The Gift Read Free

into its folds before it would become suitable for traveling.
    The landlady came to call him to the telephone, and he, politely stooping his shoulders, followed her into the dining room. “In the first place, my dear sir,” said Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski, “why are they so reluctant at your old boardinghouse to divulge your new number? Left there with a bang, didn’t you? In the second place, I want to congratulate you.… What, you haven’t heard yet? Honestly?” (“He hasn’t heard anything about it yet,” said Alexander Yakovlevich, turning the other side of his voice toward someone out of the range of the telephone). “Well, in that case get a firm grip on yourself and listen to this—I’m going to read it to you: ‘The newly published collection of poems by the hitherto unknown author Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev strikes one as such a brilliant phenomenon, and the poetic talent of the author is so indisputable.…’ You know what, I shan’t go on, but you come over to our place tonight. Then you will get the whole article. No, Fyodor Konstantinovich, my good friend, I won’t tell you anything now, neither who wrote this review, nor in what émigré Russian-language paper it appeared, but if you want my personal opinion, then don’t be offended, but I think the fellow is treating you much too kindly. So you’ll come? Excellent. We’ll be expecting you.”
    As he hung up the receiver Fyodor nearly knocked the stand with flexible steel rod and attached pencil off the table; he tried to catch it, and it was then that he did knock it off; then he bumped his hip against the corner of the sideboard; then he dropped a cigarette that he was pulling out of the pack as he walked; and finally he miscalculated the swing of the door which flew open so resonantly that Frau Stoboy, just then passing along the corridor with a saucer of milk in her hand, uttered an icy “Oops!” He wanted to tell her that her pale yellow dress with bluish tulips was beautiful, that the parting in her frizzled hair and the quiveringbags of her cheeks endowed her with a George-Sandesque regality; that her dining room was the height of perfection; but he limited himself to a beaming smile and nearly tripped over the tiger stripes which had not kept up with the cat as it jumped aside; after all, though, he had never doubted that it would be this way, that the world, in the person of a few hundred lovers of literature who had left St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev, would immediately appreciate his gift.
    We have before us a thin volume entitled
Poems
(a plain swallow-tailed livery, which in recent years has become just as much
de rigueur
as the braiding of not long ago—from “Lunar Reveries” to symbolic Latin), containing about fifty twelve-line poems all devoted to a single theme: childhood. In fervently composing them, the author sought on the one hand to generalize reminiscenses by selecting elements typical of any successful childhood—hence their seeming obviousness; and on the other hand he has allowed only his genuine quiddity to penetrate into his poems—hence their seeming fastidiousness. At the same time he had to take great pains not to lose either his control of the game, or the viewpoint of the plaything. The strategy of inspiration and the tactics of the mind, the flesh of poetry and the specter of translucent prose—these are the epithets that seem to us to characterize with sufficient accuracy the art of this young poet.… And, having locked his door, he took out his book and threw himself on the couch—he had to reread it right away, before the excitement had time to cool, in order to check the superior quality of the poems and fore-fancy all the details of the high approbation given them by the intelligent, delightful, as yet unnamed reviewer. And now, as he sampled and tested them, he was doing the exact opposite of what he had done a short time ago, when he had skimmed over the book in one instantaneous