Soloveichiks, Dr. Solov & Mrs. Sol in Signs and Symbols

In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) one of the old couple’s fellow travelers in the subway resembles Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago:

 

During the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did not exchange a word, and every time she glanced at his old hands, clasped and twitching upon the handle of his umbrella, and saw their swollen veins and brown-spotted skin, she felt the mounting pressure of tears. As she looked around, trying to hook her mind onto something, it gave her a kind of soft shock, a mixture of compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the passengers—a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails—was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman. Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago. (1)

 

In a letter of June 28, 1888, to Pleshcheev Chekhov compares the little naked soloveichiki (nightingales) that just hatched out from the eggs to undressed Jewish babies:

 

Именье Смагиных велико и обильно, но старо, запущено и мертво, как прошлогодняя паутина. Дом осел, двери не затворяются, изразцы на печке выпирают друг друга и образуют углы, из щелей полов выглядывают молодые побеги вишен и слив. В той комнате, где я спал, между окном и ставней соловей свил себе гнездо, и при мне вывелись из яиц маленькие, голенькие соловейчики, похожие на раздетых жиденят. На риге живут солидные аисты. На пасеке обитает дед, помнящий царя Гороха и Клеопатру Египетскую.

 

The Smagins’ estate is “great and fertile,” but old, neglected, and dead as last year’s cobwebs. The house has sunk, the doors won’t shut, the tiles in the stove squeeze one another out and form angles, young suckers of cherries and plums peep up between the cracks of the floors. In the room where I slept a nightingale had made herself a nest between the window and the shutter, and while I was there little naked nightingales, looking like undressed Jew babies, hatched out from the eggs. Sedate storks live on the barn. At the beehouse there is an old grandsire who remembers the King Gorokh [Translator’s Note: The equivalent of Old King Cole.] and Cleopatra of Egypt.

 

Chekhov’s letter of June 28 is a reply to Pleshcheev’s letter of June 23, 1888, that after Pleshcheev’s and Chekhov’s death was published in the newspaper (and later in the eponymous collection, vol. II, pp. 246-250) Slovo (“Word”). Slovo is an anagram of volos (a hair). In Signs and Symbols the boy’s mother mentions Dr. Solov (volos in reverse):

 

It was nearly midnight when, from the living room, she heard her husband moan, and presently he staggered in, wearing over his nightgown the old overcoat with the astrakhan collar that he much preferred to his nice blue bathrobe.

“I can’t sleep!” he cried.

“Why can’t you sleep?” she asked. “You were so tired.”

“I can’t sleep because I am dying,” he said, and lay down on the couch.

“Is it your stomach? Do you want me to call Dr. Solov?”

“No doctors, no doctors,” he moaned. “To the devil with doctors! We must get him out of there quick. Otherwise, we’ll be responsible.... Responsible!” He hurled himself into a sitting position, both feet on the floor, thumping his forehead with his clenched fist.

“All right,” she said quietly. “We will bring him home tomorrow morning.”

“I would like some tea,” said her husband and went out to the bathroom. (3)

 

Chekhov was a doctor. As to Pleshcheev, he is chiefly remembered for his poem about the swallow (a pet of chrestomathies and books for children) that begins as follows:

 

Травка зеленеет,
Солнышко блестит;
Ласточка с весною
В сени к нам летит.

 

The little grass is greening,
The sun is shining bright.
The swallow in the time of spring
Flies to our site.

 

A diminutive of solntse (“sun”), solnyshko brings to mind Mrs. Sol, the old couple’s next-door neighbor whose name means in Latin "sun:"

 

At the time of his birth, they had already been married for a long time; a score of years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab gray hair was pinned up carelessly. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the faultfinding light of spring. Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was now, in New York, wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty years’ standing. They seldom saw Isaac and had nicknamed him the Prince. (1)

 

Sosedi ("Neighbors," 1892) is a story by Chekhov. The old man’s brother is a namesake of Chekhov’s friend Isaac Levitan (the great landscape painter, 1860-1900). Levitan's coeval, Chekhov outlived him by just four years. At the beginning of Signs and Symbols a time span of four years is mentioned:

 

For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars. (1)

 

Brother Isaac's nickname, the Prince brings to mind “sweet Prince of poetry,” as at the end of his essay on Viktor Gofman (in the “Silhouettes of Russian Writers”) Yuli Ayhenvald (the critic who was particularly fond of Chekhov and even wrote two articles on children in Chekhov’s stories and on Chekhov's letters) calls Gofman (who committed suicide in 1911, at the age of twenty-seven, in Paris):

 

"Покойной ночи, милый принц!" - такими словами напутствовал Горацио в могилу своего друга Гамлета. Покойной ночи и тебе, милый принц поэзии, Виктор Гофман!..

 

Ayhenvald quotes the words of Horatio, “Good night, sweet Prince,” at the end of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

 

In VN's play Sobytie ("The Event," 1938) Ryovshin (Lyubov's lover who was nicknamed volosatyi glist, "the hirsute worm," by his colleagues) mentions the late Margarita Semyonovna Gofman. The action in VN's play takes place on the fiftieth birthday of Antonina Pavlovna Opoyashin, a lady writer whose name and patronymic clearly hints at Chekhov. One of the guests at Antonina Pavlovna's birthday party, the famous writer, "quotes" Hamlet's words from his famous monologue (zad, as Shakespeare would have said, zad iz zyk vestchan). The guests at Antonina Pavlovna's birthday party include a reporter from Solntse (a newspaper) who was invited by the portrait painter Troshcheykin (Lyubov's husband). Troshcheykin's name and patronymic, Alexey Maksimovich, hints at Gorky, the author of Deti Solntsa ("Children of the Sun," 1905), a play. At the beginning of "The Event" Troshcheykin says that art always moves in the counter-sun direction.

 

In VN's play Izobretenie Val’sa (“The Walz Invention,” 1938) the Minister of War tells the Colonel that his watch is as correct as karmannoe solnyshko (a pocket sun):

 

Полковник. Ваши отстают. У меня без двух, и я поставил их правильно, по башне.
Министр. Нет, вы ошибаетесь. Мои верны, как карманное солнышко.
Полковник. Не будем спорить, сейчас услышим, как пробьёт.
Министр. Пойдёмте, пойдёмте, я голоден. В животе настраиваются инструменты. (Act One)

 

According to Ayhenvald, Viktor Gofman is a poet of waltz:

 

Затем кружение слов, их встреча после пройденного кругооборота ещё усиливают то впечатление, что Гофман – поэт вальса, но вальса смягчённого в своем темпе и музыкально-замедленного. Паж инфанты и природы в самую упоительность, в безумие бала вносит благородную тишину и задумчивость духа, - и вот мы читаем:

 

Был тихий вечер, вечер бала,
Был летний бал меж темных лип.
Там, где река образовала
Свой самый выпуклый изгиб.
....................................................
Был тихий вальс, был вальс певучий,
И много лиц, и много встреч.
Округло нежны были тучи,
Как очертанья женских плеч.
Был тихий вальс меж лип старинных
И много встреч, и много лиц,
И близость чьих-то длинных, длинных,
Красиво загнутых ресниц.

 

The action in “The Walz Invention” seems to take place in a dream that Troshcheykin’s wife Lyubov dreams in the sleep of death after committing suicide on her dead son’s fifth birthday (two days after her mother’s fiftieth birthday). The action in Signs and Symbols takes place on the boy's twentieth birthday.

 

In VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) Ember (Shakespeare's translator) mentions an actor who played Metternich in The World Waltzes and who is cast as Polonius:

 

Here Ember suddenly raises his voice to a petulant scream of distress. He says that instead of this authentic Ophelia the impossible Gloria Bellhouse, hopelessly plump, with a mouth like the ace of hearts, has been selected for the part. He is especially incensed at the greenhouse carnations and lilies that the management gives her to play with in the 'mad' scene. She and the producer, like Goethe, imagine Ophelia in the guise of a canned peach: 'her whole being floats in sweet ripe passion,' says Johann Wolfgang, Ger. poet, nov., dram. & phil. Oh, horrible.

