The Jetsam - Lara Biyuts (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📗

courtyard of Cheka (the Bolshevik security service), being executed for participation in monarchist conspiracy. (One legend of his death says that at the ceremony of the upcoming shooting down, one of the Bolshevik commissars was literate enough to recognize Gumilyov among the convinced. The commissar stopped the executors and turned to Gumilyov: “Poet Gumilyov! Come forth!” Without leaving the rank of the condemned, the poet said in reply: “Here is not a poet Gumilyov. Here is an army officer Gumilyov.” Thus, he was killed among other army officers.) By the way, the poem The Tram That Lost Its Way first occurred to Gumilyov one early morning, on the way home, to his apartment in St Petersburg, where he walked after his next long night of playing cards at his friend’s.

As some biographers of one more poet of Silver Age Marina Tsvetayeva (1892–1941) say, she foretold her death of a stranglehold in her poem. Indeed, she dies in this way, with her suicide looking like a poor imitation, committed by security service.

In the 20th century, among Russian researchers and readers, the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is a cult figure, acknowledged as an undoubted prophet. He never foretold a way that he would die, but in his young age, he heard the mystic warning from a gipsy fortuneteller, who told him to beware of a tall blond man wearing in white. Pushkin was said to keep it always in mind, and the gipsy proved to be right, he died shot in his stomach by the tall blond army officer whose full uniform was white. With his vivid temperament and worldly nature, a freethinker, Pushkin is a true man of genius in his writings with his genius akin Mozart’s. Pushkin has several beautiful poems, dedicated to a long way along a snow-clad road in winter. One of the poems, most impressive, in my view, is entitled Devils.

A long way through the steppe, by night. A blizzard in the steppe. And a vision of devils. What do the travelers see and hear overhead? Note: overhead, some spirits flying high in the night sky, in other words, in the ether. It’s the snow and sounds of the blizzard, on the face of it, overhead as well as around. Yes, and yet it’s something more. Every time I reread the poem, I feel more and more certain that in his vision of the blizzard, like in a prophetic dream, the author as though foresees the modern day wireless means of communication, radio, telephone and so forth, whose realm is nothing other but the ether or cosmos, and whose noise could seem terrific to a 19th century human and even to some of us, if we could hear all the radio and phone lines at once like it happens at times, when we happen to listen to radio short waves. Giving my imagination a bridle, I permit myself to say that the vision in the poem is that of the future inventions, which might look like something supernatural, like evil spirits in the author’s time, and which is seen through the alembic of his fancy. “What a crowd! Where are they carried?” asks the author, and I’d like to know an answer to the question along with him. Midsummer and a frosty winter are most weird periods of a year, when it is possible to see and foresee much. The sounds of the wireless means of communication and the essences of humans who serve and use them (advertizing, communing) are heard in the noise of the blizzard, though I am not sure concerning the Internet system, because personally I hardly ever listen to music on the Net, therefore the Internet is mostly silent to me -- all this is heard in the noise and seen by the author and maybe something else, much more supernatural. At least, I feel like this, when reading the text in Russian. Here is the text in English:

 

“Devils” (translated by Genia Gurarie)

 

Storm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;

Flying snow is set alight

By the moon whose form they cover;

Blurred the heavens, blurred the night.

On and on our coach advances,

Little bell goes din-din-din...

Round are vast, unknown expanses;

Terror, terror is within.

 -- Faster, coachman! "Can't, sir, sorry:

Horses, sir, are nearly dead.

I am blinded, all is blurry,

All snowed up; can't see ahead.

Sir, I tell you on the level:

We have strayed, we've lost the trail.

What can WE do, when a devil

Drives us, whirls us round the vale?

"There, look, there he's playing, jolly!

Huffing, puffing in my course;

There, you see, into the gully

Pushing the hysteric horse;

Now in front of me his figure

Looms up as a queer mile-mark --

Coming closer, growing bigger,

Sparking, melting in the dark."

Storm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;

Flying snow is set alight

By the moon whose form they cover;

Blurred the heavens, blurred the night.

We can't whirl so any longer!

Suddenly, the bell has ceased,

Horses halted... -- Hey, what's wrong there?

“Who can tell! -- a stump? a beast?..”

Blizzard's raging, blizzard’s crying,

Horses panting, seized by fear;

Far away his shape is flying;

Still in haze the eyeballs glare;

Horses pull us back in motion,

Little bell goes din-din-din...

I behold a strange commotion:

Evil spirits gather in --

Sundry, ugly devils, whirling

In the moonlight's milky haze:

Swaying, flittering and swirling

Like the leaves in autumn days...

What a crowd! Where are they carried?

What's the plaintive song I hear?

Is a goblin being buried,

Or a sorceress married there?

Storm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;

Flying snow is set alight

By the moon whose form they cover;

Blurred the heavens, blurred the night.

Swarms of devils come to rally,

Hurtle in the boundless height;

Howling fills the whitening valley,

Plaintive screeching rends my heart...

 

“Sundry, ugly devils, whirling” -- this line can be translated closer to the original text as “oh so endless; oh so ugly”. “Ugly” because “they” or rather “it” is alien to the narrator therefore frightening. “Endless” because “it” acts in the endless ether or cosmos.

Any thoughts?

 

2009

 

NABOKOV AND THE CULTURE OF HOMOSEXUALITY

 

As we know, Vladimir Nabokov succeeded in several kinds of sports when he was a young boy and then a young man. Going in for ports was a matter of course to his milieu and his family, and it was for the sake of his father’s love for him as well as it was the Russian doctors’ prescription. When VN was an elderly professor in the USA, he wrote that he was ready to admit that he looked much like a hippopotamus, and yet “my calves still look like a footballer’s.” Only we, nabocophiles can know how high was the scale of his narcissism, which as such could make a human believed queer – no? His narcissism plus his genius, which is always a sort of deviation, all together make him one of queerest people ever.

However much we feel certain of that, VN himself never believed so – or it only seemed to be.  

The great Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov was a confirmed homophobe. “It behooves his fans and admirers to admit it -- and also to regret it.” -- (Galya Diment, vice president of the Nabokov Society and a professor in the Slavic department at the University of Washington). Portraying his homosexual personages as shallow, intellectually trivial and ineffectual, he often uses the word “mincing”, introducing them with a nudge and a wink and a snigger. Aires and graces. However, in his writings he mocks at everyone in general, including the reader, which is his favorite attitude, and gays seem to be the favorite object of his irony -- in this regard it is interesting to note that, however bad and pitiful they are, they are in almost every his 17 novels, beginning with his first novel Mary.

Anti-Semites carry on conversations about the Jewish mafia; homophobes carry on conversations about a homosexual mafia. But VN has no such ideas -- he who was born to the family of the progressive politician and lawyer deeply involved in legislative debates over homosexuality, he whose wife was Jewish, and “among the writers he admired there were plenty of homosexuals, from Proust to Edmund White.” Perhaps his homophobia was a result of critiques by two gays, two his archenemies Georgy Adamovich and Georgy Ivanov? But he bore presence of two other homosexuals, successfully communing with them: his publisher Frank Taylor and professor Karlinsky who wrote book reviews, praising to VN’s books. This makes us recall other writer with the same attitude towards homosexuals and homosexuality, with the same abundance of bad gays in his works, Marcel Proust. The French writer often portrays homosexuals in grotesque manner, but his own outright homosexuality lurks behind this manner. It would probably be rather a crazy idea to suppose: what if Nabokov is a latent homosexual? Perhaps he is a Russian Proust, however unfounded the supposition is? VN adored Proust, especially when he was young, although later he was slightly disappointed, and yes they have something in common with each other, thought not without some differences. Nabokov novels main characters are always men, with women being only their pale reflections. As we know, psychologists suspect that inveterate homophobes are latent homosexuals, that the homophobes castigate publicly homosexuality merely because they feel it subconsciously in their mind, and with the fulminations and some open and aggressive actions they try to suppress it -- in their own mind first of all. That seems closer to Nabokov’s case. VN is known to regard homosexuality as a heritable phenomenon, and he had a reason to fear of activating the genes in his own nature.

His father had three brothers: Dmitri, Sergei and Konstantin; the latter was known as a man “indifferent to women”. Konstantin Nabokov was a thin, prim, rather melancholic bachelor “with anxious eyes”. He lived in London, in a club apartment with walls hung with photos of “some young English officers”. Charg d’affaires at the Russian Embassy, he had time to publish his Notes of a Diplomat. After the February Revolution he deputized for the Ambassador. The “indifference to women” is the euphemism that VN uses for more exact definition “homosexuality”, which comes out of the intimate relationship of Uncle Konstantin and Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich who was a famous homosexual.

The portrayal of his maternal uncle Vasily Rukavishnikov is more explicit yet the same careful in Nabokov’s memoirs. It was a not tall, thin man with thick moustache and short brushed-up dark hair; he enjoyed wearing refined clothes and jewellery; a carnation was always in the buttonhole of his elegant suit; he belonged to the decadent circle of the fashionable dandies where Oscar Wilde was an icon; and he was a bachelor too. Uncle Vasily, “Ruka” (“Hand”), as his friends called him, stuttered at some consonants; he wrote good verses in French that he set to his own accompaniment -- I’ve translated two lines of one of his romances --

“A flock of doves shades the tender sky.

Chrysanthemums dress up for All Hallow’s Day…”

 -- but of all the Nabokovs his nephew Sergei was he who learned to play the music by heart. Uncle Vasily was a diplomat at the Russian Embassy in Rome, specializing at decipher. His white, pillared mansion bordered upon the Nabokov’s family estate of Vyra; nearly every day Uncle Vasily came to the Nabokovs at lunchtime. “When I was aged eight or nine,” VN writes in Speak, Memory, “he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and (while two young footmen were clearing the table in the empty dining room) fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments.” As VN writes, his uncle “walked mincing with his small feet wearing white shoes” -- right in this way he always describes homosexuals. When Vladimir was 11 or so, once his uncle came to Vyra, and after alighting and greeting he said to his nephew in French, “How yellow you’ve got. You’ve lost your good looks, my poor little thing.” Apparently, his nephew’s former good looks attracted him. Nevertheless, when his nephew was 15 he declared Vladimir as his heir; he bequeathed his favorite nephew approximately two million dollars and a large Russian estate, but his European real estate -- the Italian villa and Pyrenean castle -- he left by will to “an Italian” and