The “Gift” of Nabokov in a brief summary
The hero of the novel is Fedor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a Russian emigre, the son of a famous entomologist, the son of an aristocratic family, who is poor in Berlin in the second half of the 1920s, earning private lessons and publishing nostalgic twelve books about childhood in Russia in Russian newspapers. He feels a huge literary potential, he is bored with emigrant gatherings, his only idol among contemporaries is the poet Koncheev. With him, he leads a relentless inner dialogue “in the language of the imagination.” Godunov-Cherdyntsev, strong, healthy, young, full of happy premonitions, and his life is not overshadowed neither by poverty, nor by the uncertainty of the future. He constantly catches in the landscape, in a scrap of tram talk, in his dreams, signs of future happiness, which for him consists of love and creative self-realization.
The novel begins with a rally: inviting Cherdyntsev to visit, emigrant Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevsky promises
In the second, Cherdyntsev receives a mother in Berlin who came to him from Paris. His apartment owner, Frau Stoboi, found a spare room for her. Mother and son recall Cherdyntsev, the elder, the father of the hero who disappeared in his last expedition, somewhere in Central Asia. Mother still hopes that he is alive. A son who has been searching for a hero for his first serious book for a long time, is planning to write a biography of his father and remembers his childhood paradise – excursions with his father around the estate, catching butterflies, reading old magazines, solving etudes, sweet lessons – but feels that out of these scattered notes and dreams, the book does not loom: he is too close, intimately recalls his father, and therefore is not able to objectify his image and write about him as a scientist and traveler. Moreover, in the story of his wanderings the son is too poetic and dreamy, and he wants scientific rigor. Material to him is both too close, and at times alien. And the external impetus to the termination of work is the move of Cherdyntsev to a new apartment. Frau Stoboy found herself a more reliable, well-meaning and well-meaning guest: the idleness of Cherdyntsev, his writing embarrassed her. Cherdyntsev opted for the apartment of Marianna Nikolaevna and Boris Ivanovich Schegolev not because he liked this couple: he was attracted by a charming maiden dress, as if inadvertently thrown in one of the rooms. This time he guessed the call of fate, for nothing that the dress belonged not to Zina Merz, Marianna Nikolaevna’s daughter from her first marriage, but to her friend, who brought her blue air toilet for alteration. Material to him is both too close, and at times alien. And the external impetus to the termination of work is the move of Cherdyntsev to a new apartment. Frau Stoboy found herself a more reliable, well-meaning and well-meaning guest: the idleness of Cherdyntsev, his writing embarrassed her. Cherdyntsev opted for the apartment of Marianna Nikolaevna and Boris Ivanovich Schegolev not because he liked this couple: he was attracted by a charming maiden dress, as if inadvertently thrown in one of the rooms. This time he guessed the call of fate, for nothing that the dress belonged not to Zina Merz, Marianna Nikolaevna’s daughter from her first marriage, but to her friend, who brought her blue air toilet for alteration. Material to him is both too close, and at times alien. And the external impetus to the termination of work is the move of Cherdyntsev to a new apartment. Frau Stoboy found herself a more reliable, well-meaning and well-meaning guest: the idleness of Cherdyntsev, his writing embarrassed her. Cherdyntsev opted for the apartment of Marianna Nikolaevna and Boris Ivanovich Schegolev not because he liked this couple: he was attracted by a charming maiden dress, as if inadvertently thrown in one of the rooms. This time he guessed the call of fate, for nothing that the dress belonged not to Zina Merz, Marianna Nikolaevna’s daughter from her first marriage, but to her friend, who brought her blue air toilet for alteration. Frau Stoboy found herself a more reliable, well-meaning and well-meaning guest: the idleness of Cherdyntsev, his writing embarrassed her. Cherdyntsev opted for the apartment of Marianna Nikolaevna and Boris Ivanovich Schegolev not because he liked this couple: he was attracted by a charming maiden dress, as if inadvertently thrown in one of the rooms. This time he guessed the call of fate, for nothing that the dress belonged not to Zina Merz, Marianna Nikolaevna’s daughter from her first marriage, but to her friend, who brought her blue air toilet for alteration. Frau Stoboy found herself a more reliable, well-meaning and well-meaning guest: the idleness of Cherdyntsev, his writing embarrassed her. Cherdyntsev opted for the apartment of Marianna Nikolaevna and Boris Ivanovich Schegolev not because he liked this couple: he was attracted by a charming maiden dress, as if inadvertently thrown in one of the rooms. This time he guessed the call of fate, for nothing that the dress belonged not to Zina Merz, Marianna Nikolaevna’s daughter from her first marriage, but to her friend, who brought her blue air toilet for alteration. as if inadvertently thrown in one of the rooms. This time he guessed the call of fate, for nothing that the dress belonged not to Zina Merz, Marianna Nikolaevna’s daughter from her first marriage, but to her friend, who brought her blue air toilet for alteration. as if inadvertently thrown in one of the rooms. This time he guessed the call of fate, for nothing that the dress belonged not to Zina Merz, Marianna Nikolaevna’s daughter from her first marriage, but to her friend, who brought her blue air toilet for alteration.