'Or her father... We all know him and love him, don't we? and it would be so simple to have him right: Polonius-Pantolonius, a pottering dotard in a padded robe, shuffling about in carpet slippers and following the sagging spectacles at the end of his nose, as he waddles from room to room, vaguely androgynous, combining the pa and the ma, a hermaphrodite with the comfortable pelvis of a eunuch — instead of which they have a stiff tall man who played Metternich in The World Waltzes and insists on remaining a wise and wily statesman for the rest of his days. Oh, most horrible.'

But there is worse to come. Ember asks his friend to hand him a certain book - no, the red one. Sorry, the other red one. (chapter 7)

 

In his poem Evropa ("Europe," 1914) Mandelshtam (the author of "Telephone," 1918) compares Europe to a crab or starfish from the Mediterranean and mentions Metternich:

 

Как средиземный краб или звезда морская,
Был выброшен водой последний материк.
К широкой Азии, к Америке привык,
Слабеет океан, Европу омывая.

Изрезаны её живые берега,
И полуостровов воздушны изваянья;
Немного женственны заливов очертанья:
Бискайи, Генуи ленивая дуга.

Завоевателей исконная земля —
Европа в рубище Священного союза —
Пята Испании, Италии Медуза
И Польша нежная, где нету короля.

Европа цезарей! С тех пор, как в Бонапарта
Гусиное перо направил Меттерних, —
Впервые за сто лет и на глазах моих
Меняется твоя таинственная карта!

 

Like a crab or starfish from the Mediterranean,

The sea washed up this continent, last of them all.

Grown used to America, to vast Asia's sprawl,

Ocean licks at Europe and begins to weaken.

 

Her living coastlines have been carved away,

Peninsulas sculptured to fragility;

Outlines of bays are almost womanly,

The slackened bow of Genoa, Biscay.

 

A land for conquerors from time's beginning,

This Europe that Holly Alliance left rent and torn -

The Spanish heel, Italy's jellyfish form,

And gentle Poland, a kingdom with no king.

 

Europe of Caesars! since Metternich took aim

Pointing his goose-quill pen at Bonaparte -

Your mysterious map is changing before my eyes

After a century, for the first time.

 

At the end of Signs and Symbols the boy's father has got to the crab apple when the telephone rings again:

 

The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to ring. He stood in the middle of the room, groping with his foot for one slipper that had come off, and childishly, toothlessly, gaped at his wife. Since she knew more English than he, she always attended to the calls.

”Can I speak to Charlie?” a girl’s dull little voice said to her now.

“What number do you want? . . . No. You have the wrong number.”

She put the receiver down gently and her hand went to her heart. “It frightened me,” she said.

He smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his excited monologue. They would fetch him as soon as it was day. For his own protection, they would keep all the knives in a locked drawer. Even at his worst, he presented no danger to other people.

The telephone rang a second time.

The same toneless, anxious young voice asked for Charlie.

“You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing. You are turning the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero.” She hung up again.

They sat down to their unexpected, festive midnight tea. He sipped noisily; his face was flushed; every now and then he raised his glass with a circular motion, so as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald head stood out conspicuously, and silvery bristles showed on his chin. The birthday present stood on the table. While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reexamined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the telephone rang again. (3)

 

What number, the wrong number and the incorrect number seem to hint "I'm ill at these numbers," a phrase used by Hamlet in his letter to Ophelia:

 

Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.

 

'O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have not art to reckon my groans: but that I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu.

'Thine evermore most dear lady, whilst

this machine is to him, HAMLET.' (Act II, scene 2)

 

"A cluster of brookside flowers," the hat of Mrs. Sol brings to mind Ophelia's death in the brook.