Part 45 (2/2)

LIK.

”Lik” was published in the emigre review Russkiya Zapiski, Paris, February 1939, and in my third Russian collection (Vesna v Fialtre, Chekhov Publis.h.i.+ng House, New York, 1956). ”Lik” reflects the miragy Riviera surroundings among which I composed it and attempts to create the impression of a stage performance engulfing a neurotic performer, though not quite in the way that the trapped actor expected when dreaming of such an experience.

The present English translation appeared first in The New Yorker, October 10, 1964, and was included in Nabokov's Quartet, Phaedra Publishers, New York, 1966.

V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975

MADEMOISELLE O.

”Mademoiselle O” is from Nabokov's Dozen, 1958 (see Appendix).

VASILIY s.h.i.+SHKOV.

To relieve the dreariness of life in Paris at the end of 1939 (about six months later I was to migrate to America) I decided one day to play an innocent joke on the most famous of emigre critics, George Adamovich (who used to condemn my stuff as regularly as I did the verse of his disciples) by publis.h.i.+ng in one of the two leading magazines a poem signed with a new pen name, so as to see what he would say, about that freshly emerged author, in the weekly literary column he contributed to the Paris emigre daily Poslednie Novosti. Here is the poem, as translated by me in 1970 (Poems and Problems, McGraw-Hill, New York): THE POETS.

From room to hallway a candle pa.s.ses

and is extinguished. Its imprint swims in one's eyes,

until, among the blue-black branches,

a starless night its contours finds.

It is time, we are going away: still youthful,

with a list of dreams not yet dreamt,

with the last, hardly visible radiance of Russia

on the phosph.o.r.ent rhymes of our last verse.

And yet we did know-didn't we?-inspiration,

we would live, it seemed, and our books would grow

but the kithless muses at last have destroyed us,

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