Dolinin, Alexander. The Gift: Addendum to Commentary. 2007

Alexander Dolinin (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the commentator of the only authorized Russian edition of The Gift, published in the fourth volume of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes (1999-2001). During the seven years after the appearance of this long-awaited Russian edition of the novel, professor Dolinin has accumulated many new illuminating notes to the text which he plans to post in the forthcoming issues of the NOJ. In the current issue, Dolinin explicates the intricate story of Nabokov's attempts to publish the full text of the novel in pre-war Europe, updates the corpus of critical responses to the novel by Nabokov contemporaries, and offers some fresh contexts to our understanding of the semantics of the title of The Gift by appealing to the writings by Derzhavin, Pushkin, Khodasevich, James Joyce and Gleb Struve. Dolinin concludes his series of notes with a number of subtle comments deciphering obscure passages in the first chapter of Nabokov's novel.