Vladimir Nabokov: The Gift

tinkling somewhere beneath his little platform, as he lifted his legs in white stockings and with pompons on the shoes, higher and higher with barely perceptible jerks—and abruptly everything stopped and he froze in an angular attitude. And perhaps it is the same with my poems? But the truthfulness of juxtapositions and deductions is sometimes better preserved on the near side of the verbal fence.

From the accumulating poetical pieces in the book we gradually obtain the image of an extremely receptive boy, living in extremely favorable surroundings. Our poet was born on July 12, 1900, in the Leshino manor, which for generations had been the country estate of the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs. Even before he reached school age the boy read through a considerable number of books from his father’s library. In his interesting reminiscences so-and-so recalls how enthusiastically little Fedya and his sister Tanya, who was two years his elder, engaged in amateur theatricals, and how they would even write plays themselves for their performances…. That, my good man, may be true of other poets but in my case it is a lie. I have always been indifferent to the theater; although I remember that we did have a puppet theater with cardboard trees and a crenellated castle with celluloid windows the color of raspberry jelly through which painted flames like those on Vereshchagin’s picture of the Moscow Fire flickered when a candle was lighted inside—and it was this candle which, not without our participation, eventually caused the conflagration of the entire building. Oh, but Tanya and I were fastidious when it came to toys! From indifferent givers on the outside we would often receive quite wretched things. Anything that came in a flat carton with an illustrated cover boded ill. To one such cover I tried to devote my stipulated twelve lines, but somehow the poem did not rise. A family, seated around a circular table illuminated by a lamp: the boy is dressed in an impossible sailor suit with a red tie, the girl wears laced boots, also red; both, with expressions of sensuous delectation, are stringing beads of various colors on straw-like rods, making little baskets, birdcages and boxes; and, with similar enthusiasm, their half-witted parents take part in the same pastime—the father with a prize growth on his pleased face, the mother with her imposing bosom; the dog is also looking at the table, and envious Grandma can be seen ensconced in the background. Those same children have now grown up and I often run across them in advertisements: he, with his glossy, sleekly tanned cheeks, is puffing voluptuously on a cigarette or holding in his brawny hand, with a carnivorous grin, a sandwich containing something red (“eat more meat!”); she is smiling at a stocking she herself is wearing, or, with depraved delight, pouring artificial cream on canned fruit; and in time they will become sprightly, rosy, gormandizing oldsters—and still have ahead of them the infernal black beauty of oaken caskets in a palm-decked display window…. Thus a world of handsome demons develops side by side with us, in a cheerfully sinister relationship to our everyday existence; but in the handsome demon there is always some secret flaw, a shameful wart on the behind of this semblance of perfection: the glamorous glutton of the advertisement, gorging himself on gelatin, can never know the quiet joys of the gourmet, and his fashions (lingering on the billboard while we move onward) are always just a little behind those of real life. Some day I shall come back to a discussion of this nemesis, which finds a soft spot for its blow exactly where the whole sense and power of the creature it strikes seem to lie.

In general Tanya and I preferred sweaty games to quiet ones—running, hide-and-seek, battles. How remarkably the word “battle” (srazhenie) suggests the sound of springy compression when one rammed into the toy gun its projectile—a six-inch stick of colored wood, deprived of its rubber suction cup in order to increase the impact with which it struck the gilt tin of a breastplate (worn by a cross between a cuirassier and a redskin), making in it a respectable little dent.

The author had occasion to hide (we are now in the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs’ mansion on the English Quay of the Neva, where it stands even today) among draperies, under tables, behind the upright cushions of silk divans, in a wardrobe, where moth crystals crunched under one’s feet (and whence one could observe unseen a slowly passing manservant, who would seem strangely different, alive, ethereal, smelling of apples and tea) and also

on whose dusty shelves vegetated such objects as: a necklace made of wolf’s teeth; a small bare-bellied idol of almatolite; another, of porcelain, its black tongue stuck out in national greeting; a chess set with camels instead of bishops; an articulated wooden dragon; a Soyot snuffbox of clouded glass; ditto, of agate; a shaman’s tambourine and the rabbit’s foot going with it; a boot of wapiti leather with an innersole made from the bark of the blue honeysuckle; an ensiform Tibetan coin; a cup of Kara jade; a silver brooch with turquoises; a lama’s lampad; and a lot of similar junk which—like dust, like the postcard from a German spa with its mother-of-pearl “Gruss”—my father, who could not stomach ethnography, somehow happened to bring back from his fabulous travels. The real treasures—his butterfly collection, his museum—were preserved in three locked halls; but the present book of poems contains nothing about that: a special intuition forewarned the young author that some day he would want to speak in quite another way, not in miniature verse with charms and chimes but in very, very different, manly words about his famous father.

Again something has gone wrong, and one hears the flippantly flat little voice of the reviewer (perhaps even of the female sex). With warm affection the poet recalls the rooms of the family house where it (his childhood) was spent. He has been able to imbue with much lyricism the poetic descriptions of objects among which it was spent. When you listen closely… We all, attentively and piously… The strains of the past… Thus, for instance, he depicts lampshades, lithographs on the walls, his schoolroom desk, the weekly visit of the floor-polishers (who leave behind an odor compounded of “frost, sweat, and mastic”), and the checking of the clocks:

Giving an occasional tongue clack with its pendulum and making a strange pause, as if to gather its strength, before striking. Its ticking, like an unrolled tape divided by stripes into inches, served as an endless measure of my insomnias. It was just as hard for me to fall asleep as to sneeze without having tickled with something the inside of a nostril, or to commit suicide by resorting to means at the body’s disposal (swallowing my tongue, or something like that). At the beginning of the agonizing night I could still play for time by subsisting on conversations with Tanya, whose bed stood in the next room; despite rules, we would open the door slightly, and then, when we heard our governess going to her own room, which was adjacent to Tanya’s, one of us would gently shut it: a lightning barefoot sprint and then a dive into bed. While the door was ajar we would exchange conundrums from room to room, every now and then lapsing into silence (I can still hear the tone of this twin silence in the dark), she to guess mine, I to think of another. Mine were always on the fantastic and silly side, while Tanya adhered to classical models: