Akhmatova, "Художнику"

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

Your work seems but a whim sometimes, 
Those labors blessed as they may be: 
Unceasing gild of autumn limes, 
Unending blue of newest sea. 

To think now that this slumber's glaze,  
Leads me anon into your grove, 
Where I, afraid of every maze,  
A-swoon seek traces of your trove. 

Beneath your arch should I then slip,
Swept by your hand into a sky,
To cool my hateful heat adrift?

And there I'll meet eternal bliss,
And there, with scorching lids closed tight,
Anew I'll find a tearful gift.

Look at the Harlequins!

I cannot possibly remember when I first heard the term "harlequin romance" (childhood and adolescence occasionally baffle me with their echoes), but for a young person this is precisely the association that love might entail. After all, what adults do physically and emotionally must strike the earnest child as nothing more than silly and banal. Grass and pets and balls and schoolless afternoons and books and gum and games – these are what little boys and girls are made of; time is too long and its arms too outstretching to commit to something forever. True enough, coming of age turns into a sort of comeuppance for those lazy, hazy days lost to speculation and wonder, and almost all of us are better off for the learning. But let us not forget our amazement and imagination as they took root all around us. Let us celebrate the whims and lies of a life separated from the hard liberty of being grown up and responsible, when – as some fear on cold, lonely days – consequences are as drab as our reasons. So if the etymology of harlequin is indeed some kind of Germanic diminutive for little hell or devil, we would be even more anxious to enjoy this book.  

Our narrator and titan, it will be revealed in time, is a "certain Russian prince" by the name of Vadim Vadimovich. Vadim Vadimovich belongs to that now-doddering generation of émigrés who got out of Russia through a spinning back-door turnstile before Lenin and his crimson thugs busted through the main entrance (in time, as it were, to see only a pile of swirling dust). So was it then and now, somewhere in the early mist of the 1970s, little seems to have changed except the name plates at the Politburo. Princely refuge – after allegedly shooting a Soviet soldier who threatened rendition – is sought in England, then Germany, then France, then eventually, once some foul continental forces forego busting through doors altogether and start setting unwanted tenements to flame, to that awkward jumble of Puritanical pressures and Social Darwinism known as the United States. Whatever you wish to say about our dear Vadim Vadimovich, America is clearly too tame and bland for his tastes. And thinking back now, he recalls the seeds of his own ambition:

I actually believed even then, in my early twenties, that by mid-century I would be a famous and free author, living in a free, universally respected Russia, on the English quay of the Neva or on one of my splendid estates in the country and writing there prose and poetry in the infinitely plastic tongue of my ancestors: among them I counted one of Tolstoy's grand-aunts and two of Pushkin's boon companions. The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored branches looked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by an electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer's dark voice just before the thunder, or by one line of King Lear.

A better summary of Look at the Harlequins could not be furnished by any reviewer, which is necessarily part of Vadim Vadimovich's plan. There are women in his life as they are in every life, and he makes of them little use apart from their patterns for characters in his wondrous novels and poems. There is Iris Black, who would die young, Annette Blagovo, whom he would also kill off under rather different circumstances, Louise Anderson, the prurient Philistine widow of a fat poet and critic of infinitely greater trendiness than our poor Vadim Vadimovich (which means, naturally, that he will be forgotten as quickly as those trends), and a fourth, unnamed wife, who is a few decades younger than her master. With these forming with our prince a sort of love pentagon, we begin a march towards the present, a march that rapidly devolves into a hop, a skip, and a few more skips.

What is skipped? Plenty; a whole lot; in a way everything except his books, of which we get occasional quotes but more commonly nice, direct allusions (Vadim Vadimovich is a nice, direct prince), and his comments on the savagery of the world. He is so cruel to the women he loved that we scarcely believe he loved them at all. This includes his long-lost daughter Isabel (from Annette) who is said to be a remarkable genius. This daughter-genius then does something quite out of keeping with geniuses and good offspring: she elopes with a hippie type who then, in turn, defects to the Soviets, changing his identity along the way. It is truly a sad moment when Vadim Vadimovich and wife three lunch with only daughter and future son-in-law:

He was twenty-five years old. He had spent five years studying Russian, and spoke it as fluently, he said, as a trained seal (a small sample justified the comparison). He was a declared 'revolutionary,' and a hopeless nincompoop, knowing nothing, crazy about jazz, existentialism, Leninism, pacifism, and African Art. He thought snappy pamphlets and catalogues so much more 'meaningful' than fat old books. A sweet, stale, and unhealthy smell emanated from the poor fellow.

We have all smelled this odor, which I believe is closely akin to that of an orange left out for a week or two. Since classical music, philosophy, the Renaissance, and classical art tend to counterleague against the ignorance of the modernist trends smashed in the quote above (I will omit pacifism; there is absolutely nothing wrong with pacifism; although most pacifists do indeed emit the rotten orange smell for whatever reason), we have little more to do here but nod and sigh and hope that Isabel has enough genius to identify fraud as readily as her progenitor.

Those who know little about Nabokov's biography (one can imagine the casual reader deeming all of this a graceful farce) may be bored in the same way that people who crave action and adventure are easily dulled by time's thud. Those who do know something about Nabokov's life may think themselves in on the joke as some kind of exclusive club members, although such a conclusion would be just as misguided. The truth is that Vadim Vadimovich alone knows the truth and he knows it from the inside out, not the other way around, which is our circuitous route. Not a few gemstones limn (to use a popular critic's favorite and much-abused verb) this path: after almost being hit by a motorcycle, our narrator "ignored his roar of hate"; some friends "sat enjoying Martinis in the orchestra seats of a marvelous sunset"; a plain woman is forgotten as "the very insignificance of her appearance canceled the pursuit of a vague recollection"; Vadim sips on "the indifferent white wine [he] had the polite weakness to praise"; and "Annette would occasionally curb with an opaque, almost ophidian look, her mother's volubility." There are also a few details that really have no business being in a Nabokov book, including one so shocking that it must be a joke and a half, if not two jokes. Those harlequins sure are a burlesque bunch.     

Solovyev, "Память"

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

Rush me, memory, on ageless wing
To that land my heart holds dear,
Her I see alone still smoldering
In dark winter I so fear.

Bitter pain has rent my soul in two,
And both lives are seared and burnt,
Past this nearness rises something new,
Foil to spring deceased and spurned.

Onwards, memory, on silent wing!
Other images divine!
Her I see on greenish pond’s lush ring
In the brightest summer's shine.

And our Tosna wild reflects the sun
Which these vertical shores spite.
There I see the pines of childhood run
On the deadly sands so white.

Memory, desist! All grief endured
Once again assails my soul,
Tears of sorrows past have now been lured
In a wave reborn from all.

The Admiralty Spire

Once upon a time a now-forgotten Italian art critic called this city "Russia's window to Europe," a platitude not meant wholly as a compliment. Through the turmoil of the last couple of centuries and Moscow's usurping of its place as the governmental capital, the term "window to Europe" has appended itself to St. Petersburg's many titles. These inevitably include "the northern capital," "Leningrad," its name for sixty-seven inglorious years, "Russia's capital of culture," and "The Venice of the North" (a name also bestowed upon both this German city and this Scandinavian capital), among a few more local variants. Whatever the name chosen, the point remains: Petersburg is an imitation. Yet if you have ever been to Petersburg, one of the most magnificent metropolises on this planet, you may well disagree. There are elements that can be hastily categorized as Italian-influenced – after all, Italians did design the city in the form it assumed three hundred and twelve years ago – but these have been transformed by time and empire to reflect a very different understanding of human nature. Some more cynical minds may sneer at the sleaze and corruption that have always composed the foreigner's guidebook to Soviet and post-Soviet territory; others may claim that Russia's enduring struggle to gain religious autonomy makes their pseudo-Roman architecture a particularly lurid form of blasphemy. But we will leave behind these negative hordes to their misbegotten agendas and proceed to a tale of mild salacity and great nostalgia.

The story purports to be a letter by an unnamed Russian émigré residing in Berlin to a Soviet writer called Serge Solntsev, which etymologically suggests "a vassal to the sun." Yet for the entirety of the story apart from the very last line, our writer will address Solntsev as "madam," a conceit that devolves into his identification of the writer's novel, The Admiralty Spire, with the narrator's love affair with Katya, his first love in a Russia that seems lost forever ("since the day of our last meeting there has been a lapse of sixteen years – the age of a bride, an old dog, or the Soviet Republic"). Hence is derived a litany of small everyday objects that can only gain significance in the memory of an exile. We see resurrected, inter alia, a porcelain ballerina with lifted leg, hautbois berries, a breast-pocket handkerchief, the part in his hair right down the middle, and beautiful scenes of young love:

And when night finally fell, and the house was asleep, Katya and I would look at the dark house from the park where we kept huddled on a hard, cold, invisible bench until our bones ached, and it all seemed to us like something that had already once happened long ago: the outline of the house against the pale-green sky, the sleepy movements of the foliage, our prolonged, blind kisses.

The narrator's initial accusation is one of theft: the novelist, like so many predatory hacks, is alleged to have met Katya at some point in the not-so-distant past and become enraptured with her tale of first love, ecstatic and radiant as it must have been, and so much brighter than her own mishandled and lowly affairs. Well, at least that last part is implied. Over the course of the narrator's rantings the events and shades of meaning begin, however, to take a different turn. Our Soviet novelist has been transformed again into the very source of this love affair which doesn't really resemble the storyline one bit. It is here that we sense the narrator is reading one story and imagining another:

In your elegant description, with profuse dots, of that summer, you naturally do not forget for a minute – as we used to forget – that since February of that year the nation was "under the rule of the Provisional government," and you oblige Katya and me to follow revolutionary events with keen concern, that is, to conduct (for dozens of pages) political and mystical conversations that – I assure you – we never had. In the first place, I would have been embarrassed to speak, with the righteous pathos you lend me, of Russia's destiny, and in the second place, Katya and I were too absorbed in each other to pay attention to the Revolution.

Thereupon follows a Petersburg anecdote about a cat, a "truck packed with jolly rioters" (a dead giveaway in any tale by Nabokov), a fateful swerve, and then the repetition of the same sequence in Spain, which deprives the event of any "deep occult meaning." It also hints at another type of story, the very core of which the narrator ingresses as his memories float further and further away from unfriendly and rather parochial shores.

As for the eponymous spire: this sits atop a naval building and is one of the most renowned members of the Petersburg skyline. There are countless references to it in Russian literature, and some critics have even adopted the rather faddish interpretation of its presence to denote the architectonic and structural acme towards which all poets strive (perhaps not all poets; critics often tend to gaze upon poets like sheep). Yet there is a more plausible spin provided near the beginning of Nabokov's tale that relates to the introduction of this famous poem by Pushkin, a monumental work literally and figuratively, in which "admiralty spire" is given, in Russian at least, a line of its own:

I love thee, City Peter built,                                 
I love thy harsh and horrid gaze;
The mighty flow of Neva silt
The shoreline granite by thy haze;
Thy filigreed wall iron-cast,                                      
Тhy lucid dusk and moonless shine
Of pensive days that ever last,
While I, room-bound, my thoughts untwine;
And read and write bereft of lamp, 
As clear and sleeping masses ramp
Up empty streets beneath the fire
Of thy taut admiralty spire. 
Without the gloaming to corrupt
The gilded clouds that linger long,
Til hasty dawn shall interrupt
Brief night's half-hour twilit song.

Should night bring us our notions of mortality and dread, endless day might inspire us to overcome our fears and hope for a fairer destiny. Nabokov's political leanings were always quite evident in his works, with his bitterness towards two loud and brutal regimes peaking for a solid decade between 1937 and 1947 (thankfully, one at least was extinguished). Not that one needs the political background to enjoy what is said; only the most unimaginative reader requires history and dogma to frame his fiction. But those of us who have the opportunity now can look back and smile at the prescience of his insight, given that he never supposed he would see his hometown again, and if he did, only ravaged and naked in nightmares without sense or end. Windows, we recall, often let us look in as well as out.

Bunin, "В Москве"

A poem ("In Moscow") by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Behind the Arbat's ancient alleys' dust,
Lies a most special city – now it's March.  
The mezzanine feels lowly, cold, and parch'd,
No few rats roam, but nights are marvelous. 

A daytime thaw, some drops, a scorching sun, 
A nighttime freeze, yet this air will be clean, 
A dawn that so resembles Moscow's sheen, 
So distant, ancient.  I will sit undone 

By unlit hearth, beside the window frame
Of moonlight's flood, and thence will gaze so far
Upon the garden and the seldom star ...
How gentle is the spring night sky!  How tame 

The springtime moon!  And crosses glimmer warm,
Like candles on a country church. Blue sky   
Descends through tender branches softly pried; 
And like gold helmets forg'd against all storm, 
The cupolas at smallest tips will shine ...