Only in very expert hands could it be made to transcend its humble origin—the pallid poetry of eighteenth-century France

my livid light flitted across the six-pillared white portico at the back of my uncle’s mute, shuttered manor

every whiff of damp leaf, every autumn-rusted frond of fern in the St. Petersburg countryside

her high-school-girlish prose could evoke with plangent strength

The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds

Current prose and poetry, brilliant planets and pale galaxies, flowed by the casement of my garret night after night

Only much later, in the forties, did some of those writers finally discover a definite slope down which to slide in a more or less genuflectory attitude.

Bunin, a spry old gentleman, with a rich and unchaste vocabulary, was puzzled by my irresponsiveness to the hazel grouse of which I had had enough in my childhood and exasperated by my refusal to discuss eschatological matters

we emerged into the pallid bleakness of a Paris winter day

His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse