Nabokov wrote it between 1935 and 1937 while living in Berlin, and it was published in serial form under his pen name, Vladimir Sirin.

The story's apparent protagonist is Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a Russian writer living in Berlin after his family fled the Bolshevik Revolution.

In the fifth and final chapter, Fyodor states his ambition to write a book that in description is very similar to The Gift.

[2] Nabokov's son, Dmitri, translated the book's first chapter into English; Michael Scammell completed the rest.

Fyodor Konstantinovitch Cherdyntsev (in Russian version the main character is called Fyodor Konstantinovitch Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the first part of the name refers to Pushkin's play Boris Godunov) is a Russian émigré living in Berlin in the 1920s, and the chapter starts with him moving to a boarding-house on Seven Tannenberg Street.

The poems reach back to Fyodor's childhood, which he spent with his sister Tanya in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and the Leshino manor, the country estate of the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs.

Fyodor arrives at the party only to learn that he has fallen victim to a crude April fool's joke; his book has not received any attention at all in the press.

Fyodor is dreaming about his native Russia as he rides in a tramcar to visit his language student, but he can no longer stand it and returns to his lodgings.

Before her departure they attend a local Russian literary event, and Fyodor is the last poet there to recite one of his poems.

Although almost unnoticed, he is inspired by his mother's visit and by his study of Pushkin, and he seeks her support for his new project, a book about his father, Konstantin Kirillovich.

He collects material, stumbles upon Sushoshchokov's account of his grandfather, Kirill Ilyich, a gambler who made and lost a fortune in America before returning to Russia, and he starts to focus on his father's activities as an explorer, lepidopterist, and scientific writer, whose journeys between 1885 and 1918 led him to Siberia and Central Asia.

He moves in with them because he sees a short, pale-blue dress in an adjacent room and assumes that it belongs to their daughter.

In the afternoon Fyodor gives his tutorial lessons and visits a bookstore, where he comes across Koncheyev's book of poems "Communication" and some reviews that failed to understand it.

They are without money, both at the moment have lost the key to their apartment, but they are happy, they feel that fate brought them together, and Zina declares that he will be “a writer as has never been before“.

The novel was first published serially in the Parisian émigré magazine Sovremennye zapiski; however, chapter four was rejected: ”a pretty example of life finding itself obliged to imitate the very art it condemns”.

Chapter Two is a surge toward Pushkin in Fyodor's literary progress and contains his attempt to describe his father's zoological explorations.

The last chapter combines all the preceding themes and adumbrates the book Fyodor dreams of writing someday: The Gift.

[4] Initially the complex novel was not successfully received; it was either ignored or criticized as an incendiary attack on Russian literature.

[6] Many other motifs are present, including time, reality, nature, love, parents, Russia, literature, art, death, light, colors, dreams, travel, and exile.