Describing his fellow writers in Paris, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! 1974) mentions the honest nonentity Suknovalov, author of the popular social satire Geroy nashey ery ("Hero of Our Era"):
I recognized the critic Basilevski, his sycophants Hristov and Boyarski, my friend Morozov, the novelists Shipogradov and Sokolovski, the honest nonentity Suknovalov, author of the popular social satire Geroy nashey ery ("Hero of Our Era") and two young poets, Lazarev (collection Serenity) and Fartuk (collection Silence). (Part Two, 4)
The name Suknovalov comes from suknoval (fuller). Ugol’shchik i suknoval is the Russian title of Aesop’s fable “The Charcoal Burner and the Fuller:”
A charcoal-burner carried on his trade in his own house. One day he met a friend, a Fuller, and entreated him to come and live with him, saying that they should be far better neighbors and that their housekeeping expenses would be lessened. The Fuller replied, “The arrangement is impossible as far as I am concerned, for whatever I should whiten, you would immediately blacken again with your charcoal.”
Like will draw like.
In his epigram on K. Dembrovski (1817-20) Pushkin compares his looks to those of Aesop:
Когда смотрюсь я в зеркала,
То вижу, кажется, Эзопа,
Но стань Дембровский у стекла,
Так вдруг покажется там <жопа>.
When I look in the mirrors,
It seems to me that I see Aesop,
But if Dembrovski shlould stand at the glass,
An ass would suddenly appear in it.
In Pushkin’s epigram Ezopa (of Aesop) rhymes with zhopa (ass). In the draft of Pushkin’s narrative poem in octaves Domik v Kolomne (“A Small Cottage in Kolomna,” 1830) Ezopa rhymes with Kopa (at Mr. Kop's) and Evropa (Europe).
А, вероятно, не заметят нас:
Меня с октавами моими крупно.
Однако ж нам пора. Ведь я рассказ
Готовил; а шучу довольно крупно
И ждать напрасно заставляю вас.
Язык мой - враг мой; все ему доступно,
Он обо всем болтать себе привык.
Фригийский раб, на рынке взяв язык,
Сварил его (у господина Копа
Коптят его). Эзоп его потом
Принёс на стол... Опять, зачем Эзопа
Я вплёл с его вареным языком
В мои стихи? Что вся прочла Европа,
Нет нужды вновь беседовать о том!
Насилу-то, рифмач я безрассудный,
Отделался от сей октавы трудной! (XXI-XXII)
Aesop and his varyonyi yazyk (boiled tongue) mentioned by Pushkin in the draft of his poem bring to mind sukonnyi yazyk (the insipid language) of Blok’s drama Roza i krest (“The Rose and Cross”) set to music by the composer Bazilevski. The epithet sukonnyi comes from sukno (cloth). Suknoval (fuller) comes from sukno and valyat’ (to full).
The title of Suknovalov’s satire is a play on Lermontov’s Geroy nashego vremeni ("A Hero of Our Time," 1840). In his poem Skazka dlya detey (“Fairy Tale for Children,” 1841) Lermontov says that he is bez uma ot troystvennykh sozvuchiy i vlazhnykh rifm – kak naprimer na Yu (crazy about triple accords and moist rhymes – as for example on Yu):
Стихов я не читаю — но люблю
Марать шутя бумаги лист летучий;
Свой стих за хвост отважно я ловлю;
Я без ума от тройственных созвучий
И влажных рифм — как например на Ю.
Вот почему пишу я эту сказку.
Её волшебно-тёмную завязку
Не стану я подробно объяснять,
Чтоб кой-каких допросов избежать,
Зато конец не будет без морали,
Чтобы её хоть дети прочитали. (2)
The penultimate letter of the Russian alphabet, Ю (Yu) is pronounced rather like “you.” Vadim calls his last love “You.” Vadim’s first three wives (Iris Black, Annette Blagovo and Louise Adamson) seem to be his half-sisters. Like will draw like.
According to Lermontov, he courageously catches his verse za khvost (by its tail). At the end of his poem Ty i ya (“You and I,” 1820) Pushkin says that he uses for wiping purpose Khvostov’s tough ode:
Окружён рабов толпой,
С грозным деспотизма взором,
Афедрон ты жирный свой
Подтираешь коленкором;
Я же грешную дыру
Не балую детской модой
И Хвостова жёсткой одой,
Хоть и морщуся, да тру.
Surrounded by a crowd of slaves,
With a formidable look of despotism,
You wipe up with calico
Your fat Afedron.
As to me, with children’s fashion
I don’t pamper my sinful hole
and wipe it, wincing,
with Khvostov’s tough ode.
In Pushkin’s poem “you” is the tsar Alexander I. In the last line of his poem K byustu zavoevatelya (“To the Bust of a Conqueror,” 1829) Pushkin says that Alexander I was v litse i v zhizni arlekin (an harlequin in face and in life):
Напрасно видишь тут ошибку:
Рука искусства навела
На мрамор этих уст улыбку,
А гнев на хладный лоск чела.
Недаром лик сей двуязычен.
Таков и был сей властелин:
К противочувствиям привычен,
В лице и в жизни арлекин.
It's wrong to see a clumsy style
The hand of art has truly wrought
Both marble lips that seem to smile
And brows that frown in angry thought.
This two-faced look he never shed,
For so he was, this potentate:
On inner conflicts he was fed,
A harlequin in face and fate.
In his poem Pushkin describes Thorvaldsen’s “Bust of Alexander I” (1820). The sculptor’s name brings to mind Tornikovski, a Soviet “diplomat” who used a blue-flowering ash for his correspondence with Kalikakov:
Brushing all my engagements aside, I surrendered again--after quite a few years of abstinence!--to the thrill of secret investigations. Spying had been my clystère de Tchékhov even before I married Iris Black whose later passion for working on an interminable detective tale had been sparked by this or that hint I must have dropped, like a passing bird's lustrous feather, in relation to my experience in the vast and misty field of the Service. In my little way I have been of some help to my betters. The tree, a blue-flowering ash, whose cortical wound I caught the two "diplomats," Tornikovski and Kalikakov, using for their correspondence, still stands, hardly scarred, on its hilltop above San Bernardino. But for structural economy I have omitted that entertaining strain from this story of love and prose. Its existence, however, helped me now to ward off--for a while, at least--the madness and anguish of hopeless regret. (5.1)
A comedy name (from kal, “excrement,” and kakat’, “to defecate”), Kalikakov also brings to mind calico with which in Pushkin’s poem Alexander I wipes his fat Afedron.
In Pushkin’s short novel Dubrovski (1832) a hollow in the trunk of an oak tree is used for the correspondence between Dubrovski and Masha Troekurov. The name Dubrovski comes from dubrova (leafy grove) and dubrova comes from dub (oak tree). Vadim's surname (that can be guessed by the reader) Yablonski comes from yablonya (apple tree). In Pushkin's drafts Dubrovski was sometimes called Ostrovski. The name Ostrovski comes from ostrov (island). At the end of LATH Vadim mentions Ceylon and Jamaica, the sibling islands:
"That's all very well," I said, as I groped for the levers of my wheelchair, and you helped me to roll back to my room. "And I'm grateful, I'm touched, I'm cured! Your explanation, however, is merely an exquisite quibble--and you know it; but never mind, the notion of trying to twirl time is a trouvaille; it resembles (kissing the hand resting on my sleeve) the neat formula a physicist finds to keep people happy until (yawning, crawling back into bed) until the next chap snatches the chalk. I had been promised some rum with my tea--Ceylon and Jamaica, the sibling islands (mumbling comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away)--" (Part Seven, 4)
Yazyk is Russian for "tongue" and "language." The term Ezopov yazyk (Aesopian language) was first used by Saltykov-Shchedrin. The main character in Saltykov's novel Gospoda Golovlyovy ("The Golovlyov Family," 1880), Iudushka (little Judas) Golovlyov brings to mind Khristosik (little Christ), as G. A. Vronsky (the movie man in VN's novel Ada, 1969) called all pretty starlets:
Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 — her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband’s unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: ‘Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld’) she [Aqua] took advantage of his being massaged in the solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom — and experienced a delicious shock: her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along — ever since Shakespeare’s birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G.A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. (1.3)
Khristosik reminds one of Hristov (Basilevski's sycophant). Marina was pregnant with Ada. Describing Marina's first pregnancy, Van uses the phrase interesnoe polozhenie):
Marina arrived in Nice a few days after the duel, and tracked Demon down in his villa Armina, and in the ecstasy of reconciliation neither remembered to dupe procreation, whereupon started the extremely interesnoe polozhenie (‘interesting condition’) without which, in fact, these anguished notes could not have been strung. (1.2)
Interesnoe polozhenie (pregnancy) brings to mind prichyom tut polozhenie ('situation-shituation'), a phrase used by G. A. Vronsky in "Ardis the Second:"
And now hairy Pedro hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).
‘Your leetle aperture must be raccommodated,’ he said.
‘Que voulez-vous dire, for goodness sake?’ she asked, instead of dealing him a backhand wallop.
‘Permit that I contact your charming penetralium,’ the idiot insisted, and put a wet finger on the hole in her swimsuit.
‘Oh that’ (shrugging and rearranging the shoulder strap displaced by the shrug). ‘Never mind that. Next time, maybe, I’ll put on my fabulous new bikini.’
‘Next time, maybe, no Pedro?’
‘Too bad,’ said Ada. ‘Now go and fetch me a Coke, like a good dog.’
‘E tu?’ Pedro asked Marina as he walked past her chair. ‘Again screwdriver?’
‘Yes, dear, but with grapefruit, not orange, and a little zucchero. I can’t understand’ (turning to Vronsky), ‘why do I sound a hundred years old on this page and fifteen on the next? Because if it is a flashback — and it is a flashback, I suppose’ (she pronounced it is a flashback — and it is a flashback, I suppose’ (she pronounced it fleshbeck), ‘Renny, or what’s his name, René, should not know what he seems to know.’
‘He does not,’ cried G.A., ‘it’s only a half-hearted flashback. Anyway, this Renny, this lover number one, does not know, of course, that she is trying to get rid of lover number two, while she’s wondering all the time if she can dare go on dating number three, the gentleman farmer, see?’
‘Nu, eto chto-to slozhnovato (sort of complicated), Grigoriy Akimovich,’ said Marina, scratching her cheek, for she always tended to discount, out of sheer self-preservation, the considerably more slozhnïe patterns out of her own past.
‘Read on, read, it all becomes clear,’ said G.A., riffling through his own copy.
‘Incidentally,’ observed Marina, ‘I hope dear Ida will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can’t be made to recite French poetry.’
‘If she protests,’ said Vronsky, ‘she can go and stick a telegraph pole — where it belongs.’
The indecent ‘telegraph’ caused Marina, who had a secret fondness for salty jokes, to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis’ so smehu vrode Adï): ‘But let’s be serious, I still don’t see how and why his wife — I mean the second guy’s wife — accepts the situation (polozhenie).’
Vronsky spread his fingers and toes.
‘Prichyom tut polozhenie (situation-shituation)? She is blissfully ignorant of their affair and besides, she knows she is fubsy and frumpy, and simply cannot compete with dashing Hélène.’
‘I see, but some won’t,’ said Marina. (1.32)
Pokativshis’ so smehu vrode Adï brings to mind Miss Vrode-Vorodin, Count Starov's elderly cousin and house-keeper in LATH:
"Your bride," he said, using, I knew, the word in the sense of fiancée (and speaking an English which Iris said later was exactly like mine in Ivor's unforgettable version) "is as beautiful as your wife will be!"
I quickly told him--in Russian--that the maire of Cannice had married us a month ago in a brisk ceremony. Nikifor Nikodimovich gave Iris another stare and finally kissed her hand, which I was glad to see she raised in the proper fashion (coached, no doubt, by Ivor who used to take every opportunity to paw his sister).
"I misunderstood the rumors," he said, "but all the same I am happy to make the acquaintance of such a charming young lady. And where, pray, in what church, will the vow be sanctified?"
"In the temple we shall build, Sir," said Iris--a trifle insolently, I thought.
Count Starov "chewed his lips," as old men are wont to do in Russian novels. Miss Vrode-Vorodin, the elderly cousin who kept house for him, made a timely entrance and led Iris to an adjacent alcove (illuminated by a resplendent portrait by Serov, 1896, of the notorious beauty, Mme. De Blagidze, in Caucasian costume) for a nice cup of tea. The Count wished to talk business with me and had only ten minutes "before his injection."
What was my wife's maiden name?
I told him. He thought it over and shook his head. What was her mother's name?
I told him that, too. Same reaction. What about the financial aspect of the marriage?
I said she had a house, a parrot, a car, and a small income--I didn't know exactly how much.
After another minute's thought, he asked me if I would like a permanent job in the White Cross? It had nothing to do with Switzerland. It was an organization that helped Russian Christians all over the world. The job would involve travel, interesting connections, promotion to important posts.
I declined so emphatically that he dropped the silver pill box he was holding and a number of innocent gum drops were spilled all over the table at his elbow. He swept them onto the carpet with a gesture of peevish dismissal. (Part One, 10)
The name Vrode-Vorodin seems to combine the word vrode (“like; a sort of, a kind of; such as”) with Borodin, a composer who set to music Pushkin’s poem Dlya beregov otchizny dal’ney… (“For the shores of distant fatherland…” 1830). Alexander Porfirievich Borodin (1833-87) was an illegitimate son of a Georgian Prince and a Russian woman (who asked her son to call her "aunt"). Officially Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) is Van's aunt (and Van never calls her "mother"). In Saltykov's novel Iudushka Golovlyov's "real" name is Porfiriy. Porfiriy Petrovich is the investigator in Dostoevski's Prestuplenie i nakazanie ("Crime and Punishment," 1867). The middle part of The Dare (1950), Vadim's novel that corresponds to Vadim's Dar ("The Gift," 1937), is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoevski, whose politics Vadim's hero finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ's conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age. (2.5) Dostoevski's second wife, Anna Snitkin, worked for him as a stenographer. Vadim meets his second wife, Annette Blagovo (Bel's mother), when she comes to work for him as a typist.
The surname Borodin comes from boroda (beard). For his incognito visit of the Soviet Russia Vadim grows a beard:
"Shall I grow a beard to cross the frontier?" muses homesick General Gurko in Chapter Six of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus.
"Better than none," said Harley Q., one of my gayest advisers. "But," he added, "do it before we glue on and stamp O.B.'s picture and don't lose weight afterwards." So I grew it--during the atrocious heartracking wait for the room I could not mock up and the visa I could not forge. It was an ample Victorian affair, of a nice, rough, tawny shade threaded with silver. It reached up to my apple-red cheekbones and came down to my waistcoat, commingling on the way with my lateral yellow-gray locks. Special contact lenses not only gave another, dumbfounded, expression to my eyes, but somehow changed their very shape from squarish leonine, to round Jovian. Only upon my return did I notice that the old tailor-made trousers, on me and in my bag, displayed my real name on the inside of the waistband.
My good old British passport, which had been handled cursorily by so many courteous officers who had never opened my books (the only real identity papers of its accidental holder), remained, after a procedure, that both decency and incompetence forbid me to describe, physically the same in many respects; but certain of its other features, details of substance and items of information, were, let us say, "modified" by a new method, an alchemysterious treatment, a technique of genius, "still not understood elsewhere," as the chaps in the lab tactfully expressed people's utter unawareness of a discovery that might have saved countless fugitives and secret agents. In other words nobody, no forensic chemist not in the know, could suspect, let alone prove, that my passport was false. I do not know why I dwell on this subject with such tedious persistence. Probably, because I otlynivayu--"shirk"--the task of describing my visit to Leningrad; yet I can't put it off any longer. (Part Five, 1)
Like Mark Aldanov (VN's friend and fellow writer), Alexander Borodin was a professional chemist. Borodin is the author of Knyaz' Igor ("Prince Igor," 1887), an opera based on the ancient epic Slovo o Polku Igoreve ("The Song of Igor's Campaign"). At the beginning of Slovo its author mentions veshchiy Boyan (the vatic Boyan), a bard who was active at the court of Yaroslav the Wise. Describing his life in Paris, Vadim mentions the "Boyan" publishing firm:
The "Boyan" publishing firm (Morozov's and mine was the "Bronze Horseman," its main rival), with a bookshop (selling not only émigré editions but also tractor novels from Moscow) and a lending library, occupied a smart three-story house of the hôtel particulier type. In my day it stood between a garage and a cinema: forty years before (in the vista of reverse metamorphosis) the former had been a fountain and the latter a group of stone nymphs. The house had belonged to the Merlin de Malaune family and had been acquired at the turn of the century by a Russian cosmopolitan, Dmitri de Midoff who with his friend S. I. Stepanov established there the headquarters of an antidespotic conspiracy. The latter liked to recall the sign language of old-fashioned rebellion: the half-drawn curtain and alabaster vase revealed in the drawing-room window so as to indicate to the expected guest from Russia that the way was clear. An aesthetic touch graced revolutionary intrigues in those years. Midoff died soon after World War One, and by that time the Terrorist party, to which those cozy people belonged, had lost its "stylistic appeal" as Stepanov himself put it. I do not know who later acquired the house or how it happened that Oks (Osip Lvovich Oksman, 1885?--1943?) rented it for his business. (Part Two, 4)