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Chapter Three Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift But one's own truth is not to blame if it coincides with the truth some poor fellow has borrowed. -Nabokov, The Gift NABOKOV WOULD NO DOUBT have been annoyed by my placement of his Russian masterpiece, The Gift,I adjacent to what he called "Pasternak's melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago. "2 As Mayakovsky complained in his poem Anniversary of Nadson, Nabokov might also have objected that in the alphabet of Russian literary monuments Pasternak stands between him and Pushkin. Nonetheless, there is much that connects The Gift to Doctor Zhivago, and to The Master and Margarita. These three novels establish a triangular concept of authorship, in which the auto-reflexive device of the mise en abyme relates the author's vision of selfhood to his modernist reordering ofthe literary tradition. Nowhere is this tripartite strategy more in evidence than in Nabokov's The Gift. If the mise en abyme is the apex in a triangle of authorship, literary tradition forms one of the two remaining vertices; and the part played by literary tradition in The Gift has been widely recognized.3 Nabokov writes in his foreword to the English translation: "It is the last novel I wrote, or ever shall write, in Russian. Its heroine is not Zina, but Russian Literature." The particular beauty of Nabokov's heroine, Russian Literature, betrays the eye ofits beholder, of course. Dostoevsky, for example, does not fit into the literary canon described by The Gift. An implicit or explicit view ofselfhood forms the second vertex in this triangle of authorship. Selfhood in The Gift relies neither upon discourse, as in The Master and Margarita, nor upon metaphor, as in Doctor Zhivago; but Nabokov's view of the selfis related to both. Fyodor's articulation of his identity in The Gift is a function of his (metaphoric) "location" relative to the underlying sources of his valuative judgment. In other words, Fyodor creates a topography of self in the novel by charting the distance that separates him from Russia, from his childhood, and from his family, especially his father. It is hardly surprising that identity occupies a central position in The Gift, since the novel is more or less autobiographical and contains at least two extensive biographies within it. 72 Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift My assertion that the novel contains various mises en abyme which reorder the Russian literary tradition will probably raise no serious objections. Nabokov's wide-ranging use of metafiction and his desire to define and preserve Russia's literary heritage have been well documented by scholarly criticism.4 Consequently, this chapter examines several passages in The Gift that are familiar in Nabokov criticism. My claim to originality lies in my local interpretations of those passages, in my explication of self-presentation in the novel, and in my particular relation of The Gift to The Master and Margarita and to Doctor Zhivago. THE STRUCTURAL SELF: GEOMETRY VERSUS GEOGRAPHY My personal I, the one that wrote books, the one that loved words, colors, mental fireworks, Russia, chocolate and Zina-had somehow diSintegrated and dissolved ... One might dissolve completely that way. -Nabokov, The Gift In the previous two chapters on The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago , I attempted to discover the critical idiom best suited to each novel's portrayal ofselfhood. In Bulgakov's novel, discourse proved the best match; in Doctor Zhivago it was the figurative language of metaphor and metonym. The playful, highly metafictional style of Nabokov defies easy categorization , however, and many critics have chosen either to keep close to the structural boundaries of the novel in their analyses of its hero or to see through Fyodor, as it were, and identify Nabokov himself in his hero. In both cases, it is as if Fyodor "had somehow diSintegrated and dissolved" into the critical background, leaving only Nabokov and his narrative strategies. As I see it, the great danger is that while reading Nabokov, one is tempted to try to match wits with him, to play his game and, if not beat him at it, at least make a good showing. His novels overflow with riddles, puzzles , word plays, tricks, and illusions that draw the reader into a narrative maze which mayor may not reveal an exit. Most notably, Nabokov has suggested chess problems and mimicry as keys for unlocking his complex narrative strategies. The Defense provides the clearest example of the chess analogy, but even in The Gift Fyodor initially derives...

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