1. Nabokov, Vladimir, The Gift (New York, 1991), 123Google Scholar. Vladimir Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomakh (hereafter SSRP), 4:306. For more on this apocryphal instance of mimicry, see Dieter E. Zimmer, Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths, Web version (2012), under *Hepialus armoricanus Oberthür, at www.dezimmer.net/eGuide/Lep2.1-F-K.htm (last accessed October 27, 2016).

2. Weir, Justin, Author as Hero: Self and Tradition in Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov (Evanston, 2002), 87Google Scholar.

3. In Eugene Onegin, the fictitious persona of the “real” “authoring” individual as creative author stands as Pushkin’s central structuring device. This “romantic irony” escorts the poet across the boundary from life into art, where “Pushkin” undergoes a process of self-reflection and, perhaps, growth through the telling of and digressing from Eugene’s story. Paradoxically, the poet is both Eugene’s friend and his creator. Whereas Pushkin’s novel explores the psyche of the creative artist as if from just outside the margin of his own created work, in The Gift, by contrast, Nabokov takes this structure and inverts it, now exploring artistic creation from just within its boundary with the outside (“real”) world. The “author” character is defocalized, hidden in anonymous third-person language that blends seamlessly (at times) into Fyodor’s own voice, and then finally differentiates and stakes its own claim to the “novel.” The novel makes only barely noticeable evocations of this author-like persona, until the final paragraph, when he steps onto the proscenium and declares his solidarity with Onegin’s “Pushkin.” If we accept that this consciousness is fundamentally linked with Fyodor’s, then we learn at this conclusion that the character we thought all along was just a hero is, actually, also the “author” on some plane, whose life and loves and creative struggles we have been witnessing.

4. A classic example is the rabbit-duck illusion, which dates to at least 1892; geometrical examples date to antiquity.

5. Leving, Yuri, Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel (Boston, 2011), 270Google Scholar.

6. Ibid., 267–70. Those in favor of an “invisible author”: Dolinin, Alexander, “ The Gift ,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Alexandrov, Vladimir (New York, 1995), 135–68Google Scholar; Toker, Leona, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, NY, 1989)Google Scholar; Pekka Tammi, Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics: A Narratological Analysis, Annales Academiae Scientiarium Fennicae, ser. B, vol. 231 (Helsinki, 1985)—but see caveat below; Boris Maslov, “Poet Koncheev: Opyt tekstologii personazha,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 47 (2001), at magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2001/47/maslov.html (last accessed October 27, 2016); Grishakova, Marina, The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames (Tartu, 2006)Google Scholar. Those proposing that Fyodor (in some sense) is the “author” of the text: Begnal, Michael H., “Fiction, Biography, History: Nabokov’s The Gift ,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 10:2 (1980): 138–43Google Scholar; Boyd, Brian, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, 1990)Google Scholar; Connolly, Julian, Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (Cambridge, UK, 1992)Google Scholar; Blackwell, Stephen H., Zina’s Paradox: The Figured Reader in Nabokov’s Gift (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Andrei Babikov, “‘Dar’ za chertoi stranitsy,” Zvezda 2015, no. 4, at magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2015/4/7bab.html (last accessed October 27, 2016); Weir, Author, 75. Some critics have proposed that there is no author-figure within the work, e.g. Levin, Iurii, “Ob osobennostiakh povestvovatel΄noi struktury i obraznogo stroia romana V. Nabokova ‘Dar,’” Russian Literature, no. 9 (1981): 191–229 Google Scholar, here 192. For an important and related treatment of the narrator in Nabokov’s next novel, see Barabtarlo, Gennady, “Taina Naita. Narrative Stance in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight ,” in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6.1 (2008), 57–80 Google Scholar.

7. Marina Grishakova, The Models, 242, cited in Leving, Keys, 269.

8. See, e.g., Dolinin, “The Gift,” 161; Maslov, “Poet Koncheev,” n7; compare Tammi, Problems, 96–97, and Leving, Keys, 269.

