A.Sklyarenko: [  ] As a schoolboy Van is platonically in love with Mrs Tapirov's daughter [  ] The widow's name comes from tapir[  ] This exotic animal is mentioned by Bryusov in his 1911 poem "Весёлый зов весенней зелени..." [  ]In his devastating essay on Bryusov [  ] Yuli Aihenvald (the critic whom VN mentions in Speak, Memory along with Marina Tsvetaev, a "poet of genius") notes that this tapir, artificially brought from such a distant land for the rhyme's sake alone, tramples down with its heavy gait the whole poem.

Jansy Mello: I was reminded of Christian Morgenstern's verses: "Ein Wiesel / saß auf einem Kiesel …[  ] Das raffinier- / te Tier / tat’s um des Reimes willen." (A weasel / sat on a pebble / in the midst of a bubbling brook. / Do you know why? / The mooncalf / told me the secret / in confidence: / the clever beast / did it for the sake of a rhyme.). Instead of a tapir, a weasel…  And yet, how different. Morgenstern’s satirical twist is pure joy.

I wonder if VN would have agreed with the critic Aihenvald's rejection of random sounds  and references inserted for "the sake of the rhyme" ( or for "the sake of the pun").  This kind of manoeuvre, used for the fun of it and never in despair, would hold some appeal to VN, I think. Not necessarily by listing words with the same initial consonant or endings (cars, bars, stars… Carmen, barmen…), or like Hazel's "toilest". I must first check into some of the exchanges between VN and Edmund Wilson (in their letters, edited by S.Karlinski),*at their more playful moments.

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* - By googling after a short-cut into the VN/EW letters, I got sidetracked and found an entry for “Torpid Smoke: The stories of Vladimir Nabokov," edited by Steven G.Kellman and Irving Malin, mentioning  VN's experiments with rhyme: "I think that if one were to tune one's lyre to Puskin's or Derzhavin’s prosody, one ought to avoid inexact rhymes [  ] "More than once I have written in The Rudder about ungraceful rhymes, which torture one's ears and create a comical effect due to one's ear's habitual associations…A rhyme ought to make the reader both amazed and satisfied, amazed by how unusual it is, and satisfied with its preciseness and musicality [PSS,118)."  However, this is a kind of a "tapir" in our present exchange…!