Poetry, Exile, and Prophetic Mystification in "Vasiliy Shishkov" (1939) Vladislav Khodasevich, a major Russian poet and Nabokov's literary comrade-in-arms, died on June 14, 1939.23 Living in Paris and mourning the loss of Khodasevich, Nabokov composed "Poèty" (The Poets), part of a cycle of three programmatic poems he wrote in the summer and early fall of 1939. This poem, one of his best, albeit not devoid of formal shortcomings, centers on the destiny of Russian émigré poets who were shaped in exile (cf. Vasiliy Shishkov in the story) and typifies his recurring motif of exiting this world and entering another: Pora, my ukhodim: eshchë molodyeThe first four of the nine quatrains identify with the plight of the younger generation of émigré poets to which Nabokov himself belonged, and do not equate "exiting the world" directly with death; the Englished variant downplays this even further by replacing "pora nam iz mira uiti" (literally, it is time for us to leave the world) with "time for us to go." However, the next three quatrains build up a Khodasevich-specific tension between the beauty and grace of the world, on the one hand, and its horror and ugliness, on the other: "ne videt' vsei muki, vsei prelesti mira" (not to see all this world's enchantment and torment); "detei maloletnikh,/ igraiushchikh v priatki vokrug i vnutri/ ubornoi" (the young children/ who play hide-and-seek inside and around/ the latrine).25 Like the Khodasevich of his tragic cycle, "Evropeiskaia noch'" (The European Night, 1922-1929), Nabokov draws on the realia of modern Western civilization, such as an advertisement for aspirin: "rydan'ia reklamy na tom beregu" (an electric sign's tears on the opposite bank). The last two quatrains concentrate--presumably--on the death of Khodasevich. Note the way Nabokov uses ellipses in the Russian text to indicate a threshold for something that words cannot communicate: Seichas perekhodim s poroga mirskogoThe last quatrain points directly to the title poem of Khodasevich's third pre-émigré verse collection, Putëm zerna (Grain's Way, 1920). Below are the last three couplets of "Grain's Way" and the last quatrain of "The Poets": Tak i dusha moia idët putëm zerna:Both poems refer to homeland ("moia strana," "otchizna"). Moreover, Nabokov ends his tombeau with a key word from Khodasevich's lexicon, zerna (grain) in the genitive singular case, exactly as Khodasevich ends his. The poems also share an underlying mythopoetics: the motif of a grain of wheat dying into the ground in order to be reborn: "In very truth I tell you, unless a grain falls into the ground and dies, it remains that and nothing more; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest" (John 12: 24). Sometime in June 1939 Nabokov also wrote a Khodasevich obituary that sums up the deceased poet's achievement. In the obituary a poet's death is described in the same terms as in "The Poets," as a departure. In both texts, Nabokov employs forms of the verb ukhodit'/uiti (to leave, to depart). At the end of his Khodasevich obituary, he writes: Kak by to ni bylo, teper' vsë koncheno: zaveshchannoe sokrovishche stoit na polke, u budushchego na vidu, a dobytchik ushël tuda, otkuda byt' mozhet koe-chto doletaet do slukha bol'shikh poetov, pronzaia nashe bytie svoei potustoronnei svezhest'iu -- i pridavaia iskusstvu kak raz to tainstvennoe, chto sostavliaet ego nevydelimyi priznak [italics added].27I have italicized four key notions shared by "The Poets" and "On Khodasevich," two related to the main secret, and two to the recurrent motif of entering the otherworld. Both tributes to Khodasevich, in prose and in verse, appeared in the July (49) issue of Contemporary Annals for 1939. The obituary was signed with Nabokov's usual pen-name, V. Sirin, while the poem bore a different signature: Vasiliy Shishkov. Nabokov's plans for an elegant revenge against his foes became a tour de force of literary mystification. All the technical circumstances behind the hoax have not been uncovered. Nabokov shared his plot with a few friends. Among the editors of Contemporary Annals, his accomplices were Il'ia Fondaminskii and Vadim Rudnev.28 At the same time, in 1957 another former editor, Mark Vishniak, refered to Vasiliy Shishkov as if he were a real poet, and not Nabokov's mystification.29 A two-page manuscript with two other poems, dated "X. 39" and signed "Vas. Shishkov," has survived among some sixty letters that Nabokov sent the émigré littérateur Zinaida Shakhovskaia in the 1930s.30 Of the two poems preserved by Shakhovskaia, the second, "Otviazhis'--ia tebia umoliaiu!" (Will you leave me alone?), was published in the April (70) issue of Contemporary Annals in 1940 under the title "Obrashchenie" (The Appeal) and also signed "Vas. Shishkov"--half a year after the "Vasiliy Shishkov" mystification had been unveiled by Nabokov himself. In the manuscript two poems, "My s toboiu tak verili v sviaz' bytiia..." (We so firmly believed in the linkage of life...) and "Will you leave me alone..." are united by a title, "Obrashcheniia" (Appeals), and assigned roman numbers I and II. The three poems ("We so firmly believed in the linkage of life...," "The Poets," and "Will you leave me alone? I implore you!" [also known as "The Appeal"]) form a three-part lyrical cycle that exhibits numerous connections with the short story "Vasiliy Shishkov" as well as with the circumstances behind its inception, production, and reception. My reconstruction of the "Vasiliy Shishkov" poetic cycle is supported among other facts by Nabokov's consecutive arrangement of the three poems in the 1953 collection Stikhotvoreniia (Poems).31 In addition to their textological connections, all three poems of the "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle display organic ties in their versification (ternary meters, rhyming practices; see below) and also share several central clusters of images and motifs, including nostalgia and entering the otherworld. For instance, the poems speak of refusing oneself the privilege of seeing Russia in dreams: "ukhodim: eshchë molodye,/ so spiskom eshchë ne prisnivshikhsia snov" (we are going away: still youthful,/ with a list of dreams not yet dreamt; "The Poets") and "chtob s toboi i vo snakh ne skhodit'sia/ otkazat'sia ot vsiacheskikh snov" (lest we only in dreams come together, all conceivable dreams to foreswear; "Will you leave me alone?..."); in both cases "snov" (genitive plural of the Russian "son": dream) is in the rhyming position.
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Notes 23. On Nabokov and Khodasevich, see [Nikita] Struve, "V. Khodasevich i V. Nabokov," Vestnik R. Kh. D. 148:3 (1986): 123-128. 24. For Nabokov's commentary to the poem, see Stikhi, 319-20. 25. Nabokov's use of the word "ubornaia" (latrine, in the genitive case, "ubornoi") in a lyrical poem was probably informed by Vladimir Korvin-Piotrovskii's poem "Is nochnykh progulok" (From Nighttime Walks), Rul' 2458 (December 25, 1928): 2, where this word also appears in a description of a cityscape; the poem was published in Rul' on the same page with Nabokov's own "A Christmas Story." 26. Vladislav Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov (Moscow: Tsenturion interpaks, 1992), 94-95. 27. Nabokov, "O Khodaseviche," Sovremennye zapiski 69 (July 1939): 264. 28. See Vladimir Nabokov, "Notes for the Russian Recital in New York City (early 1950s)," corr. MS. and TS., VN LC, container 8, folder 5. 29. M. N. Vishniak, "Sovremennye zapiski." Vospominaniia redaktora (Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, Slavic and East European Series, No. 7, 1957), 123. 30. Vladimir Nabokov, "Obrashcheniia," MS., ZSh LC. 31. See Stikhotvoreniia, 19-23; "We so firmly believed..." is dated 1938, "The Poets" and "Will you leave me alone?..." 1939. In Stikhi only one short poem separates "We so firmly belived..." from "The Poets" and "Will you leave me alone?...," which follow each other consecutively. In PP and Stikhi, Nabokov assigned a different title to "Will you leave me alone?...": "K Rossii" (To Russia); cf. "Obrashchenie" (The Appeal) in the Contemporary Annals publication. The poems "Oko" (Oculus) and "Chto za noch' s pamiat'iu sluchilos'" (What happened overnight...) may also be related to this cycle. "Oculus" is the fourth known poem by Nabokov written in 1939; see PP, 100-101 and Stikhi, 264. Dated 1939 and written in Paris, it mentions the "disappeared boundary between eternity and matter": "... ischezla granitsa / mezhdu vechnost'iu i veshchestvom"; compare in "We so firmly believed...": "... dymka volny / mezhdu mnoi i toboi, mezhdu mel'iu i tonushchim" (a wave's haze / between me and you, between shallow and sinking). "What happened overnight..." is dated 1938 in Stikhotvoreniia (18), PP (90-91), and Stikhi (259); PP and Stikhi indicate that it was written in Menton.
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