Keys to The Gift

Front matter

KEYS TO THE GIFT A Guide to Nabokov's Novel

STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND SLAVIC LITERATURES, CULTURES AND HISTORY

Series Editor: Lazar Fleishman (Stanford Universtity)

Chapter One COMPOSITION AND PUBLICATION

Writing.’ 6.4 aio de wo le Re ae a SS ewe we A GU a d

TheManüscrpt s s 09 0x ee we ome xe Roy EOS ee SS

Editing: e T x unevkoR fe URE BASS m un DAD eee Oe ee

The Unwritten Part Two . . s e se ee s ea seme ee smeda

The Market Valüe a u s moau ce e ae see RR ea ww, a

Chapter Two HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Plot of What to Do? s s a w s s s ex e wos d ua Aa taa aa Berlin: The Russian Emigré Community Between the Two World Wars References o s icant e nae warp ATE ee wx a a ON EOS

Contents

Chapter Three

STRUCTURE Title . ee a oe ome S 9 OR oos 127 Plot Sane CENTIES 133 Narrative s METTI 135 Calendat w oe oe a a ee o ee a a E x X EUR S 143 SEDE: pae aoe, eea a oe Beale a ee ee 152 Characters. oos a are ee e o aa ORO € Gk ee a 162 Structüre s sw eo w a a a o a e a a 205 Themes acn ma are te ek Se ieee ee 213 References: «RUE um REX ume ee a SUR ke ARE Us 236

Chapter Four

Method s s os ege x 9o 9 wk VON wv 90x wo Xo 49 o9 S EU 245 Form. s s 2 oss so ooo Rogo o RR oy oh XS Ros 249 Style oa eo eee oe ee od BA be eee oe 252 Transitions s moe oe a w wR we ee me a 257 Points Of VIEW s s coa e a ocg amaa 4 3^3 x SoA a w a Bo 265 SOUrCES a i 41:0. urb ar v de d nran dheara d je eta y 270 Allision$. s «4 x s sooo o oom xo] omo yo RO Xo os 277 Intertextuality u s e o wk ee ee a ee ee a 286 References s d r eco m sim e n en is wa m m ES RB RIS EAD eos 305

Chapter Five

Types. of Commentary s s es s-s i a oe mir ceres 322 The Opening Scene- 24 mk e u e E ELM L ees 337 References ana n d e e e a a e es a 368

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Contents

Chapter Six ENGLISH TRANSLATION Passing the Test . sa «saser ee ee ee es 379 MOI dU soa m wed ho ok eee eo ewe ay Ane ee de Se 411

Chapter Seven

CRITICAL RECEPTION Contemporary Critics: 1937-38... s © s s e s esoo sso etess 415 Contemporary Critics: 1938-56 s s s lll. 424 Contemporary Critics: 1962-77 . . s o e a 436 Critical Reception: 1977-2000s . ... es 474 Références mra e a de EUR m a ee eo ae a 480 Appendixes Appendix]: ie ee Gà wow Gs m a a ew ew EA leo 487 Appendix TT p s a 6 09x o ee OR we A 503 Appendix TM o o « + e s e a me ee oom o wa 508 Appendix IV. + ce 2o o9 ow owox 6 a Oe Wovo ee v 515 Index ss Se Geg& ae a M a oea m Soe SOR BES 518

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“Where are the keys? Keys, my keys!”

Alexander Pushkin, The Covetous Knight (1830)

To critically interpret a text means to read it in order to discover, along with our reactions to it, something about its nature. To use a text means to start from it in order to get something else, even accepting the risk of misinterpreting it from the semantic point of view. If I tear out the pages of my Bible to wrap my pipe tobacco in them, I am using this Bible, but it would be daring to call me a textualist — even though I am, if not a strong pragmatist, certainly a very pragmatic person.

Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation

Imagine purchasing an expensive coffee maker without a user’s manual, or trying to run an outdated word processing program on a brand new iPad. You would probably be able to produce a simple cup of coffee to sip while gazing at the green block letters on your screen, but what is the point of this elementary task if the machines are designed for excellence? Reading Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Dar (The Gift) without a critical guide is comparable to the unwelcome prospect of trying to enjoy Joyce’s Ulysses without a single line of commentary. Current English-language editions of The Gift, however, seem to produce just this sort of blundering. The Gift is a difficult novel, and requires an especially meticulous and expansive scholarly guide.

