The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  It was decided that she should set off at nine and he would follow an hour later. Cramped by the time limit, he did not sit down to work after supper but fiddled around with a new émigré magazine where Koncheyev was twice mentioned fleetingly, and these casual references, which implied the poet’s general recognition, were more valuable than even the most favorable review: only six months ago this would have provoked in him what Pushkin’s envious Salieri felt, but now he himself was amazed by his own indifference to another’s fame. He looked at his watch and slowly began to change. He unearthed his drowsy-looking dinner jacket, and lapsed into thought. Still meditating, he took out a starched shirt, put his evasive collar studs in, climbed into it, shivering from its rigid chill. Again was motionless for a moment, then automatically pulled on his black trousers with a stripe, and remembering that he had made up his mind only that morning to cross out the last of the sentences he had written the previous day, he bent over the already heavily corrected page. As he read the sentence over, he wondered—should he leave it intact after all, made an insertion mark, wrote in an additional adjective, froze over it—and swiftly crossed out the whole sentence. But to leave the paragraph in that condition, i.e., its construction hanging over a precipice with a boarded window and a crumbling porch, was a physical impossibility. He examined his notes for this part and suddenly—his pen stirred and started to fly. When he looked again at his watch it was three in the morning, he had the chills, and everything in the room was dim from tobacco smoke. Simultaneously he heard the click of the American lock. His door was ajar, and as she passed by it through the hall, Zina caught sight of him, pale, with mouth wide open, in an unbuttoned starched shirt with suspenders trailing on the floor, pen in hand and the half-mask on his desk showing black against the whiteness of paper. She locked herself in her room with a bang and everything again grew quiet. “That’s a fine mess” said Fyodor in a low voice. “What have I done?” Thus he never found out what dress Zina had gone in; but the book was finished.

  A month later, on a Monday, he took the fair copy to Vasiliev, who as early as last autumn, knowing of his investigations, had half offered to have the Life of Chernyshevski published by the house attached to the Gazeta. The following Wednesday Fyodor was again there, chatting quietly with old Stupishin, who used to wear bedroom slippers at the office. Suddenly the study door opened and filled with the bulk of Vasiliev, who looked blackly at Fyodor for a moment, and then said impassively: “Be so good as to come in,” and moved to one side for him to slip through.

  “Well, have you read it?” asked Fyodor as he took a seat across the table.

  “I have,” replied Vasiliev in a gloomy bass.

  “Personally,” said Fyodor briskly, “I would like it to come out this spring.”

  “Here’s your manuscript,” said Vasiliev suddenly, knitting his brows and handing him the folder. “Take it. There can be no question of my being party to its publication. I assumed that this was a serious work, and it turns out to be a reckless, antisocial, mischievous improvisation. I am amazed at you.”

  “Well, that’s nonsense, you know,” said Fyodor.

  “No, my dear sir, it’s not nonsense,” roared Vasiliev, irately fingering the objects on his desk, rolling a rubber stamp, changing the positions of meek books “for review,” conjoined accidentally, with no hopes for permanent happiness. “No, my dear sir! There are certain traditions of Russian public life which the honorable writer does not dare to subject to ridicule. I am absolutely indifferent to whether you have talent or not, I only know that to lampoon a man whose works and sufferings have given sustenance to millions of Russian intellectuals is unworthy of any talent. I know that you won’t listen to me, but nevertheless [and Vasiliev, grimacing with pain, clutched at his heart] I beg you as a friend not to try to publish this thing, you will wreck your literary career, mark my words, everyone will turn away from you.”

  “I prefer the backs of their heads,” said Fyodor.

  That night he was invited to the Chernyshevskis, but Alexandra Yakovlevna put him off at the last minute: her husband was “down with flu” and “ran a high temperature.” Zina had gone to the cinema with someone so that he only met her the next evening. “ ‘Kaput on the first try,’ as your stepfather would put it,” he said in reply to her question about the manuscript and (as they used to write in the old days) briefly recounted his conversation at the editorial office. Indignation, tenderness toward him, the urge to help him immediately, found expression with her in a burst of enterprising energy. “Oh, that’s how it is!” she exclaimed. “All right. I’ll get the money for publication, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “For the baby a meal, for the father a coffin,” he said (transposing the words in a line of Nekrasov’s poem about the heroic wife who sells her body to get her husband his supper), and another time she would have taken offense at this bold joke.

