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names of the Snowy Owl, the terror of tundra rodents, and is
also applied to the handsome Hawk Owl, but in old Russian
mythology it is a multicolored bird, with a woman's face and
bust, no doubt identical with the "siren," a Greek deity,
transporter of souls and teaser of sailors. In 1920, when
casting about for a pseudonym and settling for that fabulous
fowl, I still had not shaken off the false glamour of Byzantine
imagery that attracted young Russian poets of the Blokian era.
Incidentally, circa 1910 there had appeared literary
collections under the editorial title of Sirin devoted
to the so-called "symbolist" movement, and I remember how
tickled I was to discover in 1952 when browsing in the Houghton
Library at Harvard that its catalogue listed me as actively
publishing Blok, Bely, and Bryusov at the age of ten.
An arresting phantasmagoric image of Russian emigre
life in Germany is that of film extras playing themselves, as
it were, as do Ganin in Mashenka and those characters in
your story "The Assistant Producer, " whose "only hope and
profession was their past-- that is, a set of totally unreal
people, " who, you write, were hired "to represent 'real'
audiences in pictures. The dovetailing of one phantasm into
another produced upon a sensitive person the impression of
living in a Hall of Mirrors, or rather a prison of mirrors, and
not even knowing which was the glass and which was yourself. "
Did Sirin ever do that sort of work?
Yes, I have been a tuxedoed extra as Ganin had been and
that passage in Mashenka, retitled Mary in the
1970 translation, is a rather raw bit of "real life." I don't
remember the names of those films.
Did you have much to do with film people in Berlin?