"The Gift," written in the mid-1930s in Berlin, is the ninth and final of Nabokov's Russian-language novels and, although it may initially appear as an old-fashioned realist novel, it is the most complex—his "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," a love story, an artist's novel, the story of a successful quest for identity. The protagonist, a young man from a materially well-off family in St. Petersburg, who has become a tenant in Berlin due to the Revolution, finds both his style and his wife. The lovesick poet keeps his head high in the clouds of Russian poetry. His published poems no longer satisfy him; he begins to write a biography of his admired father but abandons it, finding it presumptuous. "The Gift," the gift, consists of three elements: it is a poetic talent, whose self-affirmation is...