"vasiliy shishkov"

Poetry, Exile, and Prophetic Mystification in "Vasiliy Shishkov" (1939)
by Maxim D. Shrayer
page four of nine

"The Poets" was printed in Contemporary Annals in July 1939 and attracted the attention of émigré critics. Before discussing the possible reasons why Adamovich allowed himself to be deceived by Nabokov's mystifying scheme--and hailed the birth of a new poet--I would like to outline another motive for Nabokov's choice of the name "Vasiliy Shishkov." It goes back to Khodasevich, who had a number of reasons to dislike both G. Ivanov and Adamovich.

Khodasevich's fondness for literary mystifications has been a subject of critical discussions, including those in his own memoirs.32 During a joint evening of poetry in 1936 in Paris, Nabokov heard Khodasevich read "Zhizn' Vasiliia Travnikova" (The Life of Vasilii Travnikov), a fictional account of the life and works of Aleksandr Pushkin's elder contemporary, whom Khodasevich invented not only to trap his literary enemies but also to reaffirm his own place in what he saw as the kernel tradition in Russian poetry.33 The Khodasevich piece on Travnikov contained several quotations from the fictitious poet's oeuvre. Khodasevich composed and stylized some, while he borrowed at least one from his late friend the poet Muni (S. V. Kissin). A brilliant performance, "The Life of Vasilii Travnikov" beguiled the audience and elicited much praise from Adamovich, who was generally reluctant to pay Khodasevich his due.34 As the Khodasevich scholar A. L. Zorin has pointed out, the blindness and gullibility of the public--led by Adamovich himself in being taken in by this obvious hoax--defies rational explanation. Khodasevich's mystification worked perfectly, which not only created a precedent for Nabokov's invented poet, Vasiliy Shishkov, but also offered concrete tips.

Nabokov's biographer has suggested that the names Shishkov and Travnikov share an etymological pattern: both derive from general botanical terms, the former from shishka (pine cone), the latter from trava (grass).35 There is another possible antecedent for Nabokov's choice of an alternative nom de plume and the name of his fictitious character. In 1926 he started a short story about a young émigré who crosses the Russian border illegally to undertake an expedition to his old manor-house.36 The story was left unfinished, but Nabokov signed the manuscript with the name "Vasiliy Shalfeev." The last name Shalfeev, although less common than either Shishkov or Travnikov, is also of botanical origin, from shalfei, a medicinal herb familiar to most Russians for its soothing effect upon the respiratory system (Nabokov suffered from frequent throat ailments) and known in English as garden sage (Salvia officinalis). Someone as fond of dictionaries as Nabokov was (he used to read the Dal' dictionary and later Webster's in bed) may have considered this pseudonym with a double etymological twist as a possibility. In addition, the risky expedition that the protagonist of the 1926 "Shalfeev" story undertakes to Russia across the Polish border seems akin in spirit and design to what Martin plots in Podvig (Glory, 1931) and Vasiliy Shishkov contemplates and then rejects in 1939: "Try making my way back to Russia? No, the frying pan is enough" ("èto polymia"; Stories, 499/VF, 213).

Just as the inception of these two mystifications reveals many affinities, their reception also follows a similar pattern, especially when in both cases the herald of the two "new" poets--Travnikov and Shishkov--was Adamovich. "Rejecting hope and consolation in life, in poetry [Travnikov] strove to repudiate any use of ornamentation,"--thus Khodasevich assessed his invented protagonist's contribution.37 Having subscribed to Khodasevich's mystification, Adamovich praised the discovered poet for writing the kind of verse that had been unknown in Russia before Pushkin and Evgenii Baratynskii: "impeccable, sober, devoid of any sentimentality, any stylistic excesses."38 Three years later, Adamovich gave an enthusiastic endorsement to another "discovered" poet, Vasiliy Shishkov, in his regular column in The Latest News:

Who is Vasiliy Shishkov? Have other poems signed with his name appeared before? I cannot be sure of it, but I do not seem to recall seeing this name in print. In any event, the name did not stick to my memory, although judging by the poem published in Contemporary Annals, it should have. In Shishkov's "The Poets" every line, every word exhibits talent [Adamovich quotes the first two quatrains of "The Poets"]. I regret being unable to quote this marvelous poem in full for lack of space; I will however ask again: Who is Vasiliy Shishkov? Where does he come from? It is very possible that in a year or two this name will be familiar to all who care about Russian poetry.39

