![]() ![]() ![]() He lodges in furnished rooms and scratches a living as a private tutor while his first collection of poems sells a few copies to fellow émigrés. He also happens to be a literal aristocrat, a Russian count dispossessed of his estates by the Revolution and living in apparently permanent exile in Berlin in the mid-1930s. This capacity makes him one of nature’s aristocrats, as Clarence Brown once wrote of the poet Mandelstam, refined, elegant and immeasurably, immaterially rich. A virtuoso of perception, he sees around him many small, delightful details – a shopkeeper’s pumpkincoloured bald spot an iridescent oil slick on a road with a plume-like twist, asphalt’s parakeet – that others around him miss. In Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1938) the young poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is solitary and gifted. ![]()
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