Without Lifting A Finger

He liked absolutely any person who introduced an element of rebellion or, at the very least, mischief, into the world—up to and including maniacs and arsonists, whom he wrote about extensively and was happy to talk about for hours on end. He was a bit of an arsonist himself. Not once did I ever see him put out a match after lighting a cigarette: he would invariably throw the match away unextinguished. After lunch or during his evening tea, when the ashtray would be filled with a sufficient quantity of cigarette butts, matches, and papers, he made it his cherished habit to furtively shove a lit match inside the pile. After doing so, he would attempt to distract the attention of those around him—while he himself cast cunning glances over his shoulder at the blazing bonfire. It seemed that these “little family fires,” as I once suggested calling them, took on a certain wicked and joyful symbolic meaning in his eyes. He felt great respect for the experiments being done in atomic fission; h...

 I lived a good distance away from Gorky. Walking the streets at night was exhausting and not without its dangers: a person could get robbed. For this reason, it was not uncommon for me to stay the night; a bed would be made up for me on the divan that stood in the dining room. Late in the evening, the hustle and bustle would die down. The hour would arrive for the family to take their tea. I served as an audience for Gorky’s much-loved reminiscences, the ones that he always trotted out when he wished to “charm” his new acquaintances. Later on, I would learn that these stories were rather limited in number and that, though they retained the appearance of improvisations, they would repeat themselves verbatim, year after year. More than once, I came across character sketches written by people who had happened to visit Gorky’s at one time or another and each time I would laugh when I arrived at the stereotypical phrase: “Alexei Maximovich’s thoughts unexpectedly turn toward the past, ...

 In 1917, Klyuev’s influence, which essentially resonated with Esenin’s own worldview, gave way to the influence of the left-wing SRs. It was at that time that the SRs explained to Esenin that the Rus’ that was to come, the one he had been dreaming of, was, in fact, the new state. This new state would also be built on a religious foundation: not on a pagan or a Christian foundation, but, rather, on a socialist one; not on a faith in redeeming gods, but on faith in the self-organized human being. They explained to him that “there is socialism and then there is Socialism”—that socialism with a lowercase letter is merely a social and political program, but that there is Socialism with a capital letter, too: a “religious idea, a new faith and a new knowledge to which the knowledge and old faith of Christianity are giving way…The best even of professional Christian theologians see this, know this.” “The new universal idea (Socialism) will act as dynamite; it will break the chains that C...

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.



Also reading: Khodasevich (a real live book!). Bilingual edition. Translated from the Russian by Peter Daniels. (Maybe I'll put up Daniels' version of "The Monkey" alongside Nabokov's someday. Maybe I'll have some time -- far down the road -- to dabble in the Russian myself.) Will certainly look more at Nabokov's Pale Fire in relation to Khodasevich's "Ballada." * Khodasevich's "Petersburg": They gave themselves to sad monotonous tasks, until their strength was spent. Half-dead among them, only I distracted their predicament. They looked at me and they forgot their bubbling kettles boiling dry, the boots of felt that scorched on stoves -- all listening to my poetry Then in sepulchral Russian dark a flowery herald-girl took my hand; and music's concord was revealed to me, knocked sideways in the wind. Mad with visions, over the sheet-ice on the canal, I'd reach the bank and slither up the crumbli...