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THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

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раскуривает трубку. Апахи похищают белых девушек. Потом—месть,<br />

груды золота и скальпов!<br />

It's all because it's hot, or because there's no external plot in my life. I'll have to<br />

invent one. It'll have to be very complicated and intricate with frequent<br />

unexpected events requiring resourcefulness and energy. Some sort of redskin<br />

Mexican novel with gaming-houses, treacherous caballeros, and a love-struck<br />

Indian girl. Noble mustangs fall in the pampas from exhaustion. Chingachgook<br />

takes a draw on his pipe. Apaches kidnap white girls. Then—revenge, heaps of<br />

gold and scalps!<br />

Critics have noted this textual connection 68 but have not elaborated on the poem's relation<br />

to the larger context of Muni's story. Both Khodasevich's lyric persona and<br />

Pereyaslavtsev want to plunge into the intricate fiction of a bad Western full of Apaches<br />

and violence. These adventures will rid them of earlier selves—will create new identities<br />

and new worlds in which to live. They will arouse the purely sensational fears of old,<br />

childhood days, not the complicated psychological battles experienced by Bol'shakov.<br />

The third and final stanza of Khodasevich's poem encapsulates Pereyaslavtsev's<br />

desire to escape his tender, passionate adolescence filled with romantic songs and affairs:<br />

Я устал быть нежным и счастливым!<br />

Эти песни, ласки, розы—плен!<br />

Ах, из роз люблю я сердцем лживым<br />

Только ту, что жжет огнем ревнивым,<br />

Что зубами с голубым отливом<br />

Прикусила хитрая Кармен!<br />

I am tired of being tender and happy!<br />

These songs, caresses, roses are imprisonment!<br />

Ah, of roses I love with my deceitful heart,<br />

Only the one that burns with a jealous fire,<br />

The one that with her blue-tinted teeth<br />

The crafty Carmen bit!<br />

Khodasevich's lyric hero feels trapped in romantic clichés (songs, caresses, roses), yet he<br />

suggests that these clichés may be truer than his new, cold character with his deceitful<br />

68<br />

See N.A. Bogomolov's commentary in Khodasevich, Stikhotvoreniia, 382-3 and Andreeva's in Kissin,<br />

Legkoe bremia, 186.<br />

43

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