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

The short story "Vasiliy Shishkov" comments not only on the verse of the invented poet and his inventor, but also on its reception by Russian émigré critics. In the brief remarks prepared by Nabokov for the 1979 edition of his poetry, only half a sentence deals with the "Vasiliy Shishkov" controversy: "...that I could not help prolonging the joke and described my meetings with the non-existent Shishkov in a short story which, among other treats [sredi prochego iziuma], contained a critical reading of the poem itself and Adamovich's praises" (Stikhi, 320).

No one thus far has attempted to take Nabokov's remark seriously and literally. In "Vasiliy Shishkov" the young poet Shishkov and his interlocutor, the narrator Nabokov, offer critical commentaries on each other's work. Since the character is a literary personification of his creator, it is only to be expected that the poetic material and the critical commentaries it elicited would be homologous with Nabokov's poetic and critical oeuvre. To narrow the circle, I propose to examine the critical exchange between Shishkov and Nabokov--the metaliterary centerpiece of the story--in light of Nabokov's verse and Nabokov's criticism, and critical observations on Nabokov by Adamovich and Khodasevich.

When Nabokov reads the first notebook containing what Shishkov would subsequently label as his parodies of "the product of metromania," he is outraged by three defects: the tasteless sound orchestration, the poor rhyming practices, and the omnivorousness of the poems' themes. He offers examples of atrocious rhymes from Shishkov's "bad" poems: "dostatochno skazat', chto sochetalis' takie pary, kak 'zhasmina-vyrazhala uzhas mina', 'besedki' i 'bes edkii', 'noktiurna'-brat dvoiurnyi' (for example, teatr-gladiator, mustang-tank, Madonna-belladonna; VF, 207/ Stories, 495); the rhymes in the Englished text are somewhat better than in the original. In comparing these examples with several examples of Nabokov's own "chic" alliterations and unfortunate rhymes, I draw from the entire corpus of Nabokov's verse as selected by him for the 1979 edition, but a certain emphasis will be placed on his poetic output of the 1930s, particularly the seven poems published in Paris under the pen-name "Sirin" between 1931 and 1935.42

Nabokov's poetic output exhibits a number of alliterations of the sort that he criticized in the story: "v Nazarete na zare" ("Lastochki," 1920), "zdravstvui, o zdravstvui, greza berėzovoi severnoi roshchi" ("Babochka," 1917-1922), "za potselui Tseilon" ("Ia Indiei nevidimoi vladeiu...," 1923), "baluiu balladoi" ("Bezumets," 1933, originally published in The Latest News). These alliterations smack of the excesses of Igor' Severianin and Konstantin Bal'mont and are much inferior to some of Nabokov's own like "gaer grubyi" ("Ten'," 1925) or "charuiushchemy chapparaliu" ("K kn. S. M. Kachurinu," 1947).43

The next layer of comparison involves Shishkov's and Nabokov's rhymes. There are striking resemblances between the examples criticized in the story and the following compound rhymes in Nabokov's poetry: "apostolu-po stolu" ("Tainaia vecheria," 1918), "uglovatyi--voshla ty" ("Ia pomniu v pliushevoi oprave...," 1923), "iz raia--vybiraia" ("Pustiak--nazvan'e machty..., " 1926), "pripomnish' son--na pamiat' on" ("Snovidenie," 1927). His poetic corpus also includes such trite and "meretricious" (as the narrator of the story puts it) rhymes as "lazur'iu--glazur'iu" (1923), "vetra--metra" (1925), "nashe--krashe" (1927), "prostiraiu--osiazaiu," (1928), "schastlivo--opaslivo" (1930), "rabami--oblakami" (1934), "sidit--gliadit" (1934), "Kachurin--lazuri" (1947), and such cacophonic rhymes as "sëla--dolgii" (1926) and "besposhchaden--radi" (1932).

In a study of Nabokov's versification, G. S. Smith proposes that "departures from exactitude" have a marked function in his verse.44 Smith finds it noteworthy that Nabokov employs cacophonous compound rhymes like "besedki--bes edkii" to demonstrate the poor quality of Shishkov's "bad" poems. He also points out that in "serious" poems like "Slava" (Fame, 1942) Nabokov uses "outlandish" compound rhymes as an ideologically or aesthetically marked category. Such practice reaches a climax in the most directly political of his poems, "O praviteliakh" (On Rulers, 1944), where both the compound rhymes and a reference to "my deceased name-sake" point to the great Futurist poet Vladimir Maiakovskii (incidentally, Nabokov considered Maiakovskii a "paltry Soviet poet not devoid of some glamour and knack but fatally corrupted by the regime he served with loyalty"; Stikhi, 320).45 In contrast to Smith's data, my own analysis of Nabokov's versification shows experimentation with inexact and compound rhyming--with varying degree of success--to be a consistent feature of his poetry. In fact, as early as 1919 we find such Maiakovskian signature rhymes as "mogli vy--netoroplivyi" ("Football"; cf. Maiakovskii's famous poem "A vy mogli by" [Would You Dare, 1913] where "ryby" is rhymed with "mogli by"). Moreover, in the 1930s Nabokov was trying to work out a signature rhyme of his own--most likely challenged by the exhilarating experimentation in Soviet Russia by such poets as Nikolai Aseev, Semën Kirsanov, Il'ia Sel'vinskii, and Nikolai Tikhonov and certainly by Marina Tsvetaeva in emigration. Two important long poems of the 1930s--both published in The Latest News--display a peculiar rhyming of a feminine clausula with a dactylic one or vice versa. In "Vecher na pustyre" (An Evening on a Vacant Lot, 1932) we find seven rhymes of this sort: "proshche--zanoschivoi," "odinochestvo--nochi," "baloven'--nebyvaloi," "pamiat'iu--plamia," "schastiia--chashchu," "otnialo--neplotno," "oko--krivobokuiu." Another poem, the confessional "Kak ia liubliu tebia" (How I love you, 1934) contains four more rhymes of this type: "oprometchivo--trudnoi rechi," "snova--osnovano," "stvolami--plamenem," "rastsvetshei--vechnoe." The experimentation with inexact rhyming--both Nabokov's (author) and his Shishkov's (text)--signals again that Nabokov might have reached a plateau in poetry and that he tried to revitalize his poetic form.

