Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

Meanwhile the air in the poems has grown warmer and we are preparing to return to the country, where we might move as early as April in the years before I began school (I began it only at the age of twelve).

This poem is the author’s own favorite, but he did not include it in the collection because, once again, the theme is connected with that of his father and economy of art advised him not to touch that theme before the right time came. Instead he reproduced such spring impressions as the first sensation immediately upon walking out of the station: the softness of the ground, its kindred proximity to your foot, and around your head the totally unrestrained flow of air. Vying with each other, furiously lavishing invitations, standing up on their boxes, flourishing their free hand and mingling their uproar with exaggerated “whoas,” the droshky drivers called to the early arrivals. A little way off an open motorcar, crimson both inside and out, awaited us: the idea of speed had already given a slant to the steering wheel (sea-cliff trees will understand what I mean), while its general appearance still retained—out of a false sense of propriety, I suppose—a servile link with the shape of a victoria; but if this was indeed an attempt at mimicry then it was totally destroyed by the roar of the motor with the muffler bypass opened, a roar so ferocious that long before we came in sight a peasant on a hay wagon coming the other way would jump off and try to hood his horse with a sack—after which he and his cart would often end up in the ditch or even in the field; where, a minute later, having already forgotten us and our dust, the rural stillness would collect again, cool and tender, with only the tiniest aperture left for the song of a skylark.

Perhaps one day, on foreign-made soles with heels long since worn down, feeling myself a ghost despite the idiotic substantiality of the insulators, I shall again come out of that station and without visible companions walk along the footpath that accompanies the highway the ten or so versts to Leshino. One after another the telegraph poles will hum at my approach. A crow will settle on a boulder—settle and straighten a wing that has folded wrong. The day will probably be on the grayish side. Changes in the appearance of the surrounding landscape that I cannot imagine, as well as some of the oldest landmarks that somehow I have forgotten, will greet me alternately, even mingling from time to time. I think that as I walk I shall utter something like a moan, in tune with the poles. When I reach the sites where I grew up and see this and that—or else, because of fires, rebuilding, lumbering operations or the negligence of nature, see neither this nor that (but still make out something infinitely and unwaveringly faithful to me, if only because my eyes are, in the long run, made of the same stuff as the grayness, the clarity, the dampness of those sites), then, after all the excitement, I shall experience a certain satiation of suffering—perhaps on the mountain pass to a kind of happiness which it is too early for me to know (I know only that when I reach it, it will be with pen in hand). But there is one thing I shall definitely not find there awaiting me—the thing which, indeed, made the whole business of exile worth cultivating: my childhood and the fruits of my childhood. Its fruits—here they are, today, already ripe; while my childhood itself has disappeared into a distance even more remote than that of our Russian North.

The author has found effective words to describe sensations experienced upon making the transition to the countryside. How much fun it is, says he, when

At the age of ten a new diversion was added. We were still in the city when the marvel rolled in. For quite a time I led it around by its ram horns from room to room; with what bashful grace it moved along the parquet floor until it impaled itself on a thumbtack! Compared to my old, rattling and pitiful little tricycle, whose wheels were so thin that it would get stuck even in the sand of the garden terrace, the newcomer possessed a heavenly lightness of movement. This is well expressed by the poet in the following lines:

And the day after that there inevitably come thoughts of “freewheeling”—a word which to this day I cannot hear without seeing a strip of smooth, sloping, sticky ground glide past, accompanied by a barely audible murmur of rubber and an ever-so-gentle lisp of steel. Bicycling and riding, boating and bathing, tennis and croquet; picnicking under the pines; the lure of the water mill and the hayloft—this is a general list of the themes that move our author. What about his poems from the point of view of form? These, of course, are miniatures, but they are executed with a phenomenally delicate mastery that brings out clearly every hair, not because everything is delineated with an excessively selective touch, but because the presence of the smallest features is involuntarily conveyed to the reader by the integrity and reliability of a talent that assures the author’s observance of all the articles of the artistic covenant. One can argue whether it is worth while to revive album-type poetry, but one certainly cannot deny that within the limits he has set himself Godunov-Cherdyntsev has solved his prosodic problem correctly. Each of his poems iridesces with harlequin colors. Whoever is fond of the picturesque genre will appreciate this little volume. To the blind man at the church door it would have nothing to say. What vision the author has! Awaking early in the morning he knew what kind of a day it would be by looking at a chink in the shutter, which

And in the evening he gazes with the same screwed-up eyes at the field, one side of which is already in shadow, while the other, farther one

It would seem to us that perhaps it was really not literature but painting for which he was destined from childhood, and while we know nothing of the author’s present condition, we can nevertheless clearly picture a straw-hatted boy, sitting very uncomfortably on a garden bench with his watercolor paraphernalia and painting the world bequeathed him by his forebears: