The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

“My uncle,” said Kern, cracking a nut, “was thrown out of school for reading What to Do?”

  “And what is your opinion?” said Alexandra Yakovlevna addressing Goryainov.

  Goryainov spread his hands. “I don’t have any particular one,” he said in a thin voice, as if mimicking someone. “I’ve never read Chernyshevski, but when I come to think of it … A most boring, Lord forgive me, figure!”

  Alexander Yakovlevich leaned back slightly in his armchair, blinking, twitching, his face alternately lighting up in a smile and then fading again, and said:

  “Nevertheless I welcome Fyodor Konstantinovich’s idea. Of course a lot strikes us today as both comic and boring. But in that era there is something sacred, something eternal. Utilitarianism, the negation of art and so on—all this is merely an accidental wrapping, under which it is impossible not to distinguish its basic features: reverence for the whole human race, the cult of freedom, ideas of equality—equality of rights. It was an era of great emancipations, the peasants from the landowners, the citizen from the state, women from domestic bondage. And don’t forget that not only were the best principles of the Russian liberation movement born then—a thirst for knowledge, steadfastness of spirit, heroic self-sacrifice—but also it was precisely in this era, fed by it in one way or another, that such giants as Turgenev, Nekrasov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were developing. Moreover it goes without saying that Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevski himself was a man with a vast, versatile mind, with enormous, creative willpower, and the fact that he endured dreadful sufferings for the sake of his ideology, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of Russia, more than redeems a certain harshness and rigidity in his critical views. Moreover I maintain that he was a superb critic—penetrating, honest, brave.… No, no, it’s wonderful, you must certainly write it!”

  The engineer Kern had already been on his feet for some time, walking about the room, shaking his head and bursting to say something.

  “What are we talking about?” he suddenly exclaimed, taking hold of the back of a chair. “Who cares what Chernyshevski thought of Pushkin? Rousseau was a lousy botanist, and I wouldn’t have been treated by Dr. Chekhov for anything in the world. Chernyshevski was first of all a learned economist and that’s how he should be regarded—and with all my respect for Fyodor Konstantinovich’s poetic talents, I am somewhat doubtful that he is capable of appreciating the merits and demerits of his man’s Commentaries on John Stuart Mill.”

  “Your comparison is absolutely wrong,” said Alexandra Yakovlevna. “It’s ridiculous! Chekhov didn’t leave the slightest trace in medicine, Rousseau’s musical compositions are mere curiosities, but in this case no history of Russian literature can omit Chernyshevski. But there’s something else I don’t understand,” she continued swiftly. “What interest does Fyodor Konstantinovich have in writing about people and times to which his whole mentality is completely alien? Of course I don’t know what his approach will be. But if he, let’s speak plainly, wants to show up the progressive critics then it’s not worth the effort: Volynski and Eichenwald did this long ago.”

  “Oh, come, come,” said Alexander Yakovlevich, “das kommt nicht in Frage. A young writer has become interested in one of the most important epochs in Russian history and is about to write a literary biography of one of its major figures. I don’t see anything strange in that. It’s not very difficult to get to know the subject, he’ll find more than enough books, and the rest all depends on talent. You say approach, approach. But granted a talented approach to a given subject, sarcasm is a priori excluded, is irrelevant. That’s how it seems to me at least.”

  “Did you see how Koncheyev was attacked last week?” asked the engineer Kern, and the conversation took another turn.

  Out on the street when Fyodor was saying good-by to Goryainov the latter retained his hand in his own large, soft hand and said puckering up his eyes: “Let me tell you, my lad, you’re quite a joker. Recently there died the social-democrat Belenki—a kind of perpetual émigré, so to speak: he was exiled by both the Tsar and the proletariat, so that whenever he indulged in his reminiscences he would begin: “U nas v Zheneve, chez nous à Genève.…” Perhaps you’ll write about him as well?”

  “I don’t understand?” said Fyodor half-questioningly.

  “No, but on the other hand I understood perfectly. You are as much preparing to write about Chernyshevski as I am about Belenki, but then you made a fool of your audience and stirred up an interesting argument. All the best, good night,” and he left with his slow, heavy gait, leaning on a cane and holding one shoulder slightly higher than the other.

  The way of life to which he had become addicted while studying his father’s activities was now renewed for Fyodor. It was one of those repetitions, one of those thematic “voices” with which, according to all the rules of harmony, destiny enriches the life of observant men. But now, taught by experience, he did not allow himself his former slovenliness in the use of sources and provided even the smallest note with an exact label of its origin. In front of the national library, near a stone pool, pigeons strolled cooing among the daisies on the lawn. The books to be taken out arrived in a little wagon along sloping rails at the bottom of the apparently small premises, where they awaited distribution, and where there seemed to be only a few books lying around on the shelves when in fact there was an accumulation of thousands.

  Fyodor would embrace his portion, struggling with its disintegrating weight, and walk to the bus stop. From the very beginning the image of his planned book had appeared to him extraordinarily distinctly in tone and outline, he had the feeling that for every detail he ran to earth there was already a place prepared and that even the work of hunting up material was already bathed in the light of the forthcoming book, just as the sea throws a blue light on a fishing boat, and the boat itself together with this light is reflected in the water. “You see,” he explained to Zina, “I want to keep everything as it were on the very brink of parody. You know those idiotic ‘biographies romancées’ where Byron is coolly slipped a dream extracted from one of his own poems? And there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it. And most essentially, there must be a single uninterrupted progression of thought. I must peel my apple in a single strip, without removing the knife.”

  As he studied his subject he saw that in order to completely soak himself in it he would have to extend his field of activity two decades in either direction. Thus an amusing feature of the age was revealed to him—essentially trifling, but proving to be a valuable guideline: during fifty years of utilitarian criticism, from Belinski to Mihailovski, there was not a single molder of opinion who did not take the opportunity to jeer at the poems of Fet. And into what metaphysical monsters turned sometimes the most sober judgments of these materialists on this or that subject, as if the Word, Logos, were avenging itself on them for being slighted! Belinski, that likable ignoramus, who loved lilies and oleanders, who decorated his window with cacti (as did Emma Bovary), who kept five kopecks, a cork and a button in the empty box discarded by Hegel and who died of consumption with a speech to the Russian people on his bloodstained lips, startled Fyodor’s imagination with such pearls of realistic thought as, for example: “In nature everything is beautful, excepting only those ugly phenomena which nature herself has left unfinished and hidden in the darkness of the earth or water (molluscs, worms, infusoria, and so on).” Similarly, in Mihailovski it was easy to discover a metaphor floating belly upwards as for example: “[Dostoevski] struggled like a fish against the ice, ending up at times in the most humiliating positions”; this humiliated fish rewarded one for working through all the writings of the “reporter on contemporary issues.” From here there was a direct transition to the fighting lexicon of the present day, to the style of Steklov speaking of Chernyshevski’s times (“The plebeian writer who nestled in the pores of Russian life … branded routine opinions with the battering ram
of his ideas”), or to the idiom of Lenin who in his polemical heat attained the heights of absurdity: (“Here there is no fig leaf … and the idealist stretches out his hand directly to the agnostic”). Russian prose, what crimes are committed in thy name! A contemporary critic wrote about Gogol: “His people are deformed grotesques, his characters, Chinese-lantern shadows, the events he depicts, impossible and ridiculous,” and this fully corresponded to the opinions held by Skabichevski and Mihailovski about Chekhov—opinions that, like a fuse lit at the time, have now blown these critics to bits.

  He read Pomyalovski (honesty in the role of tragic passion) and found there this lexical fruit salad: “little raspberry-red lips like cherries.” He read Nekrasov, and sensing a certain urban-journalist defect in his (frequently enchanting) poetry, he found an apparent explanation for the vulgarisms in his pedestrian Russian Women (“How jolly, furthermore, To share your every thought in common With someone you adore”) in the discovery that despite his walks in the country he confused gadflies with bumblebees and wasps ([over the flock] “a restless swarm of bumblebees” and ten lines lower down: the horses under the smoke of a bonfire “seek shelter from the wasps”). He read Herzen and was again better able to understand the flaw (a false glib glitter) in his generalizations when he noticed that this author, having a poor knowledge of English (witnessed by his surviving autobiographical reference, which begins with the amusing Gallicism “I am born”), had confused the sounds of two English words “beggar” and “bugger” and from this had made a brilliant deduction concerning the English respect for wealth.

  Such a method of evaluation, taken to its extreme, would be even sillier than approaching writers and critics as exponents of general ideas. What is the significance of Suhoshchokov’s Pushkin’s not liking Baudelaire, and is it fair to condemn Lermontov’s prose because he twice refers to some impossible “crocodile” (once in a serious and once in a joking comparison)? Fyodor stopped in time, thus preventing the pleasant feeling that he had discovered an easily applicable criterion from being impaired by its abuse.

  He read a great deal—more than he had ever read. Studying the short stories and novels of the men of the sixties he was surprised by their insistence on the various ways their characters saluted one another. Meditating over the thralldom of Russian thought, that eternal tributary to this or that Golden Horde, he was carried away by weird comparisons. Thus, in paragraph 146 of the censorship code for 1826, in which authors were enjoined to “uphold chaste morals and not to replace them solely by beauty of the imagination,” one had only to replace “chaste” by “civic” or some such word in order to get the private censorship code of the radical critics; and similarly, when the reactionary Bulgarin informed the government in a confidential letter of his readiness to color the characters in the novel he was writing to suit the censor, one could not help thinking of the later fawning that even such authors as Turgenev indulged in before the Court of Progressive Public Opinion; and the radical Shchedrin, using a cart shaft to fight with and ridiculing Dostoevski’s sickness, or Antonovich, who called that author “a whipped and expiring animal,” were little different from right-winger Burenin, who persecuted the unfortunate poet Nadson. In the writings of another radical critic, Zaytsev, it was comical to find, forty years before Freud, the theory that “all these aesthetic feelings and similar illusions ‘elevating us’ are only modifications of the sexual instinct …”; this was the same Zaytsev who called Lermontov a “disillusioned idiot,” bred silkworms in leisured exile at Locarno (they never cocooned), and often crashed down the stairs from shortsightedness.

  Fyodor tried to sort out the mishmash of philosophical ideas of the time, and it seemed to him that in the very roll call of names, in their burlesque consonance, there was manifested a kind of sin against thought, a mockery of it, a blemish of the age, when some extravagantly praised Kant, others Kont (Comte), others again Hegel or Schlegel. And on the other hand he began to comprehend by degrees that such uncompromising radicals as Chernyshevski, with all their ludicrous and ghastly blunders, were, no matter how you looked at it, real heroes in their struggle with the governmental order of things (which was even more noxious and more vulgar than was their own fatuity in the realm of literary criticism), and that other oppositionists, the liberals or the Slavophiles, who risked less, were by the same token worth less than these iron squabblers.

  He sincerely admired the way Chernyshevski, an enemy of capital punishment, made deadly fun of the poet Zhukovski’s infamously benign and meanly sublime proposal to surround executions with a mystic secrecy (since, in public, he said, the condemned man brazenly puts on a bold face, thus bringing the law into disrepute) so that those attending the hanging would not see but would only hear solemn church hymns from behind a curtain, for an execution should be moving. And while reading this Fyodor recalled his father saying that innate in every man is the feeling of something insuperably abnormal about the death penalty, something like the uncanny reversal of action in a looking glass that makes everyone left-handed: not for nothing is everything reversed for the executioner: the horse-collar is put on upside down when the robber Razin is taken to the scaffold; wine is poured for the headsman not with a natural turn of the wrist but backhandedly; and if, according to the Swabian code, an insulted actor was permitted to seek satisfaction by striking the shadow of the offender, in China it was precisely an actor—a shadow—who fulfilled the duties of the executioner, all responsibility being as it were lifted from the world of men and transformed into the inside-out one of mirrors.

  He clearly sensed a deception on a governmental scale in the actions of the “Tsar-Liberator,” who very soon got bored with all this business of granting freedoms; for it was the Tsar’s boredom that gave the chief hue to reaction. After the manifesto the police fired into the people at the station of Bezdna—and Fyodor’s epigrammatic vein was tickled by the tasteless temptation to regard the further fate of Russia’s rulers as the run between the stations Bezdna (Bottomless) and Dno (Bottom).