To go a step further, a comparison of the rhyming practices in the three poems of the "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle (presumably drawn from Shishkov's "good" poems in the second notebook) with the rest of Nabokov's poetry of the 1930s also reveals much affinity. In the cycle we find such bleak and feeble rhymes as "molodye--Rossii," "glazakh--vetviakh," "pokinul--dolinu"; such parodic rhymes as "maloletnikh--letnikh," "slëzy--berëzy," "udivitel'no--nedeistvitel'noi"; such purely grammatical rhymes as "obidet'--videt'" (cf. also "byt'--zabyt'" in the 1923 poem "Sankt-Peterburg--uzornyi inei..."). Adamovich must have been so taken by the prophetic message of "The Poets" that he overlooked some of its obvious formal weaknesses, several of which are emblematic of Nabokov's versification overall. On the other hand, while Nabokov's metrical conservatism is not atypical of the versification of Russian émigrés (classical meters were often employed as a protective armor against what many émigré poets saw as the ideologically-charged avant-gardism of Russian Soviet poetry), his rhyming practices bespeak a certain indifference to the semantic function of rhyme. On the other hand, in his émigré criticism Nabokov did display an understanding of what constitutes a quality rhyme. For instance, in a 1931 review, he wrote: "I think that if one were to tune one's lyre to Pushkin's or Derzhavin's prosody, one ought to avoid inexact rhymes (ravnina--edinyi, veter--vstretit', lirnik--kumirni)."46 He also advised his younger brother, Kirill Nabokov, in 1930, to pay closer attention to rhyming perfection:

More than once I have written in The Rudder about ungraceful rhymes, which torture one's ears and create a comical effect due to one's ear's habitual associations. For instance, you rhyme "mozg" and "roz"; having reached the word "roz," where one's ear awaits a rhyme, one involuntarily makes "rozg" from "roz," and this "rozg" [i.e., "birch rods" instead of "roses"] are laughable. "Zhadnyi" and "sada" or "pozharishch" and "lapishch" do not rhyme at all, while "rastsvet" and "tsvet" or "kogti" and "nogti" rhyme too obviously, being cognates, and this is bad. A rhyme ought to make the reader both amazed and satisfied, amazed by how unusual it is, and satisfied with its preciseness and musicality (PSS, 118).

What are we to make of such a seeming double standard? A case of not seeing a beam in one's own eye? Perhaps a blindness to the limitations of one's own verse would be too one-dimensional for Nabokov. What do "phosphorescent rhymes of our last verse" signify in "The Poets"? Are they gleaming with formal brilliance? Or are they, perhaps, dim and moldy? Or do they in fact signal the imminence of the poetic death and "disappearance" of Vasiliy Shishkov, along with his creator Vladimir Nabokov, then still Sirin, and their colleagues, other Russian émigré poets? It is probably all of the above if one concludes that Nabokov provides a double-edged commentary in "Vasiliy Shishkov" on his own poetic practices. Thus, his analysis of first Shishkov's "bad" poems and now his "good" ones also sends an important self-critical message regarding his poetic crisis of the 1930s.

Before shifting to the matter of Shishkov's disappearance within his own verse, I will sum up my comparisons of Shishkov's and Nabokov's versification. Atypical of Nabokov's prosody as the meter of "The Poets" may be, its rhyming connects the "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle with his poetic output in general and with the other poems of the 1930s in particular. For Nabokov, rhyme seems to have been a structural/structuring and grammatical device, and only occasionally a paronomastic device.47 In the poems of the "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle, the oracular poetic persona makes up for the unremarkable versification.

42. Note that the poem "Probuzhdenie" (The Awakening) appeared in vol. 47 (1931) of Sovremennye zapiski, never to be reprinted again; see "Probuzhdenie," Sovremennye zapiski 47 (1931): 232-233. "We so firmly believed..." was reprinted in Iurii Ivask, ed., Na zapade (New York: Izdatel'stvo imeni Chekhova, 1953), 290; both "We so firmly believed..." and "The Poets" were featured in Iurii Terapiano's selection of émigré poetry in 1959 in Grani 44 (October-December 1959): 3-12. "The Poets" also appeared in both English and Russian in 1970 in the Nabokov issue of TriQuarterly, subsequently published as Alfred Appel Jr. and Charles Newman, eds., Nabokov (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

43. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Nabokov's poetry are from Stikhi, his self-selected and largest volume of Russian poetry, published posthumously in 1979.

44. See Smith, "Nabokov and Russian Verse Form," Russian Literary Triquarterly 24 (Spring 1990): 271-305.

45. Stikhi, 320.

46. See Kniga, 392.

47. A rare exception is the poem "Vliublënnost'" (Being in Love) composed by the last of Nabokov's literary representatives, Vadim in Look at the Harlequins! (1973). In Vadim's poem, "vliublënnost'" (literally, being in love) is rhymed with "potustoronnost'" (literally, otherwordliness) thereby making a point about the connections between love and the otherworld.