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and an addendum labelled here as the second such but in this edition there isn’t a first (unless it is that originally unpublished chapter.)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.)

Penguin, 1991, 236 p, plus xviii p Introductory essay by Mary McCarthy and 12 p Index.

On the face of it an exploration of the last work of a recently murdered US poet, John Shade of Wordsmith College, New Wye, Appalachia, with a foreword by the narrator, Charles Kinbote, the poem itself and the narrator’s commentary on it, Pale Fire (that poem’s title as well as this novel’s) is actually something else again. Or several things again.

The foreword gives the narrator’s account of how the poem was written (on eighty index cards) and how he came to be in charge of both its editing and publication but also provides hints of the shifting ground the text in front of the reader embodies. Kinbote’s relationship with Shade and his wife Sybil (names here tend to the symbolic,) is not particularly friendly; Kinbote comes across as something of a stalker and voyeur. Other academics’ doubts about the poem or its significance are dismissed as nonsense. Kinbote slips in references to his origins in the country of Zembla and his translations of previous Shade poems into Zemblan. That Kinbote lives in a house rented from a Professor Goldsworth – also of Wordsmith College – rings bells to a Spoonerist (compare Wordsworth and Goldsmith, noted poets.) In this section Kinbote suggests his commentary ought to be read before Shade’s poem. Perhaps I should have taken that advice but I doubt it makes much difference. The book seemed to read perfectly well in the printed order and the poem is comprehensible enough on its own in any case.

The poem itself, in four Cantos of two different lengths but symmetrical overall, amounting to 999 lines – each an iambic pentameter – is comprised of rhyming couplets but never at any time reduces to doggerel. Kinbote asserts the poem is actually 1000 lines long, as its first was also to be its last but was never written down. (For the symmetry, it would have to be.)

The meat of the book is in the commentary, though, where Kinbote’s conviction that he supplied Shade with the idea for his poem with his reminiscences of Zembla becomes increasingly hard to credit, mixed up as it is with his potted history of Zembla and its last king, Charles the Beloved, its revolution and the king’s unlikely escape though an underground passage used by his grandfather for illicit liaisons with an actress in the theatre where she performed. Kinbote parallels the writing of the poem to and with the journey from Zembla to the US of Jakob Gradus, a gunman hired by the new Zemblan regime’s secret police to kill the king. Gradus is also known as Jacques d’Argus, Jacques Derges and Jack Grey. This last is the name Shade’s killer, an escapee from a lunatic asylum, gave to the police. Through it all Kinbote, whose name is more likely Botkin, a refugee from Zembla teaching in the Russian Department at Wordsmith’s, gradually reveals his true identity as that last king (or, at least, of his belief in that identity) and that he was the intended target of the gunman. But even his account of the shooting is suspect, as the two witnesses, Gradus and a gardener who intervened to restrain him, recall things differently in later statements to the police. Nabokov is not only presenting us with an unreliable narrator but also an unreliable commentator.

Perhaps I ought to mention that at one point Kinbote relays to us Shade’s disquisition on the use of the word “coloured” to refer to “negroes.”

Mary McCarthy’s essay calls the book, “a Jack-in-the-box, a Fabergé egg, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat and mouse game, a do-it-yourself kit.” It is all of these and more. Pale Fire is an astonishing feat of construction. An intellectual maze, a hall of distorting mirrors, but still utterly readable. A portrait of an unhinged mind convinced it is entirely rational, a fillip to those who delight in the use of such words as pudibundity, fatidic and inenubilable (even if they have to look them up.) Food for the mind, if not quite the heart.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introductory essay; Gradus’ (Gradus’s.) For some of the others I wasn’t sure these were real typos or indications that Kinbote was deranged: sleezy (sleazy,) “another boy, another boy” (why the repetition?) “the harmonies hiving in the man” (hiving?) Keats’ (Keats’s,) momento (memento,) demolishment (demolition, but this was in dialogue,) John Slade (Shade,) sprung (sprang,) “harebreath escapes” (hairsbreadth escapes,) confusely (confusedly,) hoplessness (hopelessness,) Ukranian (Ukrainian,) remindful (reminiscent,) ginko (ginkgo.)