Developed at SPbU Faculty of Philology
by charitable donation from the Russkiy Mir Foundation
Russkiy Mir Foundation
Lectures
"The Gift" by Vladimir Nabokov. 1937–1938
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.
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