Penguin Classics "The greater part of The Gift (in Russian, Dar) was written in 1935-1937, in Berlin; its last chapter was completed in 1937 on the French Riviera. The leading emigre magazine Sovremennye Zapiski, conducted in Paris by a group of former members of the Social Revolutionary party, published the novel serially (63-67, 1937-8), omitting, however, Chapter Four, which was rejected for the same reasons that the biography it contains was rejected by Vasiliev in Chapter Three (p. 204): a pretty example of life finding itself obliged to imitate the very art it condemns. Only in 1952, almost twenty years after it was begun, did there appear an entire edition of the novel brought out by that Samaritan organization, the Chekhov Publishing House, New York. It is fascinating to imagine the regime under which Dar may be read in Russia." Vladimir Nabokov