Vladimir Nabokov
FIRST POEM
In order to reconstruct the summer of 1914, when the
numb fury of verse-making first came over me, all I really need is to
visualize a certain pavilion. There the lank, fifteen-year-old lad I
then was, sought shelter during a thunderstorm, of which there was
an inordinate number that July. I dream of my pavilion at least twice
a year, and some symbol, that of a frustrated landjunkerish complex
or the like, might be extracted from it, I dare say, by whoever believes
in the dreary inanities of psychoanalytic interpretation.
As
a rule, it appears in my dreams quite independently of their
subject matter, which, of course, may be anything, from abduction
to zoolatry.
It
hangs around, so to speak, with the unobtrusiveness of
an artist's signature. I find it clinging to a corner of the dream canvas
or cunningly worked into some ornamental part of the picture. At
times, however, it seems to be suspended in the middle distance-a
trifle baroque, and yet in tune with the handsome trees whose sap
once ran through its timber. Wine-red and bottle-green and dark-blue
lozenges of stained glass lend a chapel-like touch to the lattice work
of its casements.
It
is just as it was in my boyhood, a sturdy old
wooden structure above a ferny ravine in a private park some fifty
miles south of St. Petersburg. Just as it was, or perhaps a little more
perfect. In the real thing some of the glass was missing, crumpled
leaves had been swept in by the wind. At my feet, a dead horsefly lay
on its back near the brown remains of a birch ament. And the patches
of disintegrating whitewash on the inside of the door had been used
by various trespassers for such jottings as: "Dasha, Tamara and Lena
have been here" or "Down with Austria!"
The storm passed quickly. The rain which had been a mass of
violently descending water wherein the trees writhed and rolled, was
reduced all of a sudden to slanting lines of silent gold against
.a
back-
