The Gift

The Gift is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian émigré 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.