 Brilliant's Audio presents the unabridged recording of The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov, performed by Stefan Rudnitsky. Forward. The greater part of The Gift, in Russian, Dar, was written in 1935 to 1937 in Berlin. Its last chapter was completed in 1937 on the French Riviera. The leading emigre magazine, Sovremennier-Zapisky, conducted in Paris by a group of former members of the Social Revolutionary Party, published the novel serially, issues 63 to 67, 1937 to 38. Omitting, however, chapter 4, which was rejected for the same reasons that the biography it contains was rejected by Vasiliyov in chapter 3, page 219. A pretty example of life finding itself obliged to imitate the very art it condemns. Only in 1952, almost twenty years after it was begun, did there appear an entire edition of the novel brought out by that Samaritan organization, the Chekhov Publishing House, New York. It is fascinating to imagine the regime under which Dar may be read in Russia. I had been living in Berlin since 1922, thus synchronously with the young man of the book. But neither this fact nor my sharing some of his interests, such as literature and lipidoptera, should make one say, aha, and identify the designer with the design. I am not, and never was, Fyodor Goronov-Cherdincev. My father is not the explorer of Central Asia that I still may become someday. I never would, Zina Merz, and never worried about the poet Koncheev or any other writer. In fact, it is rather in Koncheev, as well as in another incidental character, the novelist Vladimirov, that I distinguish odds and ends of myself as I was circa 1925. In the days I worked on this book, I did not have the knack of recreating Berlin and its colony of expatriates as radically and ruthlessly as I have done in regard to certain environments in my later English fiction. Here and there history shows through art history. Fyodor's attitude toward Germany reflects too typically perhaps the crude and irrational contempt that Russian emigres had for the natives in Berlin, Paris, or Prague. My young man is moreover influenced by the rise of a north... Sample complete. Ready to continue?