Shadow rhyming: Andrey Bely's method in O. Sedakova's stanzas In memory of Nabokov

The paper exposes the inner plot of O. Sedakova’s stanzas In Memory of Nabokov, based on Nabokov’s reception of Andrey Bely’s doctrine of verse. Andrey Bely understood rhythm as a way to achieve the autonomy of individual themes within a large work, while referring to the digressions of rhythm from meter as “shadows”. Nabokov embraced Andrey Bely’s scholarship not only in his practice as a poet, but also in his natural science, describing the reproduction of butterfly patterns while isolating their habitats according to the same principles by which Andrey Bely had described the isolation of themes in a poem. Sedakova’s stanzas reproduce plots and images from the poems of Nabokov’s novel The Gift, while showing many parallels with the interpretation of this novel in Soviet structuralism (Yuri Levin, Mikhail Lotman), where the confusion of points of view, the unusual relationship of narrative persons and temporal plans were interpreted partly with the help of Andrey Bely’s terms and categories. I explain the general subject of Sedakova’s poem in these terms, understanding rhythm as an optical effect of light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance about the future: game as the only way to tell a poetic giftedness, so that these stanzas appear to be transitional to the Sedakova’s De arte poetica. The image of billiards, the rolling ball from Nabokov’s novel, the consideration of the universe from outside as part of the big game, does not simply combine Nabokov’s figurative speech with a metaphysical consideration of time and the universe catastrophes, but introduces a particular rhythmic pattern. The lines in which the meter coincides with the rhythm turn out to be gnomic, containing a memorable aphorism, and Sedakova’s technique continues the one used by Vyacheslav Ivanov. Other lines iconically depict this random movement of balls, which Nabokov tried to put into the basis of poetry. The theme of forms as shadows usually requires one missed accent, forming a rhythmic shadow in the original rhythmic form. And the theme of the changing conditions of vision usually requires two misses, which gives rise to a representation of unusual catastrophic vision. The overall plot of these stanzas is therefore reconstructed as a transformation of the habits of sight on the way to the mastery of verse.