The epigraph to VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) is from Discours sur les ombres by the invented French thinker Pierre Delalande:
Comme un fou se croit Dieu
nous nous croyons mortels.
Delalande. Discours sur les ombres
Madame Eugenie Lalande is a character in E. A. Poe’s story The Spectacles (1844). In Eureka: an Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe (1848) E. A. Poe writes:
As our starting-point, then, let us adopt the Godhead. Of this Godhead, in itself, he alone is not imbecile — he alone is not impious who propounds —— nothing. “Nous ne connaissons rien,” says the Baron de Bielfeld — “Nous ne connaissons rien de la nature ou de l’essence de Dieu: — pour savoir ce qu’il est, il faut être Dieu même.” — “We know absolutely nothing of the nature or essence of God: — in order to comprehend what he is, we should have to be God ourselves.”
“We should have to be God ourselves!” — With a phrase so startling as this yet ringing in my ears, I nevertheless venture to demand if this our present ignorance of the Deity is an ignorance to which the soul is everlastingly condemned.
Godhead brings to mind Lochanhead, a place where Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) got off on the fatal night of her death:
"Are we quite sure she's acting right?" you asked.
"It's technically a blind date, of course.
Well, shall we try the preview of Remorse?"
And we allowed, in all tranquillity,
The famous film to spread its charmed marquee;
The famous face flowed in, fair and inane:
The parted lips, the swimming eyes, the grain
Of beauty on the cheek, odd gallicism,
And the soft form dissolving in the prism
Of corporate desire. "I think," she said,
"I'll get off here." "It's only Lochanhead."
"Yes, that's okay." Gripping the stang, she peered
At ghostly trees. Bus stopped. Bus disappeared. (ll. 448-460)
Lochan means in Scottish “small lake.” On the other hand, it brings to mind Vasisualiy Lokhankin, Bender’s, Balaganov’s and Panikovsky’s landlord in Ilf and Petrov’s novel Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931). In a conversation with Lokhankin Ostap Bender uses the phrase mon Dieu (“my God”) and then repeats it in German, mein Gott:
Гостиница «Карлсбад» была давно покинута. Все антилоповцы, за исключением Козлевича, поселились в «Вороньей слободке» у Васисуалия Лоханкина, чрезвычайно этим скандализованного. Он даже пытался протестовать, указывая на то, что сдавал комнату не трем, а одному — одинокому холостяку. «Мон дье, Васисуалий Андреевич, — отвечал Остап беззаботно, — не мучьте себя.
Ведь интеллигентный-то из всех трех я один, так что условие соблюдено!» На дальнейшие сетования хозяина Бендер рассудительно молвил: «Майн Готт, дорогой Васисуалий! Может быть, именно в этом великая сермяжная правда!» И Лоханкин сразу успокоился, выпросив у Остапа двадцать рублей. Паниковский и Балаганов отлично ужились в «Вороньей слободке», и их голоса уверенно звучали в общем квартирном хоре. Паниковского успели даже обвинить в том, что он по ночам отливает керосин из чужих примусов. Митрич не преминул сделать Остапу какое-то ворчливое замечание, на что великий комбинатор молча толкнул его в грудь.
The Carlsbad Hotel had long been abandoned. All the Antelopeans, except Kozlevich, had moved to the Crow’s Nest to stay with Vasisualiy Lokhankin, which scandalized him to no end. He even tried to protest, pointing out that he had offered the room to one person, not three, and to a respectable bachelor at that. "Mon dieu, Vasisualiy Andreevich," said Ostap nonchalantly, "stop torturing yourself.”
As the landlord continued to lament, Bender added weightily: "Mein Gott, dear Vasisualiy! Maybe that's exactly what the Great Homespun Truth is all about.” Lokhankin promptly gave in and hit Bender up for twenty rubles. Panikovsky and Balaganov fit in very well at the Rookery, and their self-assured voices soon joined the apartment's chorus. Panikovsky was even accused of stealing kerosene from other people's Primus stoves at night. Mitrich, never one to miss an opportunity, made some nitpicking remark to Ostap. In response, the grand strategist silently shoved him in the chest. (Chapter 15 “Antlers and Hoofs”)
In a conversation with Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) Shade mentioned those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov :
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
According to Kinbote, after line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost 'man'
In Spanish...
Ombre is French for “shade, shadow.” In VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) Fyodor speaks of Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski’s death and mentions the French thinker Delalande, the author of Discours sur les ombres:
Но был один человек, мнение которого Фёдор Константинович уже узнать не мог. Александр Яковлевич Чернышевский умер незадолго до выхода книги.