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My own reading of the novel was not easy and, therefore, typical. The first encounter occurred in the early nineties, when an old friend presented me with a small copy of the novel published in the provincial Russian town of Omsk (much to my chagrin, I later discovered that this particular edition was peppered with monstrous errata). At the time, I was studying abroad in Israel and could have afforded the hardbound 1975 Ardis edition, lovingly printed on vellum paper, but the tiny red paperback easily carried in a pocket served well for an undergraduate student working odd jobs. A few times I glanced through the opening pages of the book, but could hardly force myself beyond that point. My attention dwindled easily; I found the painfully long sentences irritating. Given the abundance of parenthetical digressions, by the time I reached the end of a paragraph I would often forget how it had begun, which provoked multiple readings. I tried to cheat by snatching fragments at random, but this grew tiresome and only made me want to put the book aside. I felt perplexed. I liked Nabokov’s other novels, but The Gift was somehow different.

I remember how I tried to engage with the fourth chapter, Chernyshevski’s biography, while working as a guard at the maternity ward in the Hadassah Ein-Kerem hospital. Unfortunately, the moments of peace between attacks from irritated expectant fathers and importunate relatives were too brief to allow time for the novel to truly beguile me. I will refrain, however, from drawing any conclusions or seeking symbolism in the fact that I was impregnated with the seed of this book while working at the labor ward, especially since my devotion was not then carried to full term, as I did not finish the novel.

It is possible that the very structure of The Gift discouraged me in my halfhearted courtship and challenged me to hold out for a true romance. As ironic as this may sound, the first spark flared during my own honeymoon, which was not even remotely romantic. When I had just returned from a summer of military training, my new bride and I, finding ourselves short of money, decided to spend the month after our wedding at an Israeli kibbutz, where we harvested apples next to the sloping Jerusalem Mountains. For some reason, I decided to shove Nabokov's misleadingly petite book into my bag. Along with another young couple, we shared a room divided by an oversized wardrobe that barely blocked a third of the space needed for privacy; for the rest we strung makeshift curtains. As in the Shchyogolev apartment in Berlin, one could easily hear the neighbors' toilet splashes (and not only that), and right outside the entrance to our dwelling was an improvised zoo complete with garrulous monkeys, a couple of goats, and a flabby iguana.

Despite (and perhaps because of) these eclectic circumstances, I found myself unexpectedly captivated by the world of The Gift. I began to immerse myself in it as soon as the hard days of physical labor had ended, lying on my bed or on the ground under the pomegranate bushes and... feeling increasingly happy. I stepped into Zina and Fyodor’s universe as imperceptibly as the protagonist of Nabokov's novel crossed the realities between his own dreams and daily Berlin life, just as Godunov-Cherdyntsev Senior entered the rainbow. Inevitably came the afternoon when I finished the book. I closed my eyes, refusing to believe that the novel I had hungered for, that I had wanted so much to continue devouring, could end so suddenly.

As often happens, I hesitated for a long time to analyze my feelings rationally and examine the source of my delight under any sort of intellectual magnifying glass. Then, in 1996, Professor Roman Timenchik (my beloved teacher at the Hebrew University) offered for the very first time his graduate seminar entitled “The Russian Nabokov.”

That first semester we only read about twenty-five pages of the opening chapter (the entire novel is over three hundred pages). Usually we looked at several sentences per class, but in the case of some particularly complex constructions, we might spend up to two sessions on a single phrase. Practicing the method of close reading (and our readings were very close indeed!) we brainstormed about the text. We began by discussing a simple understanding of the pragmatic message of each sentence, then moved toward dissecting the syntax, before finally attempting to crack the metatextual codes and track down the implicit literary allusions. I audited the same course the following year and our progress turned out to be even more modest: we managed to get through only the first fifteen pages. By the time I left Israel, I had attended Timenchik’s seminar three times (twice from start to finish and then less regularly in the third year due to other commitments), and our intense discussions almost never duplicated the debates of the previous years, proving to be just as interesting, stimulating, and refreshing.

