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The Poetics of Science in, and around, Nabokov's The Gift
Author(s) -
Blackwell Stephen H.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
the russian review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.136
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9434
pISSN - 0036-0341
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9434.00275
Subject(s) - poetics , citation , philosophy , computer science , library science , linguistics , poetry
The Gift is a strange novel: pseudo-autobiographical yet fanciful, wandering-even careening-yet, in the end, tightly woven. It portrays the literary world of the Russian emigration in Berlin, but it does so through highly idiosyncratic eyes. It is a novel about love and literary growth, yet a full quarter of it-not a trivial amount, by any reckoningdescribes the life of nineteenth-century socialist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, with another hefty chunk devoted to geographical exploration and butterfly hunting. Its heroine is Russian literature, yet alongside Ada, it is one of Nabokov's most scientifically engaged novels. How are we to resolve such discrepancies in the novel's apparently fissile energies? Up to now, most scholarship surrounding The Gift has focused on its artistic form, its literary allusiveness, and its polemics with Nabokov's ideological opponents among the 6migr6s. It has been explored, as well, as a demonstration of Nabokov's artistic vision of the world (we are allowed to see the process of Fyodor's creative perception of reality and its transformation into art); also, from the psychological point of view, as an artistic refraction of Nabokov's own loss of his father.1