The Gift

And was hardly inferior in blueness
To my present remembrance of it.

And in the evening he gazes with the same screwed-up eyes at the field, one side of which is already in shadow, while the other, farther one

Is illumed, from its central big boulder
To the edge of the forest beyond it
And is bright as by day.

It would seem to us that perhaps it was really not literature but painting for which he was destined from childhood, and while we know nothing of the author’s present condition, we can nevertheless clearly picture a straw-hatted boy, sitting very uncomfortably on a garden bench with his watercolor paraphernalia and painting the world bequeathed him by his forebears:

Cells of white porcelain
Contain blue, green, red honey.
First, out of pencil lines,
On rough paper a garden is formed.
The birches, the balcony of the outbuilding,
All is spotted with sunlight. I soak
And twirl tight the tip of my paintbrush
In rich orange yellow;
And, meantime, within the full goblet,
In the radiance of its cut glass,
What colors have blazed,
What rapture has bloomed!

This, then, is Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s little volume. In conclusion let us add… What else? What else? Imagination, do prompt me! Can it be true that all the enchantingly throbbing things of which I have dreamt and still dream through my poems have not been lost in them and have been noticed by the reader whose review I shall see before the day is over? Can it really be that he has understood everything in them, understood that besides the good old “picturesqueness” they also contain special poetic meaning (when one’s mind, after going around itself in the subliminal labyrinth, returns with newfound music that alone makes poems what they should be)? As he read them, did he read them not only as words but as chinks between words, as one should do when reading poetry? Or did he simply skim over them, like them and praise them, calling attention to the significance of their sequence, a feature fashionable in our time, when time is in fashion: if a collection opens with a poem about “A Lost Ball,” it must close with “The Found Ball.”

Only pictures and ikons remained
In their places that year
When childhood was ended, and something
Happened to the old house: in a hurry
All the rooms with each other
Were exchanging their furniture,
Cupboards and screens, and a host
Of unwieldy big things:
And it was then that from under a sofa,
On the suddenly unmasked parquet,
Alive, and incredibly dear,
It was revealed in a corner.

The book’s exterior appearance is pleasing.

Having squeezed the final drop of sweetness from it, Fyodor stretched and got up from his couch. He felt very hungry. The hands of his watch had lately begun to misbehave, now and then starting to move counterclockwise, so that he could not depend on them; to judge by the light, however, the day, about to leave on a journey, had sat down with its family for a pensive pause. When Fyodor went outside he felt immersed in a damp chill (it’s a good thing I put that on): while he had been musing over his poems, rain had lacquered the street from end to end. The van had gone and in the spot where its tractor had recently stood, there remained next to the sidewalk a rainbow of oil, with the purple predominant and a plumelike twist. Asphalt’s parakeet. And what had been the name of the moving company? Max Lux. Mac’s luck.

Did I take the keys? Fyodor suddenly thought, stopping and thrusting his hand into his raincoat pocket. There he located a clinking handful, weighty and reassuring. When, three years ago, still during his existence here as a student, his mother had moved to Paris to live with Tanya, she had written that she just could not get used to being liberated from the perpetual fetters that chain a Berliner to the door lock. He imagined her joy upon reading the article about him and for an instant he felt maternal pride toward himself; not only that but a maternal tear burned the edge of his eyelids.

But what do I care whether or not I receive attention during my lifetime, if I am not certain that the world will remember me until its last darkest winter, marveling like Ronsard’s old woman? And yet… I am still a long way from thirty, and here today I am already noticed. Noticed! Thank you, my land, for this remotest… A lyric possibility flitted past, singing quite close to his ear. Thank you, my land, for your most precious… I no longer need the sound “oticed”: the rhyme has kindled life, but the rhyme itself is abandoned. And maddest gift my thanks are due… I suppose “meshes” waits in the wings. Did not have time to make out my third line in that burst of light. Pity. All gone now, missed my cue.

He bought some piroshki (one with meat, another with cabbage, a third with tapioca, a fourth with rice, a fifth… could not afford a fifth) in a Russian foodshop, which was a kind of wax museum of the old country’s cuisine, and quickly finished them off on a damp bench in a small public garden.

The rain began coming down faster: someone had suddenly tilted the sky. He had to take cover in the circular shelter at the streetcar stop. There on the bench two Germans with briefcases were discussing a deal and endowing it with such dialectic details that the nature of the merchandise was lost, as when you are looking through an article in Brockhaus’ Encyclopedia and lose its subject, indicated in the text only by its initial letter. Shaking her bobbed hair a girl entered the shelter with a small, wheezing, toadlike bulldog. Now this is odd: “remotest” and “noticed” are together again and a certain combination is ringing persistently. I will not be tempted.

The shower ended. With perfect simplicity—no dramatics, no tricks—all the streetlamps came on. He decided he could already set off for the Chernyshevskis’ so as to be there towards nine, Rhine, fine, cline. As happens with drunks, something preserved him when he crossed streets in this state. Illuminated by a street-lamp’s humid ray, a car stood at the curb with its motor running: every single drop on its hood was trembling. Who could have written it? Fyodor could not make a final choice among several emigre critics. This one was scrupulous but untalented; that one, dishonest but gifted; a third wrote only about prose; a fourth only about his friends; a fifth… and Fyodor’s imagination conjured up this fifth one: a man the same age as he or even, he thought, a year younger, who had