Vladimir Nabokov. A Forgotten Poet
© 1944 Copyright by Vladimir Nabokov
1
In 1899, in the ponderous, comfortable padded St.
Petersburg of those days, a prominent cultural organization,
the Society for the Advancement of Russian Literature, decided
to honor in a grand way the memory of the poet Konstantin
Perov, who had died half a century before at the ardent age of
four-and-twenty. He had been styled the Russian Rimbaud and,
although the French boy surpassed him in genius, such a
comparison is not wholly unjustified. When only eighteen he
composed his remarkable Georgian Nights, a long,
rambling "dream epic," certain passages of which rip the veil
of its traditional Oriental setting to produce that heavenly
draft which suddenly locates the sensorial effect of true
poetry right between one's shoulder blades.
This was followed three years later by a volume of poems:
he had got hold of some German philosopher or other, and
several of these pieces are distressing because of the
grotesque attempt at combining an authentic lyrical spasm with
a metaphysical explanation of the universe; but the rest are
still as vivid and unusual as they were in the days when that
queer youth dislocated the Russian vocabulary and twisted the
necks of accepted epithets in order to make poetry splutter and
scream instead of twittering. Most readers like best those
poems of his where the ideas of emancipation, so characteristic
of the Russian fifties, are expressed in a glorious storm of
obscure eloquence, which, as one critic put it, "does not show
you the enemy but makes you fairly burst with the longing to
fight." Personally I prefer the purer and at the same time
bumpier lyrics such as "The Gypsy" or "The Bat."
Perov was the son of a small landowner of whom the only
thing known is that he tried planting tea on his estate near
Luga. Young Konstantin (to use a biographical intonation) spent
most of his time in St. Petersburg vaguely attending the
university, then vaguely looking for a clerical job-- little
indeed is known of his activities beyond such trivialities as
can be deduced from the general trends of his set. A passage in
the correspondence of the famous poet Nekrasov, who happened to
meet him once in a bookshop, conveys the image of a sulky,
unbalanced, "clumsy and fierce" young man with "the eyes of a
child and the shoulders of a furniture mover."
He is also mentioned in a police report as "conversing in
low tones with two other students'" in a coffeehouse on Nevsky
Avenue. And his sister, who married a merchant from Riga, is
said to have deplored the poet's emotional adventures with
seamstresses and washerwomen. In the autumn of 1849 he visited
his father with the special intent of obtaining money for a
trip to Spain. His father, a man of simple reactions, slapped
him on the face; and a few days later the poor boy was drowned
while bathing in the neighboring river. His clothes and a
half-eaten apple were found lying under a birch tree, but the
body was never recovered.
His fame was sluggish: a passage from the Georgian
Nights, always the same one, in all anthologies; a violent
article by the radical critic Dobrolubov, in 1859, lauding the
revolutionary innuendoes of his weakest poems; a general notion
in the eighties that a reactionary atmosphere had thwarted and
finally destroyed a fine if somewhat inarticulate talent-- this
was about all.
In the nineties, because of a healthier interest in
poetry, coinciding as it sometimes does with a sturdy and dull
political era, a flurry of rediscovery started around Perov's
rhymes while, on the other hand, the liberal-minded were not
averse to following Dobrolubov's cue. The subscription for a
monument in one of the public parks proved a perfect success. A
leading publisher collected all the scraps of information
available in regard to Perov's life and issued his complete
works in one fairly plump volume. The monthlies contributed
several scholarly surveys. The commemorative meeting in one of
the best halls of the capital attracted a crowd.
2
A few minutes before the start, while the speakers were
still assembled in a committee room behind the stage, the door
opened gustily and there entered a sturdy old man, clad in a
frock coat that had seen-- on his or on somebody else's
shoulders-- better times. Without paying the slightest heed to
the admonishments of a couple of ribbon-badged university
students who, in their capacity of attendants, were attempting
to restrain him, he proceeded with perfect dignity toward the
committee, bowed, and said, "I am Perov."
A friend of mine, almost twice my age and now the only
surviving witness of the event, tells me that the chairman (who
as a newspaper editor had a great deal of experience in the
matter of extravagant intruders) said without even looking up,
"Kick him out." Nobody did-- perhaps because one is apt to show
a certain courtesy to an old gentleman who is supposedly very
drunk. He sat down at the table and, selecting the
mildest-looking person, Slavsky, a translator of Longfellow,
Heine, and Sully-Prudhomme (and later a member of the terrorist
group), asked in a matter-of-fact tone whether the "monument
money" had already been collected, and if so, when could he
have it.
All the accounts agree on the singularly quiet way in
which he made his claim. He did not press his point. He merely
stated it as if absolutely unconscious of any possibility of
his being disbelieved. What impressed one was that at the very
beginning of that weird affair, in that secluded room, among
those distinguished men, there he was with his patriarchal
beard, faded brown eyes, and potato nose, sedately inquiring
about the benefits from the proceedings without even bothering
to produce such proofs as might have been faked by an ordinary
impostor.
"Are you a relative?" asked someone.
"My name is Konstantin Konstantinovich Perov," said the
old man patiently. "I am given to understand that a descendant
of my family is in the hall, but that is neither here nor
there."
"How old are you?" asked Slavsky.
"I am seventy-four," he replied, "and the victim of
several poor crops in succession."
"You are surely aware," remarked the actor Yermakov, "that
the poet whose memory we are celebrating tonight was drowned in
the river Oredezh exactly fifty years ago." "Vzdor"
("Nonsense"), retorted the old man. "I staged that business for
reasons of my own."
"And now, my dear fellow," said the chairman, "I really
think you must go."
They dismissed him from their consciousness and flocked
out onto the severely lighted platform where another committee
table, draped in solemn red cloth, with the necessary number of
chairs behind it, had been hypnotizing the audience for some
time with the glint of its traditional dйcanter. To the left of
this, one could admire the oil painting loaned by the
Sheremetevski Art Gallery: it represented Perov at twenty-two,
a swarthy young man with romantic hair and an open shirt
collar. The picture stand was piously camouflaged by means of
leaves and flowers. A lectern with another decanter loomed in
front and a grand piano was waiting in the wings to be rolled
in later for the musical part of the program.
The hall was well packed with literary people, enlightened
lawyers, schoolteachers, scholars, eager university students of
both sexes, and the like. A few humble agents of the secret
police had been delegated to attend the meeting in
inconspicuous spots of the hall, as the government knew by
experience that the most staid cultural assemblies had a queer
knack of slipping into an orgy of revolutionary propaganda. The
fact that one of Perov's first poems contained a veiled but
benevolent allusion to the insurrection of 1825 suggested
taking certain precautions: one never could tell what might
happen after a public mouthing of such lines as "the gloomy
sough of Siberian larches communicates with the underground
ore" ("sibirskikh pikht oogrewmyi shorokh s podzemnoy
snositsa roodoy"). As one of the accounts has it, "soon
one became aware that something vaguely resembling a
Dostoyevskian row [the author is thinking of a famous slapstick
chapter in The Possessed] was creating an atmosphere of
awkwardness and suspense." This was due to the fact that the
old gentleman deliberately followed the seven members of the
jubilee committee onto the platform and then attempted to sit
down with them at the table. The chairman, being mainly intent
upon avoiding a scuffle in full view of the audience, did his
best to make him desist. Under the public disguise of a polite
smile he whispered to the patriarch that he would have him
ejected from the hall if he did not let go the back of the
chair which Slavsky, with a nonchalant air but with a grip of
iron, was covertly wresting from under the old man's gnarled
hand. The old man refused but lost his hold and was left
without a seat. He glanced around, noticed the piano stool in
the wings, and coolly pulled it onto the stage just a fraction
of a second before the hands of a screened attendant tried to
snatch it back. He seated himself at some distance from the
table and immediately became exhibit number one.
Here the committee made the fatal mistake of again
dismissing his presence from their minds: they were, let it be
repeated, particularly anxious to avoid a scene; and moreover,
the blue hydrangea next to the picture stand half concealed the
obnoxious party from their physical vision. Unfortunately, the
old gentleman was most conspicuous to the audience, as he sat
there on his unseemly pedestal (with its rotatory
potentialities hinted at by a recurrent creaking), opening his
spectacle case and breathing fishlike upon his glasses,
perfectly calm and comfortable, his venerable head, shabby
black clothes, and elastic-sided boots simultaneously
suggesting the needy Russian professor and the prosperous
Russian undertaker.
The chairman went up to the lectern and launched upon his
introductory speech. Whisperings rippled all over the audience,
for people were naturally curious to know who the old fellow
was. Firmly bespectacled, with his hands on his knees, he
peered sideways at the portrait, then turned away from it and
inspected the front row. Answering glances could not help
shuttling between the shiny dome of his head and the curly head
of the portrait, for during the chairman's long speech the
details of the intrusion spread, and the imagination of some
started to toy with the idea that a poet belonging to an almost
legendary period, snugly relegated to it by textbooks, an
anachronistic creature, a live fossil in the nets of an
ignorant fisherman, a land of Rip van Winkle, was actually
attending in his drab dotage the reunion dedicated to the glory
of his youth.
". . . let the name of Perov,"' said the chairman, ending
his speech, "be never forgotten by thinking Russia. Tyutchev
has said that Pushkin will always be remembered by our country
as a first love. In regard to Perov we may say that he was
Russia's first experience in freedom. To a superficial observer
this freedom may seem limited to Perov's phenomenal lavishness
of poetical images which appeal more to the artist than to the
citizen. But we, representatives of a more sober generation,
are inclined to decipher for ourselves a deeper, more vital,
more human, and more social sense in such lines of his as
When the last snow hides in the shade of the cemetery wall
and the coat of my neighbor's black horse
shows a swift blue sheen in the swift April sun,
and the puddles are as many heavens cupped in the Negro-hands
of the Earth,
then my heart goes out in its tattered cloak
to visit the poor, the blind, the foolish,
the round backs slaving for the round bellies,
all those whose eyes dulled by care or lust do not see
the holes in the snow, the blue horse, the miraculous puddle.
A burst of applause greeted this, but all of a sudden
there was a break in the clapping, and then disharmonious gusts
of laughter; for, as the chairman, still vibrating with the
words he had just uttered, went back to the table, the bearded
stranger got up and acknowledged the applause by means of jerky
nods and awkward wavings of the hand, his expression combining
formal gratitude with a certain impatience. Slavsky and a
couple of attendants made a desperate attempt to bundle him
away, but from the depth of the audience there arose the cries
of "Shame, shame!" and "Astavte starika!" ("Leave the
old man alone!")
I find in one of the accounts the suggestion that there
were accomplices among the audience, but I think that mass
compassion, which may come as unexpectedly as mass
vindictiveness, is sufficient to explain the turn things were
taking. In spite of having to cope with three men the
"starik" managed to retain a remarkable dignity of
demeanor, and when his halfhearted assailants retired and he
retrieved the piano stool that had been knocked down during the
struggle, there was a murmur of satisfaction. However, the
regrettable fact remained that the atmosphere of the meeting
was hopelessly impaired. The younger and rowdier members of the
audience were beginning to enjoy themselves hugely. The
chairman, his nostrils quivering, poured himself out a tumbler
of water. Two secret agents were cautiously exchanging glances
from two different points of the house.
3
The speech of the chairman was followed by the treasurer's
account of the sums received from various institutions and
private persons for the erection of a Perov monument in one of
the suburban parks. The old man unhurriedly produced a bit of
paper and a stubby pencil and, propping the paper on his knee,
began to check the figures which were being mentioned. Then the
granddaughter of Perov's sister appeared for a moment on the
stage. The organizers had had some trouble with this item of
the program since the person in question, a fat, popeyed,
wax-pale young woman, was being treated for melancholia in a
home for mental patients. With twisted mouth and all dressed up
in pathetic pink, she was shown to the audience for a moment
and then whisked back into the firm hands of a buxom woman
delegated by the home.
When Yermakov, who in those days was the darling of
theatergoers, a kind of beau tйnor in terms of the
drama, began delivering in his chocolate-cream voice the
Prince's speech from the Georgian Nights, it became
clear that even his best fans were more interested in the
reactions of the old man than in the beauty of the delivery. At
the lines
If metal is immortal, then somewhere
there lies the burnished button that I lost
upon my seventh birthday in a garden.
Find me that button and my soul will know
that every soul is saved and stored and treasured
a chink appeared for the first time in his composure and
he slowly unfolded a large handkerchief and lustily blew his
nose-- a sound which sent Yermakov's heavily adumbrated,
diamond-bright eye squinting like that of a timorous steed.
The handkerchief was returned to the folds of the coat and
only several seconds after this did it become noticeable
to the people in the first row that tears were trickling from
under his glasses. He did not attempt to wipe them, though once
or twice his hand did go up to his spectacles with claw-wise
spread fingers, but it dropped again, as if by any such gesture
(and this was the culminating point of the whole delicate
masterpiece) he was afraid to attract attention to his tears.
The tremendous applause that followed the recitation was
certainly more a tribute to the old man's performance than to
the poem in Yermakov's rendering. Then, as soon as the applause
petered out, he stood up and marched toward the edge of the
platform.
There was no attempt on the part of the committee to stop
him, and this for two reasons. First, the chairman, driven to
exasperation by the old man's conspicuous behavior, had gone
out for a moment and given a certain order. In the second
place, a medley of strange doubts was beginning to unnerve some
of the organizers, so that there was a complete hush when the
old man placed his elbows on the reading stand.
"And this is fame," he said in such a husky voice that
from the back rows there came cries of "Gromche,
gromche!" ("Louder, louder!")
"I am saying that this is fame," he repeated, grimly
peering over his spectacles at the audience. "A score of
frivolous poems, words made to joggle and jingle, and a man's
name is remembered as if he had been of some use to humanity!
No, gentlemen, do not delude yourselves. Our empire and the
throne of our father the Tsar still stand as they stood, akin
to frozen thunder in their invulnerable might, and the
misguided youth who scribbled rebellious verse half a century
ago is now a law-abiding old man respected by honest citizens.
An old man, let me add, who needs your protection. I am the
victim of the elements: the land I had plowed with my sweat,
the lambs I had personally suckled, the wheat I had seen waving
its golden arms-- "'
It was then that two enormous policemen quickly and
painlessly removed the old man. The audience had a glimpse of
his being rushed out-- his dickey protruding one way, his beard
the other, a cuff dangling from his wrist, but still that
gravity and that pride in his eyes.
When reporting the celebration, the leading dailies
referred only in passing to the "regrettable incident" that had
marred it. But the disreputable St. Petersburg Record, a
lurid and reactionary rag edited by the brothers Kherstov for
the benefit of the lower middle class and of a blissfully
semiliterate substratum of working people, blazed forth with a
series of articles maintaining that the "regrettable incident"
was nothing less than the reappearance of the authentic Perov.
4
In the meantime, the old man had been collected by the
very wealthy and vulgarly eccentric merchant Gromov, whose
household was full of vagabond monks, quack doctors, and
"pogromystics." The Record printed interviews with the
impostor. In these the latter said dreadful things about the
"lackeys of the revolutionary party" who had cheated him of his
identity and robbed him of his money. This money he proposed to
obtain by law from the publishers of Perov's complete works. A
drunken scholar attached to the Gromov household pointed out
the (unfortunately rather striking) similarity between the old
man's features and those of the portrait.
There appeared a detailed but most implausible account of
his having staged a suicide in order to lead a Christian life
in the bosom of Saint Russia. He had been everything: a
peddler, a bird catcher, a ferryman on the Volga, and had wound
up by acquiring a bit of land in a remote province. I have seen
a copy of a sordid-looking booklet. The Death and
Resurrection of Konstantin Perov, which used to be sold on
the streets by shivering beggars, together with the
Adventures of the Marquis de Sade and the Memoirs of
an Amazon. My best find, however, in looking through old
files, is a smudgy photograph of the bearded impostor perched
upon the marble of the unfinished Perov monument in a leafless
park. He is seen standing very straight with his arms folded;
he wears a round fur cap and a new pair of galoshes but no
overcoat; a little crowd of his backers is gathered at his
feet, and their little white faces stare into the camera with
that special navel-eyed, self-complacent expression peculiar to
old pictures of lynching parties.
Given this atmosphere of florid hooliganism and
reactionary smugness (so closely linked up with governmental
ideas in Russia, no matter whether the Tsar be called
Alexander, Nicholas, or Joe), the intelligentsia could hardly
bear to visualize the disaster of identifying the pure, ardent,
revolutionary-minded Perov as represented by his poems with a
vulgar old man wallowing in a painted pigsty. The tragic part
was that while neither Gromov nor the Kherstov brothers really
believed the purveyor of their fun was the true Perov, many
honest, cultivated people had become obsessed by the impossible
thought that what they had ejected was Truth and Justice.
As a recently published letter from Slavsky to Korolenko
has it: "One shudders to think that a gift of destiny
unparalleled in history, the Lazarus-like resurrection of a
great poet of the past, may be ungratefully ignored-- nay, even
more, deemed a fiendish deceit on the part of a man whose only
crime has been half a century of silence and a few minutes of
wild talk." The wording is muddled but the gist is clear:
intellectual Russia was less afraid of falling victim to a hoax
than of sponsoring a hideous blunder. But there was something
she was still more afraid of, and that was the destruction of
an ideal; for your radical is ready to upset everything in the
world except any such trivial bauble, no matter how doubtful
and dusty, that for some reason radicalism has enshrined.
It is rumored that at a certain secret session of the
Society for the Advancement of Russian Literature the numerous
insulting epistles that the old man kept sending in were
carefully compared by experts with a very old letter written by
the poet in his teens. It had been discovered in a certain
private archive, was believed to be the only sample of Perov's
hand, and none except the scholars who pored over its faded ink
knew of its existence. Neither do we know what their findings
were.
It is further rumored that a lump of money was amassed and
that the old man was approached without the knowledge of his
disgraceful companions. Apparently, a substantial monthly
pension was to be granted him under the condition that he
return at once to his farm and stay there in decorous silence
and oblivion. Apparently, too, the offer was accepted, for he
vanished as jerkily as he had appeared, while Gromov consoled
himself for the loss of his pet by adopting a shady hypnotizer
of French extraction who a year or two later was to enjoy some
success at the Court.
The monument was duly unveiled and became a great favorite
with the local pigeons. The sales of the collected works
fizzled out genteelly in the middle of a fourth edition.
Finally, a few years later, in the region where Perov had been
born, the oldest though not necessarily the brightest
inhabitant told a lady journalist that he remembered his father
telling him of finding a skeleton in a reedy part of the river.
5
This would have been all had not the Revolution come,
turning up slabs of rich earth together with the white rootlets
of little plants and fat mauve worms which otherwise would have
remained buried. When, in the early twenties, in the dark,
hungry, but morbidly active city, various odd cultural
institutions sprouted (such as bookshops where famous but
destitute writers sold their own books, and so on), somebody or
other earned a couple of months' living by arranging a little
Perov museum, and this led to yet another resurrection.
The exhibits? All of them except one (the letter). A
secondhand past in a shabby hall. The oval-shaped eyes and
brown locks of the precious Sheremetevsky portrait (with a
crack in the region of the open collar suggesting a tentative
beheading); a battered volume of the Georgian Nights
that was thought to have belonged to Nekrasov; an indifferent
photograph of the village school built on the spot where the
poet's father had owned a house and an orchard. An old glove
that some visitor to the museum had forgotten. Several editions
of Perov's works distributed in such a way as to occupy the
greatest possible space.
And because all these poor relics still refused to form a
happy family, several period articles had been added, such as
the dressing gown that a famous radical critic had worn in his
rococo study, and the chains he had worn in his wooden Siberian
prison. But there again, since neither this nor the portraits
of various writers of the time were bulky enough, a model of
the first railway train to run in Russia (in the forties,
between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo) had been installed
in the middle of that dismal room. The old man, now well over
ninety but still articulate in speech and reasonably erect in
carriage, would show you around the place as if he were your
host instead of being the janitor. One had the odd impression
that presently he would lead you into the next (nonexisting)
room, where supper would be served. All that he really
possessed, however, was a stove behind a screen and the bench
on which he slept; but if you bought one of the books exhibited
for sale at the entrance he would autograph it for you as a
matter of course.
Then one morning he was found dead on his bench by the
woman who brought him his food. Three quarrelsome families
lived for a while in the museum, and soon nothing remained of
its contents. And as if some great hand with a great rasping
sound had torn out a great bunch of pages from a number of
books, or as if some frivolous story writer had bottled an imp
of fiction in the vessel of truth, or as if. . .
But no matter. Somehow or other, in the next twenty years
or so, Russia lost all contact with Perov's poetry. Young
Soviet citizens know as little about his works as they do about
mine. No doubt a time will come when he will be republished and
readmired; still, one cannot help feeling that, as things
stand, people are missing a great deal. One wonders also what
future historians will make of the old man and his
extraordinary contention. But that, of course, is a matter of
secondary importance.