Sometimes, we don’t know what a thing is. Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift, in Chapter Two describes some witch doctors collecting “Chinese rhubarb, whose root bears an extraordinary resemblance to a caterpillar, right down to its prolegs and spiracles—while I, in the meantime, found under a stone the caterpillar of an unknown moth, which represented not in a general way but with absolute concreteness a copy of that root, so that it was not quite clear which was impersonating which—or why.”Footnote ¹ How to tell original from copy? Which is the source and which the subsidiary? This uncertainty makes an excellent figure for the complexities in The Gift, with its elusive, shifting narrative voice. Does Fyodor, from a variety of proximities and distances, control that voice? Or is there a superior “authorial” figure nestled between Fyodor and the ultimate author, Nabokov himself? This play with the relationship between narrative form and knowledge connects Nabokov tightly with Dostoevskii’s early experiment in epistemological fiction, The Double.

Narrators (literally) speak to us; more than that, they speak to our desire for stories, for narrative, as well as for trustworthy sources of information (knowledge). We want to think of our narrators as others who serve as guides in the reading process. More complex narrators manipulate and exploit that desire, but also subtly (or overtly) mock it, through their unreliability or other intrinsic features. Nabokov’s slippery narrators, a constant feature of his works beginning with The Gift, draw on and extend a tradition that began in Romanticism, developed further in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and achieved a key summit in Dostoevskii’s work. Pushkin created a narrator who offers the illusion of blending with the real-life author; Dostoevskii’s The Double introduces a narrator who slips in the opposite direction, almost merging with his erstwhile “hero,” the subject of the narrated story. As Justin Weir notes, Fyodor “absorbs from Pushkin the idea that stories must be told in no single way but in multiple ways.”Footnote ² The Gift blends these two divergent boundary-crossings, its narrator alternately—sometimes simultaneously—gesturing towards identity with the main character (Fyodor) and with the “author” (perhaps also “Fyodor”).Footnote ³

When Dostoevskii wrote The Double he was adapting a popular Romantic motif (the doppelgänger) into a psychological and even epistemological mode. Of course, the hero Golyadkin’s sanity is the main subject of the novella, his loss of mental stability taking tangible shape in his imagined double. Yet the real story, and the real innovation, behind Dostoevskii’s work is not the hero’s psychological journey, but the reader’s own convoluted discovery process in the midst of highly contradictory and confusing information. This extraordinarily elusive and deceptive narrator forces readers to confront the question of how one can know anything about the world. The Gift and its offshoot “The Circle” share with The Double a narrative voice that cannot be pinned down definitively, and which seems to offer mutually exclusive solutions. Whereas Dostoevskii’s novel produces a situation of open ambiguity, with flickering possibilities but no apparent stability, Nabokov’s guides the ambiguity into two distinct channels, each of which can appear valid to a reader. The Gift presents something like a “multistable image”: a narrator and structure that can be viewed coherently in two distinct, opposed ways, depending on how it is viewed.Footnote ⁴ As I will demonstrate, the novel’s implicit structuring persona is a multistable narrator.

There is still no consensus on whether Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is best considered to have authored the entire text before us, or whether, instead, a fictitious author-figure hovers silently above him and gives the novel its final inner shape. This lack of agreement, and its history, is thoroughly summarized by Yuri Leving in his invaluable Keys to The Gift; after reviewing the evidence, he joins those who believe that the novel’s embracing narrative is best seen as “written & by an external, invisible author figure whose point of view occasionally coincides with Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s cognitive horizon.”Footnote ⁵ However, the question remains very much undecided. In the interest of space, I refer the reader to Leving’s excellent summary of the full debate up to this point.Footnote ⁶ In the coming pages, I will outline some of the problems attending each of the major “solutions” on record and suggest that, after all, the “open” solution, with its “multistable” potential, is the most apt. I will derive this conclusion in part from an interpretation of Dostoevskii’s The Double and a study of the narrative structure of the Gift-related story “The Circle.”

The always-questionable evidence “from the source” is contradictory. In a 1960 letter to Walter Minton, unearthed by Marina Grishakova, Véra Nabokov wrote (for her husband): “DAR consists of five chapters, four of these are written by the author (as ‘invisible observer’), the fifth (No. 4 in the sequence) purports to be the work of the main protagonist.”Footnote ⁷ This letter appears to confirm that Nabokov had in mind a diegetic author, as “invisible observer,” who does not coincide fully with the “main protagonist” (Fyodor). Two years later, however, in his foreword to the novel’s translation, Nabokov himself offers a very different formulation. He writes: “The last chapter combines all the preceding themes and adumbrates the book Fyodor dreams of writing some day: The Gift.” Taken together, the two paratexts suggest that Nabokov was keenly aware that Fyodor might be seen as the full narrative’s fictitious author—and also that another personage, an “invisible author figure,” might be seen in that role. Readers are left to their own devices.

A primary element of arguments for this separate “invisible author-figure” emerges from the presence in the narrative of scenes and perspectives that would have been unavailable to Fyodor as we see him within the story.Footnote ⁸ The main limitation of these approaches is that they take a synchronic rather than diachronic view of Fyodor’s possible roles: they ignore the fact that a later, self-regarding and aestheticizing Fyodor, as the unifying perspective behind the narration, resolves all of these concerns.Footnote ⁹ A later, more knowing Fyodor would have access to any information that Zina might have told him (about her vision of him from behind when she returned from the ball, or her farewell with her mother and Boris Schyogolev, for example).Footnote ¹⁰ One generally overlooked passage appears specifically to present an older Fyodor looking back on the days described in The Gift. Describing his failure to write about the Chernyshevskiis’ son Yasha, Fyodor as first-person narrator reminisces: “Fortunately I did not fulfill the order—I am not sure exactly what saved me: for one thing, I kept putting it off too long; for another, certain blessed intervals occurred between our meetings; and then perhaps Mmme. Chernyshevskii herself grew a little bored with me as a listener.”Footnote ¹¹ This perspective appears to be outside the time-frame of the novel’s events (a perspective echoed in Fyodor’s visits to the Grunewald in Chapter Five).

