Books: Lord of Language

THE GIFT (378 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov-Putnam ($5.95).

Vladimir Nabokov has the gift of tongue-specifically Russian and English. Famed for his novels in his second tongue (notably Pale Fire and Lolita), Nabokov has now released the English translation (which is partly his own) of The Gift, which is the last novel he wrote-26 years ago-in his native Russian. Without being a great book, it is clearly a book by a great writer; each sentence delights the ear or some area of the mind.

Nabokov's young hero is very like the young Nabokov. Count Fyodor Godu-nov-Cherdyntsev is in his early 20s, living in exile in Berlin, struggling not to be crippled by memories of the ancient family estate in Leshino, and trying to get his poetry and prose published in impoverished emigre magazines. His sister marries and leaves for Paris; he meets and falls in love with Zina, a remotely fragile German girl. All of this is simple, and corresponds roughly to the facts of Nabokov's own life.

But from the first page, the reader is off fiction's flatlands into Nabokov's magic world. His aristocratic Fyodor is a lord of language, and this patrimony cannot be expropriated.

The Gift is full of the gratuitous delights that a child finds in toys or picture books. Fyodor, like most young men who want to make their name and make love in the same breath, is a bit of a fool. In one wonderful scene his clothes are stolen as he polishes his poetry and suntan in a Berlin park. He would as gladly split a bottle as a hair.

His career as a one-man language school is a long parenthesis in the comedy of misunderstanding. Not only is teacher always playing hooky from his own school, but one of his students, who is a Dickensian portrait of infatuated complacence, actually loses command of the few English phrases he started with.

Blind, Deaf Blockhead. Fyodor has no politics (except to prefer a regime where "there is no equality and no authorities either"); he does not hanker for the Return; he does not brood on the past or hope for the future. His fellow emigres regard him as "a useless handicraftsman," a "trickster" and an "arabesquer," and he in turn regards the typical Russian emigre intellectual as "blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot."

But Fyodor lives in a world of emigres; their cards of identity have been canceled, the houses they built of them have collapsed. In Fyodor's mind the irony inherent in the lives of displaced persons becomes explicit; it becomes a dancing landscape, in which his private Russian past of butterflies, poetry and childhood games blurs into the hateful Berlin present of landladies, "Germani-cally stupid" language students, and menacing politics, as the Weimar Republic, "oppressive as a headache," clumsily snuffles toward its collapse. Fyodor's trilingual life enables Nabokov to play complicated games with the meanings of words. Fyodor is a poet, and without warning his thoughts run in poetic form; only the reader wary of Nabokov's incorrigible love of verbal conjuring will notice that whole pages printed as prose conceal rhyme schemes or blank verse and complicated prosodical measures.