Khodasevich wrote in his 1925 Ballad, describing his encounter with an armless man and his pregnant wife (presumably in Paris):
An angel gives me the lyre;
My world is limpid like glass–
And he’s now going to gape at
Charlot’s idiocies.
Charlot was Charlie Chaplin’s French nickname. Perhaps in a similar vein, Khodasevich would later call Zabolotsky an obvious graphomaniac. The skeptical émigré cared not for OBERIU poetics.