A narrating Fyodor has not just time but also imagination on his side, as he can make up details of scenery, both because he is “re-chewing” everything and imbuing it with his creative consciousness, and because he has shown us already that this is his compositional process. An excellent example of such poetic license appears in his unwritten tale about Yasha Chernyshevskii’s tragic love triangle, during the three friends’ final tramcar ride together:

Much of this passage represents information Fyodor could have gathered from his friends (though he did not interview Rudolf or Olya, so much of the detail here is suspect: the wind, for example), but two things are certainly either imaginatively added, or else evidence of an omniscient view intruding: the “rubber-soft nose pressed against the glass,” and Posner’s repetition, “which I need, which I need very much.” If, in fact, Yasha noticed the daughter’s nose pressed against the window, he most certainly did not report on that to Rudolf and Olya; and even if he did summarize Posner’s request to them, it is hardly plausible that he would have imitated the man’s speech pattern at such a moment, as they stood “sternly in the wind.” Only Yasha, or Posner, could have noted these things, but neither of them is likely to have thought of the phrase “rubber-soft” or any other epithet regarding the child’s nose—or to have thought anything at all specifically about the child. This is pure creative interpolation on Fyodor’s part—he is narrating here—and it demonstrates for us how he approaches the craft of artistically distorting his reality.Footnote ¹³

We know from Fyodor and Zina’s final discussion that he has plans to write a novel based on their history—the history we have just read: Fyodor describes “something similar to destiny’s work in regard to us,” exclaiming, “isn’t that the plot for a remarkable novel? What a theme! But it must be built up, curtained, surrounded by dense life—my life & And I shan’t write it now, I’ll be a long time preparing it, years perhaps.”Footnote ¹⁴ He intends to write a novel about his life before and during their romance, and complete it years later—perhaps in time to have it published by 1938, when The Gift itself was completed (the novel’s action runs from early 1926 to mid-1929).Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, any structural or narrative elements that seem to imply the presence of a superior authorial consciousness can still be viewed as variations on Fyodor’s own perspectives, refracted through temporal displacement and creative engagement.

However, a more significant problem confronts a theory that attempts to place Fyodor behind the entire text: in the words that I skipped in the previous passage, Fyodor also says, “let’s suppose I so shuffle, twist, mix, rechew and rebelch everything, add such spices of my own and impregnate things so much with myself that nothing remains of the autobiography but dust.” This moment inserts a kind of “liar’s paradox” into the novel, because Fyodor is announcing that he will write The Gift, but also that it will be a radical distortion of his personal story (and presumably of Zina’s, too). As Alexander Dolinin rightly notes, by virtue of the logic in this passage, if Fyodor writes a version of The Gift, it must be different from the one we have before us, though isomorphic with it.Footnote ¹⁶ Alternatively, if Fyodor has written The Gift exactly as we have it, we must believe that his life and story in his own experience were not exactly as the novel presents them. Should we, therefore, throw up our hands and admit that Fyodor cannot be the hidden author of this novel?

Let’s take a closer look at the two possible outcomes of Fyodor’s plans for “rebelching.” In the first version, we accept The Gift as an accurate account of Fyodor’s fictional world. The novel’s Fyodor hasn’t written this book, because he must have been planning to write a different book (isomorphic with The Gift) in which all the identifying details are skewed to some extent. On this reading, it seems that The Gift is simply a faithful narration of Fyodor’s (fictional) real story—the one he couldn’t write, because it would cause “mass executions of good acquaintances,” as Zina points out. The faithful narration is presented by a completely unknown “author-narrator,” an “invisible observer,” who mimics or simulates Fyodor’s own voice and then, like the fictitious Pushkin at the end of Onegin, takes leave of his own work. The authorial “I” of the final, stanzaic paragraph is different from the self-narrating character’s “I” (Fyodor’s “I”) in the penultimate paragraph, but we do not speculate on any biographical details of this narrating voice. The closing zooms out, as it were, in anticipation of the “anthropomorphic deity” who intrudes at the end of Bend Sinister. The author-narrator may shape the text of The Gift to mimic the form of Fyodor’s projected novel, but such structuring need not create a paradoxical regression, because this “author figure” can be imagined to be in control of the complete work (like Pushkin’s narrator). This is essentially Dolinin’s and Leving’s reading.

In the second “rebelched” version, we imagine the narrative about Fyodor to be, itself, a “shuffled” telling of a similar but not quite discernible series of events in the life of a character very much like Fyodor—we might call him Fyodor’s alter-ego. On this reading, we hazily imagine a biographical frame for the narrating persona; we posit the existence of a world beyond the one described in the text, and The Gift is that world’s shadowy reflection. Fyodor in this scenario becomes a distorted projection of the fictitious author figure; we imagine the two in a close relationship of near identity, specifically characterized by the surplus of knowledge held by the later, “authoring” persona, who artistically refracts his experiences in a novel that looks and feels as though it has been written by Fyodor. This temporally removed, reflective persona, a “Fyodor” in quotation marks, slides in and out of his distorted former self’s perspective, just as that earlier self would slide in and out of the “souls” of those around him (as Fyodor does with his father’s voice and with various characters in the novel, especially Alexander Chernyshevskii)—and as he also, in imagining the apocryphal review of his book of poems, slid at times into a third-person view of his own personal history. That movement to an outside perspective on self seems characteristic of Fyodor, and it echoes the narrative structure of The Eye and connects, as I will discuss below, with Dostoevskii’s The Double.

