Vladimir Nabokov. La aguja del almirantazgo
Vladimir Nabokov. THE ADMIRALTY SPIRE
Apropos of guitars, Madam, you write that "in the evening the young people would gather and Olga would sit at a table and sing in a rich contralto." Oh, well—one more death, one more victim of your sumptuous prose. Yet how I cherished the echoes of modish tziganshchina that inclined Katya to singing, and me to composing verse! Well do I know that this was no longer authentic Gypsy art such as that which enchanted Pushkin and, later, Apollon Grigoriev, but a barely breathing, jaded, and doomed muse; everything contributed to her ruin: the gramophone, the war, and various so-called tzigane songs.