great War and whose present whereabouts are unknown. The 2^nd Addendum I mentioned above is titled Father’s Butterflies, and deals extensively with the subject of butterflies.

After reading an article in a chess magazine about the nineteenth century Russian writer Nikolai Gravilovic Chernyshevski Fyodor proposes to write a biography of him. This book within a book comprises the whole of Chapter Five of The Gift.

A review of Fyodor’s book says, “Everything would have been all right if the author had not found it necessary to equip his account of it with a host of unnecessary details which obscure the sense, and with all sorts of long digressions on the most diversified themes.” (This could be a comment on The Gift itself.) We are also told that “The most enchanting things in nature and art are based on deception.”

In a discussion about the book Fyodor says, “Suppose that I so shuffle, twist, mix, rechew and rebelch everything, add such spices of my own and impregnate things so much with myself that nothing remains of the autobiography but dust….” A review calls it an “incomprehensible essay.”

A measure of the density of the prose here can be assessed from this example; “but of course the main thing is that he had intended, at his leisure, to dedicate a separate study to the question raised here, and at the same time believed that, if the precariousness of human life, and the fog settling on Russia, and the danger of a new hunt far afield projected in such an unpropitious year thwarted it, a maximally accurate exposition of the principles of such a study would still allow minds that at last understood them a chance to consummate the plan outlined by the author.”

All these interpolations and additions make The Gift far from straightforward to read or review. I did not have a similar positive response to it as I had to the same author’s Pale Fire, which I read in 2020. Nabokov’s renderings of relationships between characters are as you might expect from a novel but tend to be sidelined by all the gubbins that surround them.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian; “St Peterburg” (St Petersburg,) “Brockhaus’ Encyclopedia (Brockhaus’s – and, incidentally, Encyclopaedia.) “And in these talks between tamtambles, tamtam my spirit hardly knows” (I have no idea what tamtambles or tamtams are,) mimiking (mimicking,) “what did he use to think about” (what did he used to think about,) “at a Russian small railway station” (at a small Russian railway station,) Mortus’ (Mortus’s,) “a Ukranian” (Ukrainian.)