a night in the nabokov hotel
Sergey Stratanovsky, "In the Nabokov Hotel" (p. 165).At night, in the Nabokov Hotel
Sir Serpent entices
A schoolgirl, the hollow Lola,
Into his room
and onto his bird-shaped bed.
Seven-headed Sir Serpent.
The first head gorges itself on insects,
The second is mad about Gongora,
The third kisses Lolita on her navel
and childish breasts.
Seven-headed Sir Beast.
The last head has weighed its eyelids down
to pray to some God in the dark.
---------------
Victor Krivulin, "While We Invented Paradise" (p. 93).
while we constructed the West
in the forty Soviet languages,
just like some sort of paradise in our ashen hands,
or like Canaan, unoccupied and promised
to ourselves--
we saw the punishment of Egypt
but lived much safer than Oblomov:
we would come down, the way the Holy Spirit did,
to a sofa, holding an emigre publication
and facing a portrait of Nabokov in the purple frame . . .
meanwhile, the Lord called on our beggarly abodes
and summoned us to our real homelands,
to Europe, or to India, sometimes to Palestine,
where the hub of the Universe can be found
but we are always missing . . .
--------------
Alina Vitukhnovskaya, "Eva Browning" (p. 179)
Where are you
Eva Browning
brutality's misty girl
Little Lolita of pistols
and tender annexations
crooked chrysalis of death
Muse of ethnic cleansing
private patient
of The End
concubine of the absolute?
where are you
Eva Browning
Wagner's wise butterfly
residue of Aryan chaos
the mother of Russian violence?
- With many many thanks once again to the amazing Akiko Nakata.
Previous | Index | Next Nabokovilia | Home | Index | Books | Resources | Tributes | Contact | Shop