Fyodor is the protagonist of the novel — poet, critic, biographer of Nikolai Chernyshevski and, possibly, author of the very novel The Gift. He was born on July 12, 1900, and died no later than 1940. It is of course no mere chance that Fyodor’s birthday falls on the same date as Nikolai Chernyshevski’s, 12 July;
but the fact that Chernyshevski’s is based on the Julian calendar, while Fyodor’s is probably based on the Gregorian calendar, makes the relationship between them a parodic one (Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld 245, 7n). The most cogent summary of Fyodor’s purpose in the novel formulated to date was that presented by Leona Toker, who maintains that the main character of The Gift has two problems to solve: “what sort of works he wants to write, and what sort of life he must lead. [Fyodor] solves the fi rst by mo bilizing the powers of his intellect and imagination and going through a strenuous apprenticeship. The second solves itself through his daily ethical choices” (145).
Origins and Etymology of Fyodor’s Name
Fyodor’s fi rst name is of Greek origin, and its meaning is “God’s gift.” The early Christian and saint’s name Θεοδωρος (Theodoros) in fact derives from two separate words, θεος (theos) “god” and δωρον (doron) “gift.”
In the early 1934, Nabokov wrote with a special request to his old acquain-tance, Nikolai Yakovlev, who had now moved from Berlin to Riga. Nabokov hoped that Yakovlev, an expert in Russian history, literature, and etymology, would help him to fi nd the right last name for the protagonist of his future novel.
The ideal name the writer is looking for should match the fi rst half of the name that was already in place (Godunov) and should belong to some noble but
forgotten aristocratic family. This last name, Nabokov specifi ed, should meet the following two requirements: it must contain a hissing consonant and consist of three syllables, preferably with an amphibrachic stress, as in a metrical foot when a long or stressed syllable is located between two short or unstressed syllables (for example, the word romantic is an accentual amphibrach because a stressed syllable is inside of two unstressed ones). This could mean, as Alexander Dolinin implies, that by the time of the request Nabokov had already formed in his mind the image of the main hero of The Gift along with the semantic aura of his name (Dolinin, “K istorii sozdaniia i tisneniia romana Dar”
341). On January 18 and 27, 1934, Yakovlev supplies a list of names of extinct Russian noble families: Barbashin, Cherdyntsev, Kachurin, Ryovshin, Sineusov, Sukhoshchekov (spelled as “Suhoshchokov” in The Gift), and Koncheyev among others. Nabokov chooses Cherdyntsev, but most of them he will later bestow on invented characters in later short stories, novels, plays, and even verse (Boyd, Russian Years 255).
Historical Context
The fi rst part of his surname, Godunov, implies the protagonist’s royal descent (Johnson 109). Boris Godunov (1551–1605) was the famous member of an ancient Russian family of Tatar origin, as were a number of eminent Russian families, including the Nabokovs (whose lineage is traced back to the Tatar prince Nabok). Boris, the de facto regent of Russia from 1584, was ambitious and confi dent in his ability to rule, but he had never shown signs of being a usurper.
In 1594 Boris began to bring forward his own son, Fyodor Godunov, as joint ruler: “The boy received envoys with his father and sometimes alone, and his name was included with that of Boris in offi cial documents. Indeed, it seemed that, looking ahead to the succession of his son and to the fi rm foundation of a new Godunov dynasty, Boris was starting the training of his son early” (Grey 133). While Tsar Fyodor was alive, the boyars accepted him as a ruler, but many of them were hostile to his election as Tsar:
With vivid memories of their complete subjugation to the throne during the reign of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, they were eager now to limit the power of the throne by some formal deed which would also secure their own powers and privileges, but Boris did not want the throne on such terms. (Ibid.)
Fyodor was said to be learned in the sciences; a map of Russia remains an interesting memorial of his interests. Fyodor commissioned it personally, and it was published in his name in 1614 by the German cartographer Gerard (Ibid. 154).
Cultural Ramifi cations
Fyodor Godunov-Cherndyntsev recreates a geographical fantasy in which he joins his father in travels across southwest Asia. The second chapter of The Gift is in turn modeled after Pushkin’s prose. Alexander Pushkin’s historical play, Boris Godunov, is devoted to Tsar Boris and the period referred in the Russian history to as the Time of Troubles. Although written in 1825, it was published only in 1831 and then was not approved for performance by the state censors until 1866, almost thirty years after the author’s death. Production was fi nally permitted on the condition that certain scenes be cut — a demand which later haunted the story of Nabokov and his Godunov-Cherdyntsev.
In a diary entry written on the night of Vladimir Dmitrievich’s murder, Nabokov’s effort to recover his father’s “last words” led him to Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, which he apparently confl ated with Glinka’s opera Life for the Tsar (later renamed Ivan Susanin). Pushkin’s Godunov passionately wants “to bequeath his kingdom to his son Fyodor; he feels that his legacy of good government has justifi ed his son’s claim to the title. By the middle of the play, however, Boris fi nds himself hounded from all sides by the power of an empty name, a shade, a ‘threatening adversary’: an impostor bearing the name of the dead Prince Dmitrii” (Greenleaf 147).
Nabokov’s choice of the name “Godunov” may have been brought about by another opera based on Pushkin’s original work, the eponymous work by Mussorgsky. In Boris Godunov, both in Pushkin’s play and Mussorgsky’s opera, there is a scene in which Fyodor is studying geography. Charles Nicol believes that Mussorgsky’s “peculiar talent for children’s songs probably makes this operatic scene more memorable than the original” (Nicol 29). Indeed, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s imaginary travel and his namesake’s pastime are pro-foundly related, and probably initially through Mussorgsky’s opera rather than Pushkin’s play. Pushkin’s dramas have inspired many operas, which reinforced Nabokov’s lifelong relationship with Russia’s Bard (Leving, “Singing The Bells and The Covetous Knight”).
Highlighting the artistic strategies in The Gift, David Bethea registers Fyodor’s connection to Pushkin through his father and through his own study and contemplation of the poet (“Pushkin entered his blood. With Pushkin’s voice merged the voice of his father”; G98). The notions of poetry, love, mortality, and chance are linked through different “bloodlines” (one hereditary, the other cultural), but “Fyodor is the living example — the phenotype as it were — attesting to each bloodline’s reality” (Bethea 138). The “Godunov” of the double surname could be attributed to the family’s place in Russian history, but it could also hark back to Pushkin’s play about dynastic succession and impostorship — a more likely scenario given the context, according to David Bethea: “Indeed, by analogy to
earlier aristocratic families, like the Musin-Pushkins, Nabokov has placed his hero in a genealogical force fi eld between Pushkin on the one hand [Godunov], and the non-poetic Chernyshevski [Cherdyntsev], on the other. What Fyodor’s father calls ‘nature’s rhymes’ and what Fyodor himself is searching for when he comes down with rhyming fever early in the book belong to a common weave” (Ibid.).
Literary Allusions in the Name
When Yakovlev sent Nabokov the list of the surnames he prepared from genealogical and heraldic sources, he clarifi ed that Cherdyntsev’s name derives from Cherdyn, a small town on the Kama River in Urals.
It seems like an ominous coincidence that Osip Mandelstam, one of Fyodor’s possible prototypes, was arrested on May 14, 1934, and sentenced to three years of exile in remote Cherdyn; when the Mandelstams arrived there in early June of that year, the poet attempted to commit suicide by jumping out of the window, very much like Nabokov’s Luzhin. On June 28, 1934, Nabokov published a poem about a drowned woman (“L’Inconnue De La Seine”) in Poslednie novosti under the cryptic memo: “From F. G.-Ch.” — meaning “From poems by Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev,” the fi rst time Nabokov ever used this invented name in print.
Thanks to the intercessions of Akhmatova and Pasternak, as well as Nikolai Bukharin’s letter to Stalin, Mandelstam was transferred to the larger provincial city of Voronezh. Nabokov may have heard about the poet’s troubles from fellow émigré intellectuals who closely followed Mandelstam’s fate before and after he perished in the Stalinist Gulag (Timenchik, “O mandel’shtamovskoi nekrologii”
550-66). This is how in 1927 the contemporary émigré critic, Prince Dmitri Mirsky, described Mandelstam’s poetic prose, which inspired some of the best passages in Nabokov’s The Gift (Leving, “Tenishev Students” 141-62):
If I were asked to name the book that was most representative of young Russian literature I should recommend [Victor Shklovsky’s] A Sentimental Journey.