9. Pekka Tammi, in a footnote I had previously overlooked, and so, apparently, had Leving, did acknowledge this possibility, but declared it “no longer interesting narratologically” (Tammi, Problems, 97n80)—a distinction that serves narratology at the cost of neglecting the full thematic complexity of the work at hand. Tammi’s assertion here seems somewhat arbitrary, as elsewhere within the same argument he does not shy from thematic conclusions, e.g., “The principal point of The Gift is still this: as long as Fyodor is trying to gain control over a reality of which his own mind is a part, he will never be fully successful as a literary artist” (emphasis original), ibid., 97. The point I want to emphasize is that the fictitious authorship of a later Fyodor cannot be disproved by any of the arguments advanced to date, and that it holds significant interest that is consistent with many of the novel’s other components.

10. Gift, 206, 359; SSRP, 4:386, 535.

11. Gift, 41, SSRP, 4:227. This passage is somewhat unusual, perhaps unique, among the novel’s first-person sections, in that it reflects neither Fyodor’s current experiences within the narrated story (fabula), nor his reminiscences within the story of earlier times (e.g., his childhood). Here we have clearly Fyodor’s later perspective on the current action in the narrative. It is possible to ascribe the voice here to another time within the novel’s scope—for example, he might have related this information to Zina two years later. Regardless, the idea of a “future Fyodor” looking back on himself stands out insistently.

12. Gift, 47, SSRP, 4:233.

13. Dolinin also proposes that several instances of the pronoun “we” demonstrate the narrator’s distinctness from Fyodor, but these examples can also be interpreted as the “majestic plural” or examples of self-objectification by the later, narrating Fyodor. Dolinin rejects this later Fyodor for valid but surmountable reasons, discussed below. See Dolinin, “The Gift,” 164.

14. Gift, 363–4; SSRP, 4:539–40.

15. But, as Dolinin has shown and Yuri Leving has elaborated, dates in the novel are rather imprecise and fanciful. See Dolinin, Alexander, Nabokov’s Time Doubling: From The Gift to Lolita ,” Nabokov Studies 2 (1995), 3–40 Google Scholar, esp. 10; and Leving, Keys, 146–49.

16. Dolinin, “The Gift,” 163.

17. Gift, 139; SSRP, 4:321.

18. Date of composition from Boyd, Russian Years, 431. See Nabokov, Vladimir, “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” The New York Review of Books (March 31, 1988): 38–42 Google Scholar.

19. The notion of quantum theory’s “complementarity” may be relevant, but there is not space here to explore the matter. See my The Quill and the Scalpel (Columbus, OH, 2009), 185–88Google Scholar, for some possible avenues.

20. “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows” ( Nabokov, Vladimir, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New York, 1959 [1941]), 205Google Scholar.

21. Or, we might say, Fyodor’s world is semi-fictional from the point of view of his later narrating self (who is fictional from the reader’s point of view).

22. In the original: “за чертой страницы, как завтрашние облака”: literally, “beyond the boundary-line of the page, like tomorrow’s clouds” (Gift, 363; SSRP, 4:541).

23. Gift, 331; SSRP, 4:506. Dolinin views this passage as also indicative of the “silent observer’s” presence (“The Gift,” 162). However, the paragraph continues in the first person, almost certainly intended to represent Fyodor’s experiences in the Grunewald that summer (from a future perspective, but not a proleptic one such as we saw above surrounding the Yasha narrative).

24. Gift, 363; SSRP, 4:541.

25. Nabokov, Vladimir, Strong Opionions (New York, 1991), 95Google Scholar; see, e.g., Couturier, Maurice, Nabokov, ou la tyranie de l’auteur (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar.