This second “rebelched” version resolves the apparent paradox by encouraging us to adopt a special relationship to the idea of “truth” while reading fiction, a perspective beyond the simple suspension of disbelief. We no longer expect that the novel’s account must be literally “true” to the facts of Fyodor’s (or the “author’s”) life in order for it to be “true” to the larger artistic whole he—“Fyodor-2”—wants to communicate. We do not have an exact image of the author-figure who has composed the novel’s text, because we cannot, but we do have a good idea of what is most significant about him, and of the contours of his life. This non-exactness makes sense, both because we don’t expect fiction to be true, and because—as Fyodor suspects in his work on his father’s biography—even “truthful” non-fiction texts about individuals always distort their subject.Footnote ¹⁷ In Tiutchev’s words, repeatedly invoked by Nabokov elsewhere, мысль изреченная есть ложь (“a thought that is spoken is a lie”). Nabokov’s essay “Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible,” written in late 1936 in the midst of The Gift’s composition, emphasizes these very concerns and makes them explicit, even axiomatic.Footnote ¹⁸

A corollary to this second reading model follows the novel’s Fyodor into the future, where he has written an analogous work—one that “shuffles” the details of the events we have read, producing a virtual alternative to the world in The Gift. In that book, Fyodor would have the same authorial-narrative strategies, the same slightly ironic attitude towards his own more youthful self. In a sense, the two works—Fyodor’s imagined novel and the novel in hand, and the worlds they describe—might be complementary distorted reflections of one another, like the nonnons in Invitation to a Beheading.Footnote ¹⁹ On this reading, there are two diegetic “worlds” and two diegetic “novels” refracting those worlds. Neither novel gives a true representation of its world’s contents, but together, perhaps, through a parallax effect (or through complementarity), they might allow an intimation of a truth larger than either one alone can embody. This reading model anticipates one proposed in the final lines of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, written immediately after The Gift. Footnote ²⁰

Whichever of these readings one chooses, the final paragraph or “stanza,” in calling the characters “imagined ones” (“видения,” “visions”), and invoking the relation between Pushkin and his creation Eugene, explicitly suggests the fictionality of Fyodor’s world—as viewed by the character uttering these poetic lines, who is also, ironically, fictional.Footnote ²¹ However, the poem’s (and novel’s) last words insist that the described world does not end with its narration, but continues “beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze.”Footnote ²² This narrator declares that the lives, and the story, are not limited by the physical boundaries of the text. Chapter Five, in other words, develops the image of an author-character, through Fyodor’s address to his “reader,” (“Give me your hand, dear reader”), his description of his future book, and the purer author-like intrusion in the closing paragraph.Footnote ²³ But it also twists the entire narrative by foregrounding the idea that the novel’s characters are “visions,” just as Eugene is his Poet’s vision. Fyodor flickers between both roles, as author and imagined vision. This twist produces a violation of the fourth wall (romantic irony). Complicating things further, the same lines indicate that the tale does not really end where it seems to, that fiction has more reality in it than meets the eye, inviting, even urging the reader to continue to imagine that world beyond the end of the printed text, because “no boundary for the sage exists where I have put ‘The End.’”Footnote ²⁴ The closing stanza declares the book’s end, and simultaneously denies it. In parallel fashion, the narrative leads us increasingly to believe that Fyodor is the fictive author (invisible observer as well as protagonist), and then, with its last lines, calls that belief into question (is Fyodor a “vision,” or an “author,” or both?). This tension is triggered especially by Fyodor’s statement about rechewing and rebelching the details of his romance with Zina, mentioned above.

If we step back, these two broader strategies for reading The Gift—one with a stable “invisible observer,” one with doubled yet isomorphic Fyodors—reflect two fairly opposed visions of what Nabokov might be doing as an artist. In the first reading, the omniscient, invisible author figure dominates, serving as a stand-in for Nabokov, or for the figure of the controlling author, the (sometimes tyrannical) one meting out the fate of his characters, who are “galley slaves.”Footnote ²⁵ This reading meshes well with interpretive strategies that place a transcendent “otherworld,” or a benevolent creator, or, more abstractly but no less consequentially, metafiction at the center of Nabokov’s artistic concerns. It creates for the novel a relatively closed structure and clear solution, so it also reinforces those interpretations claiming that Nabokov always provided “elegant,” and therefore tidy, solutions to his riddles. Dolinin argues that the narrating observer is Fyodor’s “invisible creator and protector, his ‘Lone Companion’ whose consciousness, though hidden from view, is responsible for Fyodor’s fate.”Footnote ²⁶ This interpretation certainly resonates with such passages as when Fyodor says, “there really is something, there is something!” and seems confident of a presiding otherworldly figure.Footnote ²⁷ Yet there is no particular (empirical) reason to hold to this view of the novel’s structure: there is nothing in this novel (unlike in Bend Sinister) that forces us to accept unequivocally the presence of a “creator and protector” or anyone “responsible for Fyodor’s fate.” All proposed instances of intrusions by the narrative persona, rather than proving his sovereignty over the text, can no less plausibly be ascribed to Fyodor’s own creative fancy, or that of his isomorphic analogue (his double or alter-ego): that is, as the ironic self-references of an author/character exploring his complex relation to the world he both inhabits and creates—as emblems of the delayed, creative refiguration of his own experiences. The same can be argued regarding the many patterns in the novel.

The second “rebelched” reading strategy produces an open structure that does not depend so centrally on otherworldliness or authorial control. The novel’s shimmering, indeterminate alternation between two possible worlds produces an alternative model of the way art and narrative relate to the world they figure. If language always distorts, if an uttered thought is always a lie, The Gift’s retreat from representational claims suggests a different pathway to understanding and an alternative relationship between language and truth. By means of thematic play and of narrative design—but within a context of apparent novelistic realism, and hence, truthfulness—such a stance foregrounds the incomplete and provisional nature of knowledge. Thus, while presenting readers with a lavishly detailed picture of an imagined world, the novel reminds us that even from the perspective of that world and those details, the narrative cannot be understood as completely true, because representations never capture the truth. Truth, this reading suggests, is always somewhere outside the text—any text.Footnote ²⁸ Such a strategy serves well those who believe that Nabokov was more fascinated by mystery than by certainty, and that he sought to create various emblems and even structural analogies to the vast unknown.