The acquaintance of Cherdyntsev with Zina, who has long been in love with him in absentia in verse, is the topic of the third chapter. They have many common acquaintances, but fate postponed the rapprochement of the heroes to a favorable moment. Zina is sarcastic, witty, well-read, thin, terribly annoyed by her stepfather. She categorically resists Shchegolev and her mother to learn anything about her relationship with Cherdyntsev. She confines herself to walking with him around Berlin, where everything meets their happiness, resonates with him; followed by long tiring kisses, but nothing more. Unresolved passion, a feeling of approaching but slowing happiness, the joy of health and strength, the liberating talent – all this makes Cherdyntsev begin serious work at last, and by the coincidence of circumstances this becomes the “Life of Chernyshevsky.” Chernyshevsky’s figure Cherdyntsev was carried away not by the consonance of his name with his own and not even in the exact opposite of Chernyshevsky’s biography of his own, but as a result of a long search for an answer to the question that was tormenting him: why in post-revolutionary Russia everything became so gray, boring and monotonous? He refers to the famous era of the 60s, precisely in search of the culprit, but he discovers in Chernyshevsky’s life the very breaking, a crack that prevented him from arranging his life harmoniously, clearly and gracefully. This breakdown has affected the spiritual development of all subsequent generations, poisoned by the deceptive simplicity of cheap, flat pragmatism. why in post-revolutionary Russia everything became so gray, boring and monotonous? He refers to the famous era of the 60s, precisely in search of the culprit, but he discovers in Chernyshevsky’s life the very breaking, a crack that prevented him from arranging his life harmoniously, clearly and gracefully. This breakdown has affected the spiritual development of all subsequent generations, poisoned by the deceptive simplicity of cheap, flat pragmatism. why in post-revolutionary Russia everything became so gray, boring and monotonous? He refers to the famous era of the 60s, precisely in search of the culprit, but he discovers in Chernyshevsky’s life the very breaking, a crack that prevented him from arranging his life harmoniously, clearly and gracefully. This breakdown has affected the spiritual development of all subsequent generations, poisoned by the deceptive simplicity of cheap, flat pragmatism.
“Life of Chernyshevsky,” which Cherdyntsev and Nabokov made themselves a lot of enemies and made a scandal in emigration, is dedicated to debunking Russian materialism, “reasonable egoism,” attempts to live by reason, not by instinct, not by artistic intuition. Mocking Chernyshevsky’s aesthetics, his idyllic utopias, his naive economic teachings, Cherdyntsev fervently sympathizes with him as a man when he describes his love for his wife, suffering in exile, heroic attempts to return to literature and social life after liberation… Chernyshevsky’s blood has that the most “a piece of pus”, about which he spoke in the dying delirium: inability to fit organically into the world, awkwardness, physical weakness, and most importantly – ignoring the external charm of the world, the desire to reduce everything to a racy, a myth… This seemingly pragmatic, but in fact deeply speculative, abstract approach kept Chernyshevsky from living all the time, teasing him with the hope of the possibility of social reorganization, while no public reconstruction can and should not occupy the artist seeking in the course of destiny, in development history, in his and others’ lives, above all, a higher aesthetic sense, a pattern of hints and coincidences. This chapter is written with all the gleam of Nabokov’s irony and erudition. In the fifth chapter, all the dreams of Cherdyntsev come true: his book was published with the assistance of that very kind Bach, whose play he roared with laughter. It was praised by the very Koncheev, the friendship with which our hero dreamed. Finally, it is possible to be close to Zina: her mother and stepfather leave Berlin, and Godunov-Cherdyntsev and Zina Merz remain together. Full of gleeful happiness, this chapter is overshadowed only by the story of the death of Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevsky, who died without believing in a future life. “There is nothing,” he says before his death, listening to the splash of water behind the curtained windows. “It’s as clear as something that’s raining.” And on the street at this time the sun shines, and the neighbor Chernyshevsky watered flowers on the balcony.
The theme of the keys pops up in the fifth chapter: Cherdyntsev left his keys to the apartment in the room, Zina’s keys were taken away by Marianna Nikolaevna, and the lovers are on the street after almost wedding dinner. However, most likely in the Grunewald forest they will not be worse. Yes, and Cherdyntsev’s love for Zina – a love that has come close to its happy solution, but the solution is hidden from us – does not need keys and roofing.
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