Describing Hazel Shade’s investigations in the Haunted Barn, Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions the theatrical ululations and flashes of a thunderstorm:
From Jane P. I obtained however a good deal of quite different, and much more pathetic information - which explained to me why my friend had thought fit to regale me with commonplace student mischief, but also made me regret that I prevented him from getting to the point he was confusedly and self-consciously making (for as I have said in an earlier note, he never cared to refer to his dead child) by filling in a welcome pause with an extraordinary episode from the history of Onhava University. That episode took place in the year of grace 1876. But to return to Hazel Shade. She decided she wanted to investigate the "phenomena" herself for a paper ("on any subject") required in her psychology course by a cunning professor who was collecting data on "Autoneurynological Patterns among American university students." Her parents permitted her to make a nocturnal visit to the barn only under the condition that Jane P. - deemed a pillar of reliability - accompany her. Hardly had the girls settled down when an electric storm that was to last all night enveloped their refuge with such theatrical ululations and flashes as to make it impossible to attend to any indoor sounds or lights. Hazel did not give up, and a few days later asked Jane to come with her again, but Jane could not. She tells me she suggested that the White twins (nice fraternity boys accepted by the Shades) would come instead. But Hazel flatly refused this new arrangement, and after a row with her parents took her bull's-eye and notebook and set off alone. One can well imagine how the Shades dreaded a recrudescence of the poltergeist nuisance but the ever-sagacious Dr. Sutton affirmed - on what authority I cannot tell - that cases in which the same person was again involved in the same type of outbreaks after a lapse of six years were practically unknown. (note to Line 347)
In Chekhov’s play Chayka (“The Seagull,” 1896) Treplev describes Nina’s acting as coarse and tasteless, s zavyvaniyami (with ululations):
Треплев. Она убежала из дому и сошлась с Тригориным. Это вам известно?
Дорн. Знаю.
Треплев. Был у нее ребенок. Ребенок умер. Тригорин разлюбил ее и вернулся к своим прежним привязанностям, как и следовало ожидать. Впрочем, он никогда не покидал прежних, а по бесхарактерности как-то ухитрился и тут и там. Насколько я мог понять из того, что мне известно, личная жизнь Нины не удалась совершенно.
Дорн. А сцена?
Треплев. Кажется, еще хуже. Дебютировала она под Москвой в дачном театре, потом уехала в провинцию. Тогда я не упускал ее из виду и некоторое время куда она, туда и я. Бралась она все за большие роли, но играла грубо, безвкусно, с завываниями, с резкими жестами. Бывали моменты, когда она талантливо вскрикивала, талантливо умирала, но это были только моменты.
Дорн. Значит, все-таки есть талант?
Треплев. Понять было трудно. Должно быть, есть. Я ее видел, но она не хотела меня видеть, и прислуга не пускала меня к ней в номер. Я понимал ее настроение и не настаивал на свидании.
Пауза.
Что же вам еще сказать? Потом я, когда уже вернулся домой, получал от нее письма. Письма умные, теплые, интересные; она не жаловалась, но я чувствовал, что она глубоко несчастна; что ни строчка, то больной, натянутый нерв. И воображение немного расстроено. Она подписывалась Чайкой. В «Русалке» мельник говорит, что он ворон, так она в письмах всё повторяла, что она чайка. Теперь она здесь.
TREPLEV. She ran away from home and joined Trigorin; you know that?
DORN. Yes.
TREPLEV. She had a child that died. Trigorin soon tired of her and returned to his former ties, as might have been expected. He had never broken them, indeed, but out of weakness of character had always vacillated between the two. As far as I can make out from what I have heard, Nina’s domestic life has not been altogether a success.
DORN. What about her acting?
TREPLEV. I believe she made an even worse failure of that. She made her debut on the stage of the Summer Theatre in Moscow, and afterward made a tour of the country towns. At that time I never let her out of my sight, and wherever she went I followed. She always attempted great and difficult parts, but she played them tastelessly, with ululations, and her gestures were harsh. She shrieked and died well at times, but those were but moments.
DORN. Then she really has a talent for acting?
TREPLEV. I never could make out. I believe she has. I saw her, but she refused to see me, and her servant would never admit me to her rooms. I appreciated her feelings, and did not insist upon a meeting. [A pause] What more can I tell you? She sometimes writes to me now that I have come home, such clever, sympathetic letters, full of warm feeling. She never complains, but I can tell that she is profoundly unhappy; not a line but speaks to me of an aching, breaking nerve. She has one strange fancy; she always signs herself “The Sea-gull.” The miller in Pushkin’s “Mermaid” says that he is a raven, and so she repeats in all her letters that she is a sea-gull. She is here now. (Act Four)
The Raven (1845) is a ballad by E. A. Poe, the author of Ulalume (1847). In “ululations” there is ulula (Lat., owl). A bird of Russian fairy tales (and VN’s Russian nom de plume), Sirin is also the name of a small owl. The action in “The Seagull” takes place in Sorin’s estate at the lakeside (at the end of the play Dorn mentions a letter from America that interests him and then tells Trigorin that Treplev shot himself dead). A few months after the Haunted Barn incident Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega.
In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his daughter and mentions the poor seagulls:
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Anonymous.
Espied on a pine's bark,
As we were walking home the day she died,
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed,
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,
A gum-logged ant.
That Englishman in Nice,
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales - meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls!
Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song.
And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear
Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear. (ll. 236-246)
In the late 1890s Chekhov lived in Nice (and saw Queen Victoria whose bulky monument is mentioned by Kinbote in his note to Line 240). In his diary (the entry of May 4, 1897) Chekhov says that in Melikhovo he was visited by Dasha Musin-Pushkin (whose husband, engineer Glebov, was killed in a hunt), aka Cicada, who sang a lot:
Приезжала Даша Мусина-Пушкина, вдова инженера Глебова, убитого на охоте, она же Цикада. Много пела».
In his story Dama s sobachkoy (“The Lady with the Dog,” 1899) Chekhov mentions cicadas:
В Ореанде сидели на скамье, недалеко от церкви, смотрели вниз на море и молчали. Ялта была едва видна сквозь утренний туман, на вершинах гор неподвижно стояли белые облака. Листва не шевелилась на деревьях, кричали цикады и однообразный, глухой шум моря, доносившийся снизу, говорил о покое, о вечном сне, какой ожидает нас. Так шумело внизу, когда еще тут не было ни Ялты, ни Ореанды, теперь шумит и будет шуметь так же равнодушно и глухо, когда нас не будет. И в этом постоянстве, в полном равнодушии к жизни и смерти каждого из нас кроется, быть может, залог нашего вечного спасения, непрерывного движения жизни на земле, непрерывного совершенства.
At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. (chapter II)
As he speaks to his daughter (a schoolgirl of twelve), Gurov (the main character in Chekhov’s story) uses the phrase tri gradusa tepla (three degrees above freezing-point):
— Теперь три градуса тепла, а между тем идёт снег, — говорил Гуров дочери. — Но ведь это тепло только на поверхности земли, в верхних же слоях атмосферы совсем другая температура.
“It’s three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing,” said Gurov to his daughter. “The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is quite a different temperature at a greater height in the atmosphere.” (chapter IV)
On July 5, 1959 (the day on which Shade began Canto Two), Gradus (Shade’s murderer) left Onhava (the capital of Zembla) on the Copenhagen plane:
On July 5th, at noontime, in the other hemisphere, on the rain-swept tarmac of the Onhava airfield, Gradus, holding a French passport, walked toward a Russian commercial plane bound for Copenhagen, and this event synchronized with Shade's starting in the early morning (Atlantic seaboard time) to compose, or to set down after composing in bed, the opening lines of Canto Two. When almost twenty-four hours later he got to line 230, Gradus, after a refreshing night at the summer house of our consul in Copenhagen, an important Shadow, had entered, with the Shadow, a clothes store in order to conform to his description in later notes (to lines 286 and 408). Migraine again worse today. (note to Line 181)
According to Kinbote, onhava-onhava means in Zemblan “far, far away:”
On the morning of July 16 (while Shade was working on the 698-746 section of his poem) dull Gradus, dreading another day of enforced inactivity in sardonically, sparkling, stimulatingly noisy Nice, decided that until hunger drove him out he would not budge from a leathern armchair in the simulacrum of a lobby among the brown smells of his dingy hotel. Unhurriedly he went through a heap of old magazines on a nearby table. There he sat, a little monument of taciturnity, sighing, puffing out his cheeks, licking his thumb before turning a page, gaping at the pictures, and moving his lips as he climbed down the columns of printed matter. Having replaced everything in a neat pile, he sank back in his chair closing and opening his gabled hands in various constructions of tedium - when a man who had occupied a seat next to him got up and walked into the outer glare leaving his paper behind. Gradus pulled it into his lap, spread it out - and froze over a strange piece of local news that caught his eye: burglars had broken into Villa Disa and ransacked a bureau, taking from a jewel box a number of valuable old medals.
Here was something to brood upon. Had this vaguely unpleasant incident some bearing on his quest? Should he do something about it? Cable headquarters? Hard to word succinctly a simple fact without having it look like a cryptogram. Airmail a clipping? He was in his room working on the newspaper with a safety razor blade when there was a bright rap-rap at the door. Gradus admitted an unexpected visitor - one of the greater Shadows, whom he had thought to be onhava-onhava ("far, far away"), in wild, misty, almost legendary Zembla! What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!
He was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow, in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him, but he certainly had a keen mind. His name, Izumrudov, sounded rather Russian but actually meant “of the Umruds,” an Eskimo tribe sometimes seen paddling their umyaks (hide-lined boats) on the emerald waters of our northern shores. Grinning, he said friend Gradus must get together his travel documents, including a health certificate, and take the earliest available jet to New York. Bowing, he congratulated him on having indicated with such phenomenal acumen the right place and the right way. Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up giving his address which was of all places -- Our man, who interrupted the herald of success to say he had never -- was bidden not to display so much modesty. A slip of paper was now produced on which Izumudrov, shaking with laughter (death is hilarious), wrote out for Gradus their client's alias, the name of the university where he taught, and that of the town where it was situated. No, the slip was not for keeps. He could keep it only while memorizing it. This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious. The gay green vision withdrew - to resume his whoring no doubt. How one hates such men! (note to Line 741)
At the end of “The Lady with the Dog” Chekhov uses the phrase daleko-daleko (far, far away):
Потом они долго советовались, говорили о том, как избавить себя от необходимости прятаться, обманывать, жить в разных городах, не видеться подолгу. Как освободиться от этих невыносимых пут?
- Как? Как? - спрашивал он, хватая себя за голову. - Как?
И казалось, что ещё немного - и решение будет найдено, и тогда начнётся новая, прекрасная жизнь; и обоим было ясно, что до конца ещё далеко-далеко и что самое сложное и трудное только ещё начинается.
Then they discussed their situation for a long time, trying to think how they could get rid of the necessity for hiding, deception, living in different towns, being so long without meeting. How were they to shake off these intolerable fetters?
“How? How?” he repeated, clutching his head. “How?”
And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning. (chapter IV)
Shade’s birthday, July 5 is also Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday. On July 5, 1959, Kinbote and Gradus (both of whom were born in 1915) are forty-four. Chekhov died in July 1904, at the age of forty-four.
In a letter of Oct. 30, 1903, to his wife Chekhov (who lived alone in Yalta) complains that paring his fingernails on the right hand is a torture:
Что за мучение обрезать ногти на правой руке. Без жены мне вообще плохо.
In ll. 183-184 Shade mentions the little scissors with which he pares his fingernails:
The little scissors I am holding are
A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.
I stand before the window and I pare
My fingernails and vaguely am aware
Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb,
Our grocer's son; the index, lean and glum
College astronomer Starover Blue;
The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew;
The feminine fourth finger, an old flirt;
And little pinky clinging to her skirt.
And I make mouths as I snip off the thin
Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call "scarf-skin." (ll. 183-194)
At the end of his story Gusev (1890) Chekhov compares one of the clouds to a pair of scissors:
А наверху в это время, в той стороне, где заходит солнце, скучиваются облака; одно облако похоже на триумфальную арку, другое на льва, третье на ножницы... Из-за облаков выходит широкий зелёный луч и протягивается до самой средины неба; немного погодя рядом с этим ложится фиолетовый, рядом с ним золотой, потом розовый... Небо становится нежно-сиреневым. Глядя на это великолепное, очаровательное небо, океан сначала хмурится, но скоро сам приобретает цвета ласковые, радостные, страстные, какие на человеческом языке и назвать трудно.
Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors.... From behind the clouds a broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle of the sky; a little later another, violet-colored, lies beside it; next that, one of gold, then one rose-colored.... The sky turns a soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colors for which it is hard to find a name in human speech. (chapter V)
Describing his parents, Kinbote mentions Colonel Gusev, King Alfin’s ‘aerial adjutant:’
King's Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
Demoiselle is French for “dragonfly.” In a footnote to her Russian translation of Shade’s poem Vera Nabokov points out that Krylov translated Lafontaine’s fable La Cigale et la Fourmi as Strekoza i muravey (“The Dragonfly and the Ant”). Strekoza (“The Dragonfly”) is a magazine in which young Chekhov published his humorous short stories.
Shade compares his index finger to the College astronomer Starover Blue. In his article Sotsial-demokraticheskaya dushechka (“The Social-Democratic Darling,” 1905) Lenin compares Tov. Starover (Comrade Old Believer) to the heroine of Chekhov’s story Dushechka (“The Darling,” 1899):
«Тов. Старовер очень похож на героиню чеховского рассказа „Душечка“. Душечка жила сначала с антрепренёром и говорила: мы с Ванечкой ставим серьёзные пьесы. Потом жила она с торговцем лесом и говорила: мы с Васечкой возмущены высоким тарифом на лес. Наконец, жила с ветеринаром и говорила: мы с Колечкой лечим лошадей. Так и тов. Старовер. „Мы с Лениным“ ругали Мартынова. „Мы с Мартыновым“ ругаем Ленина. Милая социал-демократическая душечка! в чьих-то объятиях очутишься ты завтра?»
In his Commentary Kinbote mockingly calls Gradus Vinogradus and Leningradus:
All this is as it should be; the world needs Gradus. But Gradus should not kill kings. Vinogradus should never, never provoke God. Leningradus should not aim his peashooter at people even in dreams, because if he does, a pair of colossally thick, abnormally hairy arms will hug him from behind and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. (note to Line 171)
As pointed out by Kinbote, "Leningrad used to be Petrograd" and, prior to 1914, the city's name was St. Petersburg. Peterburg ("Petersburg," 1914) is a novel by Andrey Bely. In his review of Bely’s novel Andrey Polyanin (the penname of Sofia Parnok) quotes Tolstoy’s words from his Afterword to Chekhov's “Darling:”
С благоговением вспоминается фраза Льва Толстого из чудесного его "Послесловия" к рассказу Чехова "Душечка:" "Любовь не менее свята, будет ли её предметом Кукин или Спиноза, Паскаль, Шиллер".
"Love is no less sacred whether its object is Kukin or Spinoza, Pascal, Schiller."
In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Lolita marries Richard F. Schiller. In a letter to Lolita Mona Dahl (Lolita’s schoolmate at Beardsley College) describes a stage performance of “The Enchanted Hunters” and mentions the terrific electric storm outside that interfered with their own modest offstage thunder:
“Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow the responsiveness, the relaxed vitality, the charm of my - and the author’s - Diana; but there was no author to applaud us as last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own modest offstage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother’s confinement (our baby, alas, did not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still bear traces of the paint.
“We are going to New York after tomorrow, and I guess I can’t manage to wriggle out of accompanying my parents to Europe. I have even worse news for you. Dolly-Lo! I may not be back at Beardsley if and when you return. With one thing and another, one being you know who, and the other not being who you think you know, Dad wants me to go to school in Paris for one year while he and Fulbright are around.
“As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving at the bit of French nonsense. Remember? Ne manque pas de dire ton amant, Chimène, comme le lac est beau car il faut qu’il t’y mène. Lucky beau! Qu’il t’y - What a tongue-twister! Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from your Poet, and best regards to the Governor. Your Mona. P. S. Because of one thing and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly controlled. So better wait till I write you from Europe.” (She never did as far as I know. The letter contained an element of mysterious nastiness that I am too tired today to analyze. I found it later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and give it here titre documentaire . I read it twice.) (2.19)
During their second road trip across the USA Humbert and Lolita have breakfast in the township of Soda:
We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001.
“Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is already here.”
“Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.” (2.18)
A little earlier Lolita draws Humbert’s attention to the three nines changing into the next thousand in the odometer:
“If he’s really a cop,” she said shrilly but not illogically, “the worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared. Ignore him, Dad.”
“Did he ask where we were going?”
“Oh, he knows that” (mocking me).
“Anyway,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.”
“Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you - Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,” she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.”
It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick; and silently we traveled on, unpursued. (ibid.)
Shade's poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. In its unfinished form Shade’s poem consists of 999 lines. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade’s poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). “Soda” rhymes with “coda.”
Tolstomordik (Fatface) mentioned by Gumbert in the Russian version (1967) of Lolita seems to blend Tolstoy with Chernomordik, the chemist in Chekhov’s story Aptekarsha (“A Chemist’s Wife,” 1886). In a letter of February 14, 1900, to Olga Knipper (a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater whom Chekhov married in 1901) Chekhov says that he will go to Sevastopol incognito and put himself down in the hotel-book Count Chernomordik:
Я решил не писать Вам, но так как Вы прислали фотографии, то я снимаю с Вас опалу и вот, как видите, пишу. Даже в Севастополь приеду, только, повторяю, никому об этом не говорите, особенно Вишневскому. Я буду там incognito, запишусь в гостинице так: граф Черномордик.
I had made up my mind not to write to you, but since you have sent the photographs I have taken off the ban, and here you see I am writing. I will even come to Sevastopol, only I repeat, don’t tell that to anyone, especially not to Vishnevsky. I shall be there incognito, I shall put myself down in the hotel-book Count Blackphiz.
In the same letter Chekhov thanks Knipper for her photographs that she sent to him:
Милая актриса, фотографии очень, очень хороши, особенно та, где Вы пригорюнились, поставив локти на спинку стула, и где передано Ваше выражение — скромно-грустное, тихое выражение, за которым прячется чёртик. И другая тоже удачна, но тут Вы немножко похожи на евреечку, очень музыкальную особу, которая ходит в консерваторию и в то же время изучает на всякий случай тайно зубоврачебное искусство и имеет жениха в Могилёве; и жених такой, как Манасевич. Вы сердитесь? Правда, правда, сердитесь? Это я мщу Вам за то, что Вы не подписались.
The photographs are very, very good, especially the one in which you are leaning in dejection with your elbows on the back of a chair, which gives you a discreetly mournful, gentle expression under which there lies hid a little demon. The other is good too, but it looks a little like a Jewess, a very musical person who attends a conservatoire, but at the same time is studying dentistry on the sly as a second string, and is engaged to be married to a young man in Mogilev, and whose fiancé is a person like Manasevich. Are you angry? Really, really angry? It’s my revenge for your not signing them.
Humbert’s very photogenic mother was killed by a lightning:
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (1.2)
In a letter of July 6, 1898, to Sumbatov-Yuzhin (an actor and playwright) Chekhov predicts to Yuzhin that a lightning in Monte-Carlo will kill him:
Будь здоров и благополучен и не бойся нефрита, которого у тебя нет и не будет. Ты умрёшь через 67 лет, и не от нефрита; тебя убьёт молния в Монте-Карло.
Don’t be afraid of nephritis. You’ll die in sixty-seven years and not of nephritis; a lightning in Monte-Carlo will kill you.
The Lady who Loved Lightning is a play written by Quilty in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom. Before the breakfast in Soda, Lolita tells HH that she is not a lady and does not like lightning:
We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us.
“I am not a lady and do not like lightning,” said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace. (2.18)
Mrs. Richard F. Schiller dies in childbed in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. In his poem Zaklinanie (“Invocation,” 1830) Pushkin calls his dead mistress vozlyublennaya ten’ (the beloved shade) and compares her to a distant star:
Явись, возлюбленная тень,
Как ты была перед разлукой,
Бледна, хладна, как зимний день,
Искажена последней мукой.
Приди, как дальная звезда,
Как лёгкой звук иль дуновенье,
Иль как ужасное виденье,
Мне всё равно, сюда! сюда!..
Beloved shade, come to me,
As at our parting -- wintry, ashen
In your last minutes' agony;
Emerge in any form or fashion:
A distant star across the sphere,
A gentle sound, a puff of air or
A most appalling wraith of terror,
I care not how: appear, appear!..
(tr. G. Gurarie)