In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) Herman Brink had called the system of the boy’s delusions “referential mania:"
The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly, but long before that she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. "Referential mania," Herman Brink had called it. In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such are glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings - but alas it is not! With distance the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up in terms of granite and groaning firs the ultimate truth of his being. (1)
The boy’s mania and the doctor’s name bring to mind Hermann’s delusion in Pushkin's story Pikovaya dama ("The Queen of Spades," 1834):
Две неподвижные идеи не могут вместе существовать в нравственной природе, так же, как два тела не могут в физическом мире занимать одно и то же место. Тройка, семёрка, туз – скоро заслонили в воображении Германна образ мёртвой старухи. Тройка, семёрка, туз – не выходили из его головы и шевелились на его губах. Увидев молодую девушку, он говорил: «Как она стройна!.. Настоящая тройка червонная». У него спрашивали: «который час», он отвечал: «без пяти минут семёрка». Всякий пузатый мужчина напоминал ему туза. Тройка, семёрка, туз – преследовали его во сне, принимая все возможные виды: тройка цвела перед ним в образе пышного грандифлора, семёрка представлялась готическими воротами, туз огромным пауком. Все мысли его слились в одну, – воспользоваться тайной, которая дорого ему стоила. Он стал думать об отставке и о путешествии. Он хотел в открытых игрецких домах Парижа вынудить клад у очарованной фортуны. Случай избавил его от хлопот.
Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world. "Three, seven, ace," soon drove out of Hermann's mind the thought of the dead Countess. "Three, seven, ace," were perpetually running through his head and continually being repeated by his lips. If he saw a young girl, he would say: "How slender she is! quite like the three of hearts." If anybody asked: "What is the time?" he would reply: "Five minutes to seven."
Every stout man that he saw reminded him of the ace. "Three, seven, ace" haunted him in his sleep, and assumed all possible shapes. The threes bloomed before him in the forms of magnificent flowers, the sevens were represented by Gothic portals, and the aces became transformed into gigantic spiders. One thought alone occupied his whole mind--to make a profitable use of the secret which he had purchased so dearly. He thought of applying for a furlough so as to travel abroad. He wanted to go to Paris and tempt fortune in some of the public gambling-houses that abounded there. Chance spared him all this trouble. (chapter VI)
A pack of soiled playing cards is mentioned in Signs and Symbols:
When he had gone to bed, she remained in the living room with her pack of soiled playing cards and her old photograph albums. Across the narrow yard where the rain tinkled in the dark against some battered ash cans, windows were blandly alight and in one of them a black-trousered man with his bare elbows raised could be seen lying supine on a untidy bed. She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a baby he looked more surprised than most babies. From a fold in the album, a German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiance fell out. Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig, a slanting house front badly out of focus. Four years old, in a park: moodily, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel as he would from any other stranger. Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths--until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. Age six - that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a famous chess player. He again, aged about eight, already difficult to understand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in a book which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the branch of a leafless tree. Aged ten: the year they left Europe. The shame, the pity, the humiliating difficulties, the ugly, vicious, backward children he was with in that special school. And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a long convalescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his which his parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child hardened as it were into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions, making him totally inaccessible to normal minds. (2)
In Pushkin’s story Hermann (who goes out of his mind and ends up in room Number 17 of the Obukhov Hospital) is a German. Herman Brink’s surname brings to mind i bezdny mrachnoy na krayu (and on the brink of a grave abyss), a line in Walsingham’s “Hymn to the Plague” in Pushkin’s little tragedy Pir vo vremya chumy (“A Feast in Times of Plague,” 1830):
Есть упоение в бою,
И бездны мрачной на краю,
И в разъяренном океане,
Средь грозных волн и бурной тьмы,
И в аравийском урагане,
И в дуновении Чумы.
There’s rapture on the battleground,
And where the black abyss is found,
And on the raging ocean main,
Amid the stormy waves of death,
And in the desert hurricane,
And in the Plague’s pernicious breath.
(tr. J. Falen)
The very air that the boy exhales (and that has to be indexed and filed away) reminds one of dykhan’ye polnoe chumy (the plague-infected breath) of deva-roza (the rose of a maiden) at the end of Walsingham’s hymn:
Итак, — хвала тебе, Чума,
Нам не страшна могилы тьма,
Нас не смутит твое призванье!
Бокалы пеним дружно мы
И девы-розы пьём дыханье, —
Быть может... полное Чумы!
So hail to you, repellent Pest!
You strike no fear within our breast;
We are not crushed by your design;
So fill the foaming glasses high,
We’ll sip the rosy maiden wine
And kiss the lips where plague may lie!
Deva-roza recalls Aunt Rosa who was put to death by the Germans.
Pushkin mentions chuma (the plague) in the penultimate sextet of his poem Ne day mne bog soyti s uma (“The Lord forbid my going mad,” 1833):
Да вот беда: сойди с ума,
И страшен будешь как чума,
Как раз тебя запрут,
Посадят на цепь дурака
И сквозь решетку как зверка
Дразнить тебя придут.
Alas! The man whose mind is lost,
Would be as awful as a curse,
And very soon be locked,
They'd put the fool in chains in rage,
And, as a wild beast, through the cage
They would you tease and mock.
(tr. E. Bonver)
Golos yarkiy solov’ya (the brilliant voice of the nightingale) in the poem’s last sextet brings to mind one of the Soloveichiks who had married Rebecca Borisovna’s daughter:
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)
At the end of VN's play Sobytie ("The Event," 1938) Troshcheykin, the portrait painter who fears assassination, compares the late tea after Antonina Pavlovna's birthday party to pir vo vremya chumy (the feast during the plague):
Трощейкин. О, если бы вы могли предсказать, что с нами будет! Вот мы здесь сидим, балагурим, пир во время чумы, а у меня такое чувство, что можем в любую минуту взлететь на воздух. (Барбошину.) Ради Христа, кончайте ваш дурацкий чай! (Act Three)
In Вальсингам (Walsingham, the main character in Pushkin's "Feast in Times of Plague") there is Вальс (Waltz). The action in VN's play Izobretenie Val'sa ("The Waltz Invention," 1938) 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 (or twenty-first) birthday.