Когда однажды французского мыслителя Delalande на чьих-то похоронах спросили, почему он не обнажает головы (ne se de'couvre pas), он отвечал: я жду, чтобы смерть начала первая (qu'elle se de'couvre la premie`re). В этом есть метафизическая негалантность, но смерть большего не стоит. Боязнь рождает благоговение, благоговение ставит жертвенник, его дым восходит к небу, там принимает образ крыл, и склоненная боязнь к нему обращает молитву. Религия имеет такое же отношение к загробному состоянию человека, какое имеет математика к его состоянию земному: то и другое только условия игры. Вера в Бога и вера в цифру: местная истина, истина места. Я знаю, что смерть сама по себе никак не связана с внежизненной областью, ибо дверь есть лишь выход из дома, а не часть его окрестности, какой является дерево или холм. Выйти как-нибудь нужно, "но я отказываюсь видеть в двери больше, чем дыру да то, что сделали столяр и плотник" (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres p. 45 et ante). Опять же: несчастная маршрутная мысль, с которой давно свыкся человеческий разум (жизнь в виде некоего пути) есть глупая иллюзия: мы никуда не идем, мы сидим дома. Загробное окружает нас всегда, а вовсе не лежит в конце какого-то путешествия. В земном доме, вместо окна -- зеркало; дверь до поры до времени затворена; но воздух входит сквозь щели. "Наиболее доступный для наших домоседных чувств образ будущего постижения окрестности долженствующей раскрыться нам по распаде тела, это -- освобождение духа из глазниц плоти и превращение наше в одно свободное сплошное око, зараз видящее все стороны света, или, иначе говоря: сверхчувственное прозрение мира при нашем внутреннем участии" (там же, стр. 64). Но все это только символы, символы, которые становятся обузой для мысли в то мгновение, как она приглядится к ним...
But there was one man whose opinion Fyodor was no longer able to ascertain. Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski had died not long before the book appeared.
When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he did not uncover himself (ne se découvre pas), he replied: “I am waiting for death to do it first” (qu’elle se découvre la première). There is a lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job” (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this is only symbols—symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them…. (Chapter Five)
The Chernyshevski couple, Alexander Yakovlevich and Alexandra Yakovlevna, have the same name and patronymic as goluboy vorishka (the bashful chiseller) and his wife in Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stulyev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928):
Завхоз 2-го дома Старсобеса был застенчивый ворюга. Всё существо его протестовало против краж, но не красть он не мог. Он крал, и ему было стыдно. Крал он постоянно, постоянно стыдился, и поэтому его хорошо бритые щёчки всегда горели румянцем смущения, стыдливости, застенчивости и конфуза. Завхоза звали Александром Яковлевичем, а жену его – Александрой Яковлевной. Он называл её Сашхен, она звала его Альхен. Свет не видывал ещё такого голубого воришки, как Александр Яковлевич.
The Assistant Warden of the Second Home of Stargorod Social Security Administration was a shy little thief. His whole being protested against stealing, yet it was impossible for him not to steal. He stole and was ashamed of himself. He stole constantly and was constantly ashamed of himself, which was why his smoothly shaven cheeks always burned with a blush of confusion, shame, bashfulness and embarrassment. The assistant warden's name was Alexander Yakovlevich, and his wife's name was Alexandra Yakovlevna. He used to call her Sashchen, and she used to call him Alchen. The world has never seen such a bashful chiseller as Alexander Yakovlevich. (chapter VIII “The Bashful Chiseller”)
Poor Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski went mad after the suicide of his son Yasha. Similarly, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian descent) went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of Kinbote's Commentary).
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. 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”).
Fyodor’s book on Chernyshevski (Part Four of “The Gift”) begins and ends with a sonnet. In Eureka E. A. Poe (the author of The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade, 1845) mentions “as simple a thing as a sonnet by Mr. Solomon Seesaw:”
Now, distinctness — intelligibility, at all points, is a primary feature in my general design. On important topics it is better to be a good deal prolix than even a very little obscure. But abstruseness is a quality appertaining to no subject per se. All are alike, in facility of comprehension, to him who approaches them by properly graduated steps. It is merely because a stepping-stone, here and there, is heedlessly left unsupplied in our road to the Differential Calculus, that this latter is not altogether as simple a thing as a sonnet by Mr. Solomon Seesaw.
At the beginning of VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) one of the transparent narrators (who seem to be the devils) mentions the middle stretch of the seesaw:
Here’s the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn’t hear me.
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun. (chapter 1)
The novel's main character, Hugh Person tells Armande (who mispronounces Hugh’s name) that she drops her haitches like pears in a blindman’s cup:
She rang him up around midnight, waking him in the pit of an evanescent, but definitely bad, dream (after all that melted cheese and young potatoes with a bottle of green wine at the hotel's carnotzet). As he scrabbled up the receiver, he groped with the other hand for his reading glasses, without which, by some vagary of concomitant senses, he could not attend to the telephone properly.
"You Person?" asked her voice.
He already knew, ever since she had recited the contents of the card he had given her on the train, that she pronounced his first name as "You."
"Yes, it's me, I mean 'you,' I mean you mispronounce it most enchantingly."
"I do not mispronounce anything. Look, I never received - "
"Oh, you do! You drop your haitches like - like pearls into a blindman's cup."
"Well, the correct pronunciation is 'cap.' I win. Now listen, tomorrow I'm occupied, but what about Friday - if you can be ready à sept heures précises?"
He certainly could.
She invited "Percy," as she declared she would call him from now on, since he detested "Hugh," to come with her for a bit of summer skiing at Drakonita, or Darkened Heat, as he misheard it, which caused him to conjure up a dense forest protecting romantic ramblers from the blue blaze of an alpine noon. He said he had never learned to ski on a holiday at Sugarwood, Vermont, but would be happy to stroll beside her, along a footpath not only provided for him by fancy but also swept clean with a snowman's broom - one of those instant unverified visions which can fool the cleverest man. (chapter 12)
In "The Golden Calf" Panikovsky imitates blindness (one of the novel's chapters is entitled "Homer, Milton and Panikovsky). In VN's novel Kamera Obskura (1933) Bruno Kretschmar becomes blind as a result of a car crash. The characters in VN's novel Ada (1969) include three blind characters. The Spanish word for "man," hombre begins with an H.
In Chapter Five of “The Gift” Fyodor mentions Shirin’s novel Sedina (“The Hoary Abyss”) with an Epigraph from the Book of Job:
Фёдор Константинович собрался было восвояси, когда его сзади окликнул шепелявый голос: он принадлежал Ширину, автору романа "Седина" (с эпиграфом из книги Иова), очень сочувственно встреченного эмигрантской критикой. ("Господи, отче -- --? По Бродвею, в лихорадочном шорохе долларов, гетеры и дельцы в гетрах, дерясь, падая, задыхаясь, бежали за золотым тельцом, который, шуршащими боками протискиваясь между небоскребами, обращал к электрическому небу изможденный лик свой и выл. В Париже, в низкопробном притоне, старик Лашез, бывший пионер авиации, а ныне дряхлый бродяга, топтал сапогами старуху-проститутку Буль-де-Сюиф. Господи отчего -- --? Из московского подвала вышел палач и, присев у конуры, стал тюлюкать мохнатого щенка: Махонький, приговаривал он, махонький... В Лондоне лорды и лэди танцевали джими и распивали коктейль, изредка посматривая на эстраду, где на исходе восемнадцатого ринга огромный негр кнок-оутом уложил на ковер своего белокурого противника. В арктических снегах, на пустом ящике из-под мыла, сидел путешественник Эриксен и мрачно думал: Полюс или не полюс?.. Иван Червяков бережно обстригал бахрому единственных брюк. Господи, отчего Вы дозволяете всё это?"). Сам Ширин был плотный, коренастый человек, с рыжеватым бобриком, всегда плохо выбритый, в больших очках, за которыми, как в двух аквариумах, плавали два маленьких, прозрачных глаза, совершенно равнодушных к зрительным впечатлениям. Он был слеп как Мильтон, глух как Бетховен, и глуп как бетон. Святая ненаблюдательность (а отсюда – полная неосведомленность об окружающем мире -- и полная неспособность что-либо именовать) -- свойство, почему-то довольно часто встречающееся у русского литератора-середняка, словно тут действует некий благотворный рок, отказывающий бесталанному в благодати чувственного познания, дабы он зря не изгадил материала. Бывает, конечно, что в таком темном человеке играет какой-то собственный фонарик, -- не говоря о том, что известны случаи, когда по прихоти находчивой природы, любящей неожиданные приспособления и подмены, такой внутренний свет поразительно ярок -- на зависть любому краснощекому таланту. Но даже Достоевский всегда как-то напоминает комнату, в которой днём горит лампа.
Fyodor was about to walk home when a lisping voice called him from behind: it belonged to Shirin, author of the novel The Hoary Abyss (with an Epigraph from the Book of Job) which had been received very sympathetically by the émigré critics. (“Oh Lord, our Father! Down Broadway in a feverish rustle of dollars, hetaeras and businessmen in spats, shoving, falling and out of breath, were running after the golden calf, which pushed its way, rubbing against walls between the skyscrapers, then turned its emaciated face to the electric sky and howled. In Paris, in a low-class dive, the old man Lachaise, who had once been an aviation pioneer but was now a decrepit vagabond, trampled under his boots an ancient prostitute, Boule de Suif. Oh Lord, why—? Out of a Moscow basement a killer came out, squatted by a kennel and began to coax a shaggy pup: little one, he repeated, little one… In London, lords and ladies danced the Jimmie and imbibed cocktails, glancing from time to time at a platform where at the end of the eighteenth ring a huge Negro had laid his fair-haired opponent on the carpet with a knockout. Amid arctic snows the explorer Ericson sat on an empty soapbox and thought gloomily: The pole or not the pole?… Ivan Chervyakov carefully trimmed the fringe of his only pair of pants. Oh Lord, why dost Thou permit all this?”) Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes—which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot. A blissful incapacity for observation (and hence complete uninformedness about the surrounding world—and a complete inability to put a name to anything) is a quality quite frequently met with among the average Russian literati, as if a beneficent fate were at work refusing the blessing of sensory cognition to the untalented so that they will not wantonly mess up the material. It happens, of course, that such a benighted person has some little lamp of his own glimmering inside him—not to speak of those known instances in which, through the caprice of resourceful nature that loves startling adjustments and substitutions, such an inner light is astonishingly bright—enough to make the envy of the ruddiest talent. But even Dostoevski always brings to mind somehow a room in which a lamp burns during the day.
“An Epigraph from the Book of Job” brings to mind Lev Shestov’s book Na vesakh Iova (“In Job’s Balances,” 1929). Lev Shestov is the author of Potestas clavium. Vlast’ klyuchey (“Power of the Keys,” 1923). The keys play an important part in “The Gift.” In Tysyacha i odna noch’ (“A Thousand and One Nights”), a Preface to Potestas clavium, Shestov says that mankind is plunged into a perpetual night – even in a thousand and one nights:
Человечество живёт не в свете, а во тьме, окутанное одною непрерывною ночью. Нет, не одной, и не двумя, и не десятью - а тысячью и одной ночью!
Mankind does not live in the light but in the bosom of darkness; it is plunged into a perpetual night. No! Not in one or two or ten but in a thousand and one nights! (4)
In “Invitation to a Beheading” Cincinnatus seems pitch-black to others, as though he had been cut out of a cord-size block of night:
Он не сердился на доносчиков, но те умножались и, мужая, становились страшны. В сущности, темный для них, как будто был вырезан из кубической сажени ночи, непроницаемый Цинциннат поворачивался туда-сюда, ловя лучи, с панической поспешностью стараясь так стать, чтобы казаться светопроводным. Окружающие понимали друг друга с полуслова, - ибо не было у них таких слов, которые бы кончались как-нибудь неожиданно, на ижицу, что ли, обращаясь в пращу или птицу, с удивительными последствиями. В пыльном маленьком музее, на Втором Бульваре, куда его водили в детстве и куда он сам потом водил питомцев, были собраны редкие, прекрасные вещи, - но каждая была для всех горожан, кроме него, так же ограничена и прозрачна, как и они сами друг для друга. То, что не названо, - не существует. К сожалению, все было названо.
He was not angry at the informers, but the latter multiplied and, as they matured, became frightening. Cincinnatus, who seemed pitch-black to them, as though he had been cut out of a cord-size block of night, opaque Cincinnatus would turn this way and that, trying to catch the rays, trying with desperate haste to stand in such a way as to seem translucent. Those around him understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences. In the dusty little museum on Second Boulevard, where they used to take him as a child, and where he himself would later take his charges, there was a collection of rare, marvellous objects, but all the townsmen except Cincinnatus found them just as limited and transparent as they did each other. That which does not have a name does not exist . Unfortunately everything had a name. (chapter 2)
The English title of VN’s novel brings to mind the beginning of Canto Eleven of Byron’s Don Juan:
When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"
And proved it—'twas no matter what he said:
They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,
Too subtle for the airiest human head;
And yet who can believe it! I would shatter
Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,
Or adamant, to find the World a spirit,
And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
Bishop Berkeley makes one think of the Bishop of Yeslove mentioned by Kinbote in his Commentary:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see note to line 247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958) representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers, military groups, worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely, and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as flowergirls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisors, and finally gave in. On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for guidance and strength (see further my note to lines 433-434).
After line 274 there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...
One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme--and spare his reader the embarrassing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)
The name of Zembla’s capital, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. “Yes, love” and “heaven” occur in close proximity in Byron’s poem The Giaour (1813):
Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire. (ll. 1132-1135)
In Chapter Seven (XXII: 5) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions “the singer of the Giaour and Juan:”
Хотя мы знаем, что Евгений
Издавна чтенье разлюбил,
Однако ж несколько творений
Он из опалы исключил:
Певца Гяура и Жуана
Да с ним ещё два-три романа,
В которых отразился век
И современный человек
Изображён довольно верно
С его безнравственной душой,
Себялюбивой и сухой,
Мечтанью преданной безмерно,
С его озлобленным умом,
Кипящим в действии пустом.
Although we know that Eugene
had long ceased to like reading,
still, several works
he had exempted from disgrace:
the singer of the Giaour and Juan
and, with him, also two or three novels
in which the epoch is reflected
and modern man rather correctly represented
with his immoral soul, selfish and dry,
to dreaming measurelessly given,
with his embittered mind
boiling in empty action.
