The Gift may be seen as a more mature and enlarged version of Nabokov's first novel Mary (1926), with an added jumbling of narrative styles and generic forms. It is permeated with a strong “literary” component, largely (though not exclusively) relating to Russian literature – both nineteenth-century “classical” and émigré. According to Nabokov's English-version foreword, indeed, his novel's heroine “is not Zina, but Russian Literature” (9). Published serially (as Dar) in a Russian émigré journal in 1937-8, the work appeared shorn of its fourth chapter, the “biography” of the nineteenth-century radical, Nikolay Chernyshevski (retaining Nabokov's idiosyncratic spelling), which was censored by the editors in circumstances strikingly similar to those threatening the Nabokovian protagonist within the novel. Published in full in New York in 1952, Nabokov's last Russian novel, even in its truncated form, was considered,...
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Citation: Cornwell, Neil. "Dar". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5747, accessed 05 December 2025.]
