d) The 'Nabokov variant'

There are novels that are textual masks, or representations of the imagination of an entire population in a narrative form. One of these amazing ‘theatres of comprehension’ is Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift, whose plot is all of Russian literature, in its unfolding, starting from Pushkin. Each time, Nabokov embodies the unconscious of his models, from Gogol to Turgeniev, even turning the ‘drama’ into parody. The idea of that ‘end of history’ the Bolshevik Revolution took with it, led him to seek - as a creative author - the only possible deliverance of the times in ‘criticism’. The Gift is an example of continuous translation relived as a play of masks: those masks that Nietzsche intended as the basic principle of every human communication. Thus it is not surprising that Nabokov had to adopt a foreign language, and namely English, as the only expressive means useful for producing ‘novels’. As The Gift was translated into English by the writer himself, for a translator well versed in the ‘secret things’ of Slavic studies, a comparison of the Russian and English versions represents an exceptional tool for understanding the difference existing between creative interpretation and linguistic rendering, and between ‘stylistic adaptation’ and ‘projection’ of an entire culture in the scenario of ‘another’ culture.