Disputing the game-like, postmodernist nature of Nabokov's novel. The Gift is studied as the continuing development of the Russian classical novel tradition, primarily Pushkin's "liberal novel". The novel about Chernyshevsky, a story within a story, is not a pasquinade as it is generally assumed but a dramatic, though not free from irony, study of the fate of the "iron bullies" that lived back in the 1860s. The Gift is a rare example in the 20th century novel history of a happy person story, of acceptance of the being and gratitude to life. Nabokov's philosophy of "peripheral vision", "the delight of sense perception", is aimed right at that.