Le Don

8vo of 404 pp., publisher’s wrappers, uncut.

214 x 144 mm.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Le Don. Traduit de l’anglais par Raymond Girard.

Paris, nrf Gallimard, 1967.

First French edition of Nabokov’s last Russian novel.

One of the 36 copies printed on large paper.

“Having imbued himself, thanks to his genius, with Russian classics, he had forged a unique style and managed to write the best Russian-language novel of the past century: The Gift” (Dr Anatoly Livry).

“Since the world of the Don has become just as spooky as most of my other worlds, I can speak of this book with a certain detachment. This is the last novel I wrote, and will ever write, in Russian. Her heroine is not Zina, but Russian literature” (Vladimir Nabokov).

The Gift is not only a novel but also a literary study, a book within a book, in which all the mechanisms of creation are meticulously analyzed, and the bases on which it rests: memory, in poems about childhood; the imagination, in the attempt at interpretation concerning the paternal universe; historical reality.

Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift is undoubtedly one of his most accomplished works.

This abundant text combines a faithful portrayal of the emigrant circles of Berlin in the 1920s, the imagination of the wide open spaces of Asia, the biography of the Russian philosopher and revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and the story of the birth of a vocation for writer in the central character, Fyodor Godunov-Tcherdyntsev.

“Vladimir Nabokov is one of the most brilliant, original and complex writers of the twentieth century. No writer of the last century as had so broad or so decisive an influence on American, as well as non-American, fiction” (The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction).

One of the 36 copies printed on large paper, preserved in publisher’s wrappers.