Reading: This and That

Been jumping around a bit, but one constant has been rereading Nabokov: Speak Memory, Glory (first time and I got a bit bored), Sebastian Knight. 

In rereading Knight I thought how wonderfully Nabokov draws from (always tweaking) his own bio. I also (not totally out of the blue) thought of Khodasevich, who I hadn't read (I only know a few poems via Nabokov) or read about for some while. I scratched the itch (this morning) and long story short: I downloaded his Necropolis (prose, memoirs, The Symbolists) and am reading the first "essay" on Nina Petrovskaya:


Nina Petrovskaya was not attractive. But in 1903 she was young—and that makes quite a difference. She was “rather smart,” as Blok said, and she was “sensitive,” as they might have said if she had lived a century earlier. Most importantly, she was very good at “matching pitch.” She immediately became the object of a number of loves.

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