Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

“How sunburned you are,” said Koncheyev, “it can hardly be good for you. And where, pray, are your clothes?”

“Over there,” said Fyodor, “on the other side, in the woods.”

“Someone might steal them,” remarked Koncheyev. “It’s not for nothing there’s a proverb: Freehanded Russian, light-fingered Prussian.”

Fyodor sat down and said: “There is no such proverb. By the way, do you know where we two are? Beyond those blackberry bushes, down below, is the place where the Chernyshevski boy, the poet, shot himself.”

“Oh, was it here?” said Koncheyev without especial interest. “You know, his Olga recently married a furrier and went off to the United States. Not quite the lancer whom Pushkin’s Olga married, but still …”

“Aren’t you hot?” asked Fyodor.

“Not a bit. I have a weak chest and I always freeze. But of course when one sits next to a naked man one is physically aware that there exist men’s outfitters, and one’s body feels blind. On the other hand it seems to me that any mental work must be completely impossible for you in such a denuded state.”

“A good point,” grinned Fyodor. “One seems to live more superficially—on the surface of one’s own skin….”

“That’s it. All you’re concerned with is patrolling your body and trailing the sun. But thought likes curtains and the camera obscura. Sunlight is good in the degree that it heightens the value of shade. A jail with no jailer and a garden with no gardener—that is I think the ideal arrangement. Tell me, did you read what I said about your book?”

“I did,” replied Fyodor, watching a little geometrid caterpillar that was checking the number of inches between the two writers. “I did indeed. At first I wanted to write you a letter of thanks—you know, with a touching reference to undeservingness and so on—but then I thought that this would have introduced an intolerable human smell into the domain of free opinion. And besides—if I produced a good book I should thank myself and not you, just as you have to thank yourself and not me for understanding what was good—isn’t that true? If we start bowing to one another, then, as soon as one of us stops the other will feel hurt and depart in a huff.”

“I didn’t expect truisms from you,” said Koncheyev with a smile. “Yes, all that is so. Once in my life, only once, I thanked a critic, and he replied: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I really liked your book!’ and that really’ sobered me forever. By the way, I didn’t say everything I could have said about you… You were so taken to task for nonexistent defects that I no longer wanted to harp on those that were obvious to me. Furthermore, in your next work you will either get rid of them or they will develop into special virtues all your own, the way a speck on an embryo turns into an eye. You are a zoologist, aren’t you?”

“In a way—as an amateur. But what are those defects? I wonder if they coincide with the ones I know.”

“First, an excessive trust in words. It sometimes happens that your words in order to introduce the necessary thought have to smuggle it in. The sentence may be excellent, but still it is smuggling, and moreover gratuitous smuggling, since the lawful road is open. But your smugglers under the cover of an obscure style, with all sorts of complicated contrivances, import goods that are duty free anyway. Secondly, there is a certain awkardness in the reworking of the sources: You seem to be undecided whether to enforce your style upon past speeches and events or to make their own more salient. I took the trouble to confront one or two passages in your book with the context in the complete edition of Chernyshevski’s works, same copy you must have used: I found your cigarette ash between the pages. Thirdly, you sometimes bring up parody to such a degree of naturalness that it actually becomes a genuine serious thought, but on this level it suddenly falters, lapsing into a mannerism that is yours and not a parody of a mannerism, although it is precisely the kind of thing you are ridiculing—as if somebody parodying an actor’s slovenly reading of Shakespeare had been carried away, had started to thunder in earnest, but had accidentally garbled a line. Fourthly, one observes in one or two of your transitions something mechanical, if not automatic, which suggests you are pursuing your own advantage, and taking the course you find easier. In one passage, for example, a mere pun serves as such a transition. Fifthly and finally, you sometimes say things chiefly calculated to prick your contemporaries, but any woman will tell you that nothing gets lost so easily as a hairpin—not to speak of the fact that the least swerve of fashion may make pins obsolete: think how many sharp little objects have been dug up whose exact use not a single archaeologist can tell! The real writer should ignore all readers but one, that of the future, who in his turn is merely the author reflected in time. That, I think, is the sum of my complaints against you and generally speaking they are trivial. They are completely eclipsed by the brilliance of your achievements—about which I could still say a fair bit.”

“Oh, that is less interesting,” said Fyodor, who during this tirade (as Turgenev, Goncharov, Count Salias, Grigorovich and Boborykin used to write) had been nodding his head with an approving mien . “You diagnosed my shortcomings very well,” he continued, “and they correspond to my own complaints against myself, although, of course, I put them in a different order—some of the points run together while others are subdivided further. But besides the defects you have noted in my book, I am aware of at least three more—they, perhaps, are the most important of all. Only I’ll never tell you them—and they won’t be there in my next book. Do you want to talk about your poetry now?”

“No thank you, I’d rather not,” said Koncheyev fearfully. “I have reasons for thinking that you like my work, but I am organically averse to discussing it. When I was small, before sleep I used to say a long and obscure prayer which my dead mother—a pious and very unhappy woman—had taught me (she, of course, would have said that these two things are incompatible, but even so it’s true that happiness doesn’t take the veil). I remembered this prayer and kept saying it for years, almost until adolescence, but one day I probed its sense, understood all the words—and as soon as I understood I immediately forgot it, as if I had broken an unrestorable spell. It seems to me that the same thing might happen to my poems—that if I try to rationalize them I shall instantly lose my ability to write them. You, I know, corrupted your poetry long ago with words and meaning—and you will hardly continue writing verse now. You are too rich, too greedy. The Muse’s charm lies in her poverty.”

“You know, it’s odd,” said Fyodor, “once, about three years ago, I imagined most vividly a conversation with you on these subjects—and you know it came out somewhat similar! Although, of course, you shamelessly played up to me and all that. The fact that I know you so well without knowing you makes me unbelievably happy, for that means there are unions in the world which don’t depend at all on massive friendships, asinine affinities or ‘the spirit of the age,’ nor on any mystical organizations or associations of poets, where a dozen tightly knit mediocrities ‘glow’ by their common efforts.”

“At all events I want to warn you,” said Koncheyev frankly, “not to flatter yourself as regards our similarity: you and I differ in many things, I have different tastes, different habits; your Fet, for instance, I can’t stand, and on the other hand I am an ardent admirer of the author of The Double and The Possessed , whom you are disposed to slight…. There is much about you I don’t like—your St. Petersburg style, your Gallic taint, your neo-Voltaireanism and weakness for Flaubert—and I find, forgive me, your obscene sporty nudity simply offensive. But then, with these reservations, it would be true probably to say that somewhere—not here but on another plane, of whose angle, by the way, you have an even vaguer idea than I—somewhere on the outskirts of our existence, very far, very mysteriously and inexpressibly, a rather divine bond is growing between us. But perhaps you feel and say all this because I praised your book in print—that also happens, you know.”