In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his life in Berlin in the 1920s and in Paris in the late 1930s and compares Sirin (VN’s Russian nom de plume) to a meteor that passed across the dark sky of exile and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness:
I met many other émigré Russian authors. I did not meet Poplavski who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas.
Go to sleep, O Morella, how awful are aquiline lives
His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse. I met wise, prim, charming Aldanov; decrepit Kuprin, carefully carrying a bottle of vin ordinaire through rainy streets; Ayhenvald—a Russian version of Walter Pater—later killed by a trolleycar; Marina Tsvetaev, wife of a double agent, and poet of genius, who, in the late thirties, returned to Russia and perished there. But the author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic structure of society, so the mystagogues of émigré letters deplored his lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when in the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin’s admirers made much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirrorlike angles of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to “windows giving upon a contiguous world… a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.” Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness. (Chapter Fourteen, 2)
In his poem Mudrym (“To Wise Men,” 1903-1906) Bunin compares the hero to iskromyotnyi meteor (a sparkling meteor):
Герой – как вихрь, срывающий палатки,
Герой врагу безумный дал отпор,
Но сам погиб – сгорел в неравной схватке,
Как искромётный метеор.
А трус – живёт. Он тоже месть лелеет,
Он точит меткий дротик, но тайком.
О да, он – мудр! Но сердце в нём чуть тлеет:
Как огонёк под кизяком.
In Bunin’s poem meteor rhymes with otpor (repulse; rebuff). Otpor is an anagram of ropot (murmur, grumble) and of topor (axe). ln VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) Cincinnatus's brother-in-law, the wit, suggests that Cincinnatus reads the word ropot backward:
Возьми-ка слово "ропот", - говорил Цинциннату его шурин, остряк, - и прочти обратно. А? Смешно получается? Да, брат, - вляпался ты в историю. В самом деле, как это тебя угораздило?
"Take the word 'anxiety,'" Cincinnatus's brother-in-law, the wit, was saying to him. "Now take away the word 'tiny', Eh? Comes out funny, doesn't it? Yes, friend, you've really got yourself in a mess. In truth, what made you do such a thing?" (Chapter IX)
Kazn’ (“Execution,” 1915) is a poem by Bunin:
Туманно утро красное, туманно,
Да всё светлей, белее на восходе,
За тёмными, за синими лесами,
За дымными болотами, лугами...
Вставайте, подымайтесь, псковичи!
Роса дождём легла на пыль,
На крыши изб, на торг пустой,
На золото церковных глав,
На мой помост средь площади...
Точите нож, мочите солью кнут!
Туманно солнце красное, туманно,
Кровавое не светит и не греет
Над мутными, над белыми лесами,
Над росными болотами, лугами...
Орите позвончее, бирючи!
- Давай, мужик, лицо умыть,
Сапог обуть, кафтан надеть.
Веди меня, вали под нож
В единый мах - не то держись:
Зубами всех заем, не оторвут!
In the preceding paragraph of his autobiography VN says that Bunin invited him to some kind of expensive and fashionable eating place in Paris for a heart-to-heart talk:
Another independent writer was Ivan Bunin. I had always preferred his little-known verse to his celebrated prose (their interrelation, within the frame of his work, recalls Hardy’s case). At the time I found him tremendously perturbed by the personal problem of aging. The first thing he said to me was to remark with satisfaction that his posture was better than mine, despite his being some thirty years older than I. He was basking in the Nobel prize he had just received and invited me to some kind of expensive and fashionable eating place in Paris for a heart-to-heart talk. Unfortunately I happen to have a morbid dislike for restaurants and cafés, especially Parisian ones—I detest crowds, harried waiters, Bohemians, vermouth concoctions, coffee, zakuski, floor shows and so forth. I like to eat and drink in a recumbent position (preferably on a couch) and in silence. Heart-to-heart talks, confessions in the Dostoevskian manner, are also not in my line. Bunin, a spry old gentleman, with a rich and unchaste vocabulary, was puzzled by my irresponsiveness to the hazel grouse of which I had had enough in my childhood and exasperated by my refusal to discuss eschatological matters. Toward the end of the meal we were utterly bored with each other. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” remarked Bunin bitterly as we went toward the cloakroom. An attractive, frail-looking girl took the check for our heavy overcoats and presently fell with them in her embrace upon the low counter. I wanted to help Bunin into his raglan but he stopped me with a proud gesture of his open hand. Still struggling perfunctorily—he was now trying to help me—we emerged into the pallid bleakness of a Paris winter day. My companion was about to button his collar when a look of surprise and distress twisted his handsome features. Gingerly opening his overcoat, he began tugging at something under his armpit. I came to his assistance and together we finally dragged out of his sleeve my long woolen scarf which the girl had stuffed into the wrong coat. The thing came out inch by inch; it was like unwrapping a mummy and we kept slowly revolving around each other in the process, to the ribald amusement of three sidewalk whores. Then, when the operation was over, we walked on without a word to a street corner where we shook hands and separated. Subsequently we used to meet quite often, but always in the midst of other people, generally in the house of I. I. Fondaminski (a saintly and heroic soul who did more for Russian émigré literature than any other man and who died in a German prison). Somehow Bunin and I adopted a bantering and rather depressing mode of conversation, a Russian variety of American “kidding,” and this precluded any real commerce between us. (SM, Chapter Fourteen, 2)
In the 1890s Bunin lived in Poltava. The words ropot and topor occur in a close proximity to each other in Canto One (ll. 451-455) of Pushkin’s Poltava (1829):
Он заглушает ропот сонный.
Он говорит: «В неравный спор
Зачем вступает сей безумец?
Он сам, надменный вольнодумец,
Сам точит на себя топор.»
But he remorselessly suppresses
The sleepy grumbling in his heart.
He says: “But why’d the madman challenge
A foe so far beyond his measure?
That arrogant free thinker brought
The axe upon his neck himself.
(tr. I. Eubanks)
Describing the beheading of Kochubey and Iskra, Pushkin compares the road that leads to the site of the execution to zmeinyi khvost (a serpent’s tail):
Толпы кипят. Сердца трепещут.
Дорога, как змеиный хвост,
Полна народу, шевелится.
The crowd is boiling. Hearts are racing.
The road is clad in human scales,
And writhes, as if a serpent’s tail.
(Canto Two, ll. 387-389)
The road that leads to the fortress in which Cincinnatus is imprisoned resembles a snake:
Сообразно с законом, Цинциннату Ц. объявили смертный приговор шепотом. Все встали, обмениваясь улыбками. Седой судья, припав к его уху, подышав, сообщив, медленно отодвинулся, как будто отлипал. Засим Цинцинната отвезли обратно в крепость. Дорога обвивалась вокруг её скалистого подножья и уходила под ворота: змея в расселину. Был спокоен; однако его поддерживали во время путешествия по длинным коридорам, ибо он неверно ставил ноги, вроде ребенка, только что научившегося ступать, или точно куда проваливался, как человек, во сне увидевший, что идет по воде, но вдруг усомнившийся: да можно ли? Тюремщик Родион долго отпирал дверь Цинциннатовой камеры, - не тот ключ, - всегдашняя возня.
In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus С. in a whisper. All rose, exchanging smiles. The hoary judge put his mouth close to his ear, panted for a moment, made the announcement and slowly moved away, as though ungluing himself. Thereupon Cincinnatus was taken back to the fortress. The road wound around its rocky base and disappeared under the gate like a snake in a crevice. He was calm; however, he had to be supported during the journey through the long corridors, since he planted his feet unsteadily, like a child who has just learned to walk, or as if he were about to fall through like a man who has dreamt that he is walking on water only to have a sudden doubt: but is this possible? Rodion, the jailer, took a long time to unlock the door of Cincinnatus’s cell — it was the wrong key — and there was the usual fuss. (Chapter One)
In Pushkin’s Stikhi, sochinyonnye noch'yu vo vremya bessonnitsy ("Verses Composed at Night during the Insomnia," 1830) shyopot (whisper) rhymes with ropot:
Мне не спится, нет огня;
Всюду мрак и сон докучный.
Ход часов лишь однозвучный
Раздаётся близ меня,
Парки бабье лепетанье,
Спящей ночи трепетанье,
Жизни мышья беготня...
Что тревожишь ты меня?
Что ты значишь, скучный шёпот?
Укоризна, или ропот
Мной утраченного дня?
От меня чего ты хочешь?
Ты зовёшь или пророчишь?
Я понять тебя хочу,
Смысла я в тебе ищу...
I can't sleep, the light is out;
Chasing senseless dreams in gloom.
Clocks at once, inside my room,
Somewhere next to me, resound.
Parcae's soft and mild chatter,
Sleeping twilight's noisy flutter,
Life's commotion -- so insane..
Why am I to feel this pain?
What's your meaning, boring mumble?
Disapproving, do you grumble
Of the day I spent in vain?
What has made you so compelling?
Are you calling or foretelling?
I just want to understand,
Thus I'm seeking your intent...
(Transl. M. Kneller)