Love In Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift

To begin with, love is the major theme in Nabokov’s novel The Gift. The critic Alexander Dolinin, who in his essay of The Gift published in the Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, argues that The Gift itself can be called “a kind of declaration of love...love of the creator for his creature, and of the creature for its creator, love of a son for his father, love of an exile for his native land, love for language and those who love it, love for the beauty of the world, and last but not least, love for its readers.” (Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov 160). For the content of this paper, this essay will focus on three specific situations where love is expressed within the novel. The first one corresponds to what Nabokov calls “the triangle of …show more content…
For this reason, Yasha’s love at this point is degraded, merely imaginary, and loses its authenticity. On the other hand, The “virtuous triangle” is a completely different case. This love triangle involves the love of Fyodor 's parents. The passage in The Gift which best exemplifies the meaning of the love of his mother is the following one: “She had come to him for two weeks, after a three-year separation, and ... so different at first from the distantly receding light of memory, he again recognized in her everything that he had loved.” ( The Gift 84). In this narrative, this love is captured through the vision of the son (Fyodor) as he becomes more aware of the beauty of his mother. And this seems to make the most sense to Fyodor because this love is at the origin of an ambivalent feeling: his happiness. But as we begin to analyze the elements of love between the father, we begin to notice something different. Fyodor expresses his admiration for his father by stating: “How to describe the bliss of our walks with Father through the woods... How to describe the feeling I experienced when he showed me all the spots where in his own childhood he had caught this or that...” (The Gift