When Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) first meets Armande, his future wife, on a Swiss local train, her hands are black-gloved:
He made Armande's acquaintance in a Swiss railway carriage one dazzling afternoon between Thur and Versex on the eve of his meeting with Mr. R. He had boarded a slow train by mistake; she had chosen one that would stop at the small station from which a bus line went up to Witt, where her mother owned a chalet. Armande and Hugh had simultaneously settled in two window seats facing each other on the lake side of the coach. An American family occupied the corresponding four-seat side across the aisle. Hugh unfolded the Journal de Genève.
Oh, she was pretty and would have been exquisitely so had her lips been fuller. She had dark eyes, fair hair, a honey-hued skin. Twin dimples of the crescentic type came down her tanned cheeks on the sides of her mournful mouth. She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse. A book lay in her lap under her black-gloved hands. He thought, he recognized that flame-and-soot paperback. The mechanism of their first acquaintance was ideally banal. (Chapter 9)
At the end of the novel Hugh Person dies in a fire (chokes to death) at the Ascot Hotel. When HP attempts to escape through the window of his room, a long lavender-tipped flame stops him with a graceful gesture of its gloved hand:
The fire, fed first by oil-soaked rags planted in the basement and then helped up by lighter fluid judiciously sprayed here and there on stairs and walls, swept up rapidly through the hotel - although "fortunately," as the local paper was to put it next morning, "only a few people perished because only a few rooms happened to be occupied."
Now flames were mounting the stairs, in pairs, in trios, in redskin file, hand in hand, tongue after tongue, conversing and humming happily. It was not, though, the heat of their flicker, but the acrid dark smoke that caused Person to retreat back into the room; excuse me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door he was vainly trying to close. The window banged with such force that its panes broke into a torrent of rubies, and he realized before choking to death that a storm outside was aiding the inside fire.
At last, suffocation made him try to get out by climbing out and down, but there were no ledges or balconies on that side of the roaring house. As he reached the window a long lavender-tipped flame danced up to stop him with a graceful gesture of its gloved hand. Crumbling partitions of plaster and wood allowed human cries to reach him, and one of his last wrong ideas was that those were the shouts of people anxious to help him, and not the howls of fellow men. Rings of blurred colors circled around him, reminding him briefly of a childhood picture in a frightening book about triumphant vegetables whirling faster and faster around a nightshirted boy trying desperately to awake from the iridescent dizziness of dream life. Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son. (Chapter 26)
The cover of the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden Window, a book that Armande has in her lap, is by the famous Paul Plam:
Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he had been right: it was indeed the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden Window.
"One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.
She considered the book in her lap as if seeking in it some explanation of his remark. Her skirt was very short.
"I mean," he said, "I work for that particular publisher. For the American publisher of the hard-cover edition. Do you like it?"
She answered in fluent but artificial English that she detested surrealistic novels of the poetic sort. She demanded hard realistic stuff reflecting our age. She liked books about Violence and Oriental Wisdom. Did it get better farther on?
"Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa, when the little girl, the narrator's daughter - "
"June."
"Yes. June sets her new dollhouse on fire and the whole villa burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it is all rather symbolic, in the grand manner, and, well, curiously tender at the same time, as the blurb says, or at least said, in our first edition. That cover is by the famous Paul Plam." (Chapter 9)
The artist’s name seems to hint at iz plamya i sveta (from flame and light), a line in Lermontov’s poem Est’ rechi – znazhen’e… (“There are speeches whose meaning,” 1840):
Есть речи - значенье
Темно иль ничтожно,
Но им без волненья
Внимать невозможно.
Как полны их звуки
Безумством желанья!
В них слезы разлуки,
В них трепет свиданья.
Не встретит ответа
Средь шума мирского
Из пламя и света
Рожденное слово;
Но в храме, средь боя
И где я ни буду,
Услышав, его я
Узнаю повсюду.
Не кончив молитвы,
На звук тот отвечу,
И брошусь из битвы
Ему я навстречу.
There are words whose meanings
Are hidden or worthless!
And yet they stir emotion
In those who hear them.
How full are their sounds
Of the insanity of desire!
They contain a farewell's tears,
They contain a meeting's excitement.
No answer will be found
Amid worldly commotion
For a word born
Of flame and light;
But be I in a church, be I in battle,
Be I anywhere in the world-
Once I hear it, I
Will keep it forever.
Leaving my unfinished prayer,
I shall answer its call;
And I will rush out of battle
To meet it.
In his narrative poem Sashka (1835-36, publ. 1882) Lermontov describes a new fashion shop in the Kuznetski Most (a street in Moscow) and mentions Madame Armand who works there:
И поделом, ведь новый магазин
Открылся на Кузнецком, — не угодно ль
Вам посмотреть?.. Там есть мамзель Aline,
Monsieur Dupré, Durand, француз природный,
Теперь купец, а бывший дворянин;
Там есть мадам Armand; там есть субретка
Fanchaux — плутовка, смуглая кокетка!
Вся молодежь вокруг ее верти́тся.
Мне ж всё равно, ей богу, что случится!
И по одной значительной причине
Я только зритель в этом магазине. (ll. 1398-1408)
Hugh Person’s father dies of a stroke as he tries on new trousers in a clothing store’s fitting room:
As he, still a virgin, imagined those daring attitudes a double event happened: the thunder of a nonstop train crashed by, and magnesium lightning flashed from the booth. The blonde in black, far from being electrocuted, came out closing her handbag. Whatever funeral she had wished to commemorate with the image of fair beauty craped for the occasion, it had nothing to do with a third simultaneous event next door.
One should follow her, it would be a good lesson - follow her instead of going to gape at a waterfall: good lesson for the old man. With an oath and a sigh Hugh retraced his steps, which was once a trim metaphor, and went back to the shop. Irma told neighbors later that she had been sure the gentleman had left with his son for at first she could not make out what the latter was saying despite his fluent French. When she did, she laughed at her stupidity, swiftly led Hugh to the fitting room and, still laughing heartily, drew the green, not brown, curtain open with what became in retrospect a dramatic gesture. Spatial disarrangement and dislocation have always their droll side, and few things are funnier than three pairs of trousers tangling in a frozen dance on the floor - brown slacks, blue jeans, old pants of gray flannel. Awkward Person Senior had been struggling to push a shod foot through the zigzag of a narrow trouser leg when he felt a roaring redness fill his head. He died before reaching the floor, as if falling from some great height, and now lay on his back, one arm outstretched, umbrella and hat out of reach in the tall looking glass. (Chapter 5)
In Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time" (1840) Grushnitski (Pechorin's adversary in a pistol duel) falls from the edge of a cliff.
The invisible narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils. In "Sashka" Lermontov pins the blame for the hero's misfortunes on the devil and mentions the invisible spirit that played with Sashka's destiny as with a ball:
Теперь, друзья, скажите напрямик,
Кого винить?.. По мне, всего прекрасней
Сложить весь грех на черта — он привык
К напраслине; к тому же безопасней
Рога и когти, чем иной язык...
Итак, заметим мы, что дух незримый,
Но гордый, мрачный, злой, не отразимый
Ни ладаном, ни бранью, ни крестом,
Играл судьбою Саши, как мячом,
И, следуя пустейшему капризу,
Кидал его то вкось, то вверх, то книзу. (ll. 1057-1067)