Mandelstam’s book, The Noise of Time, though less central and represen tative, is artistically a more significant book. It is an admirable example of a poet’s prose, free from all adulterous poeticalness, but saturated with the poet’s sense of the value of words, and his power of evoking images. It is also full of the sense of history, of the individual flavor and taste of its every moment. The Petersburg of the ‘nineties and early nineteen-hundreds, the pre-Revolutionary suspense of a decaying regime, is crystallized into images of gem-like color and hardness. It is a book apart, and one of our generation’s greatest contributions to the nation’s literature. (Mirsky 256)
With minor changes, the same could actually have been said of Nabokov’s novel itself, were Mirsky to have read it a decade later — but he could not. After
Mirsky’s repatriation to the ussr (Nabokov, by the way, was “a great admirer of Mirsky’s work”; Selected Letters 91; cf. Efi mov), the independent critic soon found himself in the same place as the object of his glowing review: Mirsky was arrested in 1937, and remained a prisoner until his death in the Far East in January of 1939.
We do not have any evidence as to whether Nabokov was aware of the Cherdyn episode in Mandelstam’s biography while he was writing the novel and whether it could have played any decisive role in choosing the name Cherdyntsev for his exiled hero, but later in the English translation of The Gift the author did honor the memory of the banished Soviet poet by attaching his name to a previously disguised quote from his poetry (“the powder snow upon the wooden paving blocks of Mandelstam’s neoclassicism, and the Neva’s granite parapet on which one can scarcely discern today the imprint of Pushkin’s elbow”; G38).
Prototypes for the Main Character
Nina Berberova, who knew Nabokov well in the mid-1930s, fi rmly believed that her husband, the infl uential Russian poet and literary critic Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939), provided the bulk of the material for the image of Fyodor. Berberova was even convinced that she overheard some historical conversations between the two poets that later served as a core of the famous dialogues between Godunov-Cherdyntsev and Koncheyev:
The two visits to Khodasevich’s place (which six months ago had been my place as well, but was no longer), in clouds of cigarette smoke, tea drinking, cat petting, proved a projection of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s dialogue with Koncheyev, that dialogue that later found its way into The Gift. I was (and still am) the only person who witnessed this strange phenomenon: the reality of an event (October 23 and 30, 1932, rue des Quatre Cheminées, Billancourt, Seine, France, from 4 to 6 pm) which was to become a fantasy — never wholly realized in the pages of the novel, only imagined, and consumed in its dreamy depth — a result of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s solitary insomnia.
I had already heard of Nabokov in Berlin in 1922. Yuly Aikhenvald, literary critic of the Russian newspaper Rudder, spoke to Khodasevich of him as of a talented young poet. But his verse of that time did not interest Khodasevich: it was a pale and at the same time self-assured scanning of verse, as was written in Russia by cultured amateurs, sounding nice and imitative, recalling no one in particular and at the same time everyone. (Berberova 222)
Nabokov himself denied that Khodasevich served as a prototype either for Fyodor or Koncheyev.
Nabokov was obviously fond of this last name, as evident from the fact that he employed it in passing later in Pnin — though in an ironic context — when he alluded to the
“so-called Godunov Drawing-of-an-Animal Test” (Pnin 65). Gene Barabtarlo discovered a meticulous description of this “Drawing-a-Person Test,” introduced in 1926 and originally “used as a measure of intelligence with children,” in the fi rst volume of a monumental work, Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (ed. by Dr. Benjamin Sadock et al., 3rd ed., Baltimore-London, 1980, p. 954). The “incontestably Nabokovian touch: the real inventor’s name is not Godunov (pronounced in Russian ‘Gud-oon-off’), but, oddly enough, W. H. Goodenough”
(Barabtarlo, Phantom of Fact 159).