Scholars of Nabokov's versification have commented on the choice of a meter not common in his versification, amphibrachic tetrameter (Am 4), for "The Poets." An argument has been made that the choice of a meter that only occurs once in Nabokov's verse after 1925 was the main reason why Adamovich did not suspect a Nabokovian presence behind the text of the poem signed "Vas. Shishkov."40 However, it seems highly unlikely that Adamovich would have remembered Nabokov's metrical repertoire in such detail in 1939, especially given that Nabokov had not published verse under his name since 1935. The "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle not only contains less ornamentation than just about any other of Nabokov's pre-World War II Russian poems, but also addresses the issues that were most vital for the entire émigré literary community with utmost precision and sobriety. If Nabokov in his earlier mystification, "Night Journey," and Khodasevich in "The Life of Vasilii Travnikov," seem to partake of a playful and witty sensibility of the Pushkinian Golden Age, then Nabokov of the "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle employs literary mystification to communicate with the readers directly and without any mediating stylization. Constructing a new authorial persona for himself and lurking behind the semitransparent veil of mystification, Nabokov created a genuine voice which is unparalleled by his other poems. In the poems of the "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle, love, language/silence, and death are intoned by a relentless and at times clairvoyant poet. The death of Khodasevich was not the only one standing behind the several deaths in the cycle. There is something of the poet Boris Poplavskii (1903-1935), Nabokov's junior by some three years and a dapper darling of Russian Paris, in the image of Vasiliy Shishkov in the eponymous story. Poplavskii's death in 1935 startled the émigré literary community and signaled that something was amiss in the lives of its younger poets. Additionally, "Will you leave me alone?" (printed in 1940 when the Shishkov mystification was subsiding into history) speaks of Russia gleaming through the grass of two "far-parted tombs" ("skvoz' travu dvukh nesmezhnykh mogil"). The two non-adjacent graves refer to Nabokov's father, V. D. Nabokov, killed on March 28, 1922 and buried in Tegel outside Berlin, and mother, E. I. Nabokova, who died on May 2, 1939, and was buried at the Russian section of Olsánske Hrvbitovy in Prague (see photo below).41

The grave of Nabokov's mother, Elena (Helena) Nabokova, Prague

One cannot resist reading Shishkov's/Nabokov's poem, as well the comments that it elicited from Adamovich, in a postfactum light of somber irony: on August 17, 1939, when the review was printed, Russia Abroad had but ten months remaining. The Nazis would march into Paris on July 13, 1940, thereby shutting down the era of the First Russian Emigration. Rather than noting the meter of "The Poets," which is not at all unusual for twentieth-century Russian prosody, Adamovich probably saw in the poem a sober, direct, naked voice prophesying the end of Russian culture in European exile.

Notes

32. See A. L. Zorin, "Nachalo," in Vladislav Khodasevich, Derzhavin (Moscow: Kniga, 1988), 30-36; also see Zorin's fine commentary on the subject of the Vasilii Travnikov controversy in Khodasevich, Derzhavin, 382-83. About Muni (S. V. Kissin) see Vladislav Khodasevich, Nekropol' (Brussels: Les éditions Petropolis, 1939).

33. For details of the reading, see Boyd, RY, 424-425.

34. See Zorin, "Nachalo"; Boyd, RY, 509. Adamovich devoted a section of his literary column in The Latest News to the Khodasevich's "discovery." In a recent interview (March 15, 1994, Daytona Beach, Florida), one of the very last living émigré poet of the first wave, Igor' Chinnov (1908-1996), pointed out to me that although Adamovich was a very sensitive critic and wonderful stylist, his general knowledge of literature was more limited than it appears from reading his prose. For instance, in the 1940s Adamovich admitted to Chinnov that he had never read Dante's The Divine Comedy. Adamovich's willingness to "buy into" the Khodasevich scheme may have resulted from his insufficient knowledge of late eighteenth-century Russian literary culture; even more ludicrous is the readiness of Adamovich to believe the story about Travnikov's surviving archive, which Khodasevich claimed to have found.

35. Boyd, RY, 509.

36. Ibid., 261.

37. Khodasevich, Derzhavin, 340.

38. Ibid, 31.

39. Georgii Adamovich, "'Sovremennye zapiski'--kniga 69-aia. Chast' literaturnaia," Poslednie novosti 6716 (August 17, 1939): 3.

40. Gerald Smith, "Nabokov and Russian Verse Form," Russian Literary Triquarterly 24 (Spring 1990): 285.

41. Natal'ia Tolstaia suggested this in her useful commentary in Nabokov, Krug, 521.

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