Subject
RJ: VASILY SHISKOV (fwd)
Date
Body
British Nabokovian Roy Johnson continues his series of essays drawn from
his book manuscript on VN's short stories. Johnson plans to expand his
coverage to include the newly translated material in the new VN complete
short stories collection. NABOKV-L encourages comments and discussion
based on these essays. For those who wish to do their homework, the story
next week is "The Assistant Producer."
------------------------------------------
This week's story - VASILY SHISHKOV
-------------------------------------------
'Vasiliy Shishkov' (August 1939) need not detain us long. It is
a story which would hardly make any sense at all without its
biographical note. The emigre poet George Adamovich had been a
consistent critic of Nabokov's work, and Nabokov had tricked him
by writing a poem under the eponymous pseudonym. Not guessing its
true origin, Adamovich had praised the poem. To capitalise on
this by revealing the joke, Nabokov published the story in
question in the newspaper to which Adamov contributed a weekly
column.
The first person narrator, who turns out to be called Gospodin
Nabokov, is approached by an eager young man: "My name is Vasiliy
Shishkov. I am a poet" (TD,p.207). He wants Nabokov to give him
a sincere judgement of his work. When he produces the poems they
turn out to be worthless trash, and Nabokov tells him so,
whereupon he reveals that he has deliberately made them so to
test the rigour of Nabokov's honesty. He then produces his real
work, which is very good. In addition, he confesses to suffering
an acute form of *Weltschmerz* and even plans to publish a
magazine called 'A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity'. When this
project falls through he decides to simply disappear, leaving his
work behind. The joke concludes with the narrator's observation
"in a wildly literal sense ... he meant disappearing in his art,
dissolving in his verse" (p.215).
It is only in this sense, as a case study of what Nabokov
(*Vladimir* Nabokov, that is) calls "one poet dissolving in
another" (p.206) that the story has any independent meaning, and
even then the fiction quickly bites its own tail because there
is *not* an extant body of work by the imaginary poet, only that
written by Nabokov under his name. But what the story does show
is the manner in which Nabokov was keen to exploit the interfaces
between art and life as the sources for his fiction.
So the story is autobiographical in two senses. Its origins lie
in the historical rivalry between Adamovich and Nabokov. In
addition, the concerns of a poet who feels under threat from the
world and who hopes that his work will survive him have obvious
parallels to Nabokov's own life as an exile in 1939. Although
'Vasiliy Shishkov' might be a slight piece of work, Nabokov went
on later the same year to produce one of his most serious and
accomplished longer stories (LIK)- and one which deals with
precisely the desperate extremes of migr life. It even reflects
the geographic relocations of emigration at that time. For as the
Nazis moved westwards there was only one direction to go for
those emigres trapped in Paris, and that was southwards towards
the Riviera.
--
Dr Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
UK M20 6GZ
his book manuscript on VN's short stories. Johnson plans to expand his
coverage to include the newly translated material in the new VN complete
short stories collection. NABOKV-L encourages comments and discussion
based on these essays. For those who wish to do their homework, the story
next week is "The Assistant Producer."
------------------------------------------
This week's story - VASILY SHISHKOV
-------------------------------------------
'Vasiliy Shishkov' (August 1939) need not detain us long. It is
a story which would hardly make any sense at all without its
biographical note. The emigre poet George Adamovich had been a
consistent critic of Nabokov's work, and Nabokov had tricked him
by writing a poem under the eponymous pseudonym. Not guessing its
true origin, Adamovich had praised the poem. To capitalise on
this by revealing the joke, Nabokov published the story in
question in the newspaper to which Adamov contributed a weekly
column.
The first person narrator, who turns out to be called Gospodin
Nabokov, is approached by an eager young man: "My name is Vasiliy
Shishkov. I am a poet" (TD,p.207). He wants Nabokov to give him
a sincere judgement of his work. When he produces the poems they
turn out to be worthless trash, and Nabokov tells him so,
whereupon he reveals that he has deliberately made them so to
test the rigour of Nabokov's honesty. He then produces his real
work, which is very good. In addition, he confesses to suffering
an acute form of *Weltschmerz* and even plans to publish a
magazine called 'A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity'. When this
project falls through he decides to simply disappear, leaving his
work behind. The joke concludes with the narrator's observation
"in a wildly literal sense ... he meant disappearing in his art,
dissolving in his verse" (p.215).
It is only in this sense, as a case study of what Nabokov
(*Vladimir* Nabokov, that is) calls "one poet dissolving in
another" (p.206) that the story has any independent meaning, and
even then the fiction quickly bites its own tail because there
is *not* an extant body of work by the imaginary poet, only that
written by Nabokov under his name. But what the story does show
is the manner in which Nabokov was keen to exploit the interfaces
between art and life as the sources for his fiction.
So the story is autobiographical in two senses. Its origins lie
in the historical rivalry between Adamovich and Nabokov. In
addition, the concerns of a poet who feels under threat from the
world and who hopes that his work will survive him have obvious
parallels to Nabokov's own life as an exile in 1939. Although
'Vasiliy Shishkov' might be a slight piece of work, Nabokov went
on later the same year to produce one of his most serious and
accomplished longer stories (LIK)- and one which deals with
precisely the desperate extremes of migr life. It even reflects
the geographic relocations of emigration at that time. For as the
Nazis moved westwards there was only one direction to go for
those emigres trapped in Paris, and that was southwards towards
the Riviera.
--
Dr Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
UK M20 6GZ