26. Dolinin, “The Gift,” 165.

27. Gift, 328; SSRP, 4:503.

28. There is unfortunately not space to pursue the intriguing Derridean possibilities implied here.

29. Gift, 163–4; SSRP, 4:344.

30. Martinsen, Deborah A., “ Lolita as Petersburg Text,” Nabokov Studies no. 13 (2013–15): 95–123 Google Scholar.

31. See Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York, 1980), 100Google Scholar, 104; Connolly, Julian, “Madness and Doubling: From Dostoevsky’s The Double to Nabokov’s The Eye ,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (1990): 129–39Google Scholar; Naiman, Eric, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca, NY, 2010), 269–83Google Scholar.

32. Vinogradov, V. V., “K morfologii natural΄nogo stilia. Opyt lingvisticheskogo analiza peterburgskoi poemy ‘Dvoinik,’” in Vinogradov, V. V., Poetika russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 1976) 101–40Google Scholar; e-version at feb-web.ru/feb/classics/critics/vinogradov_v/v76/v762101-.htm, 129, 135 (last accessed October 27, 2016). Vinogradov even suggests that it was this tendency and its attendant complications that caused the novella’s lack of success with its contemporary readers (129).

33. In fact, Bakhtin goes further (and further than Vinogradov), asserting that all such scenes take place exclusively within Golyadkin’s consciousness: “we do not find a single element that exceeds the bounds of Golyadkin’s self-consciousness, not a single word or a single tone that could not have been part of his interior dialogue with himself or his dialogue with his double” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Caryl Emerson, ed. and trans., Minneapolis, 1984, 217). Bakhtin affirms that even the narrator’s voice itself is an element of Golyadkin’s consciousness, as a version of his “I for the other,” or his “second voice” (which is also manifest in the double himself).

34. In Bakhtin’s terms, the narrator presents one of Golyadkin’s own inner voices right back to him, “but in another, hopelessly alien, hopelessly censuring and mocking tone” (Problems, 221). Cf. Rosenshield, Gary: “I would suggest that the narrative is told by another double of Golyadkin who has the feelings of Golyadkin Senior, but who, in contrast to Golyadkin Senior, can see through Golyadkin Junior’s ‘treachery.’” Challenging the Bard: Dostoevsky and Pushkin, a Study of Relationship (Madison, 2013)Google Scholar, 252n39. See also Lomagina, M. F., “K voprosu o pozitsii avtora v ‘Dvoinike’ Dostoevskogo,” Filologicheskie nauki, 14 no. 5 (1971): 4–9 Google Scholar; Terras, Victor, The Young Dostoevsky (1846–1849): A Critical Study (The Hague, 1969), 207–9Google Scholar.

35. Dostoevskii, F.M., Sobranie sochinenii v 15 tomakh (Leningrad: 1988), 1:199Google Scholar; Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Double, Alpin, Hugh, trans. (London, 2004), 59Google Scholar.

36. Or, on the “otherworldly” alternative, it may embody the analogy between a benevolent artist and a benevolent creator.

37. Connolly, Julian W., “The Ethical Implications of Narrative Point of View in Dostoevsky’s The Double ,” Dostoevsky Studies no. XVII (2013): 99–111 Google Scholar.

38. V. V. Vinogradov, “K morfologii.” Vinogradov writes, “oбраз рассказчика как бы придвигается к персонажу,” (the narrator’s formal image, as it were, approaches the character’s position) (123); elsewhere, he notes that “рассказчик сливается с самим героем,” (the narrator merges with the hero) (135), though this only happens sometimes in his view.

39. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v 15 tomakh, 1:149.

40. According to Bakhtin, “we do not find a single element that exceeds the bounds of Golyadkin’s self-consciousness, not a single word or a single tone that could not have been part of his interior dialogue with himself or his dialogue with his double,” (Problems, 217).

41. By way of contrast, the word “господин” appears approximately fifty-seven times in War and Peace.

42. Dostoevskii had high hopes for the work in his letter to his brother Mikhail on February 1, 1846, just before publication; he experienced disappointment and expressed dissatisfaction with various elements two months later on April 1 after some poor reviews; and by February, 1847, seemed again ecstatic with the general response. In Diary of a Writer for November of 1877, he had a low evaluation of the novella: “I really failed with this tale, but its core idea was quite luminous, and I’ve never attempted anything more serious than this idea in the literary sphere. But the form of this tale was a complete failure.” Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v 15 tomakh, 14:338.

43. Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, 98, 104.

44. Nabokov, , Strong Opinions (New York, 1990), 83Google Scholar.

45. Connolly, “Madness,” 129.

46. In an interview, Alfred Appel asked in which of his works Nabokov began to “face the possibilities” that were fully elaborated in Pale Fire, another work with notoriously tricky “author”-narrator relations; Nabokov named The Eye (Strong Opinions, 74). Although we cannot accept Nabokov’s comments on faith, we can consider them as interpretive possibilities: they are worth examination.

47. Boyd, Russian Years, 348.

48. Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction, 109.

49. Vinogradov, “K morfologii,” 135.

50. Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction, 115.

51. Johnson, D. Barton, “Eyeing Nabokov’s Eye ,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 19, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 328–50Google Scholar.

52. Despair also adds a dash of ambiguity to the narrator’s voice, by mentioning the “author of psychological novels” to whom Hermann’s manuscript has been delivered, and who might appropriate the text as his own. This is the first example of the fictitious editor in Nabokov’s works, who also might be taken as a fictitious inner author, or false author, if we interpret this line from the opposite direction: as the (fictive) author’s oblique confession that in fact he is publishing a found text under his own name. The phrase “psychological novels” also evokes Dostoevskii.

53. For more on these shifts, see Iurii Levin, “Ob osobennostiakh,” and Blackwell, Zina’s Paradox, 58–85. Of all the proposals that a superior author-creator-figure hovers above all of Fyodor’s imaginable perspectives, Alexander Dolinin’s is the most thorough and consistent. Dolinin draws special attention to the moment when Fyodor, walking home, points out “the square where we dined” (Gift, 53; SSRP, 4:239), interpreting this “we” along with several others in the novel as evidence of a “Person Unknown,” the “we” constituting the “‘he’ of the hero and ‘I’ of his author” (“The Gift,” 164–65). While this solution is perfectly acceptable, there is nothing definitive or obligatory about it: every such “we” in the narrative could equally be read as the majestic plural, or as a reminiscing Fyodor-type narrator standing alongside his narrated, rebelched self. Dolinin is surely correct that the “square where we dined” must be the one from Chapter One’s Spartan dinner, and not the site of Fyodor’s final meal with Zina in Chapter Five.

54. Roy Johnson, using strict criteria of “unity,” judged this story a failure in 1995, but in my view, the method applied was not commensurate with the story’s complexity. See “RJ: The Circle,” NABOKV-L, June 9, 1995, at https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;a15a3d9b.9505 (last accessed November 3, 2016).

55. Tammi draws attention to the circular principle dominant in both The Gift and in Fyodor’s own creative practice; see Tammi, Problems, 96.

56. Nabokov somewhat muddled the date relations upon translating the work (with his son Dmitri). As he reports in his note on the translation, he thought he had written it in 1936 (as he had thought at the time of the 1956 Chekhov House publication of the collection Vesna v Fial΄te), whereas in fact he wrote and published it in early 1934. He was apparently led astray by the age of Tanya’s daughter, “about ten” in the story, though based on events in The Gift, she should have been five (or seven, if he had been correct that the story was written and set in 1936). To make the revised dates conform, Nabokov also changed the number of intervening years between meetings from twenty to twenty-two. However, he would have done better to acknowledge that the fictitious world of The Gift had not yet completely stabilized in his mind when he wrote the story—Fyodor’s father’s patronymic changed, as well, between the story and the novel’s publication (from initial “N.” to “Kirillovich”; the “N.” was removed only in the translation; Stories, 375). Although—in a remarkable confirmation of his avowed creative process—he had clearly envisioned a great deal of the future work already, certain minor details, such as the exact year Tanya would have her baby, remained out of focus. See Nabokov, Vladimir, Collected Stories (London, 1997), 653–54Google Scholar. For publication details, see commentary by Yuri Leving, SSRP, 3:820–21.

