Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...GIFT (378 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov-Putnam...
...Vladimir Nabokov has the gift of tongue-specifically Russian and English. Famed for his novels in his second tongue (notably Pale Fire and Lolita), Nabokov has now released the English translation (which is partly his own) of The Gift, which is the last novel he wrote-26 years ago-in his native Russian. Without being a great book, it is clearly a book by a great writer; each sentence delights the ear or some area of the mind...
...Nabokov's young hero is very like the young Nabokov. Count Fyodor Godu-nov-Cherdyntsev is in his early 20s, living in exile in Berlin, struggling not to be crippled by memories of the ancient family estate in Leshino, and trying to get his poetry and prose published in impoverished emigre magazines. His sister marries and leaves for Paris; he meets and falls in love with Zina, a remotely fragile German girl. All of this is simple, and corresponds roughly to the facts of Nabokov's own life...
...from the first page, the reader is off fiction's flatlands into Nabokov's magic world. His aristocratic Fyodor is a lord of language, and this patrimony cannot be expropriated...
...dancing landscape, in which his private Russian past of butterflies, poetry and childhood games blurs into the hateful Berlin present of landladies, "Germani-cally stupid" language students, and menacing politics, as the Weimar Republic, "oppressive as a headache," clumsily snuffles toward its collapse. Fyodor's trilingual life enables Nabokov to play complicated games with the meanings of words. Fyodor is a poet, and without warning his thoughts run in poetic form; only the reader wary of Nabokov's incorrigible love of verbal conjuring will notice that whole pages printed as prose conceal rhyme schemes or blank verse...