spider & Elsinore jackets in Invitation to a Beheading; bayronka in Ada

In Cincinnatus’s cell there is a spider, official friend of the jailed:

 

Работая лапами, спустился на нитке паук с потолка, - официальный друг заключённых.

 

Feet working, a spider — official friend of the jailed — lowered itself on a thread from the ceiling. (Chapter One)

 

At the end of Byron’s poem The Prisoner of Chillon the hero says that he had made friendship with spiders:

 

And half I felt as they were come

To tear me from a second home:

With spiders I had friendship made

And watch'd them in their sullen trade,

Had seen the mice by moonlight play,

And why should I feel less than they?

 

The spider in Cincinnatus’s cell is fed by the jailer Rodion who brings it flies and a butterfly (that manages to escape). In Canto the Ninth (XXVII: 8) of Don Juan, in which he describes Juan’s adventures in Russia, Byron mentions human insects, catering for spiders:

 

That's an appropriate simile, that jackal; --
     I've heard them in the Ephesian ruins howl
By night, as do that mercenary pack all,
     Power's base purveyors, who for pickings prowl,
And scent the prey their masters would attack all.
     However, the poor jackals are less foul
(As being the brave lions' keen providers)
Than human insects, catering for spiders.

 

Raise but an arm! 't will brush their web away,
     And without that, their poison and their claws
Are useless. Mind, good people! what I say
     (Or rather peoples) -- go on without pause!
The web of these tarantulas each day
     Increases, till you shall make common cause:
None, save the Spanish fly and Attic bee,
As yet are strongly stinging to be free.

 

In the same Canto the Ninth (VII: 3) of Don Juan Byron compares Duke of Wellington to Cincinnatus:

 

I don't mean to reflect -- a man so great as
     You, my lord duke! is far above reflection:
The high Roman fashion, too, of Cincinnatus,
     With modern history has but small connection:
Though as an Irishman you love potatoes,
     You need not take them under your direction;
And half a million for your Sabine farm
Is rather dear! -- I'm sure I mean no harm.

 

Byron then speaks of Death and twice quotes Hamlet’s famous words:

 

"To be, or not to be? that is the question,"
     Says Shakspeare, who just now is much in fashion.
I am neither Alexander nor Hephæstion,
     Nor ever had for abstract fame much passion;
But would much rather have a sound digestion
     Than Buonaparte's cancer: could I dash on
Through fifty victories to shame or fame --
Without a stomach what were a good name? (XIV)

 

At the dinner on the eve of the execution Cincinnatus and M’sieur Pierre are identically clad in gamletovki (Elsinore jackets):

 

Но вот хозяин, смуглый старик с эспаньолкой, хлопнул в ладоши, распахнулись двери, и все перешли в столовую. М-сье Пьер и Цинциннат были посажены рядом во главе ослепительного стола, - и, сперва сдержанно, не нарушая приличия, с доброжелательным любопытством, переходившим у некоторых в скрытое умиление, все поглядывали на одинаково, в гамлетовки, одетую чету; затем, по мере того как на губах м-сье Пьер разгоралась улыбка и он начинал говорить, взгляды гостей устремлялись все откровеннее на него и на Цинцинната, который неторопливо, усердно и сосредоточенно, - как будто ища разрешения задачи, - балансировал рыбный нож разными способами, то на солонке, то на сгибе вилки, то прислонял его к хрустальной вазочке с белой розой, отличительно от других украшавший его прибор.

 

Just then, however, the host, a swarthy old man with a goatee, clapped his hands. The doors were flung open, and everyone moved into the dining room. M’sieur Pierre and Cincinnatus were seated side by side at the head of a dazzling table, and everyone began to glance, with restraint at first, then with benevolent curiosity — which in some began to turn into surreptitious tenderness — at the pair, identically clad in Elsinore jackets; then, as a lambent smile gradually appeared on M’sieur Pierre’s lips and he began to talk, the eyes of the guests turned more and more openly toward him and Cincinnatus who was unhurriedly, diligently and intently — as if seeking the solution to a problem — balancing his fish knife in various ways, now on the salt shaker, now on the incurvation of the fork, now leaning it against t the slender crystal vase with a white rose that distinctly adorned his place. (Chapter XVII)

 

After the dinner M’sieur Pierre (the executioner) complains that not all the cooking was done with creamery butter (and indeed he suffers from indigestion on the next day):

 

- Ты в общем хороший, - произнёс м-сье Пьер, когда они немножко отошли, - только почему ты всегда как-то... Твоя застенчивость производит на свежих людей самое тягостное впечатление. Не знаю, как ты, - добавил он, - но хотя я, конечно, в восторге от этой иллюминации и всё такое, но у меня изжога и подозрение, что далеко не все было на сливочном масле.

