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* - MS: "The Poets" was printed in Contemporary Annals in July 1939 and attracted the attention of émigré critics. Before discussing the possible reasons why  Adamovich allowed himself to be deceived by Nabokov's mystifying scheme--and hailed the birth of a new poet--I would like to outline another motive for  Nabokov's choice of the name "Vasiliy Shishkov." It goes back to Khodasevich, who had a number of reasons to dislike both G. Ivanov and  Adamovich....During a joint evening of poetry in 1936 in Paris, Nabokov heard Khodasevich read "Zhizn' Vasiliia Travnikova" (The Life of Vasilii Travnikov), a fictional account of the life and works of Aleksandr Pushkin's elder contemporary, whom Khodasevich invented not only to trap his literary enemies but also to reaffirm his own place in what he saw as the kernel tradition in Russian poetry....A brilliant performance, "The Life of  Vasilii Travnikov" beguiled the audience and elicited much praise from Adamovich, who was generally reluctant to pay Khodasevich his due....Khodasevich's  mystification worked perfectly, which not only created a precedent for Nabokov's invented poet, Vasiliy Shishkov, but also offered concrete tips...Just as the inception of these two mystifications reveals many affinities, their reception also follows a similar pattern, especially when in both cases the herald of the two "new" poets--Travnikov and Shishkov--was Adamovich... Three years later, Adamovich gave an enthusiastic endorsement to another "discovered" poet, Vasiliy Shishkov, in his regular column in The Latest News: If Nabokov in his earlier mystification, "Night Journey," and Khodasevich in "The Life of Vasilii Travnikov," seem to partake of a playful and witty sensibility of the Pushkinian Golden Age, then Nabokov of the "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle employs literary mystification to communicate with the readers directly and without any mediating stylization. Constructing a new authorial persona for himself and lurking behind the semitransparent veil of mystification, Nabokov created a genuine voice which is unparalleled by his other poems. In the poems of the "Vasiliy Shishkov" cycle, love, language/silence, and death are intoned by a relentless and at times clairvoyant poet....Rather than noting the meter of "The Poets," which is not at all unusual for twentieth-century Russian prosody, Adamovich probably saw in the poem a sober, direct, naked voice prophesying the end of Russian culture in European exile. (published in Zembla)