  Gradually, as a result of all these raids on the past of Russian thought, he developed a new yearning for Russia that was less physical than before, a dangerous desire (with which he successfully struggled) to confess something to her and to convince her of something. And while piling up knowledge, while extracting his finished creation out of this mountain, he remembered something else: a pile of stones on an Asian pass; warriors going on a campaign each placed a stone there; on the way back each took a stone from the pile; that which was left represented forever the number of those fallen in battle. Thus in a pile of stones Tamerlane foresaw a monument.

  By winter he had already got into the writing of it, having passed imperceptibly from accumulation to creation. Winter, like most memorable winters and like all winters introduced for the sake of a narrational phrase, turned out (they always “turn out” in such cases) to be cold. At his evening trysts with Zina in an empty little café where the counter was painted an indigo color and where dark blue gnomelike lamps, miserably posing as vessels of coziness, glowed on six or seven little tables, he read her what he had written during the day and she listened, her painted lashes lowered, leaning on one elbow, playing with a glove or a cigarette case. Sometimes the proprietor’s dog would come up, a fat mongrel bitch with low-hanging bubs, and would place its head on Zina’s knee, and beneath the stroking and smiling hand that smoothed back the skin on its silky round forehead, the dog’s eyes would take on a Chinese slant, and when she was given a lump of sugar, she would take it, waddle in a leisurely manner into a corner, roll up there and very loudly start crunching. “Wonderful, but I’m not sure you can say it like that in Russian,” said Zina sometimes, and after an argument he would correct the expression she had questioned. Chernyshevski she called Chernysh for short and got so used to considering him as belonging to Fyodor, and partly to her, that his actual life in the past appeared to her as something of a plagiarism. Fyodor’s idea of composing his biography in the shape of
a ring, closed with the clasp of an apocryphal sonnet (so that the result would be not the form of a book, which by its finiteness is opposed to the circular nature of everything in existence, but a continuously curving, and thus infinite, sentence), seemed at first to her to be incapable of embodiment on flat, rectangular paper—and so much the more was she overjoyed when she noticed that nevertheless a circle was being formed. She was completely unconcerned whether or not the author clung assiduously to historical truth—she took that on trust, for if it were not thus it would simply not have been worth writing the book. A deeper truth, on the other hand, for which he alone was responsible and which he alone could find, was for her so important that the least clumsiness or fogginess in his words seemed to be the germ of a falsehood, which had to be immediately exterminated. Gifted with a most flexible memory, which twined like ivy around what she perceived, Zina by repeating such word-combinations as she particularly liked ennobled them with her own secret convolution, and whenever Fyodor for any reason changed a turn of phrase which she had remembered, the ruins of the portico stood for a long time on the golden horizon, reluctant to disappear. There was an extraordinary grace in her responsiveness which imperceptibly served him as a regulator, if not as a guide. And sometimes when at least three customers had gathered, an old lady pianist in pince-nez would sit at the upright piano in the corner and play Offenbach’s Barcarolle as a march.

  He was already approaching the end of his work (the hero’s birth, to be precise) when Zina said it would not hurt him to relax and therefore on Saturday they would go together to a fancy-dress ball at the house of an artist friend of hers. Fyodor was a bad dancer, could not stand German bohemians and moreover refused point-blank to put fantasy in a uniform, which is what in effect masked balls do. They compromised on his wearing a half-mask and a dinner jacket that had been made about four years previously and not worn more than four times in the interim. “And I’ll go as a—” she began dreamily, but cut herself short. “Only not as a boyar maiden and not as Columbine, I beg you,” said Fyodor. “That would be just like me,” said she, scornfully. “Oh, I assure you it’ll be terribly gay,” she added tenderly, to dissipate his gloom. “Why, after all we’ll be all alone in the crowd. I so want to go! We’ll be the whole night together and no one will know who you are, and I’ve thought myself up a costume specially for you.” He conscientiously imagined her with a naked, tender back and pale bluish arms—but here all kinds of excited bestial faces slipped through illegally, the coarse trash of noisy German revels; bad liquor inflamed his gullet, he belched from the chopped-egg sandwiches; but he again concentrated his thoughts, revolving to the music, on Zina’s transparent temple vein. “Of course it’ll be gay, of course we’ll go,” he said with conviction.