The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Chapter Three

  EVERY morning just after eight he was guided out of his slumber by the same sound behind the thin wall, two feet from his temple. It was the clean, round-bottomed ring of a tumbler being replaced on a glass shelf; after which the landlord’s daughter cleared her throat. Then came the spasmodic trk-trk of a revolving cylinder, then the sound of flushed water, choking, groaning and abruptly ceasing, then the bizarre internal whine of a bath tap that finally turned into the rustle of a shower. A slip-bolt clacked and footsteps receded past his door. From an opposite direction came other footsteps, dark and heavy, with a slight shuffle: that was Marianna Nikolavna hurrying to the kitchen to get some coffee for her daughter. One could hear the gas at first refusing with noisy bursts to catch light; subdued, it flared and hissed steadily. The first footsteps returned, now heeled; in the kitchen a fast, angrily agitated conversation started up. Just as some people speak with a southern or Moscow pronunciation so did mother and daughter invariably speak to one another in the accents of a quarrel. Their voices were similar, both swarthy and smooth, but one more coarse and somehow cramped, the other freer and purer. In the rumble of the mother’s there was a pleading, even a guilty pleading; in the daughter’s increasingly short replies there rang hostility. To the accompaniment of this indistinct morning storm Fyodor Konstantinovich would again fall peacefully asleep.

  Through his patchily thinning slumber he made out the sounds of cleaning; the wall would suddenly collapse on him: that meant a mop handle that had been insecurely leaning against his door. Once a week the janitor’s wife, fat, heavily breathing, reeking of stale sweat, came with a vacuum cleaner, and then all hell broke loose, the world was shattered to bits, a hellish grinding pervaded one’s very soul, destroying it, and drove Fyodor out of his bed, out of his room and out of the house. But usually, around ten o’clock, Marianna Nikolavna took her turn in the bathroom and after her came, hawking up phlegm as he went, Ivan Borisovich. He flushed the toilet as many as five times but did not use the bath, contenting himself with the murmur of the little washbasin. By half past ten everything in the house was quiet: Marianna Nikolavna had gone away to do her shopping, Shchyogolev on his shady affairs. Fyodor Konstantinovich descended into a blissful abyss where the warm remnants of his slumber mingled with a feeling of happiness, both from the previous day and still to come.

  Quite often now he began the day with a poem. Lying supine with the first satisfyingly tasty, large and long-lasting cigarette between his parched lips, he again after a break of almost ten years was composing that particular kind of poem of which a gift is made in the evening so as to be reflected in the wave that has carried it out. He compared the structure of these verses with that of the others. The words of the others had been forgotten. Only here and there among the erased letters had rhymes been preserved, rich ones interspersed with poor ones: kiss-bliss, wind in—linden—leaves—grieves. During that sixteenth summer of his life he had first taken up the serious writing of poetry; before that, except for entomological doggerel, there had been nothing. But a certain atmosphere of composition had been long known and familiar to him: at home, everyone did some scribbling—Tanya wrote in a little album with a little key to it; Mother wrote touchingly unpretentious prose-poems about the beauty of the native weald; Father and Uncle Oleg made up occasional verses—and these occasions were not infrequent; and Aunt Ksenya—she wrote poems only in French, temperamental and “musical” ones, with a complete disregard for the subtleties of syllabic verse; her outpourings were very popular in St. Petersburg society, particularly the long poem “La Femme et la Panthère,” and also a translation of Apukhtin’s “A Pair of Bays”—one stanza of which went:

  Le gros grec d’Odessa, le juif de Varsovie,

  Le jeune lieutenant, le général âgé,

  Tous ils cherchaient en elle un peu de folle vie,

  Et sur son sein rêvait leur amour passager.

  Finally there had been one “real” poet, Mother’s cousin, Prince Volkhovskoy, who had published on velvety paper an exquisitely printed, thick, expensive volume of languorous poems Auroras and Stars, all in Italian viny vignettes, with a portrait photograph of the author in the front and a monstrous list of misprints at the back. The verses were broken up into departments: Nocturnes, Autumn Motifs, The Chords of Love. Most of them were emblazoned with a motto and under all there was the exact date and place: Sorrento, Ai-Todor, or In the Train. I do not remember anything of these pieces except the oft-repeated word “transport”: which even then sounded to me like a means of moving from one place to another.

