The Gift is Nabokov's last and longest Russian novel, set among Russian emigres in Berlin in the 1920s. Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is a young poet who longs to become a great writer, while living in shabby rented rooms, remembering his explorer father and falling in love with Zina. The book includes his poems, his literary projects and a witty biography of a real nineteenth-century Russian thinker. It is a celebration of art, memory, and Russian literature itself, and a portrait of an artist finding his voice in exile.