Half way through this novel, we come on a scene where Russian writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky smudges his old boots with ink to hide the scuff marks, and freshens up his bootlaces at the same time by dipping them into the ink pot. Then he carelessly drops one of the ink-soaked laces onto a page he'd just written.

It’s difficult to imagine that scene in an age when we rarely see an ink bottle, never mind dip anything into it. The ink we use today is safely sealed in cartridges, and more often destined for electronic printers than for any kind of writing instrument. However, this little scene made me wonder what would happen if an inky bootlace fell on a page of Nabokov's writing. I imagined a snake of ink blots sliding across the text causing some words to disappear completely, others to be partially obliterated, their shape emerging from the blackness like phantoms. Still others would be transformed into new words by the deletion of a beginning syllable, a middle one or an ending.
And then I wondered how the text would read after the accident.
Like something in code?
Like something that has been censored?
Like something only partially formed, something that has not yet emerged from a chrysalis state?
Or like a text read in a dream..

[b:The Gift|8147|The Gift|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526825311l/8147._SY75_.jpg|144481], the last novel Nabokov wrote in Russian, and the most exciting of his I’ve read, offers all those variations, and much, much more.

Fyodor Godunov, poet and writer, is the first-person narrator of the book. But like a knight who has moved sideways and fallen of the edge of a chessboard, Fyodor seems to be outside the world of the main story, watching himself, the other knight as it were, still active on the squares of the storyboard, and referred to in the third person.

The early chapters of his narrative read like a dream in every sense of that phrase; Fyodor takes time out from describing daily life in Berlin in the 1920s - the chessboard of the main story - to look back at a time before the time of the story, a time that seems very remote and only visible as if through a moiré curtain. With a painter's eye for the effects of dissolving light and shimmering shade, he recreates a secondary narrative, the smoky outlines of that time before time, the childhood spent in a country that doesn't exist anymore but to which he holds the keys: Russia before the revolution. Fyodor mislays keys many times in the course of the book but he is certain that he will never mislay the keys to his Russia because he carries his homeland inside himself.
Ought one not to reject any longing for one’s homeland, for any homeland besides that which is with me, within me, which is stuck like silver sand of the sea to the skin of my soles, lives in my eyes, my blood, gives depth and distance to the background of life’s every hope? Some day, interrupting my writing, I will look through the window and see a Russian autumn.

To return to the framework of Fyodor’s Berlin story, there emerges within it a third entirely different but equally interesting narrative. Through a circuitous set of circumstances involving various interesting coincidences, Fyodor finds himself researching and writing a memoir of the Russian revolutionary writer-poet, Nicolay Chernyshevski (1828-1889) whose novels influenced many political activists including Lenin. But just as insects learn to mimic their surroundings in order to fool their enemies, Fyodor’s memoir is only the mimicry of a memoir. Though adequately factual and suitably literary, it is in reality a satire aimed at all the writer-revolutionaries like Chernyshevsky whose clumsy inky boots had trampled all over the literary legacy of Russia built so carefully by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Bely and many more.

Not surprisingly, the editors and critics among the Russian emigré community in Berlin turn out to be very sharp-eyed predators who are not fooled by such a pseudo memoir (which the reader gets to read in its entirety in chapter four of [b:The Gift|8147|The Gift|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526825311l/8147._SY75_.jpg|144481]); they are not prepared to accept that the satire might contain truth, even if only an artistic one. Fyodor’s Chernyshevsky memoir is more or less blotted out, deleted, forgotten. (In a case of life imitating art, when Nabokov succeeded in having [b:The Gift|8147|The Gift|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526825311l/8147._SY75_.jpg|144481] published in serial form in a Paris emigré magazine in 1937, it appeared without Chapter Four. The Chernyshevski chapter had once again been censored, deleted, wiped out, just as had happened in its fictional existence. It didn’t finally appear in print until the 1952 edition of [b:The Gift|8147|The Gift|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526825311l/8147._SY75_.jpg|144481]).

Within the Russian doll that is [b:The Gift|8147|The Gift|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526825311l/8147._SY75_.jpg|144481] lies a fourth story: Fyodor’s personal struggle to be a composer of something more lasting than literary or political satire. Before tackling the Chervyshevski memoir, he had already been searching for his own literary destiny; was he a poet, or a dramatist, or perhaps a novelist? Eventually, like Proust's narrator, he begins to figure out what it is he really wants to write about and how he wants to write it. Reading between the lines, and in spite of false trails and coded wording, the reader realises that [b:The Gift|8147|The Gift|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526825311l/8147._SY75_.jpg|144481] itself is the chrysalis of the book Fyodor will one day write.

……………………………………………………………

If I've given more information than I usually do about the plot of this book, it was to emphasize the structure which I think is really brilliant. But rest assured, there are a few more Russian dolls wrapped up inside [b:The Gift|8147|The Gift|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526825311l/8147._SY75_.jpg|144481]; Fyodor's Berlin life is full of character and incident, and provides a valuable record of the world of the Russian emigré community in Berlin in the 1920s.