La dádiva

The Gift is one of Nabokov's most ambitious and complex novels—"the best of my Russian novels," in the author's own words—as well as his most deliberately "literary"; it is the essential link between his Russian and English novels. In this fascinating study of a young writer's development in interwar Berlin, the central theme is that the only immortality lies in creative art, in this gift the protagonist has received, which he "feels as a burden" as he discovers the connections between this talent and Russian literature, a double "gift." The novel is replete with literary allusions, to the point that, in Nabokov's words, the true heroine is not the young Zina, with whom the protagonist is in love, but "Russian literature." The work is also steeped in the feeling of loneliness and the inevitability of exile. Although not strictly autobiographical, there are numerous similarities between the protagonist and the author, such as a passion for butterflies, a writer's ambition, and a reverence for Pushkin and Gogol. Likewise, the biography of the revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky that the young writer undertakes, which forms one of the parts of "The Gift", allows Nabokov to give free rein to his most forceful opinions on politics and literature.