There may be no definitive way to choose between these two strategies. Both can be logically and factually derived from the text of the novel. My own tendency to prefer the second strategy finds some support in Fyodor’s penchant for “multi-level thinking”: the novel’s structure might be a radical development of a desire to imagine disparate, far-flung, and perhaps even contradictory things simultaneously.Footnote ²⁹ Fyodor’s life as “true,” his life as aesthetic artifact, and his imagined future novel with its parallel features combine to launch the mind into a vertiginous series of distorted reflections. However, “multi-level thinking,” in principle, would not exclude the first, more stable “invisible observer” reading strategy either, based on Fyodor’s description of the concept—just as one does not need the extrinsic author persona to anchor the otherworldly interpretation of The Gift. The novel encourages us to contemplate, serially or cumulatively, all of these variations of authorial/auctorial possibility, which may explain why Nabokov described the novel one way in 1960, and the other way in 1962.

Some will object that a solution in which Fyodor both is and is not the inner “author” of The Gift’s text, while an “invisible observer” both is and is not in control of the entire narrative, violates Nabokovian notions of well-structured form. However, a response to this objection can be found in the way such narrative ambiguity relates to the history of similarly contradictory forms in literature. In her article “Lolita as a Petersburg Text,” Deborah Martinsen explores certain parallels between Nabokov’s most famous novel and the Russian tradition of ambiguity, as seen especially in Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades,” Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Dostoevskii’s The Double.Footnote ³⁰ Her study emphasizes matters of uncertain fact in the stories, as they appear to their first-time and perhaps second- or third-time readers: does Kovalyov really wake up noseless? Does Hermann really see the countess’s ghost? Does Golyadkin really have a double? The last of these tales in particular offers an especially striking and relevant precursor for The Gift, on slightly different narrative grounds than those Martinsen is discussing, and I turn now to an exploration of affinities between these two works.

Nabokov famously claimed that The Double was Dostoevskii’s best work, a “perfect work of art,” but this fact has received relatively little discussion beyond Julian Connolly’s essay on The Eye and Eric Naiman’s provocative counterfactual chapter.Footnote ³¹ What was it about Dostoevskii’s second published novella that so attracted Nabokov? Connolly, in “Madness and Doubling: From Dostoevsky’s The Double to Nabokov’s The Eye,” discusses primarily the fabula-level similarities between the two works, what themes each author appears to be exploring through the doppelgänger conceit, as well as the important innovations in the way Nabokov developed the theme further than Dostoevskii had. I propose that it was not just the hint of metafiction, and not just the ambiguity of fabula—was Golyadkin Jr. really there?—but rather, ambiguity of siuzhet (discourse) that Nabokov found irresistibly innovative, and that we see developed first in the novella The Eye and later in The Gift. Specifically, I suspect that Nabokov was drawn to The Double’s maddeningly elusive narrator: while maintaining the guise of a third person limited perspective, the narrator violates expectations by presenting the inner, distorted, often hallucinatory world of Golyadkin Sr. as though it is real to others around him. The narrator slides into Golyadkin’s thoughts, usually by means of free indirect discourse, but he also becomes a kind of double himself, echoing Golyadkin’s verbal tics and syntax, giving voice and body to some of Golyadkin’s dearest fantasies—a point made by V.V. Vinogradov in his foundational 1922 article.Footnote ³² As with The Gift’s narrator in relation to Fyodor, there are only a few scenes where the narrator appears to provide information that might originate beyond Golyadkin’s purview: notably, at the ball for Klara Olsufyevna’s name day, and in Dr. Rutenspitz’s office, before the hero’s arrival there. And yet, the more one reads The Double, the more one may wonder whether the narrator himself might, at least sometimes, be Golyadkin’s own projection or hallucination.Footnote ³³ Dostoevskii dances around that boundary—the line where a narrator merges with a character, then seems to differentiate, merges again, and in the end leaves an impression of profound uncertainty.Footnote ³⁴ Perhaps he was experimenting with the way individuals can self-dissociate, self-criticize, or attempt to view themselves from outside, as they think others might see them, a theme made explicit in the discourse of the Underground Man. When Golyadkin says to himself, “А вот я сам по себе, да и только, и знать никого не хочу, и в невинности моей врага презираю. Не интригант, и этим горжусь. Чист, прямодушен, опрятен, приятен, незлобив” (“But then I’m my own man, and that’s that, and I don’t want to know anyone, and in my innocence I despise my enemy. I’m no schemer and I’m proud of it. Pure, straightforward, tidy, pleasant, mild-mannered”), he describes not really the way he is, but the way he would like to be perceived.Footnote ³⁵ The Gift’s narrator moves around like this too, sometimes merging in voice with Fyodor, sometimes observing him from outside, and sometimes, as at the end, merging with what appears to be an authorial figure, who may also be Fyodor or his twisted reflection. The key difference is that for Golyadkin, the dispersion and interweaving of voices is caused organically, or by some trauma in the past, provoking his paranoia and dissociation, whereas Fyodor’s experiments with voice changes are driven rather by his intense—if sporadic—curiosity about the lives and thoughts of others. Golyadkin is hiding and retreating; Fyodor is reaching out and empathizing. Both characters, Fyodor and Golyadkin, are propelled by the sense of existing within a story, a world of words, but for Golyadkin, that story represents a tension between the feared gossip of social competitors and the desired story of personal triumph, while for Fyodor, the story embodies a benevolent artist’s effort to fully imagine a world outside himself, including the various realities of other selves.Footnote ³⁶

