The Gift
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The Gift
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
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By:
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Vladimir Nabokov
About this listen
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977.
©1963 Vladimir Nabokov (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story4 out of 5 stars 639
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Russian Philosophical Feast
- By Syd Young on 02-16-13
By: Boris Pasternak, and others
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 343
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 302
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 302
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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1 out of 5 stars
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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Orlando
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Clare Higgins
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,068
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 897
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Story4 out of 5 stars 902
Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Magical
- By Mayca on 05-31-05
By: Virginia Woolf
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 647
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 572
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 567
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
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Mrs. Dalloway
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,547
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,349
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,337
It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.
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5 out of 5 stars
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One Tough Read Perfectly Delivered
- By Chris on 06-11-12
By: Virginia Woolf
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Ghosts: Edith Wharton's Gothic Tales
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Alison Larkin, Jonathan Epstein, Corinna May, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 161
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 146
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Story4 out of 5 stars 146
Beneath the brilliance that was behind The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was a dark side. A dark side which produced magnificent tales of the unseen influences in our lives, such as "Mr. Jones", "The Eyes", "Kerfol", "The Ladie's Maid's Bell", and "The Looking Glass".
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5 out of 5 stars
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Ghastly Shadows of the Feminine Condition
- By Diane on 10-16-12
By: Edith Wharton
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Madame Bovary
- By: Gustave Flaubert
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 369
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 262
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Story4 out of 5 stars 264
Emma Bovary is not content to be the mere dutiful wife of a French country doctor. She yearns for excitement and a sense of romance that pulls at her so strongly she is powerless to resist, even though pursuing her dreams will exact a terrible price. Learn why Gustave Flaubert's compelling heroine has enchanted and puzzled readers for centuries.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Now Here's a Story
- By P. Giorgio on 09-06-03
By: Gustave Flaubert
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Now, Voyager
- Femmes Fatales
- By: Olive Higgins Prouty
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 64
Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Lonely, dowdy, repressed, and pushing 40, Charlotte finds salvation at a sanitarium, where she undergoes an emotional and physical transformation. After her extreme makeover, the new Charlotte tests her mettle by embarking on a cruise and finds herself in a torrid love affair with a married man which ends at the conclusion of the voyage. But only then can the real journey begin, as Charlotte is forced to navigate a new life for herself.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Inspiration for The Movie Classic
- By Susie on 12-17-12
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The Leopard
- A Novel
- By: Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Archibald Colquhuon - translator
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 109
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 92
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Story4 out of 5 stars 91
Set in the 1860s, The Leopard tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. The dramatic sweep and richness of observation, the seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and the grasp of human frailty imbue The Leopard with its particular melancholy beauty and power, and place it among the greatest historical novels of our time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Timeless
- By Robert Massarella on 12-05-23
By: Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and others
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Light Years
- By: James Salter
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 148
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 128
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Story4 out of 5 stars 132
This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes
- By W Perry Hall on 04-18-19
By: James Salter
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Ethan Frome
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 343
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 260
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Story4 out of 5 stars 264
Ethan Frome, a poor, downtrodden New England farmer, is trapped in a loveless marriage to his invalid wife, Zeena.When Zeena's young cousin Mattie arrives to help care for her, Ethan is immediately taken by Mattie's warm, vivacious personality. They fall desperately in love as he realizes how much is missing from his life and marriage.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Slow is smooth and smooth is Fast until it isn't
- By Darwin8u on 05-29-13
By: Edith Wharton
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Les Misérables
- Penguin Classics
- By: Christine Donougher, Victor Hugo, Robert Tombs
- Narrated by: Adeel Akhtar, Natalie Simpson, Adrian Scarborough, and others
- Length: 65 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 222
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 195
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 193
Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience and by the relentless investigations of the dogged Policeman, Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great Book, Great Translation, 5 Great Narrators
- By Rain Wiegartner on 06-07-20
By: Christine Donougher, and others
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Buddenbrooks
- The Decline of a Family
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 679
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 612
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 610
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Where Have You Been All My Life, Thomas Mann?
- By Virginia Waldron on 03-30-17
By: Thomas Mann
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The Fairy Tales of Herman Hesse
- By: Hermann Hesse, Jack Zipes - translator
- Narrated by: Donovan
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Highlights
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
Step into a world of visions, philosophy, and passion in which dreamers, seekers, princesses, and wandering poets dwell. The 6 wonderful, romantic tales in this collection are reminiscent of ancient Oriental and German fairy tales. The selections, "The Poet," "The Flute Dream," "The Dwarf," "Faldum," "Ziegler," and "Dream of the Gods" were hand-picked by the narrator, legendary folk and rock musician Donovan.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The reading is quiet and heavenly
- By Atalante Lemuria on 11-12-20
By: Hermann Hesse, and others
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In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 565
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 494
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 492
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
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5 out of 5 stars
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One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
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4 out of 5 stars
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- By: Vladimir Nabokov
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A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An amazing feat for such a unique novel
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Invitation to a Beheading
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 179
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 149
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Story4 out of 5 stars 148
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Nabokov's Strange Violin Playing in the Void
- By Darwin8u on 10-28-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 94
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 66
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Story4 out of 5 stars 66
From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
- By Darwin8u on 01-11-15
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Speak Memory
- An Autobiography Revisited
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 485
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 412
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Story4 out of 5 stars 412
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Speak, Mnemosyne!
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-12
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Pnin
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
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Despair
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 111
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 100
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Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 540
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 456
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A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 485
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5 out of 5 stars
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Speak, Mnemosyne!
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Laughter in the Dark
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 149
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 132
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 130
Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Death is often the point of life's joke
- By Darwin8u on 05-19-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Luzhin Defense
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 95
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 79
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 79
Nabokov’s third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen — an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster — but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Life and chess are such lonely battles
- By Darwin8u on 11-13-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Ada, or Ardor
- A Family Chronicle
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 168
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 146
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Story4 out of 5 stars 147
Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
- By Darwin8u on 08-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Eye
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Fred Stella
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 26
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 27
Nabokov’s fourth novel, The Eye, is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov, a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in pre-war Berlin, commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife as he searches for proof of his existence among fellow émigrés who are too distracted to pay him any heed.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Ego vero, ergo sum
- By Darwin8u on 12-18-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Mary
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4 out of 5 stars 34
In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of serio-comic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin’s, who, he discovers, is Mary’s husband....
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3 out of 5 stars
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There IS something about Mary!
- By Darwin8u on 12-22-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4 out of 5 stars 41
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
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3 out of 5 stars
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A dry run at big, complex themes
- By Darwin8u on 12-08-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
What listeners say about The Gift
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Darwin8u
- 11-30-13
A complex and rich Künstlerroman
A very Proust-inspired (memory, love, dreams, art) Nabokov. The last of his Russian novels, 'the Gift' is a complex and rich Künstlerroman and is one of those novels that makes me wish I spent more time in college studying Russian simply so I could catch the nuanced differences between the Chapters where Nabokov is mimicking Pushkin, Gogol, and other Russian novelists.
Nabokov always amazes me with his ability to provoke, entertain and awe his readers. There are some novelists where it is clear they are writing for a certain audience. Nabokov seems content just to write novels that entertain an audience of one (VN). If someone else gets his books, well, it is all just a sugary and mischievous bonus, but overall ... he'd prefer to be left alone to categorize and pin his rare butterflies and metric variations.
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17 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Lara
- 08-15-14
Simply Beautiful
Where does The Gift rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
The narrator is boring and monotonous, but the story is mindbogglingly clever and the imagery is top notch.
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