  My father took little interest in poetry, making an exception only for Pushkin: he knew him as some people know the liturgy, and liked to declaim him while out walking. I sometimes think that an echo of Pushkin’s “The Prophet” still vibrates to this day in some resonantly receptive Asian gully. He also quoted, I remember, the incomparable “Butterfly” by Fet, and Tyutchev’s “Now the dim-blue shadows mingle”; but that which our kinsfolk liked, the watery, easily memorized poesy of the end of the last century, avidly waiting to be set to music as a cure for verbal anemia, he ignored utterly. As to avant-garde verse, he considered it rubbish—and in his presence I did not publicize my own enthusiasms in this sphere. Once when with a smile of irony already prepared he leafed through the books of poets scattered on my desk and as luck would have it happened on the worst item by the best of them (that famous poem by Blok where there appears an impossible, unbearable dzhentelmen representing Edgar Poe, and where kovyor, carpet, is made to rhyme with the English “Sir” transliterated as syor), I was so annoyed that I quickly pushed Severyanin’s The Thunder-Bubbling Cup into his hand so that he could better unburden his soul upon it. In general I considered that if he would forget for the nonce the kind of poetry I was silly enough to call “classicism” and tried without prejudice to grasp what it was I loved so much, he would have understood the new charm that had appeared in the features of Russian poetry, a charm that I sensed even in its most absurd manifestations. But when today I tote up what has remained to me of this new poetry I see that very little has survived, and what has is precisely a natural continuation of Pushkin, while the motley husk, the wretched sham, the masks of mediocrity and the stilts of talent—everything that my love once forgave or saw in a special light (and that seemed to my father to be the true face of innovation—“the mug of modernism” as he expressed it), is now so old-fashioned, so forgotten as even Karamzin’s verses are not forgotten; and when on someone else’s shelf I come across this or that collection of poems which had once lived with me as brother, I feel in them only what my father then felt without actually knowing them. His mistake was not that he ran down all “modern poetry” indiscriminately, but that he refused to detect in it the long, life-giving ray of his favorite poet.

  I met her in June 1916. She was twenty-three. Her husband, a distant relative of ours, was at the front. She lived in a small villa inside the boundaries of our estate and often used to visit us. Because of her I almost forgot butterflies and completely overlooked the revolution. In the winter of 1917 she went away to Novorossisk—and it was only in Berlin that I accidentally heard about her terrible death. She was a thin little thing, with chestnut hair combed high, a gay look in her big black eyes, dimples on her pale cheeks, and a tender mouth which she made up out of a flacon of fragrant ruby-red liquid by putting the glass stopper to her lips. In all her ways there was something I found lovable to the point of tears, something indefinable at the time, but now appearing to me as a kind of pathetic insouciance. She was not intelligent, she was poorly educated and banal, that is, your exact opposite … no, no, I do not mean at all that I loved her more than you, or that those assignations were happier than my evening meetings with you … but all her shortcomings were concealed in such a tide of fascination, tenderness and grace, such enchantment flowed from her most fleeting, irresponsible word, that I was prepared to look at her and listen to her eternally—but what would happe
n now if she were resurrected—I don’t know, you should not ask stupid questions. In the evenings I used to see her home. Those walks will come in handy sometime. In her bedroom there was a little picture of the Tsar’s family and a Turgenevian odor of heliotrope. I used to return long after midnight (my tutor, fortunately, had gone back to England), and I shall never forget that feeling of lightness, pride, rapture and wild night hunger (I particularly yearned for curds-and-whey with black bread) as I walked along our faithfully and even fawningly soughing avenue toward the dark house (only Mother had a light on) and heard the barking of the watchdogs. It was then also that my versificatory illness began.

  At times I would be sitting at lunch, seeing nothing, my lips moving—and to my neighbor who had asked for the sugar bowl I would pass my glass or a napkin ring. Despite my inexperienced desire to transpose into verse the murmur of love filling me (well do I remember Uncle Oleg saying that if he were to publish a volume of poetry he would certainly call it Heart Murmur), I had already rigged up my own, albeit poor and primitive, wordsmithy; thus, in selecting adjectives, I was already aware that ones like “innumerable” or “intangible” would simply and conveniently fill the yawning gap, which was longing to sing, from the caesura to the word closing the line (“For we shall dream innumerable dreams”); and again that for this last word one could take an additional adjective, of only two syllables, so as to combine it with the long centerpiece (“Of loveliness intangible and tender”), a melodic formula which, by the way, has had a quite disastrous effect on Russian, as well as on French poetry. I knew that handy adjectives of the amphibrachic type (a trisyllable that one visualizes in the shape of a sofa with three cushions—the middle one dented) were legion in Russian—and how many such “dejécted,” “enchánted” and “rebéllious” I wasted; that we had also plenty of trochees (“ténder”), but far fewer dactyls (“sórrowful”), and these somehow all stood in profile; that finally anapaestic and iambic adjectives were on the rare side, and in addition always rather dull and inflexible, like “incompléte” or “forlórn.” I knew further that great long ones like “incomprehénsible” and “infinitésimal” would come into the tetrameter bringing with them their own orchestras, and that the combination “unwanted and misunderstood” gave a certain moiré quality to the line; look at it this way—it is an amphibrach, and that way—an iamb. A little later Andrey Bely’s monumental research on “half stresses” (the “comp” and the “ble” in the line “Incomprehensible desires”) hypnotized me with its system of graphically marking off and calculating these scuds, so that I immediately reread all my old tetrameters from this new point of view and was terribly pained by the paucity of modulations. When plotted, their diagrams proved to be plain and gappy, showing none of those rectangles and trapeziums that Bely had found for the tetrameters of great poets; whereupon for the space of almost a whole year—an evil and sinful year—I tried to write with the aim of producing the most complicated and rich scud-scheme possible:

  In miserable meditations,

  And aromatically dark,

  Full of interconverted patience,

  Sighs the semidenuded park.

  and so on for half-a-dozen strophes: the tongue stumbled but one’s honor was saved. When graphically expressed by joining the “half-stresses” (“ra,” “med,” “ar,” “cal,” etc.), in the verses and from one verse to another, this monster’s rhythmic structure gave rise to something in the nature of that wobbly tower of coffeepots, baskets, trays and vases which a circus clown balances on a stick, until he runs into the barrier of the arena when everything slowly leans over the nearest spectators (screaming horribly) but on falling turns out to be safely strung on a cord.

  As a result, probably, of the weak motive power of my little lyrical rollers, verbs and other parts of speech interested me less. Not so with questions of meter and rhythm. Overcoming a natural preference for iambics, I dangled after ternary meters; later on, departures from meter fascinated me. That was the time when Balmont in his poem beginning “I will be reckless, I will be daring” launched that artificial iambic tetrameter with the bump of an extra syllable after the second foot, in which, as far as I know, not a single good poem was ever written. I would give this prancing hunchback a sunset to carry or a boat and was amazed that the former faded and the latter sank. Things went easier with the dreamy stutter of Blok’s rhythms, but as soon as I began to use them my verse was imperceptibly infiltrated by stylized medievalizing—blue page-boys, monks, princesses—similar to the way that in a German tale the shadow of Bonaparte visits the antiquary Stolz at night to look for the ghost of its tricorn.

  As my hunt for them progressed, rhymes settled down into a practical system somewhat on the order of a card index. They were distributed in little families—rhyme-clusters, rhymescapes. Letuchiy (flying) immediately grouped tuchi (clouds) over the kruchi (steeps) of the zhguchey (burning) desert and of neminuchey (inevitable) fate. Nebosklon (sky) let the muse onto the balkon (balcony) and showed her a klyon (maple). Tsvety (flowers) and ty (thou) summoned mechty (fancies) in the midst of temnoty (darkness). Svechi, plechi, vstrechi, and rechi (tapers, shoulders, meetings, and speeches) created the old-world atmosphere of a ball at the Congress of Vienna or on the town governor’s birthday. Glaza (eyes) shone blue in the company of biryuza (turquoise), groza (thunderstorm), and strekoza (dragonfly), and it was better not to get involved in the series. Derevya (trees) found themselves dully paired with kochevya (nomad encampments) as happens in the game in which one has to collect cards with the names of cities, with only two representing Sweden (but a dozen in the case of France!). Veter (wind) had no mate, except for a not very attractive setter running about in the distance, but by shifting into the genitive, one could get words ending in “meter” to perform (vetra-geometra). There were also certain treasured freaks, rhymes to which, like rare stamps in an album, were represented by blanks. Thus it took me a long time to discover that ametistovyy (amethystine) could be rhymed with perelistyvay (turn the pages), with neistovyy (furioso), and with the genitive case of an utterly unsuitable pristav (police constable). In short, it was a beautifully labeled collection that I had always close to hand.

  I do not doubt that even then, at the time of that ugly, crippling school (which I would hardly have bothered with at all were I a typical poet who never fell for the blandishments of harmonious prose) I nevertheless knew true inspiration. The agitation which seized me, swiftly covered me with an icy sheet, squeezed my joints and jerked at my fingers. The lunatic wandering of my thought which by unknown means found the door in a thousand leading into the noisy night of the garden, the expansion and contraction of the heart, now as vast as the starry sky and then as small as a droplet of mercury, the opening arms of a kind of inner embracement, classicism’s sacred thrill, mutterings, tears—all this was genuine. But at that moment, in a hasty and clumsy attempt to resolve the agitation, I clutched at the first hackneyed words available, at their ready-made linkages, so that as soon as I had embarked on what I thought to be creation, on what should have been the expression, the living connection between my divine excitement and my human world, everything expired in a fatal gust of words, whereas I continued to rotate epithets and adjust rhymes without noticing the split, the debasement and the betrayal—like a man relating his dream (like any dream infinitely free and complex, but clotting like blood upon waking up), who unnoticed by himself and his listeners rounds it out, cleans it up and dresses it in the fashion of hackneyed reality, and if he begins thus: “I dreamt that I was sitting in my room,” monstrously vulgarizes the dream’s devices by taking it for granted that the room had been furnished exactly the same as his room in real life.

  Farewell forever: on a winter day, with large snowflakes falling since morning, drifting anyhow—vertically, slantwise, even upwards. Her big arctics and tiny muff. She was taking away with her absolutely everything—including the park where they used to meet in summer. There remained only his rhymed inventory plus the
briefcase under his arm, the shabby briefcase of an upper-former who had skipped school. An odd constraint, the desire to say something important, silence, vague insignificant words. Love, to put it simply, repeats at the last parting the musical theme of shyness that precedes its first avowal. The reticulate touch of her salty lips through the veil. At the station there was vile animal bustle: this was the time when the black and white seeds of the flower of happiness, sunshine and freedom were being liberally sown. Now it has grown up. Russia is populated with sunflowers. This is the largest, most fat-faced and stupidest of flowers.

  Poems: about parting, about death, about the past. It is impossible to define (but it seems this happened abroad) the exact period of change in my attitude to writing poetry, when I became sick of the workshop, the classification of words and the collection of rhymes. But how excruciatingly difficult it was to break, scatter and forget all that: Faulty habits clung firmly, words accustomed to go together did not want to be uncoupled. In themselves they were neither bad nor good, but their combination in groups, the mutual guarantee of rhymes, the rank-grown rhythms—all this made them foul, hideous and dead. To consider himself a mediocrity was hardly any better than believing he was a genius: Fyodor doubted the first and conceded the second, but more important, strove not to surrender to the fiendish despair of a blank sheet. Since there were things he wanted to express just as naturally and unrestrainedly as the lungs want to expand, hence words suitable for breathing ought to exist. The oft repeated complaints of poets that, alas, no words are available, that words are pale corpses, that words are incapable of expressing our thingummy-bob feelings (and to prove it a torrent of trochaic hexameters is set loose) seemed to him just as senseless as the staid conviction of the eldest inhabitant of a mountain hamlet that yonder mountain has never been climbed by anyone and never will be; one fine, cold morning a long lean Englishman appears—and cheerfully scrambles up to the top.