Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

The introduction was not altogether a success. Mme. Chernyshevski met her guest with a doleful tenderness meant to show that the experience of grief had linked them long and closely; but Elizaveta Pavlovna was most of all interested in what the other woman thought of Fyodor’s verses and in why no one was writing about them. “May I embrace you before you go?” asked Mme. Chernyshevski, preparatorily rising on tiptoe—she was a head shorter than Elizaveta Pavlovna, who bent down toward her with an innocent and radiant smile which quite destroyed the meaning of the embrace. “It’s all right, one must be brave,” said the lady, letting them out onto the stairs and covering her chin with the end of the downy shawl in which she was wrapped. “One must be brave; I’ve learned to be so brave that I could give lessons in endurance, but I think you’ve also come well through this school.”

“You know,” said Elizaveta Pavlovna, stepping lightly but cautiously down the stairs and not turning her lowered head toward her son, “I think I’ll just buy cigarette papers and tobacco, otherwise it comes out so dear,” and immediately she added in the same voice: “Goodness, how sorry I am for her.” And indeed, it was impossible not to pity Mme. Chernyshevski. Her husband had been kept over three months already in an institute for the mentally ailing, in “the semi-loony bin” as he himself playfully expressed it in moments of lucidity. As long ago as October Fyodor had once visited him there. In the sensibly furnished ward sat a fatter, rosier, beautifully shaven and completely insane Chernyshevski, in rubber slippers and a waterproof cloak with a hood. “Why, are you dead?” was the first thing he asked, more discontent than surprised. In his capacity as “Chairman of the Society for Struggle With the Other World” he was continually devising methods to prevent permeation by ghosts (his doctor, employing a new system of “logical connivance,” did not oppose this) and now, probably on the basis of its nonconductive quality in another sphere, he was trying out rubber, but evidently the results achieved so far were mainly negative since, when Fyodor was about to take a chair for himself which was standing to one side, Chernyshevski said irritably: “Leave it alone, you see very well there are two sitting on it already,” and this “two,” and the rustling cloak which plashed up with every movement, and the wordless presence of the attendant, as if this had been a meeting in prison, and the whole of the patient’s conversation seemed to Fyodor an unbearable, caricatured vulgarization of that complex, transparent and still noble though half-insane state of mind in which Chernyshevski had so recently communicated with his lost son. With the broad-comedy inflections he had formerly reserved for jokes—but which he now used in earnest—he launched into extensive lamentations, all for some reason in German, over the fact that people were wasting money to invent antiaircraft guns and poison gases and not caring at all about the conduct of another, million times more important, struggle. Fyodor had a healed-over scrape on the side of his temple—that morning he had knocked it against one of the ribs of a radiator in hastily recovering the top of a toothpaste tube which had rolled underneath it. Suddenly breaking off his speech, Chernyshevski pointed squeamishly and anxiously at his temple. “Was haben Sie da?” he asked, with a grimace of pain, and then smiled unpleasantly, and growing more and more angry and agitated, began to say that you could not get by him—he had recognized right away, he said, a recent suicide. The attendant came up to Fyodor and asked him to leave. And walking through the funereally luxuriant garden, past unctuous beds in which bass-toned, dark crimson dahlias were blooming in blessed sleep and eternal repose, toward the bench where he was awaited by Mme. Chernyshevski (who never went in to her husband but spent whole days in the immediate vicinity of his quarters, preoccupied, brisk, always with packages)—walking over the variegated gravel between myrtle shrubs resembling furniture and taking the visitors he passed for paranoiacs, troubled Fyodor kept pondering over the fact that the misfortune of the Chernyshevskis appeared to be a kind of mocking variation on the theme of his own hope-suffused grief, and only much later did he understand the full refinement of the corollary and all the irreproachable compositional balance with which these collateral sounds had been included in his own life.

Three days before his mother’s departure, in a large hall which was well known to Berlin Russians and which belonged to a society of dentists, judging by the portraits of venerable tooth doctors that looked down from the walls, an open literary evening was held in which Fyodor Konstantinovich also took part. Few people had turned up and it was cold; by the doors the same a thousand times seen representatives of the local Russian intelligentsia stood around smoking, and as usual, catching sight of some familiar, friendly face, Fyodor hurried toward it with sincere pleasure, only to have it replaced by boredom after the first burst of conversation. Elizaveta Pavlovna was joined in the first row by Mme. Chernyshevski; and from the fact that his mother occasionally turned her head this way and that while adjusting her hairdo from behind, Fyodor, hovering about the hall, concluded that she was little interested in the society of her neighbor. At last the program began. First to read was a name writer who in his time had appeared in all the Russian reviews, a gray-haired, clean-shaven old man rather resembling a hoopoe, with eyes which were too good-natured for literature; in a sensibly everyday kind of voice he read a tale of Petersburg life on the eve of the revolution, with an ether-sniffing vamp, chic spies, champagne, Rasputin and apocalyptically apoplectic sunsets over the Neva. After him a certain Kron, writing under the pseudonym of Rostislav Strannyy (Rostislav the Strange), gladdened us with a long story about a romantic adventure in the town of a hundred eyes, beneath skies unknown; for the sake of beauty his epithets were placed after the nouns, his verbs had also flown off somewhere or other and for some reason the word storozhko , “warily,” was repeated about a dozen times. (“She warily let fall a smile”; “The chestnuts broke warily into blossom.”) After the interval poets came thick and fast: a tall youth with a buttonlike face, another, shortish but with a large nose, an elderly lady wearing pince-nez, another, younger, one—and finally Koncheyev, who, in contrast to the triumphant precision and polish of the others, muttered his verses in a low tired voice; but there dwelt independently in them such music, in the seemingly dark verse such a chasm of meaning yawned at one’s feet, so convincing were the sounds and so unexpectedly, out of the very same words every poet was stringing together, there sprang up, played, and slipped away without ever quenching one’s thirst a unique perfection, bearing no resemblance to words and in no need of words, that for the first time that evening the applause was not feigned. Last to appear was Godunov-Cherdyntsev. From the poems written during the summer he read those which Elizaveta Pavlovna liked so much—on Russia:

and on Berlin, beginning with the stanza:

and the one which moved her most of all, although she did not think to connect it with the memory of a young woman, long dead, whom Fyodor had loved when sixteen: