Chapter 47 third quarter

It is unlikely that I would have occasion to think of Dr. Pnin and his son later in the years of the Revolution and the Civil War.If I reconstruct some of the previous impressions, it is only limited to the occasional flashes of my mind. On an April night in the early twenties, I suddenly found myself in a Parisian cafe with a blond beard, Child-eyed Timofey Pnin, who was by then a young and learned author of several excellent treatises on Russian culture.At that time, it was fashionable for Russian writers and artists in exile to hold recitals or lectures, and they used to gather in the Three Fountains Cafe after the meeting; and amuse him and others around me by showing off my unusual memory.But he denied it all.He said he still vaguely remembered my old aunt, but had never seen me at all.He said his algebra scores were always bad, and anyway his dad never boasted about him in front of his patients; he said he only played Christine's father in that Zabava play that role.He kept emphasizing that we had never met.The little quarrel between the two became a good-natured joke, and everyone laughed; I found him so stubbornly denying his past, and I changed the subject from getting too personal.

After a while, I gradually realized that a pretty girl in a black silk dress and a golden ribbon in her brown hair became the main audience of my speech.She stood before me, resting her right elbow on the palm of her left hand, holding a cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand like a gipsy, and the smoke curled up and half closed her bright blue eyes.She was Lisa Bagolepov, a medical student who also wrote poetry.She asked me if she could send me some poems for me to judge.Later at that evening I found her sitting next to a disgustingly hairy young composer, Ivan Nagoy; and a few chairs away sat a gifted psychiatrist, Lisa's latest lover, Dr. Barragan, who gazed at her silently and disappointedly through his dark, almond-shaped eyes.

A few days later she sent her poems; hers were the imitations of Akhmatova's poems by poor poetesses in exile: listless short lyric poems that give the impression that they were written more or less Shao tiptoed out of iambic tetrameter, then let out a long and dull sigh, as if sitting down with some difficulty: I transliterated this Russian poem, filled in the accented syllables, and generally understood that u is pronounced as a short "oo", i is like a short "ee", and zh is like a French "j". An irregular rhyme like skazal-glaza is considered elegant.Also note the erotic undercurrent and cour d'amour implications.The prose is roughly translated as: "I have no jewels except my eyes, but I have a rose that is softer than my red lips. Then a quiet young man said: 'There is nothing in the world that is more beautiful than your heart. softened.' I lowered my gaze..."

I wrote and told Lisa that her poetry was not good and that she should stop writing.Not long afterward, I saw her in another cafe, full of enthusiasm and smiling, sitting around a long table with a dozen or so young Russian poets.She kept looking at me with her sapphire eyes, with ironic and mysterious obstinacy.The two of us started talking.I offered to read her poems again in a secluded place.She agreed.I ended up telling her the poems were worse than the first time I saw them.She lived in the cheapest room in a run-down little hotel, without a bathroom, next to two chattering young Englishmen.

Poor Lisa!She certainly had her art-loving moments, such as when she would stand on a dirty street by the light of a street lamp one night in May, fascinated to admire - no, adore - a wet black wall The colorful remnants of an old poster pasted up, and the translucent green leaves of the drooping lime tree by the street lamp, but she was the kind of woman who mixed healthy beauty with hysterical slovenliness, poetic passion with the very practical and vulgar There is a mixture of bad-tempered and sentimental sentiments, depressed resignation, and an exuberant capacity for domination at will.In the course of the chain of events, as a result of the abuse of affection, the narrative would not be of interest to anyone, since Lisa had swallowed a handful of sleeping pills anyway.When she was drowsy and unconscious, she knocked over an open bottle of crimson ink that she usually used to write poems, and a bright trickle flowed out of her door, which Chris and Lu discovered in time. Her life was saved.

I did not see her for two weeks after the accident, but on the eve of my departure to Switzerland and Germany she stopped me in the little garden at the end of the street where I lived, in a beautiful dress. In a new dress, dove gray like the sky in Paris, looking slim and eccentric, and wearing a really charming new hat with a bluebird feather in the top, she handed me a folded stationery. "I would like to ask for one last piece of advice from you," said Lisa, in what the French call "distortion." "This is a letter of proposal I have received. I will wait until midnight to-day if I have not heard from you by then." , I’ll just accept it.” She hailed a taxi and left.

This letter happened to be left in some of my papers.The content is as follows: "I'm afraid you will be distressed by my frankness, my dear Lise" (the writer, though in Russian, uses her name throughout in the French way, either to avoid, I suppose, too much The familiar "Lisa", either to avoid the too formal "Elizaveta Innocentyevna"). "It's always painful for a sensitive (chutkiy) person to see another person in a difficult situation. I was definitely in a difficult situation. "You, Liz, are surrounded by poets, scientists, artists, dandies. It is said that the famous painter who painted you last year is now drinking too much (govoryat, spilsya) in the Massachusetts moors. There are many other rumors. So here I dare to write to you.

"I'm not pretty, I'm dull, I'm not gifted. I'm not even rich. But, Lise, I give you all I have, to my last white blood cell, to my last One tear, everything is given to you. Believe me, this is more than any genius can give you, because a genius needs to keep a lot for himself, so that he cannot give his all like me You. I may not be happy, but I am convinced that I will do everything in my power to make you happy. I want you to write poetry, I want you to continue to study your psychotherapy--I don't know much about it, and I doubt it. The utility of the part I understand. I enclose by the way a pamphlet published in Prague by my friend Prof. Schadow which brilliantly refutes your Dr. Halpe's view that birth is a form of suicide for infants A theory of action. I have ventured to correct an obvious typo on page forty-eighth of Shadow's excellent essay. I await yours" (followed by the word "decision" presumably, the letter below and Lisa cut out all the signatures).