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RJ:Vasiliy Shishkov (fwd)
Date
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From: Robert Cook <rcook@rhi.hi.is>
A new subsacriber, I am enjoying Roy Johnson's analyses, and wish to
comment on VASILIY SHISHKOV, last week's story. I find it hard to agree
that the story "would hardly make any sense without its biographical note."
I confess to having read the note first (pp. 652-3 in the new volume of
VN's stories), but the story makes sense to me on its own, and the prank
played by VN on George Adamovich is superfluous information. (By the way,
according to that note the Shishkov poem which VN invented was NOT
published in the same newspaper to which Adamov contributed a weekly column
- as Roy Johnson claims. But VN was confessedly uncertain about the
bibliographical details.)
That the story basically concerns identity is underscored by the subtheme
of identity cards and passports - the four Germans in GN's hotel, facing
carte d'identite problems at the beginning, and later passport problems.
When Shishkov shows GN his doggerel poems, he compares them to the identity
card he would have shown the police, establishing a parallel between
official credentials and artistic credentials. When he presents GN with his
real poems, he says "Here is my real passport." When he disappears at the
end of the story, GN learns that his karta (identity card?) had run out.
VN's note tells us that VN and Shishkov are one, and then suggests that the
story might be read as "a tongue-in-cheek story about the strange case of
one poet dissolving in another." In the story, Shishkov dissolves in his
verse. I must rush off to gymnastics now, so I leave these complex matters
of identity, doubles?, the self and the other, the artist and his art, to
more competent Nabokovians.
Robert Cook
A new subsacriber, I am enjoying Roy Johnson's analyses, and wish to
comment on VASILIY SHISHKOV, last week's story. I find it hard to agree
that the story "would hardly make any sense without its biographical note."
I confess to having read the note first (pp. 652-3 in the new volume of
VN's stories), but the story makes sense to me on its own, and the prank
played by VN on George Adamovich is superfluous information. (By the way,
according to that note the Shishkov poem which VN invented was NOT
published in the same newspaper to which Adamov contributed a weekly column
- as Roy Johnson claims. But VN was confessedly uncertain about the
bibliographical details.)
That the story basically concerns identity is underscored by the subtheme
of identity cards and passports - the four Germans in GN's hotel, facing
carte d'identite problems at the beginning, and later passport problems.
When Shishkov shows GN his doggerel poems, he compares them to the identity
card he would have shown the police, establishing a parallel between
official credentials and artistic credentials. When he presents GN with his
real poems, he says "Here is my real passport." When he disappears at the
end of the story, GN learns that his karta (identity card?) had run out.
VN's note tells us that VN and Shishkov are one, and then suggests that the
story might be read as "a tongue-in-cheek story about the strange case of
one poet dissolving in another." In the story, Shishkov dissolves in his
verse. I must rush off to gymnastics now, so I leave these complex matters
of identity, doubles?, the self and the other, the artist and his art, to
more competent Nabokovians.
Robert Cook