At the end of his letter to Annette Blagovo Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! 1974) mentions Botticelli's Primavera:
She was elegant, she was languid, she was rather angelic in one sense, and dismally stupid in many others. I was lonely, and frightened, and reckless with lust--not sufficiently reckless, however, not to warn her by means of a vivid instance--half paradigm and half object lesson--or what she laid herself open to by consenting to marry me.
Milostivaya Gosudarynya Anna Ivanovna!
[Anglice Dear Miss Blagovo]
Before entertaining you viva-voce of a subject of the utmost importance, I beg you to join me in the conduct of an experiment that will describe better than a learned article would one of the typical facets of my displaced mental crystal. So here goes.
With your permission it is night now and I am in bed (decently clad, of course, and with every organ in decent repose), lying supine, and imagining an ordinary moment in an ordinary place. To further protect the purity of the experiment, let the visualized spot be an invented one. I imagine myself coming out of a bookshop and pausing on the curb before crossing the street to the little sidewalk café directly opposite. No cars are in sight. I cross. I imagine myself reaching the little café. The afternoon sun occupies one of its chairs and the half of a table, but otherwise its open-air section is empty and very inviting: nothing but brightness remains of the recent shower. And here I stop short as I recollect that I bad an umbrella.
I do not intend to bore you, glubokouvazhaemaya (dear) Anna Ivanova, and still less do I wish to crumple this third or fourth poor sheet with the crashing sound only punished paper can make; but the scene is not sufficiently abstract and schematic, so let me retake it.
I, your friend and employer Vadim Vadimovich, lying in bed on my back in ideal darkness (I got up a minute ago to recurtain the moon that peeped between the folds of two paragraphs), I imagine diurnal Vadim Vadimovich crossing a street from a bookshop to a sidewalk café. I am encased in my vertical self: not looking down but ahead, thus only indirectly aware of the blurry front of my corpulent figure, of the alternate points of my shoes, and of the rectangular form of the parcel under my arm. I imagine myself walking the twenty paces needed to reach the opposite sidewalk, then stopping with an unprintable curse and deciding to go back for the umbrella I left in the shop.
There is an affliction still lacking a name; there is, Anna (you must permit me to call you that, I am ten years your senior and very ill), something dreadfully wrong with my sense of direction, or rather my power over conceived space, because at this juncture I am unable to execute mentally, in the dark of my bed, the simple about-face (an act I perform without thinking in physical reality!) which would allow me to picture instantly in my mind the once already traversed asphalt as now being before me, and the vitrine of the bookshop being now within sight and not somewhere behind.
Let me dwell briefly on the procedure involved; on my inability to follow it consciously in my mind--my unwieldy and disobedient mind! In order to make myself imagine the pivotal process I have to force an opposite revolution of the decor: I must try, dear friend and assistant, to swing the entire length of the street, with the massive façades of its houses before and behind me, from one direction to another in the slow wrench of a half circle, which is like trying to turn the colossal tiller of a rusty recalcitrant rudder so as to transform oneself by conscious degrees from, say, an east-facing Vadim Vadimovich into a west-sun-blinded one. The mere thought of that action leads the bedded recliner to such a muddle and dizziness that one prefers scrapping the about-face altogether, wiping, so to speak, the slate of one's vision, and beginning the return journey in one's imagination as if it were an initial one, without any previous crossing of the street, and therefore without any of the intermediate horror--the horror of struggling with the steerage of space and crushing one's chest in the process!
Voilà. Sounds rather tame, doesn't it, en fait de démence, and, indeed, if I stop brooding over the thing, I decrease it to an insignificant flaw--the missing pinkie of a freak born with nine fingers. Considering it closer, however, I cannot help suspecting it to be a warning symptom, a foreglimpse of the mental malady that is known to affect eventually the entire brain. Even that malady may not be as imminent and grave as the storm signals suggest; I only want you to be aware of the situation before proposing to you, Annette. Do not write, do not phone, do not mention this letter, if and when you come Friday afternoon; but, please, if you do, wear, in propitious sign, the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wild flowers. I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl from left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and serious gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, my allegory.
On Friday afternoon, for the first time in two months she came "on the dot" as my American friends would say. A wedge of pain replaced my heart, and little black monsters started to play musical chairs all over my room, as I noticed that she wore her usual recent hat, of no interest or meaning. She took it off before the mirror and suddenly invoked Our Lord with rare emphasis.
"Ya idiotka," she said. "I'm an idiot. I was looking for my pretty wreath, when papa started to read to me something about an ancestor of yours who quarreled with Peter the Terrible."
"Ivan," I said.
"I didn't catch the name, but I saw I was late and pulled on (natsepila) this shapochka instead of the wreath, your wreath, the wreath you ordered."
I was helping her out of her jacket. Her words filled me with dream-free wantonness. I embraced her. My mouth sought the hot hollow between neck and clavicle. It was a brief but thorough embrace, and I boiled over, discreetly, deliciously, merely by pressing myself against her, one hand cupping her firm little behind and the other feeling the harp strings of her ribs. She was trembling all over. An ardent but silly virgin, she did not understand why my grip had relaxed with the suddenness of sleep or windlorn sails.
Had she read only the beginning and end of my letter? Well, yes, she had skipped the poetical part. In other words, she had not the slightest idea what I was driving at? She promised, she said, to reread it. She had grasped, however, that I loved her? She had, but how could she be sure that I really loved her? I was so strange, so, so--she couldn't express it--yes, STRANGE in every respect. She never had met anyone like me. Whom then did she meet, I inquired: trepanners? trombonists? astronomists? Well, mostly military men, if I wished to know, officers of Wrangel's army, gentlemen, interesting people, who spoke of danger and duty, of bivouacs in the steppe. Oh, but look here, I too can speak of "deserts idle, rough quarries, rocks"--No, she said, they did not invent. They talked of spies they had hanged, they talked of international politics, of a new film or book that explained the meaning of life. And never one unchaste joke, not one horrid risqué comparison... As in my books? Examples, examples! No, she would not give examples. She would not be pinned down to whirl on the pin like a wingless fly.
Or butterfly.
We were walking, one lovely morning, on the outskirts of Bellefontaine. Something flicked and lit.
"Look at that harlequin," I murmured, pointing cautiously with my elbow.
Sunning itself against the white wall of a suburban garden was a flat, symmetrically outspread butterfly, which the artist had placed at a slight angle to the horizon of his picture. The creature was painted a smiling red with yellow intervals between black blotches; a row of blue crescents ran along the inside of the toothed wing margins. The only feature to rate a shiver of squeamishness was the glistening sweep of bronzy silks coming down on both sides of the beastie's body.
"As a former kindergarten teacher I can tell you," said helpful Annette, "that it's a most ordinary nettlefly (krapivnitsa). How many little hands have plucked off its wings and brought them to me for approval!"
It flicked and was gone. (Part Two, Chapter 7)
In his poem Iz epifalamy (“From the Epithalam,” 1907) written after the meter and rhyme scheme of the Eugene Onegin stanza Sergey Solovyov mentions Botticelli’s Primavera who, to the sound of birds’ voices, glides among the nymphs, in a dense forest:
Всё улыбается светло Вам:
Цвести природа начала;
Кружится в сумраке еловом,
Над мохом, первая пчела.
Шумят разлившиеся воды,
И на закате хороводы
Тревожат песнью сон дерев.
Под звонкий смех весёлых дев
Летают лёгкие качели.
Под искрометной синевой
Светлеет ярко зелень хвой,
И Primavera Ботичелли,
Под говор птичьих голосов,
Скользит меж нимф, в глуши лесов.
Epithalam is a wedding song. Vadim soon marries Annette Blagovo (according to Vadim, “Dr. Blagovo and his wife were looking forward to a regular Greek-Orthodox wedding--a taper-lit gold-and-gauze ceremony, with high priest and low priest and a double choir”). The mother of Vadim’s daughter Bel, Annette Blagovo is Vadim’s second wife. Vadim’s first wife, Iris Black brings to mind Deva raduzhnykh vorot (the Girl of Iridescent Gate), a gnostic term mentioned by Vladimir Solovyov (Sergey’s uncle, the philosopher) at the end of his poem Nilskaya delta ("The Nile Delta", 1898):
Золотые, изумрудные,
Чернозёмные поля...
Не скупа ты, многотрудная,
Молчаливая земля!
Это лоно плодотворное,—
Сколько дремлющих веков,—
Принимало, всепокорное,
Семена и мертвецов.
Но не всё тобою взятое
Вверх несла ты каждый год:
Смертью древнею заклятое
Для себя весны всё ждет.
Не Изида трёхвенечная
Ту весну им приведёт,
А нетронутая, вечная
«Дева Радужных Ворот».
Sergey Solovyov was a close friend of Andrey Bely, the author of Arlekinada (“The Harlequinade,” 1908) and Pervoe svidanie (“The First Rendezvous,” 1921), a poem whose title links it to Vladimir Solovyov’s poem Tri svidaniya (“The Three Meetings,” 1897). On the other hand, Sergey Solovyov was a second cousin of Alexander Blok and a shafer (best man) at Blok’s wedding with Lyubov Mendeleev. In his poem Ya Gamlet. Kholodeet krov’… (“I’m Hamlet. Freezes blood,” 1914) Blok identifies himself with Hamlet and compares his wife to Ophelia:
Я – Гамлет. Холодеет кровь,
Когда плетёт коварство сети,
И в сердце – первая любовь
Жива – к единственной на свете.
Тебя, Офелию мою,
Увел далёко жизни холод,
И гибну, принц, в родном краю
Клинком отравленным заколот.
I’m Hamlet, and my blood grows cold
When meshing of deceit is weaving,
And in my heart is first love’s hold
Alive – to one alone it’s cleaving.
Ophelia, distant frigid hand
Of life at you is madly grabbing,
And I, the Prince, in native land
Succumb to poisoned épée’s stabbing.
(tr. R. Moreton)
Describing Annette’s death in a hurricane, Vadim mentions the mad scholar in his novel Esmeralda and her Parandrus (1941) who wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her flowers:
The mad scholar in Esmeralda and her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her flowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks that tornadoes and floods are really sensational only in North America. On May 17, 1953, several papers printed a photograph of a family, complete with birdcage, phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it out on the roof of their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the picture of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man, a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver’s seat, stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the Weather Bureau was accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteen schoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animals donated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor’s widow, to the Rosedale Museum, were safe in the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twister struck. But the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drowned bodies of its two occupants were never retrieved. (Part Four, chapter 2)
Describing his dialogue with Gerry Adamson (Louise’s husband), Vadim calls Dr. Olga Repnin (1946) “my novel about the professorsha:”
Her husband sat in a deep armchair, reading a London weekly bought at the Shopping Center. He had not bothered to take off his horrible black raincoat--a voluminous robe of oilskin that conjured up the image of a stagecoach driver in a lashing storm. He now removed however his formidable spectacles. He cleared his throat with a characteristic rumble. His purple jowls wobbled as he tackled the ordeal of rational speech:
GERRY Do you ever see this paper, Vadim (accenting "Vadim" incorrectly on the first syllable)? Mister (naming a particularly lively criticule) has demolished your Olga (my novel about the professorsha; it had come out only now in the British edition).
VADIM May I give you a drink? We'll toast him and roast him.
GERRY Yet he's right, you know. It is your worst book. Chute complète, says the man. Knows French, too.
LOUISE No drinks. We've got to rush home. Now heave out of that chair. Try again. Take your glasses and paper. There. Au revoir, Vadim. I'll bring you those pills tomorrow morning after I drive him to school. (Part Four, chapter 1)
In his memoir essay Mladenchestvo (“Infancy,” 1933) Hodasevich quotes his first couplet (composed at six) and points out that in his poem Pervoe Svidanie Andrey Bely rhymes antrasha (entrechat) with professorsha (a lady Professor):
Мне было лет шесть, когда сочинил я первое двустишие, выражавшее самую сущность тогдашних моих чувств:
Кого я больше всех люблю?
Ведь всякий знает - Женичку.
Не следует думать, что это двустишие вовсе лишено рифмы. В основу рифмоида "люблю - Женичку" положено очень верное чувство рифмы и ритма. В книжной поэзии я помню только один случай такой рифмовки дактилического окончания с мужским: "антраша" и "профессорша" у Андрея Белого в "Первом свидании".
In “Infancy” Hodasevich describes his early passion for ballet and mentions Korovin’s Esmeralda (a ballet based on Victor Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris):
В годы раннего моего балетоманства обстановочная часть находилась в руках "машиниста и декоратора" Вальца. Впоследствии к ней привлекли настоящих художников. С появлением Клодта и в особенности К. А. Коровина декорации и костюмы, разумеется, много выиграли в отношении художественном. Коровинская "Эсмеральда" была событием. Но должен признаться, что о пресечении вальцевской традиции мне порою хотелось вздохнуть. Постановки Вальца были отчасти безвкусны, но в них было столько таланта и волшебства, в самом их безвкусии было столько прелести, а в их наивном натурализме столько нечаянной и прелестной условности, что их всё-таки нельзя не назвать очаровательными. В 1921 году, в Петербурге, случилось мне видеть "Раймонду", поставленную в выцветших, "дореформенных" декорациях того же стиля, - это было необыкновенно хорошо.