  She borrowed somewhere a hundred and fifty marks and added seventy of her own which she had put away for winter—but this sum was insufficient, and Fyodor decided to write to Uncle Oleg in America, who regularly helped his mother and who also used occasionally to send a few dollars to him. The composition of this letter was put off from day to day, however, just as he put off, in spite of Zina’s exhortations, an attempt to get his book printed serially by an émigré literary magazine in Paris, or to interest the publishing house there which had brought out Koncheyev’s verses. In her free time she undertook to type the manuscript in the office of a relation of hers and from him she collected another fifty marks. She was angered by Fyodor’s inertia—a consequence of his hatred for any practical affairs. He in the meantime occupied himself lightheartedly with composing chess problems, dreamily went about his lessons, and rang up Mme. Chernyshevski daily: Alexander Yakovlevich’s flu had changed into an acute inflammation of the kidneys. One day in the Russian bookshop he noticed a tall, portly gentleman with a large-featured face, wearing a black felt hat (a strand of chestnut hair falling from under it) who glanced at him affably and even with a kind of encouragement. Where have I met him? thought Fyodor quickly, trying not to look. The other approached and offered his hand, generously, naively, defenselessly spreading it wide, spoke … and Fyodor remembered: it was Busch, who two and a half years ago had read his play at that literary circle. Recently he had published it and now, pushing Fyodor with his hip, nudging him with his elbow, an infantine smile trembling on his noble, always slightly sweaty face, he produced a wallet, from the wallet an envelope and from the envelope a clipping—a pitiful little review which had appeared in the Rigan émigré newspaper.

  “Now,” he said with awesome weightiness, “this Thing is also coming out in German. Moreover I am now working on a Novel.”

  Fyodor tried to get away from him, but the latter left the shop with him and suggested they should go together, and since Fyodor was on his way to a lesson, and thus was tied to a definite route, all he could do to try and save himself from Busch was to quicken his step, but this so speeded up his companion’s speech that he slowed down again in horror.

  “My Novel,” said Busch, looking into the distance and stretching aside his hand, with a rattling cuff protruding from the sleeve of his black overcoat, in order to stop Fyodor Konstantinovich (the overcoat, the black hat and the strand of hair gave him the appearance of a hypnotist, a chess maestro or a musician), “my Novel is the tragedy of a philosopher who has discovered the absolute formula. He starts speaking and speaks thus [Busch, like a conjurer, plucked a notebook out of the air and began to read on the move]: ‘One has to be a complete ass not to deduct from the fact of the atom the fact that the universe itself is merely an atom, or, it would be truer to say, some kind of trillionth of an atom. This was realized with his intuition already by that genius Blaise Pascal. But let us proceed, Louisa! [At the sound of this name Fyodor started and clearly heard the sounds of the German grenadier march: “Fa-are-well, Louisa! wipe your eyes and don’t cry; not every bullet kills a good guy,” and t
his subsequently continued to sound as if passing under the window of Busch’s subsequent words.] Exert, my dear, your attention. First, let me give a fanciful example. Let us assume that a certain physicist has managed to track down, out of the absolute-unthinkable sum of atoms out of which the All is composited, that fatal atom with which our reasoning is concerned. We are supposing that he has brought his splitting down to the least essence of that very atom, at which moment the Shadow of a Hand [the physicist’s hand!] falls on our universe with catastrophic results, because the universe is but the final fraction of one, I think, central atom, of those it consists of. It’s not easy to understand, but if you understand this you will understand everything. Out of the prison of mathematics! The whole is equal to the smallest part of the whole, the sum of the parts is equal to one part of the sum. This is the secret of the world, the formula of absolute-infinity, but having made such a discovery, the human personality can no longer go on walking and talking. Shut your mouth, Louisa!’ That’s him talking to a cutie, his lady friend,” added Busch with good-natured indulgence, shrugging one mighty shoulder.

  “If you’re interested, I can read it to you from the beginning sometime,” he continued. “The theme is colossal. And you, may I ask, what are you doing?”

  “I?” said Fyodor with a slight smile. “I have also written a book, a book about the critic Chernyshevski, only I can’t find a publisher for it.”

  “Ah! The popularizator of German materialism—of Hegel’s traducers, the grobianistic philosophers! Very honorable. I am more and more convinced that my publisher will take your work with pleasure. He’s a comic personality and for him literature is a closed book. But I have the position of adviser to him and he will hear me out. Give me your telephone number. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow—and if he agrees in principle, then I’ll skim through your manuscript, and I dare to hope that I’ll recommend it in the most flattering manner.”

  What rot, thought Fyodor and therefore was extremely surprised when the next day the kind soul did in fact ring. The publisher turned out to be a plumpish man with a sad nose, reminding him somewhat of Alexander Yakovlevich, with the same red ears and a stipple of black hairs along each side of his polished baldpate. His list of published books was small, but remarkably eclectic: translations of some German psychoanalytic novels done by an uncle of Busch’s; The Poisoner by Adelaida Svetozarov; a collection of funny stories; an anonymous poem entitled “I”; but among this trash there were two or three genuine books, such as, for example, the wonderful Stairway to the Clouds by Hermann Lande and also his Metamorphoses of Thought. Busch reacted to the Life of Chernyshevski as to a good slap at Marxism (to the delivery of which Fyodor had not given the least thought when writing his work) and at the second meeting the publisher, evidently the nicest of men, promised to publish the book by Easter; i.e., in a month’s time. He gave no advance and offered five percent on the first thousand copies, but on the other hand he raised the author’s percentage to thirty on the second thousand, which seemed to Fyodor both just and generous. However, he was completely indifferent to this side of the business (and to the fact that the sales of émigré writers seldom reached five hundred copies). Other emotions overwhelmed him. Having shaken the moist hand of radiant Busch he emerged onto the street like a ballerina flying out onto the fluorescent stage. The drizzle seemed a dazzling dew, happiness stood in his throat, rainbow nimbi trembled around the streetlamps, and the book he had written talked to him at the top of its voice, accompanying him the whole time like a torrent on the other side of a wall. He headed for the office where Zina worked; opposite that black building, with benevolent-looking windows inclined toward him, he found the pub where they were to meet.

  “Well, what news?” she asked, entering quickly.

  “No, he won’t take it,” said Fyodor watching, with delighted attention, her face cloud as he toyed with his power over it and anticipated the exquisite light he was about to summon.

  Chapter Four

  Alas! In vain historians pry and probe:

  The same wind blows, and in the same live robe

  Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise;

  And with a woman’s smile and a child’s care

  Examines something she is holding there

  Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.

  A SONNET, apparently barring the way, but perhaps, on the contrary, providing a secret link which would explain everything—if only man’s mind could withstand that explanation. The soul sinks into a momentary dream—and now, with the peculiar theatrical vividness of those risen from the dead they come out to meet us: Father Gavriil, a long staff in his hand, wearing a silk, garnet-red chasuble, with an embroidered sash across his big stomach; and with him, already illuminated by the sun, an extremely attractive little boy—pink, awkward, delicate. They draw near. Take off your hat, Nikolya. Hair with a russet glint, freckles on his little forehead, and in his eyes the angelic clarity characteristic of nearsighted children. Afterwards (in the quiet of their poor and distant parishes) priests with names derived from Cypress, Paradise, and Golden Fleece recalled his bashful beauty with some surprise: the cherub, alas, proved to be pasted on tough gingerbread which was too hard for many to bite into.

  Having greeted us, Nikolya again dons his hat, a gray, downy top hat, and quietly withdraws, very sweet in his homemade little coat and nankeen breeches, while his father, a kindly cleric who dabbles in horticulture, entertains us with talk of Saratov cherries, plums and pears. A whirl of torrid dust veils the picture.

  As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books. He excelled in his studies. For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: “Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws,” and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun.

  At the age of sixteen he had a sufficient grasp of languages to read Byron, Eugène Sue and Goethe (being ashamed to the end of his days of his barbarous pronunciation) and already had a command of seminary Latin, owing to his father’s being an educated man. Besides this he took Polish with a certain Sokolovski, while a local orange merchant taught him Persian—and also tempted him with the use of tobacco.

  Upon entering the Saratov seminary, he showed himself there to be a meek pupil and was never once flogged. He was nicknamed “the little toff,” although in fact he was not averse to general fun and games. In the summer he played dibs and took pleasure in bathing; never did he learn to swim, however, nor to fashion sparrows out of clay, nor to make nets for catching tiddlers: the holes came out uneven and the threads got tangled—fish are harder to catch than human souls (but even the souls later escaped through the rents). In winter, in the snowy darkness, a rowdy gang used to tear downhill in a huge, horse-drawn, flat sled while roaring out dactylic hexameters—and the chief of police, in his nightcap, would pull aside his curtain and grin encouragingly, happy that the seminarists’ frolics would frighten off any night burglars.

  He would have been a priest, like his father, and would have reached, very likely, a high rank—but for the regrettable incident with Major Protopopov. This was a local landowner, a bon vivant, a wencher, a dog lover: it was his son that Father Gavriil too hastily recorded in the parish register as illegitimate; meanwhile, it transpired that the wedding had been celebrated—without fuss, true, but honorably—forty days before the child’s birth. Dismissed from his post as member of the consistory, Father Gavriil fell into such a depression that his hair turned gray. “That’s how they reward the labors of poor priests,” repeated his wife wrathfully—and it was decided to give Nikolya a secular education. What later became of the young Protopopov—did he find out one day that because of him … ? Was he seized with a sacred thrill …? Or tiring rapidly of the pleasures of ebullient youth … withdrawing …?

  Incidentally: the landscape which not long before had with wondrous
languor unfolded along the passage of the immortal brichka; all that Russian viatic lore, so untrammeled as to bring tears to the eyes; all the humbleness that gazes from the field, from a hillock, from between oblong clouds; that suppliant, expectant beauty which is ready to rush toward you at the slightest sigh and share your tears; in short, the landscape hymned by Gogol passed unnoticed before the eyes of the eighteen-year-old Nikolay Gavrilovich, who with his mother was traveling in a carriage drawn by their own horses from Saratov to St. Petersburg. The whole way he kept reading a book. It goes without saying that he preferred his “war of words” to the “corn ears bowing in the dust.”

  Here the author remarked that in some of the lines he had already composed there continued without his knowledge a fermentation, a growth, a swelling of the pea, or, more precisely: at one or another point the further development of a given theme became manifest—the theme of the “writing exercises” for example: already during his student days Nikolay Gavrilovich was copying out for his own benefit Feuerbach’s “Man is what he eats” (it comes out smoother in German and even better with the help of the spelling now accepted in Russian: chelovek est’ to chto est). We remark also that the theme of “nearsightedness” develops, too, beginning with the fact that as a child he knew only those faces which he kissed and could see only four out of the seven stars of the Great Bear. His first—copper—spectacles donned at the age of twenty. A teacher’s silver spectacles bought for six rubles so as to distinguish his students in the Cadet School. The gold spectacles of a molder of public opinion put on in the days when The Contemporary was penetrating to the most fabulous depths of the Russian countryside. Again copper spectacles, bought at a little trading post beyond Lake Baikal, where they also sold felt boots and vodka. The yearning for spectacles in a letter to his sons from Yakutsk territory—requesting lenses for such and such vision (with a line marking the distance at which he could make out writing). Here the theme of spectacles dims for a time.… Let us follow another theme—that of “angelic clarity.” This is how it develops subsequently: Christ died for mankind because he loved mankind, which I also love, for which I shall also die. “Be a second Savior,” his best friend advises him—and how he glows—oh, timid! Oh, weak! (an almost Gogolian exclamation mark appears fleetingly in his student diary). But the “Holy Ghost” must be replaced by “Common Sense.” Is not poverty the mother of vice? Christ should first have shod everybody and crowned them with flowers and only then have preached morality. Christ the Second would begin by putting an end to material want (aided here by the machine which we have invented). And strange to say, but … something came true—yes, it was as if something came true. His biographers mark his thorny path with evangelical signposts (it is well known that the more leftist the Russian commentator the greater is his weakness for expressions like “the Golgotha of the revolution”). Chernyshevski’s passions began when he reached Christ’s age. Here the role of Judas was filled by Vsevolod Kostomarov; the role of Peter by the famous poet Nekrasov, who declined to visit the jailed man. Corpulent Herzen, ensconced in London, called Chernyshevski’s pillory column “The companion piece of the Cross.” And in a famous Nekrasov iambic there was more about the Crucifixion, about the fact that Chernyshevski had been “sent to remind the earthly kings of Christ.” Finally, when he was completely dead and they were washing his body, that thinness, that steepness of the ribs, that dark pallor of the skin and those long toes vaguely reminded one of his intimates of “The Removal from the Cross”—by Rembrandt, is it? But even this isn’t the end of the theme: there is still the posthumous outrage, without which no holy life is complete. Thus the silver wreath with the inscription on its ribbon To THE APOSTLE OF TRUTH FROM THE INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION OF THE CITY OF kHARKOV was stolen five years later from the ironworked chapel; moreover the cheerful sacrilegist broke the dark-red glass and scratched his name and the date on the frame with a splinter of it. And then a third theme is ready to unfold—and to unfold quite fantastically if we don’t keep an eye on it: the theme of “traveling,” which can lead to God knows what—to a tarantass with a gendarme in azure uniform, and even more—to a Yakutsk sled harnessed to half a dozen dogs. Goodness, that Vilyuisk captain of the police is also called Protopopov! But for the time being all is very pacific. The comfortable traveling carriage rolls on, Nikolay’s mother Eugenia Egorovna dozes with a handkerchief spread over her face, while her son reclines beside her reading a book—and a hole in the road loses its meaning of hole, becoming merely a typographical unevenness, a jump in the line—and now again the words pass evenly by, the trees pass by and their shadow passes over the pages. And here at last is St. Petersburg.