The Gift (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics S.) - Tapa blanda

This is a phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Gorbunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after World War I. The story is of a writer's pursuit, a tapestry of literature and lepidoptera, Russian prose and poetry.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 in St Petersburg. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English, most famously, Lolita. Between 1923 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems and translations in the Russian language and established himself as one of the most outstanding Russian émigré writers. He died in 1977.