THE little I remember about him is centered within the confines of last spring: the spring of 1939. I had been to some “Evening of Russian Émigré Literature”—one of those boring affairs so current in Paris since the early twenties. As I was quickly descending the stairs (an intermission having given me the opportunity to escape), I seemed to hear the gallop of eager pursuit behind me; I looked back, and this is when I saw him for the first time. From a couple of steps above me where he had come to a stop, he said: “My name is Vasiliy Shishkov. I am a poet.”
Then he came down to my level—a solidly built young man of an eminently Russian type, thick-lipped and gray-eyed, with a deep voice and a capacious, comfortable handshake.
“I want to consult you about something,” he continued. “A meeting between us would be desirable.”
I am a person not spoiled by such desires. My assent all but brimmed with tender emotion. We decided he would see me next day at my shabby hotel (grandly named Royal Versailles). Very punctually I came down into the simulacrum of a lounge which was comparatively quiet at that hour, if one discounted the convulsive exertions of the lift, and the conversation conducted in their accustomed corner by four German refugees who were discussing certain intricacies of the carte d’identité system. One of them apparently thought that his plight was not as bad as that of the others, and the others argued that it was exactly the same. Then a fifth appeared and greeted his compatriots for some reason in French: facetiousness? swank? the lure of a new language? He had just bought a hat; they all started trying it on.
Shishkov entered. With a serious expression on his face and something equally serious in the thrust of his shoulder, he overcame the rusty reluctance of the revolving door and barely had time to look around before he saw me. Here I noted with pleasure that he eschewed the conventional grin which I fear so greatly—and to which I myself am prone. I had some difficulty in drawing together two overstuffed armchairs—and again I found most pleasing that instead of sketching a mechanical gesture of cooperation, he remained standing at ease, his hands in the pockets of his ancient trench coat, waiting for me to arrange our seats. As soon as we had settled down, he produced a tawny notebook.
“First of all,” said Shishkov, fixing me with nice, furry eyes, “a person must produce his credentials—am I right? At the police station I would have shown my identity card, and to you, Gospodin Nabokov, I must show this—a cahier of verse.”
I leafed through it. The firm handwriting, slightly inclined to the left, emanated health and talent. Alas, once my glance went zigzagging down the lines, I felt a pang of disappointment. The poetry was dreadful—flat, flashy, ominously pretentious. Its utter mediocrity was stressed by the fraudulent chic of alliterations and the meretricious richness of illiterate rhymes. Sufficient to say that such pairs were formed as, for example, teatr-gladiator, mustang-tank, Madonna-belladonna. As to the themes, they were best left alone: the author sang with unvarying gusto anything that his lyre came across. Reading his poems one after the other was torture for a nervous person, but since my conscientiousness happened to be reinforced by the author’s watching closely over me and controlling both the direction of my gaze and the action of my fingers, I found myself obliged to stop for a few moments at every consecutive page.
“Well, what’s the verdict?” he asked when I had finished: “Not too awful?”
I considered him. His somewhat glossy face with enlarged pores expressed no ominous premonition whatever. I replied that his poetry was hopelessly bad. Shishkov clicked his tongue, thrust the notebook back into the pocket of his trench coat, and said: “Those credentials are not mine. I mean, I did write that stuff myself, and yet it is all forged. The entire lot of thirty poems was composed this morning, and to tell the truth, I found rather nasty the task of parodying the product of metromania. In return, I now have learned that you are merciless—which means that you can be trusted. Here is my real passport.” (Shishkov handed me another, much more tattered, notebook.) “Read just one poem at random, it will be enough for both you and me. By the way, to avoid any misapprehension, let me warn you that I do not care for your novels; they irritate me as would a harsh light or the loud conversation of strangers when one longs not to talk, but to think. Yet, at the same time, in a purely physiological way—if I may put it like that—you possess some secret of writing, the secret of certain basic colors, something exceptionally rare and important, which, alas, you apply to little purpose, within the narrow limits of your general abilities—driving about, so to speak, all over the place in a powerful racing car for which you have absolutely no use, but which keeps you thinking where could one thunder off next. However, as you possess that secret, people must reckon with you—and this is why I should like to enlist your support in a certain matter; but first take, please, a look at my poems.”
(I must admit that the unexpected and uncalled-for lecture on the character of my literary work struck me as considerably more impudent than the harmless bit of deception my visitor had devised. I write for the sake of concrete pleasure and publish my writings for the sake of much less concrete money, and though the latter point should imply, in one way or another, the existence of a consumer, it always seems to me that the farther my published books, in the course of their natural evolution, retreat from their self-contained source, the more abstract and insignificant become the fortuitous events of their career. As to the so-called Readers’ Judgment, I feel, at that trial, not as the defendant, but, at best, as a distant relative of one of the least important witnesses. In other words a reviewer’s praise seems to me an odd kind of sans-gêne, and his abuse, a vain lunge at a specter. At the moment, I was trying to decide whether Shishkov tumbled his candid opinion into the lap of every proud writer he met or whether it was only with me that he was so blunt because he believed I deserved it. I concluded that just as the doggerel trick had been a result of his somewhat childish but genuine thirst for truth, so the voicing of his views about me was prompted by the urge of widening to the utmost the frame of mutual frankness.)
I vaguely feared that the genuine product might reveal traces of the defects monstrously exaggerated in the parody, but my fears proved unfounded. The poems were very good—I hope to discuss them some other time in much greater detail. Recently, I was instrumental in getting one published in an émigré magazine, and lovers of poetry noticed its originality.* To the poet that was so strangely gourmand in regard to another’s opinion, I incontinently expressed mine, adding, as a corrective, that the poem in question contained some tiny fluctuations of style such as, for instance, the not quite idiomatic v soldatskih mundirah; here mundir (uniform) should rather be forma when referring as it did to the lower ranks. The line, however, was much too good to be tampered with.
“You know what,” said Shishkov, “since you agree with me that my poems are not trifles, let me leave that book in your keeping. One never knows what may happen; strange, very strange thoughts occur to me, and—Well, anyway, everything now turns out admirably. You see, my object in visiting you was to ask you to take part in a new magazine I am planning to launch. Saturday there will be a gathering at my place and everything must be decided. Naturally, I cherish no illusions concerning your capacity for being carried away by the problems of the modern world, but I think the idea of that journal might interest you from a stylistic point of view. So, please, come. Incidentally, we expect” (Shishkov named an extremely famous Russian writer) “and some other prominent people. You have to understand—I have reached a certain limit, I absolutely must take the strain off, or else I’ll go mad. I’ll be thirty soon; last year I came here, to Paris, after an utterly sterile adolescence in the Balkans and then in Austria. I am working here as a bookbinder but I have been a typesetter and even a librarian—in short I have always rubbed against books. Yet, I repeat, my life has been sterile, and, of late, I’m bursting with the urge to do something—a most agonizing sensation—for you must see yourself, from another angle, perhaps, but still you
must see, how much suffering, imbecility, and filth surround us; yet people of my generation notice nothing, do nothing, though action is simply as necessary as, say, breath or bread. And mind you, I speak not of big, burning questions that have bored everybody to death, but of a trillion trivia which people do not perceive, although they, those trifles, are the embryos of most obvious monsters. Just the other day, for example, a mother, having lost patience, drowned her two-year-old daughter in the bathtub and then took a bath in the same water, because it was hot, and hot water should not be squandered. Good God, how far this is from the old peasant woman, in one of Turgenev’s turgid little tales, who had just lost her son and shocked the fine lady who visited her in her isba by calmly finishing a bowl of cabbage soup ‘because it had been salted’! I shan’t mind in the least if you regard as absurd the fact that the tremendous number of similar trifles, every day, everywhere, of various degrees of importance and of different shapes—tailed germs, punctiform, cubic—can trouble a man so badly that he suffocates and loses his appetite—but, maybe, you will come all the same.”
I have combined here our conversation at the Royal Versailles with excerpts from a diffuse letter that Shishkov sent me next day by way of corroboration. On the following Saturday I was a little late for the meeting, so that when I entered his chambre garnie which was as modest as it was tidy, all were assembled, excepting the famous writer. Among those present, I knew by sight the editor of a defunct publication; the others—an ample female (a translatress, I believe, or perhaps a theosophist) with a gloomy little husband resembling a black breloque; her old mother; two seedy gentlemen in the kind of ill-fitting suits that the émigré cartoonist Mad gives to his characters; and an energetic-looking blond fellow, our host’s chum—were unknown to me. Upon observing that Shishkov kept cocking an anxious ear—observing, too, how resolutely and joyfully he clapped the table and rose, before realizing that the doorbell he had heard pertained to another apartment—I ardently hoped for the celebrity’s arrival, but the old boy never turned up.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Shishkov and began to develop, quite eloquently and engagingly, his plans for a monthly, which would be entitled A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity and would mainly consist of a collection of relevant newspaper items for the month, with the stipulation that they be arranged not chronologically but in an “ascending” and “artistically unobtrusive” sequence. The one-time editor quoted certain figures and declared he was perfectly sure that a Russian émigré review of that sort would never sell. The husband of the ample literary lady removed his pince-nez and, while massaging the bridge of his nose, said with horrible haws and hems that if the intention was to fight human misery, it might be much more practical to distribute among the poor the sum of money needed for the review; and since it was from him one expected that money, a chill came over the listeners. After that, the host’s friend repeated—in brisker but baser terms—what Shishkov had already stated. My opinion was also asked. The expression on Shishkov’s face was so tragic that I did my best to champion his project. We dispersed rather early. As he was accompanying us to the landing, Shishkov slipped and, a little longer than was required to encourage the general laughter, remained sitting on the floor with a cheerful smile and impossible eyes.
A fortnight later he again came to see me, and again the four German refugees were discussing passport problems, and presently a fifth entered and cheerfully said: “Bonjour, Monsieur Weiss, bonjour, Monsieur Meyer.” To my questions, Shishkov replied, rather absently and as it were reluctantly, that the idea of his journal had been found unrealizable, and that he had stopped thinking about it.
“Here’s what I wanted to tell you,” he began after an uneasy silence: “I have been trying and trying to come to a decision and now I think I have hit upon something, more or less. Why I am in this terrible state would hardly interest you; I explained what I could in my letter but that concerned mainly the business in hand, the magazine. The question is more extensive, the question is more hopeless. I have been trying to decide what to do—how to stop things, how to get out. Beat it to Africa, to the colonies? But it is hardly worth starting the Herculean task of obtaining the necessary papers only to find myself pondering in the midst of date palms and scorpions the same things I ponder under the Paris rain. Try making my way back to Russia? No, the frying pan is enough. Retire to a monastery? But religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit. Commit suicide? But capital punishment is something I find too repulsive to be able to act as my own executioner, and, furthermore, I dread certain consequences undreamt of in Hamlet’s philosophy. Thus there remains but one issue: to disappear, to dissolve.”
He inquired further whether his manuscript was safe, and shortly afterwards left, broad-shouldered yet a little stooped, trench-coated, hatless, the back of his neck needing a haircut—an extraordinarily attractive, pure, melancholy human being, to whom I did not know what to say, what assistance to render.
In late May I left for another part of France and upon returning to Paris at the end of August happened to run into Shishkov’s friend. He told me a bizarre story: some time after my departure, “Vasya” had vanished, abandoning his meager belongings. The police could discover nothing—beyond the fact that le sieur Chichkoff had long since allowed his karta, as the Russians call it, to run out.
