The Godunov-Cherdyntsev Family Tree
Kirill Ilyich is Fyodor’s grandfather, mentioned in Suhoshchokov’s Memoirs of the Past. Konstantin Kirillovich, his son and the protagonist’s father, is the hero of the unfi nished book: Fyodor reconstructs his scientifi c trip to Asia in Chapter Two of The Gift. Oleg Kirillovich, the brother of Konstantin Kirillovich, is living in Philadelphia (Shchyogolev, who happened to know Oleg Kirillovich, recognizes Fyodor’s last name when he fi rst meets him in Berlin; G143). The life of Fyodor’s sister, Tanya, is described in a more detailed manner in the short story “The Circle,” which Nabokov called a “satellite” of the novel.
Konstantin Kirillovich
Konstantin Kirillovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev is a puzzling fi gure: his presence in the story is tangible but he nonetheless remains elusive both for the readers and for the main character. The accursed question of The Gift is where is Fyodor’s father — did he perish in the last expedition or has he miraculously escaped fi rst the Asian dangers and then the Soviet persecutors on his way, presumably, back home; will he return to the lives of Fyodor and the rest of his loved ones
[Ill. 3-6] Vladislav Khodasevich
as unexpectedly as he used to do in the past? The clues are numerous, but not conclusive.
Analyzing an associative network of “invisible links” connecting the death of Konstantin Godunov — the town of Tatsienlu, the village of Chetu, French missionaries, and a mysterious butterfl y named Thecla bieti — Dieter Zimmer proposes that this network be called “the Tatsienlu complex in The Gift.” It seems that one of Fyodor’s more or less subconscious fancies had been that his father had survived and stayed on in Tibet or China, “just like the two American bikers mentioned in The Gift whom his father had met in the Gobi desert and who had become a Chinese mandarin. That may be the reason why Fyodor’s dream strangely vested his father ‘with a gold embroidered skullcap’
[G354], that is, with a mandarin’s cap” (Zimmer, “Chinese Rhubarb” 16). Yet Nabokov’s principal intent, Johnson and Coates caution us, was not to teach the reader about butterfl ies: “Rather, behind the mask of the lepidoptery, his deeper theme is the elder Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s obsession and its cruel consequences for Fyodor” (Johnson, Coates 295). To advance his research, Godunov-Cherdyntsev leaves his wife and son on their own much of the time,
“instilling in each an emptiness that could not ultimately be fi lled (in a crucial Kirill Ilyich
Oleg Kirillovich Konstantin Kirillovich (b. 1860-?)
Vezhina, Elizaveta Pavlovna
(married in 1898)
Fyodor Konstantinovich (b. 1900, July 12)
Tatiana Konstantinovna (Tanya). Married in 1928
Tanya’s daughter is born in June 25, 1929 Th e Godunov-Cherdyntsev Family Tree
scene the father’s interminable absences and his refusal to take Fyodor on one of his journeys causes the son to burst into helpless tears)” (Ibid.).
Konstantin Kirillovich’s obsession seems literally to have destroyed him — he disappears on his last journey and Fyodor is left to struggle with the phantom hope of his miraculous return: it was only when Fyodor reached adulthood that he came to suspect that the elder Godunov-Cherdyntsev undertook his journeys out of a mysterious restlessness, ‘not so much to seek something as to fl ee something’ (G115). Fyodor eventually re alizes “what a toll his father’s obsession had taken on his mother and himself,” but part of the splendor of The Gift is “how thoroughly an expansive and majestic treatment of the golden age of lepidoptery is made to serve Nabokov’s larger artistic purposes” (Johnson, Coates 295). An interesting point is taken by Anat Ben-Amos, who remarks on the idea of the presence of absence: “the father who in his absence has a real infl uence on the artistic development of his son, may represent the way the fi ctional is central to the novel. The qualities that later enable Fyodor to develop his artistic abilities and to create effective illusions begin to appear when he uses his imagination in order to have his father near him” throughout his life (Ben-Amos 130).
Another aspect linked to Fyodor’s father is Nabokov’s use of this fi gure as a mouthpiece for articulating his own scientifi c ideas, mainly related to his perceived problems with the Darwinian theory of natural selection as the core explanation for the mechanism of evolution. Writing in 1939, Nabokov shows Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev in 1917 as hostile to genitalic dissection, but by 1943, after two years at the microscope in Harvard, he was himself extending the scope of genitalic and alar description. In the opinion of Nabokov’s biographer, there is no reason to think that had the writer returned to the laboratory in the 1950s or later he would not again have welcomed and extended new taxonomic tools (Boyd, “A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterfl ies” 219).
Only after Nabokov left the laboratory was the new synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics begun in the 1940s and consolidated in the 1950s.
Elizaveta Pavlovna
Elizaveta Pavlovna Vezhina, Fyodor’s mother (married to Konstantin Kirillovich in 1898), lives in Paris and occasionally visits her son in Germany. She writes him relatively long letters, which Nabokov partially reproduces in the narrative.
The Gift opens with a street that is described as “beginning with a post offi ce and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel” (G4). This is not a mere simile, as Maya Minao maintains; although The Gift is not what we traditionally call an “epistolary novel,” it is replete with “epistolary” motifs: the separated family
members are linked through correspondence and Nabokov often presents this as samples of the respective characters’ writings (Minao 6). In his commentary on Eugene Onegin, Nabokov points out the signifi cance of this literary device, noting that in the course of the novel in verse Pushkin quotes writings by all three main characters: Onegin, Tatiana, and Lensky (Eugene Onegin, ii:384). In The Gift Nabokov offers the writing styles of both the protagonist and his mother through their letters, which is especially poignant because it is Elizaveta Pavlovna who encourages Fyodor to write his early prose. Their written exchange thus forms a part of the father’s biography in progress. Minao draws our attention to the fact that “there is no gap between each fragment of their letters: Fyodor’s question is immediately followed by his mother’s answer, which ignores and resolves the actual space and time separating mother and son. At least in the text, a long blank in which one waits for the other’s letter mercifully disappears.
The fl ow of the correspondence creates the impression of a dialogue unfolding in a single place and time, its continuity uninterrupted. Moreover, these fragments of their letters are all undated (except for the one Fyodor writes on his father’s birthday), which encourages us to ignore the entire space/time lag” (Minao 7).
The ideal correspondence marked by the bliss of sharing memories between two soul mates acts as the catalyst in launching Fyodor’s initial experiment in fi ction.