In a more recent work, Connolly focuses on the apparently ironic (sarcastic, mocking) attitude that The Double’s narrator takes towards Golyadkin, a perspective first emphasized by Victor Terras in the west and M. F. Lomagina in the Soviet Union.Footnote ³⁷ Lomagina concedes that Vinogradov’s study of The Double posits that Golyadkin and the narrator are often blended, but she claims that Bakhtin refines this approach by suggesting that the narrator is dialogically oriented towards the hero (however, as I argue in my note above, Bakhtin may actually take an even stronger stand than Vinogradov, proclaiming the merged identity of Golyadkin and his narrator).Footnote ³⁸ Lomagina further suggests, along with Terras and Connolly, that the narrator’s primary relation to the character is a mocking, even disdainful one. Connolly elaborates, suggesting that this mocking irony impedes or even prevents compassion for the character, a strategy he says Dostoevskii rejected in his later works’ narrative form. However, this critical approach seems to overlook the likely possibility, endorsed by Bakhtin, that the narrator’s irony is in fact a reflection of Golyadin’s own self-deprecation, projected outward, or identified with by the narrator, just as the hero’s verbal tics and idiosyncrasies are echoed by the narrator’s behaviors—and fully available for our compassion, not just our derision. (In fact, the narrator’s extreme empathy emerges in the very first scene, when he anthropomorphizes—ventriloquizes, really—a noisily boiling samovar).Footnote ³⁹ I propose that Vinogradov and Bakhtin were correct, and that the narrator’s relation to Golyadkin is frequently, maybe even exclusively, one of identity.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even the repeated use of the word “Gospodin” (“Mister,” but more dignified)—eight hundred and forty-three times—can be attributed to the narrator’s performance of Golyadkin’s belief that he should be addressed this way.Footnote ⁴¹ However, because the narrator seems to relate things that are “real” outside of Golyadkin, but also things that are (upon reflection) patent fantasies or hallucinations, the reader cannot determine precisely where the narrator stands in relation to that “real” world, the hero, and the verbal story itself. This formal ambiguity is a significant advance over the narrative innovations in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin or Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” even though Dostoevskii later felt his novel’s “form” to be “unsuccessful.”Footnote ⁴²

When we consider Nabokov’s attitude to Dostoevskii, we have two polemical views vying for primacy: first, the claim that Dostoevskii was “not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one”; and second, that The Double is his best work, a “perfect work of art.” Footnote ⁴³ As in so many instances, it is impossible to know which words best express Nabokov’s real beliefs. However, judging from the way The Double reverberates in several of Nabokov’s literary creations, his fascination with and admiration for the narrative designs in that novella are unambiguous. It is doubtful that such a fascination would relate specifically to the hero’s, Golyadkin’s, mental affliction, and his projection of a double into his environment. Although Nabokov probably did not really find the doppelgänger subject to be a “frightful bore,” as he told Alfred Appel, he appears to be more interested in how Golyadkin’s situation, and the narrative about him, create variations on self-perception or perspective, and we can see this engagement playing out in The Eye, Despair, and The Gift.Footnote ⁴⁴ Each of these novels launches in part from a particular facet of Dostoevskii’s narrative, each developing its chosen facet in a new direction, and to a new level of complexity or insight.

The Eye is the earliest of Nabokov’s novels to sustain strong comparison to Dostoevskii—to be inspired by him, in Julian Connolly’s words.Footnote ⁴⁵ Curiously, it is also the work in which Nabokov believed he may have begun exploring the pathway that led to Pale Fire.Footnote ⁴⁶ Brian Boyd draws attention to the innovative control of narrative perspective present in The Eye. Footnote ⁴⁷ It is the earliest of Nabokov’s novels told from a first-person perspective, or with a personalized narrator at all. It is also a highly irregular first-person perspective, in which a character appears to spawn a second, dissociated subjectivity, taking an outside perspective on his own self. Such an act is of great interest psychologically, but it is equally fascinating narratologically, when the protagonist becomes his own external observer, and also his own third-person narrator. The re-reader faces little ambiguity in the source of The Eye as first-person utterance: it all comes from Smurov’s dissociated voice, in his outsider guise (merged together with the insider at the end), and without noticeable hints at that narrator’s contingency upon a secondary fictive author. We can easily see commonality here with The Double, and particularly with its Bakhtinian reading.

In another discussion of The Eye, Connolly notes that “the narrator often encounters a blurring of boundaries between himself and his imagined alter ego & his own personality and emotions bleed into the figure of his externalized creation. In the end, the distinction between Smurov and the narrator collapses altogether.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This language recalls Vinogradov’s description of The Double, in which narrator and character “blend together” (сливаются).Footnote ⁴⁹ Connolly’s discussion also emphasizes the Bakhtinian component of Smurov’s effort (as narrator) to preserve the “last word” about himself by becoming his own author, an effort that fails in the end when he notices that he must also confront his own audience, which he suddenly and anxiously does in the final paragraph. According to Connolly, one reason for the failure of Smurov’s effort to take a fully creative perspective on his own self is that he does not really want to inhabit the truth of his own being, but rather to flee it—another trait this work shares with The Double. Footnote ⁵⁰ The Gift’s narrator-protagonist, by contrast, does not appear to be hiding from himself. D. Barton Johnson points out that The Eye is structured in order to maintain the ambiguity of the narrating “I’s” identity through most of the work, letting the narrator and Smurov resolve into a tenuous unity at the conclusion; I am proposing here that in The Gift, ambiguity of narrative perspective resolves in an apparent unity, but one that leads to still further ambiguity.Footnote ⁵¹

In The Eye, Smurov spawns an imagined double who is really just himself, but he believes (or pretends) that the double is distinct and separate from him (and not even a double). This structure produces a voice that originates within a character while giving the impression of originating outside that character. In Despair, which we cannot fully treat in this space, Hermann projects for himself a physical double, who in fact is not a double, and does not even look like him.Footnote ⁵² In The Gift, Fyodor has at least one false double—Yasha Chernyshevskii, for whom Fyodor is a double in Yasha’s mother’s eyes—but also a true double in the form of the narrator, who is, the reader may believe, a distorted, later version of the same character. Fyodor narrates Yasha’s story, even while being his ersatz double, but he never fully crosses the boundary into Yasha’s personality (with the partial exception during the tram ride, discussed above). With The Gift’s own narration, as for example in Fyodor’s attempted biography of his father, the boundary between narrator and character becomes deliberately blurred. It is this narrator, with his mixed first- and third-person perspectives on the events in and around Fyodor’s life, who is most evocative of the narrative ambiguities in Dostoevskii’s text.Footnote ⁵³

In order to complete the link between The Gift’s narration and The Double, we need to take a final detour, and explore a story that Nabokov called The Gift’s satellite, “The Circle.” Many features of this offshoot deserve more attention than they have received to date, and its existence and form raise several significant questions.Footnote ⁵⁴ Clearly the story is a distinct work, and we cannot claim that it forces us to have any definitive beliefs concerning the novel. Nabokov says that the story “separated itself” from the novel and “orbited” around it; what are we to do with such a formulation? It is not exactly a paratext, nor is it exactly a sequel (in fact, chronologically, The Gift could be viewed as a prequel to “The Circle”: the novel’s action is set a decade earlier, although it was composed during the four years following the story’s completion). Regardless of the need to distinguish clearly between the two narratives, the story and novel share many concerns in common, including several characters and similar narrative tactics. If nothing else, the puzzles “The Circle” presents may shed some light on the puzzles found in The Gift itself.

Written and first published in 1934, this story concerns the world of The Gift, but from a perspective close to that of a person who does not appear in the novel’s action: the main protagonist is Innokentiy Bychkov, the son of the Leshino estate village school teacher. Composed a few months before Nabokov began intensive work on The Gift’s Chapter Four, Fyodor’s “Life of Chernyshevskii,” it mirrors that chapter’s structure in its circularity—the “snake biting its own tale” form that connects the two works (as Nabokov also pointed out in his remarks on the story)—and also links them to the novel’s own circular structure.Footnote ⁵⁵ Curiously, the story’s action is set five years after the end of the novel’s events (1934 vs. 1929).Footnote ⁵⁶ Despite the unorthodox first words (“In the second place”), at first glance the story’s narrator appears to maintain a stable (and extrinsic, to adopt Pekka Tammi’s term) third-person perspective that hews closely to Innokentiy’s field of consciousness, though the narrator does slip in a few comments, discussed below, that make him clearly a personality, rather than an abstract voice.Footnote ⁵⁷ The main character within Innokentiy’s recollection is Fyodor’s sister Tanya, while Fyodor himself appears twice, fleetingly—once on a horse, and once by casual mention (“in Berlin”). One might be tempted to suggest that Innokentiy himself is the story’s fictional author; however, the narrative voice is essentially identical to the one found throughout ironically intoned sections of The Gift, and at several points it creates a tangible distance between the narrator and Innokentiy.

Who is this narrator? Could it be Fyodor (or Fyodor’s “alter-ego” or narrating “double”)? If it is, it is a profoundly self-distanced version of Fyodor’s voice, perhaps a creation of “Fyodor’s,” like his “Chernyshevskii” narrator. Not only does the speaker refer to Fyodor only in the third person—not surprising in the context of The Gift—but he also refers to Fyodor’s father exclusively as “Godunov-Cherdyntsev” or “the count,” locutions that appear rarely in the novel, where instead we mostly see “Konstantin Kirillovich.”Footnote ⁵⁸ These choices reflect the narrator’s close alignment with Innokentiy’s perspective. Here, too, Occam’s razor might prompt us to decide that the narrator is an “invisible observer,” an omniscient, author-like character akin to the one some see as the unifying force in The Gift. However, several features of the text, combined with some amplifications of those features added by Nabokov for the translation, suggest that such a razor might not be the best tool for parsing this story.

The story’s first words—“In the second place”—create a jarring sensation.Footnote ⁵⁹ This opening presents two problems simultaneously. With the use of a colloquial commonplace, Nabokov leads the reader to feel the presence of some sort of narrating personality engaged in a factual or logical demonstration. Even if the story began with the words, “In the first place,” readers would still find themselves introduced into the uncertain world of an explanation without context, lacking an understanding of what series of arguments has produced the need for a “first place, second place” rhetorical figure. Truncating even that common formula and leaving only the “second place” heightens the disorienting effect, but also thematizes it: while “In the first place” would create a rejoinder without its antecedent, “In the second place” presents a rejoinder without its first half, a first half that is immediately sorely missed by the reader who has, as it seems, arrived just too late to catch the opening line or lines. The fictive author has chosen to highlight the disjunction between the narrator’s language and the author’s structuring powers. I say “fictive author,” because the action begins in medias res, as well as in the middle of a logical presentation: narrators do not do this, in their role as storytelling voice (the implied narration extends backwards here, before the text’s beginning), authors do. By means of this truncation, “The Circle” begins by announcing both a narrator and an author-figure within the story’s structure.

