Morgan’s Reviews > The Gift > Status Update

Chapter 4, the life of Chernyshevski. This will go on for almost 100 pages.

The book thus far: Poet Fyodor leads an unstructured life in Berlin, and we follow him for 2+ years as he moves, falls in love, tries writing various things, and mingles now and then with the other emigrés around him.

Fyodor and Zina have gotten together now. Always a bit unrealistic, VN’s couples. He’s better at writing weirdos than humdrum romance. Or is the problem me, and I’m pushing too much of my own notions of being in love onto his story?

Awesome passage pg 163-164. “I am simply a poor young Russian selling the surplus from a gentleman’s upbringing while scribbling verses in my spare time.”

In Chapter 2 now. Protag with a vigorous imagination. Transitions are all masterful, dissolving. Long paragraphs. Some great moments: the trip back to Leshino pg 25, Yasha’s story, the imaginary dialogue that closes Chapter 1.

I treasure every page of this last of VN’s novels that I will ever have the pleasure of reading for the first time.