excerpts:
Chapter Eleven of Nabokov's autobiographical text
(Conсlusive Evidence, 1951; Speak, Memory, 1967), narrating the
creation of his first poem at age 15, is absent from the 1954 authorial Russian
version, Drugie berega [Other shores]. In that chapter, the
memoirist portrays the gestation of his maiden verses with
condescending/forgiving irony as he launches into a detailed formal analysis
(which resulted in the piece's rejection by the New Yorker in 1948; Boyd,
II: 686) of their slavish dependence on the 19th-century Russian poetic
tradition. The theme of juvenile imitativeness is echoed by several other
motifs... The affinities of Nabokov's “first poem”
with Khodasevich's “Monkey” ...with the intention “to reconstruct the summer of
1914” ...The setting of Khodasevich’s poem is a dacha near Moscow, that
of Nabokov’s “first poem,” one near St. Petersburg. Thus the time and, in a
sense, the place coincide, as does the monkey-cum-barrel-organ motif...Further
parallels are, however, not traceable, since Nabokov’s poem appears to have
stayed “unwritten.”[...] All that has been netted by Nabokov scholars are some
similarities in the early poem “Dozhd' proletel” [The rain had flown], 1917
(Boyd, I: 108, Malikova: 769-70), to which one can add a monkey and a
caged animal (tushkanchik [jerboa]) appearing in the poems “Obez'ianu v
sarafane…” (A monkey in a sarafan…), and “V zverintse” (At the Zoo)
respectively, both published already in emigration, in 1923. ...In all likelihood, we are faced not just with a twist of
“fictitiousness” in autobiographical writing (much discussed in Nabokov
criticism, e. g. in John Burt Foster’s book) but with a fully blown
mystification: a covert appropriation—aping—of a fellow poet’s work, and a
“Monkey” at that. Chapter Eleven as a whole would then forfeit its claim to a
documentary account of a first creative experience, ending up instead as an
archly fictionalized tall tale (somewhat similar to Isaak Babel’s Spravka/Moi
pervyi gonorar [Answer to inquiry/My first fee], 1928/1937, where “aping” a
friendly senior’s work—in that case, Maxim Gorky’s Childhood—also looms
large). In fact, Chapter Eleven was originally published as a short story
(“First Poem”, Partisan Review, September 1949)." ...
[...] Nabokov not only datelines his “poem” a la
Khodasevich, but also walks the talk of Fet.[...] The appropriation pulled on
Khodasevich is especially noteworthy in the context of Dar [The Gift],
1936, with its doubles relationship between Fedor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (a
fictionalized alter ego of Nabokov-Sirin) and Koncheev (a “Khodasevich”)... The
author's reference to a common pool of motifs being carefully distributed
between Speak, Memory and The Gift explicitly erases the boundary
separating his fiction and non-fiction; it echoes Nabokov's other
statements to the same effect, e. g. his programmatic decision to write
not a pure autobiography but “rather a new hybrid between that and a novel”
(Nabokov, Selected Letters, 69; quoted by Foster, 179, and Malikova,
763).[...] Apparently, the parallel existence of two
versions of his creative beginnings—autobiographical and novelistic (the
authorized English translation of The Gift came out in 1963)—did not
bother Nabokov as long as it took place in a foreign idiom or across the
language barrier. It was their meeting on Russian linguistic soil that gave him
psychological pause and that he had successfully avoided—until his posthumous
Russian comeback. As for eluding Khodasevich's notice, the success of the
appropriation was as complete as it was prompt. Just two years after his death
and one year into Nabokov's American avatar, Nabokov published translations of
several poems by Khodasevich, “The Monkey” among them! In other words, almost a
decade before implicitly claiming that poem as his own in a fictitious
non-fiction, he actually had penned it—in English [...]As stated by Berkeley Professor Robert P. Hughes, who
reprinted and prefaced this and two other poetic translations by Nabokov from
Khodasevich, along with the writer's 1973 translation of his own 1939 laudatory
obituary/essay on Khodasevich (The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in
the West, 1922-1972, ed. by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr., Berkeley:
UC Press, 1977: 52-87 [...] Boyd discusses the fictitiousness of the “first
poem” (I, 108-9), lists The Bitter Air of Exile in his Bibliography, and
mentions Nabokov's translations from Khodasevich in passing (II: 319), but never
connects the three.
[...] Nabokov is known to have liked playing games on
unsuspecting readers and later taunting them with their lack of discernment...
Be that as it may, on solving a couple more Nabokov charades, one is tempted to
ask the otherworldly VN whether he himself has noticed that hiding in the
scholarly name of his Eupithecia Nabokovi is a “good monkey”, Gr.
eu-pithekos (which, to an extent, is also true of the bluntly English
label Nabokov Pug, as it is from Gr. simos [flat-nosed, pug-nosed]
that Lat. simia [monkey, ape] is derived). He must have, for that
particular butterfly, the act of labeling, and the image of aping all converge
on the closure of the poem celebrating VN's most cherished lepidopteral catch:
"Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,/ poems that take a
thousand years to die/ but ape the immortality of this/ red label on a little
butterfly (“A Discovery”, 1943; in reciting this poem, Nabokov especially
stressed the word “ape”). " ... Having joined
the ranks of professional crackers of Nabokov's conundrums one also wonders
whether a better tack would not have been to play on their arch composer the
antithetical game of ignoring the challenge. After all, they are not age-old
enigmas wrapped in mysteries of artistic creation, but rather, to continue
paraphrasing the Churchillian description of Russia, hoaxes surrounded with
riddles inside puzzles. Well-made, but
man-made."