57. Tammi, Problems, 38–40.

58. Fyodor also refers to himself this way in imaginary reviews of his poems in chapter one (Gift, 27; SSRP, 4:213), and his narrator calls him Godunov-Cherdyntsev just before his first imaginary dialog with Koncheyev (Gift, 70; SSRP, 4:255).

59. Stories, 375.

60. Two examples must suffice. From “The Circle”: “The new building was of a grainy granitic gray on its outside; its inside, for several years and then for another long spell (that is, when it joined the staff of memory) sunnily smelled of glue; the classes were graced with glossy educational appliances such as enlarged portraits of insects injurious to field or forest; but Innokentiy found even more irritating the stuffed birds provided by Godunov-Cherdyntsev” (Stories, 375–6; SSRP, 3:640). From The Gift: “It is a funny thing, when you imagine yourself returning into the past with the contraband of the present, how weird it would be to encounter there, in unexpected places, the prototypes of today’s acquaintances, so young and fresh, who in a kind of lucid lunacy do not recognize you; thus a woman, for instance, whom one loves since yesterday, appears as a young girl, standing practically next to one in a crowded train, while the chance passerby who fifteen years ago asked you the way in the street now works in the same office as you” (Gift, 41; SSRP, 4:227–28).

61. Stories, 375. Compare Fydor’s Chernyshevskii narrator: “Sophia Perovski and her companions each took a portion (of what? History did not quite manage to…)” (Gift, 226; SSRP, 4:404).

62. Stories, 377; SSRP, 3:641. Compare Fyodor’s (or his narrator’s) question: “Where had this happened before?” (Gift, 344; SSRP, 4:519).

63. Gift, 35; SSRP, 4:221.

64. (“The schoolmaster at our village”).

65. For example: “Having greeted us, Nikolya again dons his hat, a gray, downy top hat, and quietly withdraws” (Gift, 213; SSRP, 4:392).

66. Stories, 376; SSRP, 3:641—“actually” added in the translation.

67. Stories, 377; SSRP, 3:641. The original reads simply “казались пылкому восьмикласснику.” Cf. from “The Life of Chernyshevskii”: “Свадьба друга произвела на нашего двадцатилетнего героя одно из тех чрезвычайных впечатлений…” (His friend’s wedding had produced on our twenty-year-old hero one of those extraordinary impressions…) (Gift, 220, SSRP, 4:398; emph. added). There are at least 158 instances of “наш герой” and “герой наш” in The Double. The translation of “The Circle” was probably completed during or just after the composition of Transparent Things (1972), and the introduction of the narrator’s first-person pronouns might be related to the narrative tone of that novel. Two other noteworthy instances of the narrator’s intrusions merit attention. As he gets to the heart of the Tanya-Innokentiy flirtation, the narrator momentarily adopts a highly ironic and self-reflexive transition:After that there followed several other chance encounters and finally—all right, here we go. Ready? On a hot day in mid-June—On a hot day in mid-June … (Stories, 380; SSRP, 3:644).The word “ready?” is added in the translation, perhaps to convey the second-person address that is more prominent in the original’s “Nu-s” (“all right”; the particle “-s” implying respect toward a present interlocutor—the narrator’s audience). A bit later, at Tanya’s birthday party, the first person plural reappears: “Finally, following an awkward poke, the damned raspberry stuff rolled and tumbled under the table (where we shall leave it)” (Stories, 381, SSRP, 3:645).

68. Stories, 382; SSRP, 3:646.

69. Ibid. The original is slightly more expressive: instead of “Vasiliy, who was greatly perplexed” we read, “с Василием, который недоумевал,—что случилось?” (“who wondered perplexedly, ‘what’s happened?’”).

70. Stories, 384; SSRP, 3:648 (boldface added, italics original).

71. Gift, 214, 216; SSRP, 4:393, 395.

72. Most famously, in the controversy surrounding Pale Fire’s fictitious authorship.

73. Gift, 366, 192; SSRP, 4:541, 373.