Vladimir Nabokov. El ayudante de dirección
Vladimir Nabokov. THE ASSISTANT PRODUCER
1
IN 1899, in the ponderous, comfortable padded St. Petersburg of those days, a prominent cultural organization, the Society for the Advancement of Russian Literature, decided to honor in a grand way the memory of the poet Konstantin Perov, who had died half a century before at the ardent age of four-and-twenty. He had been styled the Russian Rimbaud and, although the French boy surpassed him in genius, such a comparison is not wholly unjustified. When only eighteen he composed his remarkable Georgian Nights, a long, rambling "dream epic," certain passages of which rip the veil of its traditional Oriental setting to produce that heavenly draft