Books: Lord of Language

THE GIFT (378 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov-Putnam ($5.95).

Vladimir Nabokov has the gift of tongue-specifically Russian and English. Famed for his novels in his second tongue (notably Pale Fire and Lolita), Nabokov has now released the English translation (which is partly his own) of The Gift, which is the last novel he wrote-26 years ago-in his native Russian. Without being a great book, it is clearly a book by a great writer; each sentence delights the ear or some area of the mind.

Nabokov’s young hero is very like the young Nabokov. Count Fyodor Godu-nov-Cherdyntsev is in his early 20s, living in exile in Berlin, struggling not to be crippled by memories of the ancient family estate in Leshino, and trying to get his poetry and prose published in impoverished emigre magazines. His sister marries and leaves for Paris; he meets and falls in love with Zina, a remotely fragile German girl. All of this is simple, and corresponds roughly to the facts of Nabokov’s own life.

But from the first page, the reader is off fiction’s flatlands into Nabokov’s magic world. His aristocratic Fyodor is a lord of language, and this patrimony cannot be expropriated.

The Gift is full of the gratuitous delights that a child finds in toys or picture books. Fyodor, like most young men who want to make their name and make love in the same breath, is a bit of a fool. In one wonderful scene his clothes are stolen as he polishes his poetry and suntan in a Berlin park. He would as gladly split a bottle as a hair.

His career as a one-man language school is a long parenthesis in the comedy of misunderstanding. Not only is teacher always playing hooky from his own school, but one of his students, who is a Dickensian portrait of infatuated complacence, actually loses command of the few English phrases he started with.

Blind, Deaf Blockhead. Fyodor has no politics (except to prefer a regime where “there is no equality and no authorities either”); he does not hanker for the Return; he does not brood on the past or hope for the future. His fellow emigres regard him as “a useless handicraftsman,” a “trickster” and an “arabesquer,” and he in turn regards the typical Russian emigre intellectual as “blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot.”

But Fyodor lives in a world of emigres; their cards of identity have been canceled, the houses they built of them have collapsed. In Fyodor’s mind the irony inherent in the lives of displaced persons becomes explicit; it becomes a dancing landscape, in which his private Russian past of butterflies, poetry and childhood games blurs into the hateful Berlin present of landladies, “Germani-cally stupid” language students, and menacing politics, as the Weimar Republic, “oppressive as a headache,” clumsily snuffles toward its collapse. Fyodor’s trilingual life enables Nabokov to play complicated games with the meanings of words. Fyodor is a poet, and without warning his thoughts run in poetic form; only the reader wary of Nabokov’s incorrigible love of verbal conjuring will notice that whole pages printed as prose conceal rhyme schemes or blank verse and complicated prosodical measures.

Book Within a Book. As if these elements were not complicated enough, Conjuror Nabokov moves historical and fictional characters and events without giving special precedence to fact or invention. Thus the reader meets an emigre family-the literary Chernyshev-skis, one of whom is “in the semi-loony bin,” as he cheerfully explains. Fyodor is engaged in writing a life of their famous namesake, Nikolay Gav-rilovich Chernyshevski, a philosopher and critic who was exiled to Siberia for 20 years after publication of his novel What to Do (later to be the title of a political work by Lenin). Fyodor’s biography of Chernyshevski is given in full-it takes up Chapter 4 of The Gift. The subject is a real historical personag-though Fyodor’s wild comic style suggests otherwise-who not only has a limited place in the Bolshevik pantheon, but was regarded with veneration by the old generation of the various pre-revolutionary socialist parties.

Fyodor caricatures this revered figure from his pimply, onanistic adolescence to his addled dotage in exile in Siberia, reading Das Kapital by the banks of a stream, tearing out the pages one by one, making paper boats of them and setting them sailing into the unknown. Fyodor’s fellow emigre writers are offended. One of the enraged reviewers complains that The Life sneers at “one of the purest and most valorous sons of liberal Russia.”

All this might be discounted as a pointless fantasy like a wonderfully contrived clock with no hands, were it not for the fact, as Nabokov insists, that the real hero of The Gift is Russian literature. Nabokov’s Fyodor belongs in the comic, fantastic world of Gogol. It is in these terms that Fyodor’s caricature of Chernyshevski appears not as a caprice but as a manifesto against the “provincial and philistine” in Russian culture-a strain that is now dominant. Thus, too, Nabokov’s own great achievements should be measured by his resourcefulness as a magician of words, able to rummage in a trunkful of tarnished memories and dress up a shining drama beyond the reach of time.