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

Via his artistic practices, laid bare in "Vasiliy Shishkov" and central to the poetics of his other short stories, Nabokov validated the workings and products of artistic imagination as ontologically equivalent to the "objective" world informing his fiction. This feature of Nabokov's poetics is related to his conception of artistic cognition, where all is a function of the perceiver, who "authors" the world of the text.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, "Vasiliy Shishkov" stands as both the author's guide to his own text and the text's immortalization of the author.61 Shishkov's disappearance is Nabokov's window onto textual eternity, a perfect textual opening. As a footnote to Nabokov's lifetime of equating the author and the text, the prominent Russian émigré scholar Vladimir Veidle called his 1977 obituary "Nabokov's Disappearance." One could not think of a more Nabokov-specific formulation.62

In 1955 Georgii Adamovich, one of the key players in the Vasiliy Shishkov affair, published a volume of memoiristic essays entitled Odinochestvo i svoboda (Solitude and Freedom). As if attempting to correct postfactum his earlier reservations about Nabokov's poetry, Adamovich devoted an extensive section to analysis of it. He was right to point out that Nabokov the poet had "studied and learned something from Pasternak."63 Other critics would later identify a number of parallels between the two great writers.64 It is not impossible that while Nabokov had been influenced by Boris Pasternak's poetry in the 1920s-30s, Pasternak had considered Nabokov's experience of writing a novelistic biography of a poet (The Gift, 1937-1938) and including his verses in the text of his novel in writing Doctor Zhivago (1958). The relationship between Nabokov the novelist and poet and, Pasternak the poet and novelist, is possibly reciprocal. However, if there is one major feature that these disparate writers share, it is their organic understanding of the mirroring relationship between the author and the text.

The last issue of Mark Slonim's short-lived but absolutely first-rate Parisian biweekly newspaper, Novaia gazeta (The New Paper), featured an essay by Pasternak, "Vstrechi s Maiakovskim" (My Meetings with Maiakovskii).65 The same issue also featured Nabokov's essay, an anti-Freudian lampoon "Chto vsiakii dolzhen znat'?" (What Everyone Has to Know?).66 Pasternak's essay ends by describing his reaction to Maiakovskii's tragedy Vladimir Maiakovskii (1914):

I tak prosto bylo eto vsë. Iskusstvo nazyvalos' tragediei. Tak i sleduet emu nazyvat'sia. Tragediia nazyvalas' "Vladimir Maiakovskii". Zaglavie skryvalo genial'no prostoe otkrytie, chto poet ne avtor, -- no predmet liriki, ot pervogo litsa obrashchaiushchiisia k miru. Zaglavie bylo ne imenem sochinitelia, a familiei soderzhaniia.67

(And all this was so simple. Art was called tragedy, as art should be called. The name of the tragedy was Vladimir Maiakovskii. The title concealed a brilliantly simple discovery, that the poet is not the author, but the subject of the lyrical verse who addresses the world in first person. The title was not the first name of the author, but the last name of his content).

Copyright © 1999 by the University of Texas Press. This essay, which originally appeared in the author's The World of Nabokov's Stories, is reprinted here by kind permission of the author and University of Texas Press. This material may not be duplicated or used in any way without prior permission.

61. See Jane Grayson, Nabokov Translated (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 116-118. Grayson calls Nabokov's creation of Vasiliy Shishkov's persona "bidding farewell to [his] identity as a Russian writer, and to the Russian language."

62. Vladimir Veidle, "Ischeznovenie Nabokova," Novyi zhurnal 129 (1977): 271-274.

63. Adamovich, Odinochestvo i svoboda, 222.

64. See Aleksandr Bakhrakh, Po pamiati, po zapisiam (Paris: La presse libre, 1980), 103-104. Bakhrakh compares Pasternak's poem "Chto zhe sdelal ia za pakost'..." ("What a nasty thing I did...") and Nabokov's polemical "Kakoe sdelal ia durnoe delo..." ("What is the Evil Deed...").

65. See Boris Pasternak, "Vstrechi s Maiakovskim," Novaia gazeta 5 (May 1, 1931): 12. The essay was excerpted from Pasternak's memoiristic work Okhrannaia gramota (Safe Conduct, 1929-1931). The excerpt was probably reprinted from its publication as "Pervye vstrechi s Maiakovskim" (First Meetings with Maiakovskii) in Literaturnaia gazeta 20 (April 14, 1931). In the complete text of Safe Conduct it appears as Chapters 3-5 of Part 3.

66. Nabokov, "Chto vsiakii dolzhen znat'," Novaia gazeta 5 (May 1, 1931): 3.

67. Pasternak, "Vstrechi s Maiakovskim."