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the hayloft—this is a general list of the themes that move our author. What about his poems from the point of view of form? These, of course, are miniatures, but they are executed with a phenomenally delicate mastery that brings out clearly every hair, not because everything is delineated with an excessively selective touch, but because the presence of the smallest features is involuntarily conveyed to the reader by the integrity and reliability of a talent that assures the author’s observance of all the articles of the artistic covenant. One can argue whether it is worth while to revive album-type poetry, but one certainly cannot deny that within the limits he has set himself Godunov-Cherdyntsev has solved his prosodic problem correctly. Each of his poems iridesces with harlequin colors. Whoever is fond of the picturesque genre will appreciate this little volume. To the blind man at the church door it would have nothing to say. What vision the author has! Awaking early in the morning he knew what kind of a day it would be by looking at a chink in the shutter, which
    Showed a blue that was bluer than blue
And was hardly inferior in blueness
To my present remembrance of it.
    And in the evening he gazes with the same screwed-up eyes at the field, one side of which is already in shadow, while the other, farther one
    Is illumed, from its central big boulder
To the edge of the forest beyond it
And is bright as by day.
    It would seem to us that perhaps it was really not literature but painting for which he was destined from childhood, and while we know nothing of the author’s present condition, we can nevertheless clearly picture a straw-hatted boy, sitting very uncomfortably on a garden bench with his watercolor paraphernalia and painting the world bequeathed him by his forebears:
    Cells of white porcelain
Contain blue, green, red honey.
First, out of pencil lines,
On rough paper a garden is formed.
The birches, the balcony of the outbuilding,
All is spotted with sunlight. I soak
And twirl tight the tip of my paintbrush
In rich orange yellow;
And, meantime, within the full goblet,
In the radiance of its cut glass,
What colors have blazed,
What rapture has bloomed!
    This, then, is Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s little volume. In conclusion let us add … What else? What else? Imagination, do prompt me! Can it be true that all the enchantingly throbbing things of which I have dreamt and still dream through my poems have not been lost in them and have been noticed by the reader whose review I shall see before the day is over? Can it really be that he has understood everything in them, understood that besides the good old “picturesqueness” they also contain special poetic meaning (when one’s mind, after going around itself in the subliminal labyrinth, returns with newfound music that alone makes poems what they should be)? As he read them, did he read them not only as words but as chinks between words, as one should do when reading poetry? Or did he simply skim over them, like them and praise them, calling attention to the significance of their sequence, a feature fashionable in our time, when time is in fashion: if a collection opens with a poem about “A Lost Ball,” it must close with “The Found Ball.”
    Only pictures and ikons remained
In their places that year
When childhood was ended, and something
Happened to the old house: in a hurry
All the rooms with each other
Were exchanging their furniture,
Cupboards and screens, and a host
Of unwieldy big things:
And it was then that from under a sofa,
On the suddenly unmasked parquet,
Alive, and incredibly dear,
It was revealed in a corner.
    The book’s exterior appearance is pleasing.
    Having squeezed the final drop of sweetness from it, Fyodor stretched and got up from his couch. He felt very hungry. The hands of his watch had lately begun to misbehave, now and then starting to move counterclockwise, so that he could not depend on them; to judge by the light, however, the