 

‘On the whole you are a good fellow , said M’sieur Pierre when they had gone a litde distance, ‘only why do you always. . . . Your shyness makes an extremely unfavourable impression on new people. I don’t know about you,’  he added, ‘but although I am delighted with the illumination and so forth, I have heartburn and a suspicion that not all the cooking was done with creamery butter.’ (ibid.)

 

Among the authors quoted by Byron in Canto the Ninth (XVII: 1) of Don Juan is Montaigne:

 

"To be, or not to be?" -- Ere I decide,
     I should be glad to know that which is being?
'T is true we speculate both far and wide,
     And deem, because we see, we are all-seeing:
For my part, I'll enlist on neither side,
     Until I see both sides for once agreeing.
For me, I sometimes think that life is death,
Rather than life a mere affair of breath.

 

“Que sais-je?" was the motto of Montaigne,
     As also of the first academicians:
That all is dubious which man may attain,
     Was one of their most favourite positions.
There's no such thing as certainty, that's plain
     As any of Mortality's conditions;
So little do we know what we're about in
This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.

 

Gamletovki (from Gamlet, the Russian spelling of Hamlet) in Priglashenie na kazn’ bring to mind bayronka (open shirt) mentioned by Van Veen in VN’s novel Ada (1969):

 

A formal photograph, on a separate page: Adochka, pretty and impure in her flimsy, and Vanichka in gray-flannel suit, with slant-striped school tie, facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side, at attention, he with the shadow of a forced grin, she, expressionless. Both recalled the time (between the first tiny cross and a whole graveyard of kisses) and the occasion: it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi. (2.7)

 

Kimera hints at Kim Beauharnais, the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whose surname recalls Napoleon’s first wife.

 

As he speaks to the concierge of Les Trois Cygnes, Van uses the phrase “que sais-je?” (what do I know):

 

mont roux bellevue Sunday

dinnertime adoration sorrow rainbows

 

Van got this bold cable with his breakfast on Saturday, October 10, 1905, at the Manhattan Palace in Geneva, and that same day moved to Mont Roux at the opposite end of the lake. He put up there at his usual hotel, Les Trois Cygnes. Its small, frail, but almost mythically ancient concierge had died during Van’s stay four years earlier, and instead of wizened Julien’s discreet smile of mysterious complicity that used to shine like a lamp through parchment, the round rosy face of a recent bellboy, who now wore a frockcoat, greeted fat old Van.

‘Lucien,’ said Dr Veen, peering over his spectacles, ‘I may have — as your predecessor would know — all kinds of queer visitors, magicians, masked ladies, madmen — que sais-je? and I expect miracles of secrecy from all three mute swans. Here’s a prefatory bonus.’

‘Merci infiniment,’ said the concierge, and, as usual, Van felt infinitely touched by the courteous hyperbole provoking no dearth of philosophical thought. (3.8)

 

Describing his trysts with Ada in Mont Roux, Van mentions Château de Byron (or ‘She Yawns Castle’):

 

A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a ‘Lebanese cedar’ — if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where a princely paulownia (‘mulberry tree!’ snorted Ada), standing in state on its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk. A ginkgo (of a much more luminous greenish gold than its neighbor, a dingily yellowing local birch) marked the corner of a cobbled lane leading down to the quay. They followed southward the famous Fillietaz Promenade which went along the Swiss side of the lake from Valvey to the Château de Byron (or ‘She Yawns Castle’). The fashionable season had ended, and wintering birds, as well as a number of knickerbockered Central Europeans, had replaced the English families as well as the Russian noblemen from Nipissing and Nipigon. (ibid.)

 

Nipissing and Nipigon bring to mind Mouskin-Pouskin, as Lord Byron (whom VN calls "Pope's epigone" in his "Eugene Onegin Commentary") misspells the name Musin-Pushkin in Don Juan. In his poem Moya Rodoslovnaya ("My Pedigree," 1830) Pushkin says that he is simply Pushkin, not Musin.

 

On the other hand, Nipissing reminds one of Waterloo (as Chekhov in jest called a water-closet) and of Byron's epigram on Castlereagh:

 

Posterity will ne’er survey
a Nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss!