Pushkin, "К сну"

A work ("Sleep") by this Russian poet of genius.  You can read the original here.

O sleep, my old and dearest friend, 
The guardian of my weary bones,  
Where are you now? Plain roof will bend 
To peaceful bed above the stones,  
In silent night and wordless tones.

Come by and blow out my last light,   
And bless the dreams that dance and sway; 
By morn shall joy have gained in might,  
That joy of love both bold and fey. 

Keep memory from lonely plight,
That sad decree of farewell's choice,    
And let me know my dearest sight,       
And let me hear my dearest voice!         

When darkest night spreads black above,
And you cast eyes upon my soul: 
If only it could forget love 
Until new night has taken hold!

Esenin, "Да! Теперь - решено. Без возврата"

A work ("Now all is set, and I forsake") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Now all is set, and I forsake
My homeland's woods and sunlit glare.
No longer will the poplars cleave
Their winged foliage in my hair. 

The low house stoops without my height,
My faithful dog has long licked sod.
On crooked Moscow streets at night
I am to die, so promised God. 

This town of elms, I love it well,
Decrepit, flabby – be it so.
And drowsy golden Asia's swell
Has died upon the rounded domes.

And when the moonlight gilds the sky – 
Who knows just how it got that far!
My head hung down, I then espy
Across the street a well-known bar.

In foulest lair of noise and grime,
Through all the night until day's brink,
To hookers I will read sweet rhyme,
And heat my bones with thugs and drink. 

My heart will rise as throbbing sun,
Then I will say, in whispered shout:
"I'm just like you, o fallen one –
I also have now no way out."

On crooked streets in Moscow bright, 
My loving dog has fled the rod;
My measly house has stooped in fright:
I am to die, thus deemed my God.

Fet, "Вечер"

A work ("Evening") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Above the river clear it roved  
And rang upon the meadow dark,
And danced aloft the silent grove
The other shore now all aspark.

The dusk and distance cloak each turn, 
Its course upon the western strand;
As golden cloud hems twist and burn,  
The parting smoke of sunswept land.

A hill both hot and damp I see,     
The day's exhale in night's deep gasp,  
The summer lightning, blue and green, 
The brightest fire of our sweet past.

La Veneziana

To Alexandra on her birthday.

Readers of these pages are well-acquainted with what makes true art live and breathe: a clear and precise vision coupled with unshakable principles.  Few will ever contest that art, regardless of the medium, can survive bereft of vision, even though many current entries in modern museums have the arrogance to think that any form of expression is worth preserving as artistic (I once met an impressionable young woman who admitted that after traveling through Italy for three months and visiting the finest European museums, her favorite painter was still some splattering American mediocrity).  Of course, these modern museums cater to trends and box office receipts and have long since understood that the vast majority of us do not want to be intimidated by art.  The vast majority of us would like to waltz into any museum of the world and be able to grasp on some lazy Sunday afternoon with a vapid guide and a bunch of other clueless tourists the essence of all that we see – as if the nuances of the years of work of past masters can be gleaned by the hasty and uninitiated.  True art takes as much preparation on the part of the observer as on the part of the artist himself, a topic broached elegantly in this story.

Apart from a few wispy servants, our characters are five: a Colonel decorated for his forays in Afghanistan; his talented and somewhat cavalier son Frank; an art restorer by the name of McGore and his much younger wife Maureen; and Simpson, Frank's college roommate and complete opposite.  The site of their gathering is the Colonel's estate, which reeks of the liquor and stale glory that supposedly dignify old soldiers.  With minimal effort and secret smiles, Frank and Maureen demolish the Colonel and Simpson at lawn tennis (McGore does not or cannot participate), leading the Colonel down his habitual slope of gruff looks, overformality, and, of course, omnipresent booze.  The occasion for the McGores' visit is ostensibly for Mr. McGore, a cheerless old dog "who considered life's Creator only a second-rate imitator of the masters whom he had been studying for forty years," to work on La Veneziana, which is described thus:

The painting was very fine indeed.  Luciani had portrayed the Venetian beauty in half-profile, standing against a warm, black background.  Rose-tinted cloth revealed her prominent, dark-hued neck, with extraordinarily tender folds beneath the ear, and the gray lynx fur with which her cherry-red mantlet was trimmed was slipping off her left shoulder.  With the elongated fingers of her right hand spread in pairs, she seemed to have been on the point of adjusting the falling fur but to have frozen motionless, her hazel, uniformly dark eyes gazing fixedly, languidly from the canvas.  Her left hand, with white ripples of cambric encircling the wrist, was holding a basket of yellow fruit; the narrow crown of her headdress glowed atop her dark-chestnut hair.  On the left the black was interrupted by a large, right-angled opening straight into the twilight air and the bluish-green chasm of the cloudy evening.

A more mature Nabokov would alter our expectations in a superior story, also about forgers and easels, which I will not spoil here.  Suffice it to say that the picture turns out to resemble wholly and strikingly a certain Maureen McGore, a fact noticed by the love-struck Simpson and the very indifferent Mr. McGore.  And so, after batting around a few impassioned ideas that could easily have been expanded into a novel (the story itself is Nabokov's longest), our eyes fall to Simpson, who is very much in love with Maureen but can do very little about his shy unattractiveness and her magnificence.

There are other details that often seem to dovetail in fiction.  Frank happens to be a stellar athlete, inattentive student, and, sub rosa, an artist.  But how this odd fact is introduced (Frank early on states, quite sarcastically to his father, that "paintings perturb me") seems a bit arbitrary:

[There were] occasional rumors that Frank was good at drawing but showed his drawings to no one.  He never spoke about art, was ever ready to sing and swig and carouse, yet suddenly a strange gloom would come over him and he would not leave his room or let anyone in, and only his roommate, lowly Simpson, would see what he was up to.  What Frank created during these two or three days of ill-humored isolation he either hid or destroyed, and then, as if having paid an agonizing tribute to his vice, he would again become his merry, uncomplicated self.

It should be said that this set of characteristics is accurate: it describes, more or less, the poet who is embattled by societal circumstances and the plain nonsense of being a "public intellectual" (a ridiculous title and usually self-imposed).  In fact, true artists will often find the subject of art, which so carelessly devolves into oneupmanship, tedious and unbecoming of real interaction because most people – including numerous artists – cannot converse casually with the precision that such matters deserve.  And what do they deserve?  Perhaps more than McGore, a Philistine of occasional wit and endless platitudes, can offer.  Perhaps McGore, who speaks at length about people entering pictures as a rebuttal to Simpson's silly Gothic notion of portraits' coming to life, is not the type of person to pay any heed to true beauty, even beauty in his immediate vicinity.  That would explain, of course, a few things; yet the motivation behind the McGores' marriage is never fleshed out, apart from the hint of financial stability.  But Venetians have always had far too much art and culture to let money hold them back.

The Return of Chorb

Perhaps the title character of this story is the typical Nabokovian hero ("destitute émigré and littérateur"); perhaps all such heroes are as doomed to misery and apotheosis as their creator was damned to fame.  Whatever you may think of our dear Chorb, the beginning of our tale has few equals in modern literature: 

The Kellers left the opera house at a late hour.  In that pacific German city, where the very air seemed a little lusterless and where a transverse row of ripples had kept shading gently the reflected cathedral for well over seven centuries, Wagner was a leisurely affair presented with relish so as to overgorge one with music.  After the opera Keller took his wife to a smart nightclub renowned for its white wine.  It was past one in the morning when their car, flippantly lit on the inside, sped through lifeless streets to deposit them at the iron wicket of their small but dignified private house.  Keller, a thickset old German, closely resembling Oom Paul Kruger, was the first to step down on the sidewalk, across which the loopy shadows of leaves stirred in the streetlamp's gray glimmer.  For an instant his starched shirtfront and the droplets of bugles trimming his wife's dress caught the light as she disengaged a stout leg and climbed out of the car in her turn.  The maid met them in the vestibule and, still carried by the momentum of the news, told them in a frightened whisper about Chorb's having called.

It takes a while to reach Chorb, who will prove to be anything but the picture of upper middle-class respectability sketched so sumptuously here.  Not one detail forgets the mores of the haute bourgeoisie; for not one moment are the Kellers out of character.  In fact, their inability to do anything not preprogrammed or measured in careful, flattened teaspoons will expose them as bereft of what may broadly be termed individualism and what may more precisely be called the nuts and bolts of an artistic temperament.  Chorb will grossly represent what may be accomplished through art; the Kellers what may be accomplished through the worship of rules, savings accounts, and cleanliness.  We will root for Chorb although we know very well that his return denotes his failure.

Their relationship to Chorb, we learn, is quite involuntary: he has gone and married their beloved daughter and absconded to the ends of an interbellum Europe with nature and romance as his lodestars.  As they travel (all in flashbacks; Chorb spends the bulk of the story alone in tortured memories) it is Chorb who points out the differences in flora and fauna in that storybook way, mimicked so awkwardly in films, through an occasional aside that discloses a whole library.  He will look back in vanquished emotions at his wife, whom he married just before her demise, and attempt to locate her parted spirit in the trail that they left together:

He passed in reverse through all the spots they had visited together during their honeymoon journey.  In Switzerland where they had wintered and where the apple trees were now in their last bloom, he recognized nothing except the hotels.  As to the Black Forest, through which they had hiked in the preceding autumn, the chill of the spring did not impede memory.  And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider's web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist.

We have seen these droplets elsewhere: they were already the festive baubles on a certain dress of a certain opera-goer.  And those telegraph wires?  And that spider's web?  Our instincts suspect a solution that our voices are loath to pronounce for fear of trespassing into the overgrown lawn of symbolic weeds and far too many avid gardeners.  Maybe how Chorb's wife died – a detail that need not be mentioned on these pages – might imbue the reader with a clearer notion of life's traps and tricks, especially on those who happen to notice the loose stitches in its tapestry. 

There is a second act.  Chorb, whose name suggests an angel or something far less aerodynamic, decides in almost tawdry cinematic fashion to replace the memories of his wife, which he knows he will distort and mostly lose over the course of his life, with the corporal proximity of a woman of little virtue who bears her some resemblance.  They adjourn to a room in a filthy hotel where the couple once stayed by accident but do nothing that is expected in such rooms with such company.  The girl, a pretty thing but obviously obtuse, stands in near-nakedness at the window, a sign that she will now act as the telescope for what we might consider to be a key to interpreting this odd tale, if it truly requires any interpretation at all:

Behind the curtain the casement was open and one could make out, in the velvety depths, a corner of the opera house, the black shoulder of a stone Orpheus outlined against the blue of the night, and a row of light along the dim façade which slanted off into the darkness.  Down there, far away, diminutive dark silhouettes swarmed as they emerged from bright doorways onto the semicircular layers of illumined porch steps, to which glided up cars with shimmering headlights and smooth glistening tops.  Only when the breakup was over and the brightness gone did the girl close the curtain again.  She switched off the light and stretched on the bed beside Chorb.  Just before falling asleep she caught herself thinking that once or twice she had already been in that room; she remembered the pink picture on the wall.

It is important that this girl notices only a blotch of pink on the wall; her exposure to the opera, to the Greek myths and our modern renderings of those myths, is limited to the brief snatches that she gets of what lies directly across from this den of debasement and primitive joy.  In a way she will remind Chorb, who sleeps through her entire discovery, of his wife and what she did not get to have, as well as of his own ambitions and what they mean in relation to what society prescribes.  Society will always gather after an artistic event and pretend that they understood every moment of it; an artist will keep to himself and revel in the future possibilities of his understanding it; and some unfortunate souls will just stare and know not what they espy.  They might not even know that opera usually has three acts.