According to Hodasevich, Korovin’s Esmeralda was sobytie (an event). The name Korovin comes from korova (cow). An ox-sized animal from medieval bestiaries, Parandrus also seems to hint at Ursus (a traveling artist in Victor Hugo’s L’Homme qui rit), Quasimodo (the hunchback in Notre Dame de Paris) and Esmeralda’s tame goat Djali in the same novel.
The characters in VN’s novel Kamera obskura (“Laughter in the Dark,” 1934) include von Korovin (a guest at the party given by Kretschmar). Valts (the decorator) and sobytie (the event) mentioned by Hodasevich bring to mind VN’s plays Sobytie (“The Event,” 1938) and Izobretenie Val’sa (“The Waltz Invention,” 1938). The action in "The Waltz Invention" seems to take place in a dream that Lyubov (the wife of the portrait painter Troshcheykin in "The Event") dreams in the sleep of death after committing suicide on her dead son's fifth birthday (two days after her mother's fiftieth birthday). Like Shakespeare's Othello (who is mentioned by Troshcheykin at the beginning of "The Event"), Lyubov stabs herself. Lyubov's sister Vera brings to mind Primavera. Botticelli's Primavera is an allegory of Spring. In "The Waltz Invention" the action takes place in spring.
The eleven generals in "The Waltz Invention" resemble the mystics in Blok's play Balaganchik ("The Puppet Show," 1906) whose characters include Arlekin (the Harlequin). Among the mystics whom Blok satirized in Balaganchik were Andrey Bely and Sergey Solovyov.
Vadim Vadimovich's family name seems to be Yablonski. The surname Yablonski comes from yablonya (apple tree). According to a Russian saying, yabloko ot yabloni nedaleko padaet (“like parents, like children;” literally: “an apple falls not far from the apple-tree”). At the end of Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov (1825) an incidental character quotes this saying:
Один из народа
Брат да сестра! бедные дети, что пташки в клетке.
Другой
Есть о ком жалеть? Проклятое племя!
Первый
Отец был злодей, а детки невинны.
Другой
Яблоко от яблони недалеко падает.
One of the people
Brother and sister! Poor children, like birds in a cage.
Second person
Are you going to pity them? Goddamned family!
First person
Their father was a villain, but the children are innocent.
Second person
Like parents, like children.
In Pushkin's drama Grigoriy Otrepiev (the impostor) tells Marina Mnishek that the shade of Ivan the Terrible has adopted him and named him Dmitri from his grave:
Тень Грозного меня усыновила,
Димитрием из гроба нарекла,
Вокруг меня народы возмутила
И в жертву мне Бориса обрекла —
Царевич я.
The shade of tsar Ivan has adopted me,
And named me Dmitri from his grave,
It has stirred up the people all around,
And sacrificed Boris to me
I am the Prince!
According to Annette, she was looking for her pretty wreath, when her father started to read to her something about Vadim's ancestor who quarreled with Peter the Terrible. In his poem Moya rodoslovnaya ("My Pedigree," 1830) Pushkin mentions his prashchur (great-great-grandfather) who quarreled with Peter the Great and for this was hung by him:
Упрямства дух нам всем подгадил:
В родню свою неукротим,
С Петром мой пращур не поладил
И был за то повешен им.
Our stubborn spirit us tricks has played;
Most irrepressible of his race,
With Peter my sire could not get on;
And for this was hung by him.
(tr. I. Panin)
It seems that, like Vadim (whose father, a gambler and a rake, scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars, resided on the idyllic outskirts of history), Annette was adopted by her parents (at least, Dr Blagovo is not her real father). Prince Vadim Vadimovich Yablonski and his three successive wives (Iris Black, Annette Blagovo and Louise Adamson) are the children of Count Starov, a retired diplomat. The surname Starov comes from staryi (old). At the beginning of Blok's drama Roza i krest (“The Rose and the Cross,” 1912) Bertrand mentions yabloni staryi stvol (the trunk of an old apple tree):
Яблони старый ствол,
Расшатанный бурей февральской!
Жадно ждёшь ты весны...
Тёплый ветер дохнёт, и нежной травою
Зазеленеет замковый вал...
Чем ты, старый, ответишь тогда
Ручьям и птицам певучим?
Лишь две-три бледно-розовых ветви протянешь
В воздух, омытый дождями,
Чёрный, бурей измученный ствол!