1. Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell with collaboration of the author (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 11. All quotations in English will be from this edition. This article was originally presented as a paper at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley and Harvard. I would like to take the opportunity to thank those audiences for their constructive and open-minded comments, in particular: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Robert Hughes, William Mills Todd III, Cathy Frierson, Elizabeth Ransome and Svetlana Boym. I owe special thanks to Irina Paperno and John Burt Foster for their very helpful comments and attentive reading of my manuscript.

2. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 189-95.

3. John Burt Foster, Jr., Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 40.

4. Osip Mandel'shtam, “Word and Culture,” in The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 114.

5. Raeff, Marc gives a rather objective account in Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 Google Scholar; Nina Berberova's memoir (The Italics Are Mine, trans. Radley, Philippe [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969]Google Scholar) reflects some of those problems.

6. Here I am referring to the set of institutional paradigms identified by William Mills Todd III in his analysis of the successive structures of nineteenth century Russian literary life, from court to salon to journal. See his Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), chaps. 1-2.

7. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, LAbsolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 204.

8. Alexander Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, chap. 1, st. LVI. For a fuller discussion of romantic irony in Pushkin, please see the chapter on Eugene Onegin in my Pushkin and Romantic Fashion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

9. This is Nabokov's phrase.

10. See Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

11. For a more developed treatment of this theme, see Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

12. Sacks, Peter, The English Elegy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1–37 Google Scholar. I have retained this vestige of the psychoanalytic concepts Sacks skillfully integrates into his poetic theory, without intending to invoke any explicitly “freudian“ implications.

13. Concurrently with Nabokov, Marina Tsvetaeva was writing her two brilliant prose studies, “Moi Pushkin” and “Pushkin i Pugachev“; during her years of enforced silence Anna Akhmatova worked on the series of studies collected later under the title Zapiski o Pushkine; earlier, of course, there were Briusov's “Moi Pushkin,” Mandel'shtam's “Pushkin i Skriabin,” and Khodasevich's “Koleblerriyi trenozhnik,” among many others.

14. See Sergei Davydov, “Weighing Nabokov's Gift on Pushkin's Scales,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, eds. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 415-28.

15. See Malmstad, John E., “Khodasevich and Formalism: A Poet's Dissent in Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance: A Festschrift in Honor of Victor Erlich, eds. Jackson, Robert Louis and Rudy, Stephen (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies Publications, 1985), 68–81 Google Scholar; Bethea, David M., Khodasevich: His Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 317–31 Google Scholar; Hagglund, R, “The Russian Emigre Debate of 1928 on Criticism,” Slavic Review 32 (September 1973): 515–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Adamovich-Khodasevich Polemics,” Slavic and East European fournal 20 (Fall 1976): 239- 52.

16. Nabokov, “Foreword” to The Gift (1988), 8.

17. Reported in Brian Boyd's account of Nabokov's years at Cornell (1948-1950), in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 134.

18. The origin of the rumor about Khodasevich appears to be Berberova's The Italics Are Mine, 566. See Footnote 20 to “The Gift” in Rampton, David, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 190 Google Scholar. The more obvious phonetic association of Koncheev's name is with conch (Latin concha: pearl-oyster or trumpet), suggesting, on the contrary, the glorious continuation of Russian poetry.

19. The phrase is Iurii Tynianov's, in his essay “Mnimyi Pushkin,” Poetika. htoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 78-92.

20. Simon Karlinsky was the first to make this point in “Vladimir Nabokov's Novel Dar as a Work of Literary Criticism: A Structural Analysis,” Slavic and East European Studies 7 (1963): 284-90; and “Nabokov and Chekhov: The Lesser Russian Tradition, “ in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, eds. Alfred Appel, Jr. and Charles Newman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 7-16; as well as Davydov.

21. That The Gift really should be read in the context of the European modernist prose it ignores is suggested by John Burt Foster's theoretically profound and inter - textually precise discussion of Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (see note 3). Interestingly, Nabokov read Joyce's Ulysses in Cambridge shortly after his father's death and was acquainted with Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu by the time he began work on Dar, although he insisted that he “studied” it only in 1935-1936 “when he was already fully formed as an artist” (see Foster, 52-53).

22. Vladislav Khodasevich, “On Sirin in Vozrozhdenie 1937, trans. Walker, Michael H., in Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, ed. Page, Norman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 61–64 Google Scholar. Quoted by Irina Paperno, “How Nabokov's Gift Is Made,” in Literature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Frank (Stanford: Stanford Slavic Studies 4, no. 2 [1992]): 312.

23. Paperno does not make this clear.

24. See Malmstad's nuanced reading of Khodasevich's critical statements in Jackson and Rudy, 68-81.

25. Paperno, 295-322.

26. Tynianov's article “O Puteshestvii v Arzrum” was, however, published only in 1936, in Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, II (Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, 1936), so the probability of this is open to doubt.

27. Paperno, 313-14.

28. Ibid., 299.

29. The phrase is Gary Saul Morson's, from Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 84.

30. Foster, 31-36.

31. Ibid., 35.

32. Boyd reports that the diary entry is actually a copy made in Nabokov's mother's handwriting, which might increase the possibility of retrospective tampering (see Boyd, The Russian Years, 193 and 556).

33. Ibid., 192.

34. The Gift, 286.

35. I am grateful to Robert P. Hughes for pointing this out to me; whether Nabokov's confusion is deliberate or not is among scholars a moot point.

36. For a fuller discussion of Pushkin's assimilation of the karamzinian narrative of samozvanstvo to the machiavellian and Shakespearean conceptions of princely improvisation and imposture, see the chapter ‘“What's in a Name?': The Rhetoric of Imposture in Boris Godunov” in my Pushkin and Romantic Fashion.

37. I thank John Burt Foster for pointing out this moment in Nabokov's Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam's, 1966), 36. For interesting modern readings of Boris Godunov, please see Emerson, Caryl, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 88–141 Google Scholar; Moss, Kevin, “The Last Word in Fiction: On Significant Lies in Boris Godunov ,” Soviet and East European Journal 32, no. 2 (1988): 187–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sandler, Stephanie, Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 77–139 Google Scholar.

38. Alexander Pushkin, the scene “Tsarskie palaty” in Boris Godunov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), V: 225. My translation.

39. Boyd, 26-34, 54-67, 75-77, 11, 122-35, 138-44, 154-60, 188-91. Laura Engelstein provides a closer view of V.D. Nabokov as a forensic lawyer concerned with progressive reform in the areas of prostitution, abortion, child abuse, women's rights and homosexuality (see her The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Finde- Siècle Russia [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992], 68-86, 281).

40. Anne Nesbet has shown that a triangular suicide-pact similar to the one in The Gift had been featured in the emigre press as a symptom of the generation's spiritual malaise (see her “Suicide as Literary Fact in the 1920's,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 [Winter 1991], 827-35).

41. See the chapter, “The Sense of Not Ending: Romantic Irony in Eugene Onegin, “ in Pushkin and Romantic Fashion.

42. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud discusses the melancholic's inability to complete the “work of mourning” through cathectic reattachment to a substitutive object, a result of which might be the narcissistic rebounding on the melancholic's self of those unresolved feelings ( Freud, Sigmund, Collected Papers, trans. Riviere, Joan [New York: Basic Books, 1959], IV: 152–70Google Scholar).

43. Davydov (417) sets up the paradigm “Each of Fedor's artistic accomplishments is weighed on Pushkin's scales” but then finesses the point: “Fedor's development as an artist loosely parallels the path Russian literature took after the Golden Age of poetry in the 1820's.” Joseph Brodsky mocks the claim: “Some, like Nabokov, for example, have tried to the very end to convince themselves and those around them that even if they were not primarily poets, they were poets all the same” (“A Poet and Prose,” in Less than One: Selected Essays [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986], 177).

44. The Gift, 139. In fact, nostalgic vignettes of childhood appear in Russian poetry only with the modernists, and derive from the prose-memoir and pseudo-memoir, not from the pushkinian elegy. Marina Tsvetaeva's child's eye lyrics in her early collections Vechernii al'bom (1910) and Volshebnyi fonar’ (1912) are a more original, somewhat less coy example of the genre. On the prose memoirs of the modernists, see Wachtel, Andrew, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 Google Scholar).

45. Ibid., 18.

46. John Burt Foster has pointed out to me that “the second half of chapter 9 in Speak, Memory is built even more emphatically on the same logic.“

47. Ibid., 104, 89.

48. See my “Pushkin's ‘Journey to Arzrum': The Poet at the Border,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 940-53; and Davydov's illuminating comments on Pushkin and Nabokov's alliterative prose (419).

49. “Pushkin entered his blood. With Pushkin's voice merged the voice of his father. He kissed Pushkin's hot little hand, taking it for another, large hand smelling of the breakfast kalach.” Nabokov explains the paronomastic allusion to butterflies on the same page (94). The lines are from Pushkin's 1836 lyric “Khudozhniku” (“Grusten i vesel vkhozhu, vaiatel', v tvoiu masterskuiu …“), which is simultaneously a celebration of the artist's invention and craft, and an elegy to Del'vig, Pushkin's boyhood friend and classicist-interlocutor.

50. Alexandrov discusses Fedor's “epiphanic apprehension of the complex life of butterflies” on 118, 127, 136.

51. The Gift, 107, 109, 115.

52. Alexandrov elucidates the eucharistic imagery that accompanies an entomological expedition headed by Kh. V. Baranovskii in one of Fedor's reminiscences about his father (136).

53. Boyd, 24.

54. Foster makes a comparable point: “As a student of butterflies and other insects, he was fascinated by mimicry, camouflage, and metamorphosis; and in his art of memory he emulates this view of nature by deliberately straddling the line between seemingly clear-cut categories” (36).

55. Other details, such as the herd of moose frozen alive together with their streaming tears, are reminiscent of Carroll's famous images. Nabokov was working on his translation of Lewis Carroll, Ania v strane chudes, in summer 1922.

56. The Gift, 116-17.

57. The Gift, 113.

58. I have given chapter 4 short shrift because it has been very well served by other critics. See Paperno, as well as Sergei Davydov's “The Gift: Nabokov's Aesthetic Exorcism of Chernyshevskii,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 19, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 357- 74, for fine and detailed démonstrations of Nabokov's work with the documentary literature. David Rampton displays a less parti pris attitude when, instead of joining the ridicule, he démonstrates to what extent Nabokov misquotes, conflates quotations or quotes out of context in order to caricature Chernyshevskii's opinions (Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 64-100).

59. Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1979), 3-23.

60. Davydov (1992, 418) makes this point in general terms: “Nabokov also seems to continue Pushkin's experiments with the hybrid genre. Entire sections of the novel are written in verse form, overt and concealed, which makes Dar a generic cousin of Pushkin's ‘novel in verse.’ “