The language of the story aligns well with The Gift’s own style; the sentences and paragraphs tend to be long and meandering, leading into side-trails, parentheses, and digressions just as Fyodor’s sometimes do.Footnote ⁶⁰ Some particular quirks of the narrating voice remind us of The Gift’s narrator—particularly, the tendency to ask questions about the scene at hand. Already in the story’s third sentence, the narrator interrogates his protagonist’s melancholy: “what kind of melancholy?” he asks; “—well, a kind not yet sufficiently investigated.”Footnote ⁶¹ This unexpected aside gives some reflective texture to the narrator’s persona, layered on top of the as-yet nameless Innokentiy. Later, describing what seems to be Innokentiy’s memory of seeing Tanya out walking with her dog one day in about 1910, the narrator notes, “she slapped the pleats of her short navy-blue skirt—with what? I think with the dog leash she carried” (the original has here just “кажется” [it seems] in place of “I think”): who is asking this question, and (in the English), who is this “I”?Footnote ⁶² The “I” could certainly represent a kind of unmarked quotation: although the narrator has not told us that he is describing exactly the contents of Innokentiy’s reminiscences, it is logical that he would be doing so, and this sudden shift into what sounds like the voice of the rememberer makes some sense. And yet, the “I” could also come from the narrator who, at this point in his effort to follow the undulations of Innokentiy’s soul, has trouble making out exactly what he sees—just as Fyodor sometimes doubts that he has discerned exactly what Alexander Chernyshevskii is perceiving or imagining in the shadows and shapes around him (“But perhaps, thought Fyodor, perhaps this is all wrong, perhaps he & is not imagining his dead son right now as I imagine him doing”).Footnote ⁶³ Unmarked quotation blends into intense empathy, creating a nebulous liminal space between objective observation and complete identity.

A similar, but even more deceptive, shift occurs in the story’s fourth sentence, where we read that Innokentiy’s father “slowly & ascended from the grave, squaring his shoulders: Ilya Ilyich Bychkov, le maître d’école chez nous au village.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The phrase “squaring his shoulders” is highly stylized here (and very much like Fyodor’s “Chernyshevskii” narrator): the description is distanced from Innokentiy’s thoughts, where we later learn these words originate.Footnote ⁶⁵ The choice of words and image (“ascended,” “squaring his shoulders”), along with the full name, offers an outsider’s view of the inner content of recollection; but rather than informing us that what we see is a character’s memory, the narrator begins with this resurrection that harks back to the “regretted & days of [Innokentiy, the unknown protagonist’s] youth” to produce a very abstract image of reminiscence, with a stage-manager seeming to guide the character into position before us. In consequence, Ilya Ilyich appears not as a figment of memory, but as a literary or dramatic personage, one with an intrusive, (Romantic-) ironic author-narrator who flaunts his creative power over the scene. We sense at this point that a writer is in charge (we learn later that Innokentiy is a physician, and we have no evidence that he is also a writer). For the first-time reader, another quirk appears in the French phrase, “le maître…”: why is it in French? And who is its speaker? The “chez nous” (“at our place”) suggests to those with French or a translation that there is some “we” involved, but the identity of that “we” appears only toward the end of the story, along with the source of the words (Tanya’s and Fyodor’s mother). In light of their placement early in the story without source and context, they encourage identification with the narrator, who appears to be giving the impression that he has some connection to the described world and events: “chez nous” tentatively links the narrator to the “village.” Alternatively, as the café scene with its unnamed reminiscer crystallizes before the reader, these words might (accurately) be taken as an unmarked quotation of his thoughts, whose immediate source is unknown. Only near the story’s end do we learn that these are the words Innokentiy overhears Elizaveta Pavlovna saying to Tanya’s husband, and upon a second reading, we can ascribe them variously: to Innokentiy’s inner voice as he recollects his past and echoes the words he has just heard, within an unmarked quotation; or to a narrator who is related to Tanya and Elizaveta Pavlovna, appropriating the “chez nous” to his own perspective; or to a narrator who quotes ironically, without marks, Elizaveta Pavlovna’s words.

The narrator’s distance from Innokentiy is reaffirmed by several small moments in the text, as when we are told that “young Innokentiy readily believed the tales (actually idiotic) told about the Count’s traveling concubines, his Chinese-style inhumanity, and the secret errands he discharged for the Tsar—to spite the English.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Who is calling these tales “idiotic”? It could be an older, wiser Innokentiy, though this seems unlikely; it certainly could be “Fyodor,” and this seems more plausible; it could be a personal, third-person omniscient observer, but not an “invisible observer”—because by calling things “idiotic,” he is becoming visible: this narrator has an attitude toward the events. Another subtle marker of narratorial distance appears as Innokentiy, in eighth grade, walks past the atlantes holding up the balcony of the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs’ Embankment house: the narrator relates, “the strain of their stone muscles and their agonizingly twisted mouths struck our hotheaded uppergrader as an allegory of the enslaved proletariat.” “Hotheaded” appears to reflect an ironic narrator’s, perhaps Fyodor/“Fyodor’s,” judgment. The possessive “our,” like the “I” from “I think” discussed above, is added in the translation, and it enhances the distance between teller and protagonist, while also rendering the style still more akin to the tone of Fyodor’s “Chernyshevskii” and Dostoevskii’s The Double. Footnote ⁶⁷ All of these moments serve to indicate that the story is being composed and told by a distinct personality who is not Innokentiy, though hints of Innokentiy’s perspective may continue to tempt the reader.

An example of such temptation appears when the narration draws especially close to Innokentiy’s consciousness, relating that sixteen-year-old Tanya had “light-gray eyes, velvet-black eyebrows, a largish, pale, tender mouth, sharp incisors, and—when she was unwell or out of humor—one could distinguish the dark little hairs above her lip.”Footnote ⁶⁸ We can imagine that such detailed and intimate knowledge of Tanya’s mood-related physiognomic variations would develop naturally from a summer of romantic yearning during their several weeks of late-adolescent, playful interaction (although such minutia might be too intimate even for Innokentiy, in fact: did he really see her when she was “unwell or out of humor,” and from so close as to discern “tiny hairs”?). The narrator also tells us that Innokentiy’s local plebeian friend Vasiliy was “greatly perplexed” by Innokentiy’s change after he became a regular in Tanya’s group of playmates, and that Innokentiy himself “shuddered inwardly as he sensed his betrayal of the people’s cause.” The narrator’s knowledge of Vasiliy’s feelings breaks the tight apparent connection with Innokentiy, suggesting that Vasiliy was simply dropped, his perplexity experienced in solitude.Footnote ⁶⁹

One other curious adjustment to the translation adds a self-judgmental note to the end of Innokentiy’s visit with Tanya and her family in Paris:

The original (“успел злорадно подумать,” literally, “managed/had time to think malevolently”) does not call the thought “absurd,” but it does hint at its absurdity, with the same logic we see here. The added word, too, seems to augment the judgment felt in “malevolently,” indicating that the passage reflects not just Innokentiy’s thoughts in the moment, but his second thoughts, too. The original is more ambiguous on this score: are his second thoughts an immediate echo of the first, “malevolent” one, or do they arise only as he runs through the entire history, sitting in the café, where he “circles” back to his recollection’s starting point? Both versions imply that he had the malevolent thought, and sometime later noticed that in Paris, Russian is an idle luxury. Thus, it is clear that sometime later, he might have viewed his malevolent thought as “absurd,” but it is not at all obvious that he recognized the absurdity at the same time that he “caught himself thinking”—itself an evocative translation for “успел подумать.” In other words, this scene displays a moment of self-distancing on Innokentiy’s part, and in that way is already a precursor of the self-distancing that accompanies Fyodor’s path through The Gift.

However close the narration may at times be to Innokentiy’s perspective, the narrative’s style, structure, and self-conscious writerly qualities point towards a different “authoring” persona. The “writer” may be an “invisible observer,” or, just as likely, Fyodor (“Fyodor”), who has created this imaginative story about his sister’s friend, based on what he witnessed and on stories Tanya has told, and written mainly from this friend’s perspective—just as he worked to imagine the inner lives of others around him (the Chernyshevskiis, Vasiliev, Lyubov Markovna). There are many parts of the story that Fyodor (and even his sister) would not have been privy to, and he would have had to invent them: for example, Innokentiy’s unspoken thoughts that appear throughout the story. However, Fyodor’s creativity and interest in others make him a plausible source for this rechewed, rebelched version of his sister’s summer flirtation.

At the time “The Circle” was first published in 1934, there would have been no way for its readers to imagine that Fyodor, “Fyodor,” or a “Fyodor”-created narrator might be behind the text as voice and/or fictive author; certainly Nabokov could have imagined this, however, and so can re-readers of both of these works. His sensitivity to this kind of play with fictive authorial personas saturates The Gift, and stands out vividly in such comments in Fyodor’s “Chernyshevskii” book as “Here the author remarked,” “In my work (said the author)…”Footnote ⁷¹ The distancing markers discussed above produce the conclusion that some personality outside of Innokentiy is narrating his story, while the story’s circular structure suggests an active author figure, who may or may not be the same individual as the narrating voice but who, as a creator, seems quite similar to the Fyodor we know. The two tiny walk-on appearances by Fyodor’s character might be viewed as authorial signatures, like the cameos and surrogates that appear in so many of Nabokov’s works.

“The Circle” accomplishes a blending of different types of author-narrator-character interrelations. Like The Gift, it combines third- and first-person narration, though without the autobiographical component that dominates the first-person sections of the novel. It highlights its own authored state, hinting at a creative personality who is the fictitious source of the text. Like the novel, it gives rereaders good cause to think that this personality is “Fyodor,” but without giving conclusive grounds for this belief.

Narrators tell us what to think; they guide us in developing what we think we know about a given fictional world. Omniscient narrators appear to know what they are talking about—we assume that they know their worlds, and are “reliable.” Limited narrators with clear personal perspectives and human shortcomings are unreliable, openly giving readers an uncertain picture of fictional events. Dostoevskii’s narrator in The Double creates a hybrid: a narrator who appears omniscient, yet who turns out to describe a world that exists only (or mostly) in the mind of a madman. By trusting the narrator, even temporarily, the reader enters a dissonant state that takes time to sort out. Reading loses stability because we only gradually recognize that even the most basic facts may turn out to be illusions: the reader is Golyadkin’s double, too, for a time, believing in his fantasies and hallucinations. In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, we know where the narrator stands, and what he represents; in The Double we do not. Dostoevskii has taught Nabokov how to produce an ambiguous and elusive narrator; Nabokov has combined that lesson with Pushkin and moved the new model back into the realm of “sanity,” with the implication that what “sane” people know about the “real” world is merely a more reliable, yet still profoundly uncertain, hypothesis. Nabokov’s innovative “multistable” narrator prevents us from asserting categorical knowledge of narratives and their worlds.

We certainly find similar kinds of ambiguity, developed further in various ways, in most Nabokov novels after The Eye.Footnote ⁷² The Gift pays tribute to this feature of The Double, raising the problem to a new level, creating an “inner author” figure who merges with and diverges from the narrator and the main protagonist. Just as Golyadkin’s narrator joins him in his effort to understand and master his crumbling world, which is really just his own consciousness, The Gift’s narrator joins Fyodor in his desire to ascribe form and meaning to the world around him. But the elusive identity of the narrator foregrounds and mimics the difficulty, even impossibility, of establishing perfect knowledge of that world and its form, or, by extension, of giving an unequivocal and complete account of any human being or world. Poised between two structural embodiments, The Gift’s stanzaic final paragraph suggests that the artist’s and the reader’s desire to master an artwork or the world remains, but that more important than such mastery is to discover that there is “no boundary” at the novel’s end and proceed into the unknown and open future, taking up Fyodor’s white pencil from Chapter 3 to “imagine lots of things” (“массу вообразить”).Footnote ⁷³