How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #19
My medium happened to be Russian but could have been just as well Ukrainian, or Basic English, or Volapük. The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. (11.2.1)
That Vladimir chooses Russian for his first attempts in poetry is beside the point: he's a teen in the full throes of deep, overwrought angst. Guttural sounds may have been just as successful.
Quote #20
"My fear of losing or corrupting, through alien influence, the only thing I had salvaged from Russia—her language—became positively morbid and considerably more harassing than the fear I was to experience two decades later of my never being able to bring my English prose anywhere close to the level of my Russian." (13.4.1)
Here, "corrupting" language is the same as "corrupting" identity. Why does this seem to be true for Vladimir, as he makes his life as an émigré student?