The Gift.

The Gift (Dar) is widely regarded as the finest and most ambitious of the novels Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Russian during his years of European exile, and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. Composed in Berlin in the late 1930s and first serialized in the émigré press, the novel follows Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a young Russian émigré poet living in 1920s Berlin, as he comes into his artistic maturity, dreams of the book he will someday write, and culminates in his irreverent biography of the revered nineteenth-century radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky. At once a luminous meditation on art, love, and exile and an ode to Russian literature itself, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative, the novel did not appear complete in Russian until 1952 and reached English-language readers only in 1963, in this translation by Michael Scammell prepared with Nabokov's close collaboration. By then the worldwide success of Lolita had made its author one of the most celebrated writers in the world.