he's wrong, Tamara Gardens, Emmie & Cecilia C. in Invitation to a Beheading

As Cincinnatus (the main character in VN’s novel “Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) walks past the two men on a bench quietly conversing in the obscurity of a public garden, one of them says: a ved’ on oshibaetsya (“I say he’s wrong”):

В коридоре на стене дремала тень Родиона, сгорбившись на теневом табурете, - и лишь мельком, с краю, вспыхнуло несколько рыжих волосков. Далее, у загиба стены, другой стражник, сняв свою форменную маску, утирал рукавом лицо. Цинциннат начал спускаться по лестнице. Каменные ступени был склизки и узки, с неосязаемой спиралью призрачных перил. Дойдя до низу, он пошел опять коридорами. Дверь с надписью на зеркальный выворот: "канцелярия" - была отпахнута; луна сверкала на чернильнице, а какая-то под столом мусорная корзинка неистово шеберстила и клокотала: должно быть, в нее свалилась мышь. Миновав еще много дверей, Цинциннат споткнулся, подпрыгнул и очутился в небольшом дворе, полном разных частей разобранной луны. Пароль в эту ночь был: молчание, - и солдат у ворот отозвался молчанием на молчание Цинцинната, пропуская его, и у всех прочих ворот было то же. Оставив за собой гуманную громаду крепости, он заскользил вниз по крутому, росистому дерну, попал на пепельную тропу между скал, пересек дважды, трижды извивы главной дороги, которая, наконец стряхнув последнюю тень крепости, полилась прямее, вольнее, - и по узорному мосту через высохшую речку Цинциннат вошел в город. Поднявшись на изволок и повернув налево по Садовой, он пронесся вдоль седых цветущих кустов. Где-то мелькнуло освещенное окно; за какой-то оградой собака громыхнула цепью, но не залаяла. Ветерок делал все, что мог, чтобы освежить беглецу голую шею. Изредка наплыв благоухания говорил о близости Тамариных Садов. Как он знал эти сады! Там, когда Марфинька была невестой и боялась лягушек, майских жуков... Там, где бывало, когда всё становилось невтерпёж и можно было одному, с кашей во рту из разжеванной сирени, со слезами... Зелёное, муравчатое. Там, тамошние холмы, томление прудов, тамтатам далекого оркестра... Он повернул по Матюхинской мимо развалин древней фабрики, гордости города, мимо шепчущих лип, мимо празднично настроенных белых дач телеграфных служащих, вечно справляющих чьи-нибудь именины, и вышел на Телеграфную. Оттуда шла в гору узкая улочка, и опять сдержанно зашумели липы. Двое мужчин тихо беседовали во мраке сквера на подразумеваемой скамейке. "А ведь он ошибается", - сказал один. Другой отвечал неразборчиво, и оба вроде как бы вздохнули, естественно смешиваясь с шелестом листвы. Цинциннат выбежал на круглую площадку, где луна сторожила знакомую статую поэта, похожую на снеговую бабу, - голова кубом, слепившиеся ноги, - и, пробежав ещё несколько шагов, оказался на своей улице. Справа, на стенах одинаковых домов, неодинаково играл лунный рисунок веток, так что только по выражению теней, по складке на переносице между окон, Цинциннат и узнал свой дом. В верхнем этаже окно Марфиньки было темно, но открыто. Дети, должно быть, спали на горбоносом балконе: там белелось что-то. Цинциннат вбежал на крыльцо, толкнул дверь и вошёл в свою освещённую камеру. Обернулся, но был уже заперт. Ужасно! На столе блестел карандаш. Паук сидел на жёлтой стене.

