The Gift is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian emigre intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. In this his last, and to many his greatest, Russian novel, Nabokov unfolds the story of a writer's pursuit; a gorgeous tapestry of literature and Lepidoptera whose true hero is not Fyodor's elusive, beloved Zina, but Russian prose and poetry itself.
An autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. It tells the story of Fyodor's pursuits as a writer.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.