During the seminars, some of us questioned whether Nabokov could have possibly kept consciously in his mind such a multiplicity of allusions and reminiscences, fusing them in packed images that so deftly entrapped his readers and laying semantically explosive mines in the dense field of his prose. Could our overzealous interpretations lead us to unintentionally presumptuous fallacies? One of the puzzled students, unable to restrain himself, once exclaimed: “But even if half of what we discover here is true, then Nabokov’s mind had to be a kind of computer!”

Timenchik instantly retorted: “Then a computer he was.”

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The structure of the present book follows the conventions of current literary guides.

In Chapter One the reader is taken on a historical journey from the creation of the novel through its publication and beyond. There I bring together the scattered data pertaining to writing and publishing the novel, from its serialization in the émigré press to the most recent editions. Before the present book, this work had yet to be done in a systematic way, though I greatly appreciate the field work of many colleagues who over the years have studied and copiously annotated the archival discoveries, published Nabokov correspondence, and other documents relevant to the history of The Gift. To this I add my own research on Nabokov’s original manuscripts and archival materials at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. From issues related to the manuscript and paleography (sample textological analysis will be provided in the fifth chapter of the monograph) I move to discussion of the phantom “second part” of The Gift.

It is almost impossible, especially for a beginner, to fully appreciate The Gift and its numerous subtleties without some basic knowledge of Russian and European (German, in particular) history and artistic culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter Two, using a montage of material, is designed to provide the necessary introduction: a series of brief sections sketches Chernyshevski's Russia of the late nineteenth century, followed by excursions into the life and mores of pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg and the Russian émigré community in Berlin between the two World Wars. This historical milieu will be familiar terrain for Slavists and native speakers of Russian, but should provide those who are less conversant in Russian culture with much of the essential data necessary for a deeper understanding of Nabokov's work. I have tried to gather and arrange the available sources in such a way as to introduce readers to the most important landmarks of the intricate landscape against which The Gift swiftly and majestically unfolds.

The guide proceeds then with two further parts on “Structure” and “Style” (Chapters Three and Four, respectively). The former outlines the basic components of The Gift (its plot and characters) and reconstructs the internal chronology of the novel. Other literary elements are explored in such sections as “Setting” and “Themes.” The latter chapter deals with “Method,” “Points of View,” and “Form.” Intertextuality is one of the main principles of poetic structure in Nabokov's oeuvre and it is treated in a separate section of Chapter Four.

Without annotating the entire text of The Gift, Chapter Five, nonetheless, discusses the general principles for providing commentary on the novel and

—— xiv— provides a variety of examples of the novel’s challenging riddles and their solutions. The history of the novel’s English translation is covered in Chapter Six.

It is widely understood that The Gift provokes mixed reactions from readers. Although the number of responses to the work during Nabokov’s lifetime, especially at the time of its initial Russian-language publication during 1937-38, was limited — what material there is has still not been studied sufficiently and remains somewhat opaque. A detailed account of the history of critical reception of the novel is given in Chapter Seven. In this last chapter of the book I mainly describe and quote publications prior to the author’s death; after this, the survey becomes less comprehensive since the more recent works are readily available to anyone interested in retrieving the full texts.

The guide ends with an appendix, “Firing Practice to The Gift" (I borrow Fyodor’s own definition of his work on Chernyshevski as preparation for the “real” novel, that is The Gift itself"). For the first time, it introduces the English-language reader to a lengthy letter written by Nabokov in 1937 to his friend and former classmate at Tenishev School, Samuil Rozov, who later moved to Palestine. From a literary point of view, this letter (kept by the Rozov family for three generations now) is probably one of the most valuable documents in the entire corpus of Nabokov’s European correspondence, excluding family letters. It offers deep insight into his intimate world and his artistic laboratory, and demonstrates that the author provided a generous autobiographical layer for Fyodor’s childhood (as described in the first chapter of The Gift). With the kind permission of both heirs, Dmitri Nabokov and Arieh Rozov, the publication of the original Russian document was made possible after two successive summers of research at the Central State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg.

The other appendices and indexes (Dramatis personae, Flora and fauna, Color distribution, and Toponymy) are available as a supplement to this printed edition at the website (www.keystogift.com), which is designed to provide the reader with a quick and convenient reference regarding various technical aspects of the narrative.

ul

The next step in the study of The Gift should be the publication of a facsimile of the manuscript along with variant texts placed on the opposite pages (the kind of work that has been done for other English and Russian classics). The necessity of a variorum edition of The Gift, akin to the authoritative editions

1 Vladimir Nabokov. The Gift. New York: Vintage International, 1991, 196. Throughout the book I refer to this edition by a letter G following the page number.

in series such as The Library of America, Pléiade, or Literaturnye Pamiatniki (Literary Monuments) is self-evident. However, its implementation will most likely take years of collaborative scholarly effort. The current study is something of a compromise: an introductory attempt to gather comprehensive data on the novel from a variety of available sources. Using both referential and analytical approaches, it merely paves the way to future academic editions and invites more extensive work on what can truly be called one of the masterpieces of twentieth century modernist literature.

The rare emotional catharsis that accompanied my first serious reading of The Gift is unforgettable, and it is for this bliss that I am grateful to Nabokov. Below is my humble attempt to look beyond the skyline of the page, to catch, weigh and deconstruct the very haze, which cannot terminate the phrase.

Halifax, 2010

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Acknowledgments

The goal of this book is to systemize in a coherent and clear way the main data available on Nabokov’s The Gift, from passing mentions in private correspondence to newspaper reviews and scholarly articles accumulated during the seven decades since its first appearance in print, and to make the novel ultimately accessible to any interested reader without prior deep knowledge of Russian history or literature.

I have tried not to burden the reader with too many references to sources; however, I have felt it appropriate to include a bibliography of critical works at the end of each chapter and to credit the researchers who first came up with original answers to the riddles of The Gift, although since so much has been written on the novel in the past twenty years there are inevitable repetitions in some articles. And if at times the book reads like a collage of scholarly citations, it can be said to mimic the very method of Nabokov in his composition of The Gift; in my case this can be justified by one simple reason—the guide is an attempt to summarize and serve as a compendium of sorts for the many fine studies of Nabokov’s puzzling novel. Unattributed information will, I trust, be uncontroversial, and will derive either from general investigative work or from Nabokov papers in the Library of Congress and Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

In addition to the published labors of Nabokov scholars I am grateful to many friends and colleagues: Keith Blasing— not just for his help with editing and translation of parts of this manuscript, but also for pulling plums out of a pot-pie of metaphors; John Barnstead for translating Nabokov’s letter to Rozov; Frederick White, Olga Gurin, and Dana Dragunoiu for making my English more elastic; Lazar Fleishman for coming up with the idea of this book and Igor Nemirovsky for his patience; Roman Timenchik for being my teacher; Omry Ronen for encyclopedic insights into Nabokov and beyond; Savely Senderovich for ongoing support; Alexander Dolinin for constant inspiration; Leona Toker for serving as

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Acknowledgments the ideal of an almost legalistic structure of argumentation; Maria Malikova for her sense of elegance and style; Boris Katz for two musical consultations; Norman G. Pereira for preventing me from blunders in sketching Russia’s history; Stephen Blackwell for an intellectually charging breakfast in Kyoto; Michael Scammell for a surprisingly candid interview; Michael Katz, the translator of What to Do?, for supporting my—still unrealized— project of the annotated English edition of this Nabokov novel; Brendan Rutherford for compiling the index to this book and providing copy-editing; and, finally, to all of the students in my “Nabokov” classes taught at Dalhousie University since 2007, who enthusiastically contributed to the electronic concordance to The Gift, an online educational project (www. keystogift.com), which, thanks to Andrei Bashkin, has acquired a sleek skin worthy of competing with high-end 3D computer games.

Without the cooperation of Dmitri Nabokov in giving me access to materials in archives and permission to make use of them, this book would be a much poorer thing. Indeed, the very idea of studying Nabokov could not be imagined without his benign and stimulating presence. I am grateful to Dmitri Vladimirovich and the Nabokov Estate for permission to quote from the writer’s works, published and unpublished.

Isaac Gewirtz of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and Alice L. Birney of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress have greatly facilitated my work with the Nabokov materials.

Parts of this research appeared in The Nabokovian (39, 1997; 45, 2000; 48, 2002; 64, 2010); in The Real Life of Pierre Delalande. Studies in Russian and Comparative Literature to Honor Alexander Dolinin (Ed. by David M. Bethea, L. Fleishman, and A. Ospovat. Stanford: Stanford Slavic Studies. Vol. 34 (2), 2007); as well as in the Nabokov Online Journal (Vol. I, 2007), reprinted by permission.

I am indebted to Alexander Dolinin for reading the draft of this book; his specific comments saved me from a number of errors, while his general observations have helped me to refine the overall thesis. If I have not followed all of his suggestions, the fault is mine alone.

The author of the first ever monograph-length study of the novel, Stephen H. Blackwell, lamented: “What is The Gift, which many consider the century’s greatest Russian novel? Why is it not automatically included in ‘Great Books’ courses?” His response to his own question was that perhaps it is because of the bizarre sedateness of its plot, the sense that “nothing happens,” or its esoteric focus on artistic creation (Blackwell 1). And even though Nabokov, this “emphatically Eurocentric male writer of aristocratic background and demanding high cultural standards,” has not yet had “a comparable place in academe, for

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Acknowledgments many reasons, including his inherent difficulty, especially for students who now spend less time reading books than their forebears; his straddling the disciplinary boundaries between English and Russian; and his being deeply unfashionable in an age committed to canonical revisionism and increased attention to women, minorities, the non-Eurocentric and the demotic” (Boyd 32), my hope is that the present guide will make questions such as those above at least more approachable.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which made this research possible.

Blackwell, Stephen H. Zina’s Paradox: The Figured Reader in Nabokov’s Gift. New York, New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

Boyd, Brian. “Literature, Pattern, Lolita: Or Art, Literature, Science,” Transitional Nabokov. Ed. by Duncan White and Will Norman. New York: Peter Lang, 2009: 31-53.

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Note on Spellings of Names

Throughout this book I am using the spelling of Russian names based on the Library of Congress system, with the exception of certain conventional departures from that system (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, etc.). However, in order to be consistent with the primary text, I have decided to keep “Chernyshevski,” “Fyodor,” and Nabokov’s other idiosyncratic versions as they appear in the authorized translation of The Gift.

January. Nabokov begins gathering materials for what will become his last novel written in Russian.

November 11. Reports to Fondaminsky and Rudnev, the editors of Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), that he is still busy doing preparatory work and has not even begun writing the novel.

January-February. Composes a short story, “The Circle,” orbiting around the still emerging universe of The Gift.

June. Breaks off writing “The Life of Chernyshevski,” a fictional biography of the legendary Russian revolutionary, to switch to the anti-totalitarian novel, Invitation to a Beheading, completed in just a few weeks.

June. Begins Chapter Two of The Gift (about the butterfly expeditions into Central Asia).

Late summer. Writes a short autobiographical piece in English.

April. Reads parts of The Gift at the home of Iosif Gessen, the former editor of the journal Pravo (Law) and friend of V. D. Nabokov.

March 15. Informs Gleb Struve from Berlin that he is back to writing a major novel. Composes lyrical verse that will later be included in the first chapter.

Late spring-summer? Writes a few chapters (all lost) of an autobiography in English.

August. Begins Chapter One.

October 2. Confides to Mikhail Karpovich that the work is so intensive that he feels aches in his writing hand.

1937 January. A public reading of two excerpts from The Gift in Paris.

April. Chapter One of The Gift is published in the literary magazine Sovremennye zapiski, though remaining chapters remain incomplete. July. Moves to Cannes.

August 6. Proposes to Rudnev, the editor of Sovremennye zapiski, that Chapter Four (“The Life of Chernyshevski") be published instead of Chapter Two, which is not yet ready.

August 10-16: Exchanges letters with Fondaminsky in which he expresses his anger at the journal’s unwillingness to publish Chapter Four. September 4. Writes a private letter to Samuil Rozov in Palestine that contains many autobiographical glimpses related to the novel in progress (reprinted in the Appendix).

Mid-October. Moves to Menton. Works on Chapter Three.

January. Completes The Gift.

Spring. Sends the manuscript to Altagracia de Jannelli, his American literary agent, who forwards it to Bobbs-Merrill publishing house for consideration. Early summer. Critic Alexander Nazaroff submits the first written review of the novel to Bobbs-Merrill: “In its general type, Gift sharply differs from that which hitherto was the common run of Nabokoff's novels... Gift is not a realistic novel. I even am not sure that it can be called a novel at all. It is an ultra-sophisticated and modernist piece of introspective, almost ‘non-subjective’ writing which, in composition, may be likened to James Joyce’s Ulysses.”

July 14. Comments to Altagracia de Jannelli: “On the whole I rather liked N[azaroff]’s description of The Gift, although it is very superficial—there is a lot more in my book both for the connoisseur and the lay reader... My style and methods have nothing in common with Joyce (though I greatly appreciate Ulysses).”

October. Moves to Paris. Final installment of The Gift appears in Sovremennye zapiski.

November. Abram Kagan, co-owner of the émigré publishing house “Petropolis,” negotiates to have the novel published in two volumes.

May 28. Sergei Rachmaninoff becomes involved in a possible publication of the book.

Fall. The outbreak of the World War in Europe ruins the prospects of publishing The Gift as a monograph for the foreseeable future.

December 31. One of the final issue of the émigré Parisian newspaper Bodrost’ (Cheerfulness) features an extract from the novel’s omitted chapter (“The Arrest of Chernyshevski").

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1940 Contemplates writing the continuation of The Gift, but completes only a draft of addendum on lepidoptera as well as a rough plan for the second part, which was never to be finished.

May. The Nabokovs move to the United States, leaving most of the writer’s archive in Europe.

1941 July 25. Suggests that Peter Pertzoff, who earlier translated a number of his short stories from Russian to English, undertake the translation of The Gift, granting him exclusive rights for the project until December 1, 1941. Pertzoff’s translation was never completed.

1942-1943 Active efforts to elicit interest in The Gift on the part of American publishing industry. Among the potential translators—writers and scholars — Yarmolinsky, Wilson, Werth, Muchnic, and Guerney.

1944 May. Discusses with Zenzinov a prospective literary evening in New York and entertains the idea of publishing The Gift independently.

1945 October 25. Véra Nabokov inquires with Zenzinov again: “The last thing I would like to ask you, concerns the odds of publishing The Gift. We want to print it ourselves."

1951 July 18. Mark Aldanov recommends that Nabokov's novel be published by a new émigré Russian press, the Chekhov Publishing House, in New York.

1952 April. Reads the proofs of the first Russian-language edition of his novel. Early May. The Chekhov Press issues The Gift.

May 27. Edmund Wilson receives a complimentary copy of the novel, but apparently never reads (or finishes reading) it.

July. Review of the Russian edition of Dar in the émigré journal, Posev.

1958-1959 Donates manuscript materials relating to The Gift to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

1961 February. Anna Feigin, Véra's cousin, recommends Michael Scammell as the translator of The Gift into English.

July-August. Scammell finishes translating Chapters Four and Five. Véra writes Scammell to say that her husband is “amazed at the speed with which you work."

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Praises the forthcoming English edition of The Gift in an interview to BBC: “Tt is the longest, I think the best, and the most nostalgic of my Russian novels."

March-April. Two excerpts from The Gift appear in English translation in The New Yorker magazine.

May 27. The Gift is published in the United States while the Nabokovs travel in Europe.

July-December. Over 100 reviews of The Gift appear in various periodicals. The reception is mixed: most critics cautiously praise the novel but also project that it won't repeat the success of Lolita or Pale Fire.

September. Unequivocally claims in an interview for the Television 13 educational program in New York: ^My best Russian novel is a thing called, in English, The Gift. My two best American ones are Lolita and Pale Fire."

Fall. Gallimard in Paris publishes the French translation of The Gift by Raymond Girard.

Spring. Ardis Publishers begins reprinting Nabokov's Russian works, including The Gift.

The first scholarly paper on The Gift is published in the ussn: its author, Mikhail Lotman, pretends that he is writing about an obscure Russian poet named Godunov-Cherdyntsev, and does not mention the still forbidden Nabokov's name.

March. The Soviet magazine Ural (3-6) begins a serialized publication of what is announced as an unabridged version of The Gift (it includes the controversial Chapter Four, as well as some omissions and alterations).

The novel is printed in a book edition in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in the Urals. A Russian Americanist scholar A. Zverev contributes an introduction to this edition, whose print run amounts to a quarter of a million copies.

The Berg Collection (New York Public Library) acquires materials relating to the translation of The Gift into English, among other Nabokov's manuscripts.

Two different annotated Russian editions of Dar are published for the first time with extensive commentary (by O. Dark and A. Dolinin respectively).

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