On the corridor wall dozed the shadow of Rodion, hunched over on the shadow of a stool, with only a fringe of beard outlined in rufous. Further on, at the bend in the wall, the other guard had taken off his uniform mask and was wiping his face with his sleeve. Cincinnatus started down the stairs. The stone steps were narrow and slippery, with the impalpable spiral of a ghostly railing. Upon reaching the bottom he again went along corridors. A door with the sign ‘office’ in mirrorlike inversion was wide open; moonlight glistened on an inkwell and a wastebasket rustled and rattled furiously under the table: a mouse must have fallen into it. Cincinnatus, after passing many other doors, stumbled, hopped, and found himself in a small courtyard, filled with various parts of the dismantled moon. This night the password was silence, and the soldier at the gate responded with silence to Cincinnatus’ silence and let him pass; likewise at all the other gates. Leaving behind the misty mass of the fortress he began to slide down a steep, dewy bank of turf, reached a pale path between cliffs, twice, three times crossed the bends of the main road — which, having finally shaken off the last shadow of the fortress, ran more straight and free — and a filigrane bridge across a dried-up rivulet brought Cincinnatus to the city. He climbed to the top of a steep incline, turned left on Garden Street, and sped past a shrubbery in greyish bloom. A lighted window flashed somewhere; behind some fence a dog shook its chain but did not bark. The breeze was doing all it could to cool the fugitive’s bare neck. Now and then a wave of fragrance would come from the Tamara Gardens. How well he knew that public park! There, where Marthe, when she was a bride, was frightened of the frogs and cockchafers . . . There, where, whenever life seemed unbearable, one could roam, with a meal of chewed lilac bloom in one’s mouth and firefly tears in one’s eyes . . . That green turfy tamarack park, the languor of its ponds, the tum-tum-tum of a distant band ...He turned on Matterfact Street, past the ruins of an ancient factory, the pride of the town, past whispering lindens, past the festive-looking white bungalows of the telegraph employees, perpetually celebrating somebody’s birthdate, and came out on Telegraph Street. From there a narrow lane went uphill, and again the lindens began to murmur discreetly. Two men, supposedly on a bench, were quietly conversing in the obscurity of a public garden. ‘I say he’s wrong,’ said one. The other replied unintelligibly, and both gave a kind of sigh which blended naturally with the sough of the foliage. Cincinnatus ran out into a circular plaza where the moon stood watch over the familiar statue of a poet that looked like a snowman — a cube for a head, legs stuck together — and, after a few more pattering steps, was in his own street. On the right the moon cast dissimilar patterns of branches on the walls of similar houses, so that it was only by the expression of the shadows, by the interciliary bar between two windows, that Cincinnatus recognized his own house. Marthe’s top-floor window was dark but open. The children must be sleeping on the hook-nosed balcony — there was a glimpse of something white there. Cincinnatus ran up the front steps, pushed open the door, and entered his lighted cell. He turned around, but already he was locked in. O horrible! The pencil glistened on the table. The spider sat on the yellow wall. (Chapter I)

The phrase on oshibaetsya (he is mistaken) occurs in Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”), Part Four of VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937):

Через два дня, всё более сердясь и всё более веря в свою неуязвимость, он начал "ломать" своих судей. Это второе письмо к жене можно разделить на пункты: 1) Я тебе говорил по поводу слухов о возможном аресте, что я не запутан ни в какое дело, и что правительству придется извиняться, если меня арестуют. 2) Я так полагал, потому что знал, что за мною следят, - хвалились, что следят очень хорошо, - я положился на эту похвальбу, - ибо мой расчет был, что, зная как я живу и что делаю, будут знать, что подозрения напрасны. 3) Расчёт был глуп. Ибо я знал также, что у нас ничего не умеют делать как следует. 4) Таким образом моим арестованием комрометировали правительство. 5) Что "нам" делать? Извиниться? Но что, если он не примет извинения, а скажет: вы компрометировали правительство, моя обязанность это ему объяснить. 6) Поэтому будем отдалять неприятность. 7) Но правительство спрашивает по временам, виновен ли Чернышевский, - и правительство, наконец, добьется ответа. 8) Этого ответа я и жду.

"Копия с довольно любопытного письма Чернышевского, - карандашом приписал Потапов. - Но он ошибается: извиняться никому не придётся".

А ещё спустя несколько дней он начал писать "Что делать?", - и уже 15 января послал первую порцию Пыпину; через неделю послал вторую, и Пыпин передал обе Некрасову для "Современника", который с февраля был опять разрешен. Тогда же разрешено было и "Русское Слово", после такого же восьмимесячного запрета: и, нетерпеливо ожидая журнальной поживы, опасный сосед уже обмакнул перо.

Two days afterwards, getting more and more angry and more and more believing in his invulnerability, he began to “maul” his judges. This second letter to his wife can be divided up into points: 1) I told you in connection with the rumors about my possible arrest that I was not mixed up in any affair and that the government would be forced to apologize if it arrested me. 2) I assumed this because I knew they were following me—they boasted that they were doing it very well, and I relied on their boast, for my calculation was that, knowing how I lived and what I did, they would know that their suspicions were groundless. 3) It was a stupid calculation. For I also knew that in our country, people are incapable of doing anything properly. 4) Thus by my arrest they have compromised the government. 5) What can “we” do? Apologize? But what if “he” doesn’t accept the apology, but says: You have compromised the government, it is my duty to explain this to the government. 6) Therefore “we” shall postpone the unpleasantness. 7) But the government asks from time to time whether Chernyshevski is guilty—and finally the government will obtain an answer. 8) It is that answer I am waiting for.

“The copy of a rather curious letter from Chernyshevski,” added Potapov in pencil. “But he is mistaken: no one will have to apologize.”

A few days after that he began to write his novel, What to Do?—and by January 15th he had sent the first portion to Pypin; a week later he sent a second, and Pypin handed both to Nekrasov for The Contemporary, which had again been permitted (beginning with February). At the same time The Russian Word was also allowed after a similar eight-month suspension; and in the impatient expectation of journalistic profit, the dangerous fezzed neighbor had already dipped his pen.

Potapov’s pencil brings to mind the pencil that glistens on the table in Cincinnatus’s cell. In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) the maiden name of Armande’s mother is Anastasia Petrovna Potapov:

A little farther, an interval in the stone wall revealed a short flight of stairs and the door of a whitewashed bungalow signed Villa Nastia in French cursive. As happens so often in R.'s fiction, "nobody answered the bell." Hugh noticed several other steps lateral to the porch, descending (after all that stupid climbing!) into the pungent dampness of boxwood. These led him around the house and into its garden. A boarded, only half-completed splash pool adjoined a small lawn, in the center of which a stout middle-aged lady, with greased limbs of a painful pink, lay sun-bathing in a deck chair. A copy, no doubt the same, of the Figures et cetera paperback, with a folded letter (which we thought wiser our Person should not recognize) acting as marker, lay on top of the one-piece swimsuit into which her main bulk had been stuffed.

Madame Charles Chamar, née Anastasia Petrovna Potapov (a perfectly respectable name that her late husband garbled as "Patapouf"), was the daughter of a wealthy cattle dealer who had emigrated with his family to England from Ryazan via Kharbin and Ceylon soon after the Bolshevist revolution. She had long grown accustomed to entertaining this or that young man whom capricious Armande had stood up; but the new beau was dressed like a salesman, and had something about him (your genius, Person! ) that puzzled and annoyed Madame Chamar. She liked people to fit. The Swiss boy, with whom Armande was skiing at the moment on the permanent snows high above Witt, fitted. So did the Blake twins. So did the old guide's son, golden-haired Jacques, a bobsled champion. But my gangly and gloomy Hugh Person, with his awful tie, vulgarly fastened to his cheap white shirt, and impossible chestnut suit, did not belong to her accepted world. When told that Armande was enjoying herself elsewhere and might not be back for tea, he did not bother to conceal his surprise and displeasure. He stood scratching his cheek. The inside of his Tyrolean hat was dark with sweat. Had Armande got his letter? (Chapter 12)

A whitewashed bungalow signed Villa Nastia in French cursive recalls the festive-looking white bungalows of the telegraph employees, perpetually celebrating somebody’s birthdate. Figures in the Golden Window (the full title of R.’s novel) bring to mind Marthe’s top-floor window. According to Armande, Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan:'

"Spoke to a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a romantic tumult never felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule aurait juré avec la dernière syllabe de mon prénom. I believe Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu. Charmingly sophisticated, yet marvelously naive. Chalet above Witt built by father. (Chapter 9)

In a letter to Turgenev (quoted by Fyodor in “The Life of Chernyshevski”) Chernyshevski compares Tolstoy to a thickheaded peacock:

В тот же год появился «Рудин», но напал на него Чернышевский (за карикатурное изображение Бакунина) только в 60 году, когда Тургенев уже был ненужен «Современнику», который он покинул из-за добролюбовского змеиного шипка на «Накануне». Толстой не выносил нашего героя: «Его так и слышишь, – писал он о нем, – тоненький неприятный голосок, говорящий тупые неприятности… и возмущается в своем уголке, покуда никто не сказал цыц и не посмотрел в глаза». «Аристократы становились грубыми хамами, – замечает по этому поводу Стеклов, – когда заговаривали с нисшими или о нисших по общественному положению». «Нисший», впрочем, не оставался в долгу и, зная, как Тургеневу дорого всякое словечко против Толстого, щедро говорил о «пошлости и хвастовстве» последнего, «хвастовстве бестолкового павлина своим хвостом, не прикрывающим его пошлой задницы» и т.д. «Вы не какой-нибудь Островский или Толстой, – добавлял Николай Гаврилович, – вы наша честь» (а «Рудин» уже вышел, – два года как вышел).

That same year Turgenev’s Rudin appeared, but Chernyshevski attacked it (for its caricature of Bakunin) only in 1860, when Turgenev was no longer necessary to The Contemporary, which he had left as a result of Dobrolyubov’s directing a snake hiss at his “On the Eve.” Tolstoy could not tolerate our hero: “One keeps hearing him,” he wrote, “hearing that thin, nasty little voice of his saying obtuse, nasty things … as he keeps waxing indignant in his corner until someone says ‘shut up’ and looks him in the eye.” “The aristocrats turned into coarse ruffians,” remarks Steklov in this connection, “when they talked with inferiors or about people who were inferior to them socially.” “The inferior,” however, did not remain in debt; knowing how much Turgenev prized every word spoken against Tolstoy, Chernyshevski, in the fifties, freely enlarged upon Tolstoy’s poshlost (vulgarity) and hvastovstvo (bragging)—“the bragging of a thickheaded peacock about a tail which doesn’t even cover his vulgar bottom,” etc. “You are not some Ostrovski or some Tolstoy,” added Nikolay Gavrilovich, “you are an honor to us” (and Rudin was already out—had been out for two years).

One of the spectral narrators in Transparent Things, Mr R. brings to mind Princess R., Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov’s late mistress in Turgenev’s novel Ottsy i deti (“Fathers and Sons,” 1862). Chapter 3 of TT is the story of a pencil:

In his search for a commode to store his belongings Hugh Person, a tidy man, noticed that the middle drawer of an old desk relegated to a dark corner of the room, and supporting there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly by the lodger or servant (actually neither) who had been the last to check if it was empty (nobody had). My good Hugh tried to woggle it in; at first it refused to budge; then, in response to the antagony of a chance tug (which could not help profiting from the cumulative energy of several jogs) it shot out and spilled a pencil. This he briefly considered before putting it back.

It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never found. Now comes the act of attention.

In his shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath but one should be above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors). On the whole, it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned make. Going back a number of seasons (not as far, though, as Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction, we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is placed in a metal cylinder which has a blue eye, a sapphire with a hole drilled in it, and through this the caviar is forced. It issues in one continuous appetizing rodlet (watch for our little friend!), which looks as if it retained the shape of an earthworm's digestive tract (but watch, watch, do not be deflected!). It is now being cut into the lengths required for these particular pencils (we glimpse the cutter, old Elias Borrowdale, and are about to mouse up his forearm on a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in our haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.

Now let us not lose our precious bit of lead while we prepare the wood. Here's the tree! This particular pine! It Is cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark. We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here's the board that will yield the integument of the pencil in the shallow drawer (still not closed). We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes.

Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us! But he won't, oh no.

In his poem To Dawe, Esq. (1828) Pushkin mentions George Dawe’s divnyi karandash (sublime pencil) and Mephistopheles:

Зачем твой дивный карандаш

Рисует мой арапский профиль?

Хоть ты векам его предашь,

Его освищет Мефистофель.

Рисуй Олениной черты.

В жару сердечных вдохновений,

Лишь юности и красоты

Поклонником быть должен гений.

Why draw with your pencil sublime
My Negro profile? Though transmitted
By you it be to future time,
It will be by Mephisto twitted.

Draw fair Olenin's features, in the glow
Of heart-engendered inspiration:
Only on youth and beauty should bestow
A genius its adoration.

(VN’s translation)

The invisible narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils.

Tamariny Sady (the Tamara Gardens) so dear to Cincinnatus recall dusha tsaritsy Tamary (the spirit of Queen Tamara) mentioned by Fyodor in “The Life of Chernyshevski:”

У нас есть три точки: Ч, К, П. Проводится один катет, ЧК. К Чернышевскому власти подобрали отставного уланского корнета Владислава Дмитриевича Костомарова, еще в августе прошлого года, в Москве, за тайное печатание возмутительных изданий разжалованного в рядовые, - человека с безуминкой, с печоринкой, при этом стихотворца: он оставил в литературе сколопендровый след, как переводчик иностранных поэтов. Проводится другой катет, КП. Писарев в "Русском Слове" пишет об этих переводах, браня автора за "драгоценная тиара занялась на нём как фара ("из Гюго") хваля за "простую и сердечную" передачу куплетов Бернса ("прежде всего, прежде всего да будут все честны... Молитесь все... чтоб человеку человек был брат прежде всего"), а по поводу того, что Костомаров доносит читателю, что Гейне умер нераскаянным грешником, критик ехидно советует "грозному обличителю" "полюбоваться на собственную общественную деятельность". Ненормальность Костомарова сказывалась в витиеватой графомании, в бессмысленном, лунатическом (даром, что на заказ) составлении подложных писем с нанизанными французскими фразами; наконец, в застеночной игривости: свои донесения Путилину (сыщику) он подписывал: "Феофан Отченашенко" или "Венцеслав Лютый". Да и был он действительно лют в своей молчаливой мрачности, фатален и лжив, хвастлив и придавлен. Наделенный курьезными способностями, он умел писать женским почерком, - сам объясняя это тем, что в нём "в полнолуние гащивает душа царицы Тамары". Множественность почерков в придачу к тому обстоятельству (еще одна шутка судьбы!), что его обычная рука напоминала руку Чернышевского, значительно повышала цену этого сонного предателя. Для косвенного подтверждения того, что воззвание "К барским крестьянам" написано Чернышевским, Костомарову было задано во-первых изготовить записочку, будто бы от Чернышевского, содержащую просьбу изменить одно слово в этом воззвании; а во-вторых - письмо (к "Алексею Николаевичу"), в котором находилось бы доказательство деятельного участия Чернышевского в революционном движении. То и другое Костомаров и состряпал. Подделка почерка совершенно очевидна в начале она еще старательна, но потом фальсификатору работа как бы надоела, и он торопится кончить: взять хотя бы слово "я", которое в подлинных рукописях Чернышевского кончается отводной чертой прямой и твердой, - даже слегка загибающейся в правую сторону, - а тут, в подложном письме, эта черта с какой-то странной лихостью загибается влево, к голове, словно буква козыряет.

We have three points: C, K, P. A cathetus is drawn, CK. To offset Chernyshevski, the authorities picked out a retired Uhlan cornet, Vladislav Dmitrievich Kostomarov, who the previous August in Moscow had been reduced to the ranks for printing seditious publications—a man with a touch of madness and a pinch of Pechorinism about him, and also a verse-maker: he left a scolopendrine trace in literature as the translator of foreign poets. Another cathetus is drawn, KP. The critic Pisarev in the periodical The Russian Word writes about these translations, scolding the author for “The magnificent tiara’s Coruscation like a pharos” [from Hugo], praising his “simple and heartfelt” rendering of some lines by Burns (which came out as “And first of all, and first of all / Let all men honest be / Let’s pray that man be to each man / A brother first of all … etc.), and in connection with Kostomarov’s report to his readers that Heine died an unrepentant sinner, the critic roguishly advises the “grim denouncer” to “take a good look at his own public activities.” Kostomarov’s derangement was evidenced in his florid graphomania, in the senseless somnambulistic (even though made-to-order) composition of counterfeit letters studded with French phrases; and finally in his macabre playfulness: he signed his reports to Putilin (a detective): Feofan Otchenashenko (Theophanus Ourfatherson) or Ventseslav Lyutyy (Wenceslaus the Fiend). And, indeed, he was fiendish in his taciturnity, funest and false, boastful and cringing. Endowed with curious abilities, he could write in a feminine hand—explaining this himself by the fact that he was “visited at the full moon by the spirit of Queen Tamara.” The plurality of hands he could imitate in addition to the circumstance (yet one more of destiny’s jokes) that his normal handwriting recalled that of Chernyshevski considerably heightened the value of this hypnotic betrayer. For indirect evidence that the appeal proclamation “To the Serfs of Landowners” had been written by Chernyshevski, Kostomarov was given, first, the task of fabricating a note, allegedly from Chernyshevski, containing a request to alter one word in the appeal; and, secondly, of preparing a letter (to “Aleksey Nikolaevich”) that would furnish proof of Chernyshevski’s active participation in the revolutionary movement. Both the one and the other were then and there concocted by Kostomarov. The forgery of the handwriting is quite evident: at the beginning the forger still took pains but then he seems to have grown bored by the work and to be in a hurry to get it over: to take but the word “I,” ya (formed in Russianscript somewhat like a proofreader’s dele). In Chernyshevski’s genuine manuscripts it ends with an outgoing stroke which is straight and strong—and even curves a little to the right—while here, in the forgery, this stroke curves with a kind of queer jauntiness to the left, toward the head, as if the ya were saluting.

and Tom Tam (as in his last letter to his publisher Mr. R. calls his secretary, Mr. Tamworth):

Dear Phil,

This, no doubt, is my last letter to you. I am leaving you. I am leaving you for another even greater Publisher. In that House I shall be proofread by cherubim – or misprinted by devils, depending on the department my poor soul is assigned to. So adieu, dear friend, and may your heir auction this off most profitably.

Its holographical nature is explained by the fact that I prefer it not to be read by Tom Tam or one of his boy typists. I am mortally sick after a botched operation in the only private room of a Bolognese hospital. The kind young nurse who will mail it has told me with dreadful carving gestures something I paid her for as generously as I would her favors if I still were a man. Actually the favors of death knowledge are infinitely more precious than those of love. According to my almond-eyed little spy, the great surgeon, may his own liver rot, lied to me when he declared yesterday with a deathhead's grin that the operazione had been perfetta. Well, it had been so in the sense Euler called zero the perfect number. Actually, they ripped me open, cast one horrified look at my decayed fegato, and without touching it sewed me up again. I shall not bother you with the Tamworth problem. You should have seen the smug expression of the oblong fellow's bearded lips when he visited me this morning. As you know – as everybody, even Marion, knows – he gnawed his way into all my affairs, crawling into every cranny, collecting every German-accented word of mine, so that now he can boswell the dead man just as he had bossed very well the living one. I am also writing my and your lawyer about the measures I would like to be taken after my departure in order to thwart Tamworth at every turn of his labyrinthian plans.

The only child I have ever loved is the ravishing, silly, treacherous little Julia Moore. Every cent and centime I possess as well as all literary remains that can be twisted out of Tamworth's clutches must go to her, whatever the ambiguous obscurities contained in my will: Sam knows what I am hinting at and will act accordingly. (Chapter 21)

Judging by the gross mistake in the novel's last sentence ("Easy, you know, does it, son"), Mr. R. went straight to Hell (where he is misprinted by devils). At the end of his story Zhizn' v voprosakh i vosklitsaniyakh ("Life as a Series of Questions and Exclamations," 1882) Chekhov mentions Emmochka (who was not forgotten by the old man in his will):

