The dialectic of perception of Nabokov's poems is such that the author's well-known tendency to repeat "someone else's" as his own should be seen not as a lack of talent, originality of aesthetic solutions, but as a characteristic way of expressing his originality. Nabokov's talent allows him to pass "other people's "ideas through the prism of his personality and make them"his own". Therefore, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the "own", individual and original, in Nabokov's creative heritage is inseparable from the reinterpreted tradition.

You can name a wide range of names of those Russian artists with whose work Nabokov's poetry is fundamentally correlated. These are primarily A. S. Pushkin, Andrey Bely, A. Blok, B. Pasternak, A. Fet, F. Tyutchev. This list can be continued, but for the sake of the article, we would like to limit ourselves to one parallel that we have not yet mentioned, but which is obvious.

In one of his letters to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov disagrees with his addressee that Russian literature entered a period of decline after 1905: "The decline of Russian literature in the periods 1905-1917 is a Soviet invention. Blok, Bely, Bunin < ... > write their best stuff. And never - even in Pushkin's time - has poetry been so popular. I was born in this era, I grew up in this atmosphere" (The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. 1940 - 1971. New York, 1979. P. 220). Based on this letter, Johnson concludes that symbolism played an important role in Nabokov's creative development (Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis. 1985. P. 2 - 3). And Nabokov himself considered the Russian Silver Age to be his "cradle". It is significant that, naming two symbolist poets-Bely and Blok, he also includes Bunin, whose work is usually attributed to realism. On the other hand, Nabokov's negative attitude towards this literary movement is well known. What attracted him to Bunin's work?

page 39

On November 9, 1929, an article by critic Kirill Zaitsev titled" Bunin's World and the Syrian World "appeared in the Paris newspaper Rossiya i Slavyanskoe. The article was a review of the beginning of the novel "The Luzhin Defense "and an excerpt from Bunin's novel" The Life of Arsenyev", which appeared in one issue of Sovremennye Zapiski in 1929. Zaitsev calls this combination of circumstances "an edifying example." He speaks very unflatteringly of Nabokov's work, comparing "the heights of Bunin's poetry"with" the Syrian Spiritual Underground."

However, the very fact of such a comparison indicates that critics of the Russian diaspora were ready to consider the young Nabokov a literary rival of Bunin, who was already recognized as a master of prose and poetry at that time. Bunin himself felt the same way about Nabokov, and even created his own literary masterpiece, Dark Alleys, in an effort to surpass his "even too" capable student. "This boy pulled out a pistol and took down all the old people with one shot, including me...", - Bunin responded in the late 20s to the appearance of novels by Nabokov, who then wrote under the pseudonym Sirin: "Mashenka "(1926)," King, Queen, Jack "(1928),"Protection of Luzhin " (1930).

In the 1920s, the young Nabokov drew on a number of stylistic achievements of his older contemporary. Here we should talk about at least two specific techniques of Bunin's technique that Nabokov borrowed. This is, first of all, the repetition of a word or phrase for the purpose of emphase or rhyme. Although this technique was not Bunin's invention, Nabokov, in his review of Selected Poems, identified it precisely as Bunin's achievement and willingly adopted it. This is Bunin's signature technique that Nabokov uses in many of his poems. Let us recall, for example, the stanza from the 1919 poem " I love this life with ecstatic love...":

And I will remember the sun, the victorious sun,
and the happiness of each day.
Inspiration I will remember, and to the pale angels
I will say: let me go!
Or the first lines of "Evenings in a vacant lot":

Inspiration, pink sky,
black house with one fiery

.
Oh, this sky,

drunk by the fiery window

(Italics here and further are ours. - A.M.).

Another feature of the older contemporary's poetry that attracts the young poet's attention is the so-called gift of cee-

page 40

visions of Bunin. Nabokov himself spoke about this, calling Bunin a "color seer" and especially noting his ability to use purple. The multicolored language palette brings Nabokov's poetry closer to Bunin's. Here, for example, is the beginning of Bunin's Listopad:

The forest, like a painted tower,
Purple, gold, scarlet,
A cheerful, mottled wall
It stands over a bright glade.
Yellow carved birches
Glisten in azure blue...
Here are lines from Nabokov's poem "Clouds" (1921, Berlin):

In the sun the flying rain shines golden,
The lakes in the sky are turning a hot blue,
and a white cloud rises from behind a purple cloud
like a bare shoulder.
Even a whole series of parallels in the color scheme is striking. "Painting" in words is a distinctive feature of Bunin and Nabokov's poetry. M. Voloshin rightly noted that Bunin as a poet "has a field in which he has reached the final points of perfection. This is the area of pure painting, brought to the extreme limits that are accessible to the elements of the word" (Voloshin M. Faces of creativity. L., 1988. p. 491).

The same can be said about Nabokov. In the mid-1920s, the well-known critic Eichenwald noted in his introductory article: "Yes, he [Nabokov] sees keenly, he hears sensitively, and each piece of time and space is much more meaningful and interesting for him, who is observant, than for us... he subtly notices colors and shades, smells and sounds, and everything becomes unexpectedly significant and important under his gaze and from his words" (Nabokov V. Pokhotemeniya I poemy [Poems and Poems], Moscow, 1991, p. 13).

Nabokov's poems about nature attest to the poet's keen eye, his ability to notice the smallest details, which from the very beginning was the hallmark of all his poetry. So, in "Birches" (1921, the collection "Mountain Path") describes "the grass is all in shadowy purple cobwebs", and in the poem " At Sunset "(1935) refers to a bench "with a half-rotted board high above the ruddy river". This quality, as well as some others, shares Nabokov with Bunin, whose poetry is also filled with colorful details.

The theme of nature for both of them is invariably connected with the image of the lost Russia, which has always remained beautiful for them. The theme of the estate is also common. This is a dilapidated house, neglected garden, dubo-

page 41

vaya, linden or birch alley, old bench and field. Bunin grew up here:

A silent silence torments me.
Languishes nests native desolation.
I grew up here. But he's looking out of the window
A decayed garden. Smoulder floats over the house...
Classic Russian landscape-river and forest - by Nabokov:

Above the noisy river, heavy
with the azure of the drawn sky ,
the cheerful
but still uncertain forest swayed and froze.
In Nabokov's novel "The True Life of Sebastian Knight" there are such lines: "One of the purest feelings is the longing of an exile for home, when he strains his memory to the limit in endless attempts to preserve a vivid image of the past "(Zvezda. 1996. N 11. P. 125).

The poetry of Bunin and Nabokov is a poetry of remembrance. Moreover, for both the center of attraction, the main subject of memory is the homeland and childhood. Childhood is an "earthly paradise", lost along with the motherland, the happiest time of life, the subject of constant longing. Childhood and Russia are always together. In Other Shores, Nabokov described his homesickness as a hypertrophy of longing for a lost childhood, which he writes about in verse:

Every time I go to bed, I think:
maybe

my warmly dressed, clumsy childhood will bother to visit me
.
Returning to the homeland is possible only in a dream and for Bunin:

And I dreamed that sometimes in the autumn
On a cold night, I returned home.
Nabokov is also related to Bunin by the desire to bring poetry and prose closer together. This is evident both on the external level, when stories and novellas are combined with poems in their own collections and collected works, and poems are included in novels (for example, "The Gift", "Look at the Harlequins", the short story cycle "The Return of Chorb"), and on the internal level, when prose works are saturated with poetic imagery and metaphor. It is also worth noting that if

page 42

at first, poetry prevailed in the works of both, but later prose begins to influence poetry, which makes some researchers consider the poetry of Nabokov and Bunin only a "breakdown of the pen" of great prose writers.

Nabokov thought highly of Bunin. He dedicated to him the story "Resentment" and a poem in which, addressing Ivan Alekseevich, he swore:

... Not by thought, not by word
I will not sin against your muse.
In 1928, he wrote that Bunin's poems were the best that the Russian muse had created in several decades. He calls him a poet whose equal has not been seen since the time of Tyutchev. This was an indirect polemic with critics who believed that Bunin's poetry was inferior to his prose.

A. Bitov, in the preface to the collection "Krug", accurately noted Nabokov's peculiar attitude towards Bunin: he preferred poetry to Bunin's prose, thereby protecting his own poems from his own prose . Nabokov. Krug. L., 1990, p. 17). But his poetry is not at all an addition to prose, but something equivalent to it.

Petrozavodsk

Permanent link to this publication: