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