Старость. Едем на воды? Выходи за него, дочь моя! Глуп? Полно! Плохо пляшет, но ноги прелестны! Сто рублей за... поцелуй?! Ах, ты, чертёнок! Хе-хе-хе! Рябчика хочешь, девочка? Ты, сын, того... безнравствен! Вы забываетесь, молодой человек! Пст! пст! пст! Ллюблю музыку! Шям... Шям... панского! «Шута» читаешь? Хе-хе-хе! Внучатам конфеток несу! Сын мой хорош, но я был лучше! Где ты, то время? Я и тебя, Эммочка, в завещании не забыл! Ишь я какой! Папашка, дай часы! Водянка? Неужели? Царство небесное! Родня плачет? А к ней идёт траур! От него пахнет! Мир праху твоему, честный труженик!

Old Age. Shall we visit the spa? Marry him, my child! He’s stupid? Enough! She dances badly, but what legs! A hundred roubles… for a kiss?!  Ah, you little devil! He-he-he! Shall I give you a fritillary, little girl? Look, son, you’re, how shall I say, immoral! You have forgotten your manners young man! Shh! Shh! Shh! I lyove music! Cham… cham… champagne! Are you reading Punch? He-he-he! I’ve brought sweeties for the grandchildren!  My son is excellent, but I was better! Where are they now, the snows of yesteryear? I have’n’t forgotten you either, Emmochka, in my will!  That’s what I’m like! Papa, let me have your watch. Dropsy? Really? Rest in peace! The family are in tears! That mourning dress looks well on her! There’s a smell from him! Peace to your ashes, laborer in the vineyard!

The characters of “Invitation to a Beheading” include Emmochka (Emmie), Rodrig Ivanovich’s daughter who tells Cincinnatus that she will save him but breaks her promise, and Cecilia C., Cincinnatus’s mother. In a letter of March 28, 1891, to his family Chekhov says that he is in Bologna, a city famous for Raphael’s painting Cecilia:

Я в Болонье (Bologna), городе, знаменитом своими аркадами, косыми башнями и картиной Рафаэля «Цецилия». Сегодня едем во Флоренцию. Жив и здоров. Всем кланяюсь и желаю здравия.

Ваш Antonio.

The main character in Transparent Things, Hugh Person (a proofreader) brings to mind Chekhov's story Persona ("The Person," 1886) whose hero has a beautiful handwriting and wants to get the job of an office clerk.

In his memoir essay Iz zapisnoy knizhki (o Chekhove), ("From a Notebook. On Chekhov," 1914), Amfiteatrov says that Chekhov in jest called him "Byron," quotes Chekhov's words "if the devils exist in nature, let the devils write about the devils" and mentions Lermontov's Tamara:

Потерпев полное любовное крушение, разбитый по всему фронту, мой Демон произносил над прахом своей погибшей возлюбленной весьма трогательный монолог, в котором, между прочим, имелась такая аттестация: "Была ты, как изумруд, душой светла!"

Чехов оживился:
- Как? что? как?
- "Как изумруд, душой светла..."
- Послушайте, Байрон: почему же ваш Демон уверен, что у неё душа - зелёная?

Рассмешил меня - и стих умер. А после сказал:
- Стихи красивые, а что не печатаете, ей-ей, хорошо делаете, право... Ни к чему все эти черти с чувствами... И с человеками сущее горе, а ещё черти страдать начнут.
- Так символ же, Антон Павлович!
- Слушайте: что же - символ? Человек должен писать человеческую правду. Если черти существуют в природе, то о чертях пусть черти и пишут.

Поэтому "Демон" мой лишь украдкой печатался в провинциальных изданиях - отрывками и под разными названиями. Имени "Демон" я так и не посмел ему дать: слишком велика казалась претензия. Тем более что - был-таки грех! - хотелось поправить Михаила Юрьевича и сделать нечистого более стойким и логичным революционером, чем лермонтовский Демон, а его смертную пассию (она у меня итальянка была) более духовною и идейно развитою девицею, чем лермонтовская дикарка, грузинка Тамара.