That is all. With the kind of incident that opens a mystery story my narrative closes. I got from his friend, or rather chance acquaintance, bits of scant information about Shishkov’s life and these I jotted down—they may prove useful someday. But where the deuce did he go? And, generally speaking, what did he have in mind when he said he intended “to disappear, to dissolve”? Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one’s reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse? One wonders if he did not overestimate
The transparence and soundness
Of such an unusual coffin.
*See note.
ULTIMA THULE
DO YOU remember the day you and I were lunching (partaking of nourishment) a couple of years before your death? Assuming, of course, that memory can live without its headdress? Let us imagine—just an “apropositional” thought—some totally new handbook of epistolary samples. To a lady who has lost her right hand: I kiss your ellipsis. To a deceased: Respecterfully yours. But enough of these sheepish vignettes. If you don’t remember, then I remember for you: the memory of you can pass, grammatically speaking at least, for your memory, and I am perfectly willing to grant for the sake of an ornate phrase that if, after your death, I and the world still endure, it is only because you recollect the world and me. I address you now for the following reason. I address you now on the following occasion. I address you now simply to chat with you about Falter. What a fate! What a mystery! What a handwriting! When I tire of trying to persuade myself that he is a half-wit or a kvak (as you used to Russianize the English synonym for “charlatan”), he strikes me as a person who … who, because he survived the bomb of truth that exploded in him … became a god! Beside him, how paltry seem all the bygone clairvoyants: the dust raised by the herd at sunset, the dream within a dream (when you dream you have awakened), the crack students in this our institute of learning hermetically closed to outsiders; for Falter stands outside our world, in the true reality. Reality!—that is the pouter-pigeon throat of the snake that fascinates me. Remember the time we lunched at the hotel managed by Falter near the luxuriant, many-terraced Italian border, where the asphalt is infinitely exalted by the wisteria, and the air smells of rubber and paradise? Adam Falter was still one of us then, and, if nothing about him presaged … what shall I call it?—say, seerhood—nevertheless his whole strong cast (the caromlike coordination of his bodily movements, as though he had ball bearings for cartilages, his precision, his aquiline aloofness) now, in retrospect, explains why he survived the sh
ock: the original figure was large enough to withstand the subtraction.
Oh, my love, how your presence smiles from that fabled bay—and nevermore!—oh, I bite my knuckles so as not to start shaking with sobs, but there is no holding them back; down I slide with locked brakes, making “hoo” and “boohoo” sounds, and it is all such humiliating physical nonsense: the hot blinking, the feeling of suffocation, the dirty handkerchief, the convulsive yawning alternating with the tears—I just can’t, can’t live without you. I blow my nose, swallow, and then all over again try to persuade the chair which I clutch, the desk which I pound, that I can’t boohoo without you. Are you able to hear me? That’s from a banal questionnaire, which ghosts do not answer, but how willingly our death-cell-mates respond for them; “I know!” (pointing skyward at random), “I’ll be glad to tell you!” Your darling head, the hollow of your temple, the forget-me-not gray of an eye squinting at an incipient kiss, the placid expression of your ears when you would lift up your hair … how can I reconcile myself to your disappearance, to this gaping hole, into which slides everything—my whole life, wet gravel, objects, and habits—and what tombal railings can prevent me from tumbling, with silent relish, into this abyss? Vertigo of the soul. Remember how, right after you died, I hurried out of the sanatorium, not walking but sort of stamping and even dancing with pain (life having got jammed in the door like a finger), alone on that winding road among the exaggeratedly scaly pines and the prickly shields of agaves, in a green armored world that quietly drew in its feet so as not to catch the disease. Ah, yes—everything around me kept warily, attentively silent, and only when I looked at something did that something give a start and begin ostentatiously to move, rustle, or buzz, pretending not to notice me. “Indifferent nature,” says Pushkin. Nonsense! A continuous shying-away would be a more accurate description.
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Page 64
