As I pointed out earlier, in his memoir essay on Bryusov,
included in Necropolis, Hodasevich speaks of Bryusov's hope
to direct Russian literature under the Bolsheviks and mentions
gradusy (degrees):
А какая надежда на то, что в истории литературы
будет сказано: "В таком-то году повернул русскую литературу на столько-то
градусов".
One of the chapters of Hodasevich's essay on Muni is entitled
"Тень от дыма" (The Shadow of Smoke). Hodasevich quotes in it Muni's
words:
"А ко мне, не к стихам, а ко мне самому, каков я
есть, надо бы поставить эпиграф:
Другие дым, я тень от дыма,
Я всем завидую, кто дым."
(Others are smoke, I am a shadow of smoke
I envy everybody who is smoke.*
Muni regarded these lines as an epigraph to
himself - not to his verses, but to the person he
was.)
In the next chapter, "Семипудовая купчиха" (The
Seven-Pood-Heavy Merchant's Wife), Hodasevich points out that Muni used to
say he did not actually exist but others should not know
this:
— Видишь ли,— говорил он,— меня в
сущности нет, как ты знаешь. Но нельзя, чтобы это знали другие, а то сам
понимаешь, какие пойдут неприятности. И кончал по обыкновению
цитатой:
— Моя мечта — это воплотиться, но
чтобы уж окончательно, безвозвратно, в какую-нибудь толстую семипудовую
купчиху.**
In the next (and last) chapter, "Обуреваемый негр" (The
Shaken Negro), Hodasevich mentions two little tragedies written by Muni.
One of them was entitled The Shaken Negro (reminding the PF reader of
Kinbote's gardener) and ended in the hero dying under the wheels of
a tram. Hodasevich says that Muni (who shot himself dead in Minsk in
1916) had predicted in it his own death. On the other hand, it was
Ayhenvald who was killed by a Berlin trolley-car (on his way home from a
party given by the Nabokovs). Interestingly, Ayhenvald accused Bryusov of
his expulsion from Russia (onboard "the philosopher steamer"). In his essay on
Bryusov Hodasevich makes the following footnote:
Покойный критик Ю. И. Айхенвальд, высланный из
России в 1922 г., писал мне впоследствии: «О Брюсове… И сам я меньше всего
склонен его идеализировать. Он сделал мне не мало дурного и, когда сопричислился
к сильным мира сего, некрасиво, т.е. экономически мстил мне за отрицательный
отзыв о нём в одной из моих давнишних статей. Самая высылка моя — я это знаю
наверное, из источника безукоризненного — произошла при его содействии» (Письмо
от 5 августа 1926г.).
I have not tackled PF in serious, but - unless Shade is
Botkin's shadow - I suspect that Shade and Kinbote (who is actually
Professor Vseslav Botkin, American scholar of Russian descent) are two
different persons. Btw., the Shadows (a regicidal organization which
commissioned Gradus to assassinate the self-banished king) remind one of
Tyutchev's poem "Тени сизые смесились..." ("The blue-grey shadows got
mixed..."). The epithet sizyi ("blue-grey, dove-colored") brings to
mind shizyi oryol (smoky eagle) mentioned in the beginning of
Slovo:
Боянъ бо вещий,
аще кому хотяше песнь
творити,
то растекашется мыслию по древу,
серымъ вълкомъ по земли,
шизымъ орломъ подъ облакы.
For he, vatic Boyan,
if he wished to make a laud for one,
ranged in thought
[like the nightingale] over the tree;
like the grey wolf
across land;
like the smoky eagle
up to the clouds.
As has been pointed out before, Prince Vseslav is a character
in Slovo.
*the reminiscence of Tyutchev's famous lines:
"Our life," you said to me,
"was not the moon-lit bright smoke,
but this shadow running from the
smoke."
**Muni quotes the words of Ivan Karamazov's devil in
Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan's words "all is
allowed" are quoted by Shade in his poem.
Alexey Sklyarenko