Count Vorontsov (btw., voron is Russian for “raven”) famously called Pushkin “a poor imitator of Lord Byron.” In “The Life of Chernyshevski” (Chapter Four of “The Gift”) Fyodor points out that Chernyshevski repeated Vorontsov’s words:
Говоря, что Пушкин был «только слабым подражателем Байрона», Чернышевский чудовищно точно воспроизводил фразу графа Воронцова: «Слабый подражатель лорда Байрона». Излюбленная мысль Добролюбова, что «у Пушкина недостаток прочного, глубокого образования» – дружеское аукание с замечанием того же Воронцова: «Нельзя быть истинным поэтом, не работая постоянно для расширения своих познаний, а их у него недостаточно». «Для гения недостаточно смастерить Евгения Онегина», – писал Надеждин, сравнивая Пушкина с портным, изобретателем жилетных узоров, и заключая умственный союз с Уваровым, министром народного просвещения, сказавшим по случаю смерти Пушкина: «Писать стишки не значит еще проходить великое поприще».
When Chernyshevski said that Pushkin was “only a poor imitator of Byron,” he reproduced with monstrous accuracy the definition given by Count Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa): “A poor imitator of Lord Byron.” Dobrolyubov’s favorite idea that “Pushkin lacked a solid, deep education” is in friendly chime with Vorontsov’s remark: “One cannot be a genuine poet without constantly working to broaden one’s knowledge, and his is insufficient.” “To be a genius it is not enough to have manufactured Eugene Onegin,” wrote the progressive Nadezhdin, comparing Pushkin to a tailor, an inventor of waistcoat patterns, and thus concluding an intellectual pact with the reactionary Count Uvarov, Minister of Education, who remarked on the occasion of Pushkin’s death: “To write jingles does not mean yet to achieve a great career.”
The surname Nadezhdin comes from nadezhda (hope). In his famous epigram on Vorontsov Pushkin mentions nadezhda:
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there is hope
That he will be a full one at last.
There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Botkin, like Count Vorontsov, will be full again.
According to Fyodor, Lermontov came off luckier with the radical critics:
Счастливее оказался Лермонтов. Его проза исторгла у Белинского (имевшего слабость к завоеваниям техники) неожиданное и премилое сравнение Печорина с паровозом, сокрушающим неосторожно попадающихся под его колёса. В его стихах разночинцы почуяли то, что позже стало называться «надсоновщиной». В этом смысле Лермонтов – первый надсон русской литературы. Ритм, тон, бледный, слезами разбавленный стих гражданских мотивов до «Вы жертвою пали» включительно, все это пошло от таких лермонтовских строк, как: «Прощай, наш товарищ, недолго ты жил, певец с голубыми очами, лишь крест деревянный себе заслужил да вечную память меж нами». Очарование Лермонтова, даль его поэзии, райская её живописность и прозрачный привкус неба во влажном стихе – были, конечно, совершенно недоступны пониманию людей склада Чернышевского.
Lermontov came off luckier. His prose jerked from Belinski (who had a weakness for the conquests of technology) the surprising and most charming comparison of Pechorin to a steam engine, shattering all who were careless enough to get under its wheels. In his poetry the middle-class intellectuals felt something of the sociolyrical strain that later came to be called “Nadsonism.” In this sense Lermontov was the first Nadson of Russian literature. The rhythm, the tone, the pale, tear-diluted idiom of “civic” verse up to and including “as victims you fell in the fateful contest” (the famous revolutionary song of the first years of our century), all of this goes back to such Lermontov lines as:
Farewell, our dear comrade! Alas, upon earth
Not long did you dwell, blue-eyed singer!
A plain cross of wood you have earned, and with us
Your memory always shall linger….
Lermontov’s real magic, the melting vistas in his poetry, its paradisial picturesqueness and the transparent tang of the celestial in his moist verse—these, of course, were completely inaccessible to the understanding of men of Chernyshevski’s stamp. ("The Gift," Chapter Four)
In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m another…” 1832) Lermontov mentions nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of broken hopes) that lies in his soul, as in the ocean:
Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Ещё неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я - или бог - или никто!
No, I'm not Byron, I’m another
yet unknown chosen man,
like him, a persecuted wanderer,
but only with a Russian soul.
I started sooner, I will end sooner,
my mind won’t achieve much;
in my soul, as in the ocean,
lies a load of broken hopes.
Who can, gloomy ocean,
find out your secrets? Who
will tell to the crowd my thoughts?
Myself – or God – or none at all!
The poem's last word, nikto (nobody), brings to mind nikto b (none would), a phrase used by Mozart in Pushkin's little tragedy "Mozart and Salieri" (1830). Nikto b is Botkin in reverse.
In his essay The Texture of Time (1922) Van Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) exclaims "eureka" and mentions Alice in the Camera Obscura, a book that was given to him on his eighth birthday:
The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall, summoned on this summer morning in 1922, can pick anything he pleases: diamonds scattered all over the parquet in 1888; a russet black-hatted beauty at a Parisian bar in 1901; a humid red rose among artificial ones in 1883; the pensive half-smile of a young English governess, in 1880, neatly reclosing her charge’s prepuce after the bedtime treat; a little girl, in 1884, licking the breakfast honey off the badly bitten nails of her spread fingers; the same, at thirty-three, confessing, rather late in the day, that she did not like flowers in vases; the awful pain striking him in the side while two children with a basket of mushrooms looked on in the merrily burning pine forest; and the startled quonk of a Belgian car, which he had overtaken and passed yesterday on a blind bend of the alpine highway. Such images tell us nothing about the texture of time into which they are woven — except, perhaps, in one matter which happens to be hard to settle. Does the coloration of a recollected object (or anything else about its visual effect) differ from date to date? Could I tell by its tint if it comes earlier or later, lower or higher, in the stratigraphy of my past? Is there any mental uranium whose dream-delta decay might be used to measure the age of a recollection? The main difficulty, I hasten to explain, consists in the experimenter not being able to use the same object at different times (say, the Dutch stove with its little blue sailing boats in the nursery of Ardis Manor in 1884 and 1888) because of the two or more impressions borrowing from one another and forming a compound image in the mind; but if different objects are to be chosen (say, the faces of two memorable coachmen: Ben Wright, 1884, and Trofim Fartukov, 1888), it is impossible, insofar as my own research goes, to avoid the intrusion not only of different characteristics but of different emotional circumstances, that do not allow the two objects to be considered essentially equal before, so to speak, their being exposed to the action of Time. I am not sure, that such objects cannot be discovered. In my professional work, in the laboratories of psychology, I have devised myself many a subtle test (one of which, the method of determining female virginity without physical examination, today bears my name). Therefore we can assume that the experiment can be performed — and how tantalizing, then, the discovery of certain exact levels of decreasing saturation or deepening brilliance — so exact that the ‘something’ which I vaguely perceive in the image of a remembered but unidentifiable person, and which assigns it ‘somehow’ to my early boyhood rather than to my adolescence, can be labeled if not with a name, at least with a definite date, e.g., January 1, 1908 (eureka, the ‘e.g.’ worked — he was my father’s former house tutor, who brought me Alice in the Camera Obscura for my eighth birthday). (Part Four)
Alice in the Camera Obscura seems to blend Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) with Kamera Obskura, VN’s novel translated into English by the author as Laughter in the Dark (1938). In his Russian version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anya v strane chudes (1923), VN gives to the word lokhan' (kidney-shaped wash-tub) the incorrect masculine ending to rhyme it with pryan (spicy):
Сказочный суп - ты зелен и прян.
Тобой наполнен горячий лохан!
Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
According to Van Veen, he was born on January 1, 1870; but, if Van’s eighth birthday is January 1, 1908, he was born on January 1, 1900. In VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) Sebastian Knight was born on the thirty-first of December, 1899, in the former capital of his half-brother’s country.
Van Veen's "real" name seems to be Ivan Golovin. In Tolstoy's story Smert' Ivana Ilyicha ("The Death of Ivan Ilyich," 1886) Golovin is Ivan Ilyich's surname. Golova is Russian for "head." Btw., the surname Karenin comes from the Greek word for "head."
According to Van, he was born in Ex. In the winter of 1967 Van and Ada finish their work on their Family Chronicle and die in their favorite château in Ex, in the Swiss Alps. At the end of Ada Dr Lagosse exclaims: “Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon Dieu” (“What a book, my God, my God”):
Their recently built castle in Ex was inset in a crystal winter. In the latest Who’s Who the list of his main papers included by some bizarre mistake the title of a work he had never written, though planned to write many pains: Unconsciousness and the Unconscious. There was no pain to do it now — and it was high pain for Ada to be completed. ‘Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon Dieu,’ Dr [Professor. Ed.] Lagosse exclaimed, weighing the master copy which the flat pale parents of the future Babes, in the brown-leaf Woods, a little book in the Ardis Hall nursery, could no longer prop up in the mysterious first picture: two people in one bed. (5.6)
Dr Lagosse's exclamation brings to mind Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes mentioned by Van as he describes poor mad Aqua's torments:
Being unwilling to suffer another relapse after this blessed state of perfect mental repose, but knowing it could not last, she did what another patient had done in distant France, at a much less radiant and easygoing ‘home.’ A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same man, because they both came from Vienne, Isère, and were only sons (as her son was), evolved, or rather revived, the therapistic device, aimed at establishing a ‘group’ feeling, of having the finest patients help the staff if ‘thusly inclined.’ Aqua, in her turn, repeated exactly clever Eleonore Bonvard’s trick, namely, opting for the making of beds and the cleaning of glass shelves. The astorium in St Taurus, or whatever it was called (who cares — one forgets little things very fast, when afloat in infinite non-thingness) was, perhaps, more modem, with a more refined desertic view, than the Mondefroid bleakhouse horsepittle, but in both places a demented patient could outwit in one snap an imbecile pedant. (1.3)
Describing the night of his daughter's death, Shade mentions Exe (a place name that also hints at "execution"):
People have thought she tried to cross the lake
At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed
From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.
Others supposed she might have lost her way
By turning left from Bridgeroad; and some say
She took her poor young life. I know. You know. (ll. 488-493)
In VN's story Lik (1939) Koldunov (Lik’s cousin and schoolmate who used to be his tormentor and who continues to haunt Lik's dreams) twice repeats the word “eureka” and calls Lik barin (mister):
-- У меня,-- сказал Лик,-- у меня случайно оказался... ну, я не знаю,-- небольшой сценический талант, что ли...
-- Талант? -- закричал Колдунов.-- Я тебе покажу талант! Я тебе такие таланты покажу, что ты в штанах компот варить станешь! Сволочь ты, брат. Вот твой талант. Нет, это мне даже нравится (Колдунов затрясся, будто хохоча, с очень примитивной мимикой). Значит, я, по-твоему, последняя хамская тварь, которая и должна погибнуть? Ну, прекрасно, прекрасно. Всё, значит, и объяснилось, эврика, эврика, карта бита, гвоздь вбит, хребет перебит...
-- Олег Петрович расстроен, вы, может быть, теперь пойдете,-- вдруг из угла сказала жена Колдунова с сильным эстонским произношением. В голосе её не было ни малейшего оттенка чувства, и оттого её замечание прозвучало как-то деревянно-бессмысленно. Колдунов медленно повернулся на стуле, не меняя положения руки, лежащей как мёртвая на столе, и уставился на жену восхищенным взглядом.
-- Я никого не задерживаю,-- проговорит он тихо и весело.-- Но и меня попрошу не задерживать. И не учить. Прощай, барин,-- добавил он, не глядя на Лика, который почему-то счел нужным сказать: -- Из Парижа напишу, непременно...
-- Пускай пишет, а?-- вкрадчиво произнес Колдунов, продолжая, по-видимому, обращаться к жене. Лик, сложно отделившись от стула, пошёл было по направлению к ней, но его отнесло в сторону, и он наткнулся на кровать.
Lik said, “I turned out to have—I happened to have … Oh, I don’t know … a modest dramatic talent, I suppose you could say.”
“Talent?” shouted Koldunov. “I’ll show you talent! I’ll show you such talent that you’ll start cooking applesauce in your pants! You’re a dirty rat, chum. That’s your only talent. I must say that’s a good one!” (Koldunov started shaking in very primitive mimicry of side-splitting laughter.) “So, according to you, I’m the lowest, filthiest vermin and deserve my rotten end? Splendid, simply splendid. Everything is explained—eureka, eureka! The card is trumped, the nail is in, the beast is butchered!”
“Oleg Petrovich is upset—maybe you ought to be going now,” Koldunov’s wife suddenly said from her corner, with a strong Estonian accent. There was not the least trace of emotion in her voice, causing her remark to sound wooden and senseless. Koldunov slowly turned in his chair, without altering the position of his hand, which lay as if lifeless on the table, and fixed his wife with an enraptured gaze.
“I am not detaining anyone,” he spoke softly and cheerfully. “And I’ll be thankful not to be detained by others. Or told what to do. So long, mister,” he added, not looking at Lik, who for some reason found it necessary to say: “I’ll write from Paris, without fail.…”
“So he’s going to write, is he?” said Koldunov softly, apparently still addressing his wife. With some trouble Lik extricated himself from the chair and started in her direction, but swerved and bumped into the bed.
When Van leaves Ardis forever, Trofim Fartukov (the Russian coachman in “Ardis the Second”) calls him barin and says that even through a leathern apron he would not think of touching Blanche (a French maid at Ardis whom Trofim eventually marries):
‘The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?’
‘I’ll take you five versts across the bog,’ said Trofim, ‘the nearest is Volosyanka.’
His vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.
Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!
‘Barin, a barin,’ said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his passenger.
‘Da?’
‘Dazhe skvoz’ kozhanïy fartuk ne stal-bï ya trogat’ etu frantsuzskuyu devku.’
Barin: master. Dázhe skvoz’ kózhanïy fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bï ya trógat’: I would not think of touching. Étu: this (that). Frantsúzskuyu: French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. Úzhas, otcháyanie: horror, despair. Zhálost’: pity, Kóncheno, zagázheno, rastérzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds. (1.41)
Trofim and Blanche have a blind child (2.7).
According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), Botkin is one who makes bottekins (fancy footwear). Lik forgets at Koldunov’s the carton box containing his new shoes:
Прошло минут десять, не более. Часики шли, стараясь из деликатности на него не смотреть. Мысль о смерти необыкновенно точно совпадала с мыслью о том, что через полчаса он выйдет на освещенную сцену, скажет первые слова роли: "Je vous prie d'excuser, Madame, cette invasion nocturne" -- и эти слова, чётко и изящно выгравированные в памяти, казались гораздо более настоящими, чем шлепоток и хлебет утомленных волн или звуки двух счастливых женских голосов, доносившиеся из-за стены ближней виллы, или недавние речи Колдунова, или даже стук собственного сердца. Ему вдруг стало так панически плохо, что он встал и пошел вдоль парапета, растерянно гладя его и косясь на цветные чернила вечернего моря. "Была не была,-- сказал Лик вслух,-- нужно освежиться... как рукой... либо умру, либо снимет..." Он сполз по наклону панели и захрустел на гальке. Никого на берегу не было, кроме случайного господина в серых штанах, который навзничь лежал около скалы, раскинув широко ноги, и что-то в очертании этих ног и плеч почему-то напомнило ему фигуру Колдунова. Пошатываясь и уже наклоняясь. Лик стыдливо подошел к краю воды, хотел было зачерпнуть в ладони и обмыть голову, но вода жила, двигалась, грозила омочить ему ноги,-- может быть, хватит ловкости разуться?-- и в ту же секунду Лик вспомнил картонку с новыми туфлями: забыл их у Колдунова!
И странно: как только вспомнилось, образ оказался столь живительным, что сразу все опростилось, и это Лика спасло, как иногда положение спасает его формулировка. Надо их тотчас достать, и можно успеть достать, и как только это будет сделано, он в них выйдет на сцену — все совершенно отчетливо и логично, придраться не к чему, — и забыв про сжатие в груди, туман, тошноту, Лик поднялся опять на набережную, граммофонным голосом кликнул такси, как раз отъезжавшее порожняком от виллы напротив... Тормоза ответили раздирающим стоном. Шоферу он дал адрес из записной книжки и велел ехать как можно шибче, причем было ясно, что вся поездка — туда и оттуда в театр — займет не больше пяти минут.
К дому, где жили Колдуновы, автомобиль подъехал со стороны площади. Там собралась толпа, и только с помощью упорных трубных угроз автомобилю удалось протиснуться. Около фонтана, на стуле, сидела жена Колдунова, весь лоб и левая часть лица были в блестящей крови, слиплись волосы, она сидела совершенно прямо и неподвижно, окруженная любопытными, а рядом с ней, тоже неподвижно, стоял ее мальчик в окровавленной рубашке, прикрывая лицо кулаком, — такая, что ли, картина. Полицейский, принявший Лика за врача, провел его в комнату. Среди осколков, на полу навзничь лежал обезображенный выстрелом в рот, широко раскинув ноги в новых белых...
— Это мои, — сказал Лик по-французски.
About ten minutes passed, no more. His watch ticked on, trying tactfully not to look at him. The thought of death coincided precisely with the thought that in half an hour he would walk out onto the bright stage and say the first words of his part, “Je vous prie d’excuser, Madame, cette invasion nocturne.” And these words, clearly and elegantly engraved in his memory, seemed far more real than the lapping and splashing of the weary waves, or the sound of two gay female voices coming from behind the stone wall of a nearby villa, or the recent talk of Koldunov, or even the pounding of his own heart. His feeling of sickness suddenly reached such a panicky pitch that he got up and walked along the parapet, dazedly stroking it and peering at the colored inks of the evening sea. “In any case,” Lik said aloud, “I have to cool off.… Instant cure.… Either I’ll die or it’ll help.” He slid down the sloping edge of the sidewalk, where the parapet stopped, and crunched across the pebbly beach. There was nobody on the shore except for a shabbily dressed man, who happened to be lying supine near a boulder, his feet spread wide apart. Something about the outline of his legs and shoulders for some reason reminded Lik of Koldunov. Swaying a little and already stooping, Lik walked self-consciously to the edge of the water, and was about to scoop some up in his hands and douse his head; but the water was alive, moving, and threatening to soak his feet. Perhaps I have enough coordination left to take off my shoes and socks, he thought, and in the same instant remembered the carton box containing his new shoes. He had forgotten it at Koldunov’s!
And as soon as he remembered it, this image proved so stimulating that immediately everything was simplified, and this saved Lik, in the same way as a situation is sometimes saved by its rational formulation. He must get those shoes at once, there was just time enough to get them, and as soon as this was accomplished, he would step onstage in them. (All perfectly clear and logical.) Forgetting the pressure in his chest, the foggy feeling, the nausea, Lik climbed back up to the promenade, and in a sonorously recorded voice hailed the empty taxi that was just leaving the curb by the villa across the way. Its brakes responded with a lacerating moan. He gave the chauffeur the address from his notebook, telling him to go as fast as possible, even though the entire trip—there and from there to the theater—would not take more than five minutes.
The taxi approached Koldunov’s place from the direction of the square. A crowd had gathered, and it was only by dint of persistent threats with its horn that the driver managed to squeeze through. Koldunov’s wife was sitting on a chair by the public fountain. Her forehead and left cheek glistened with blood, her hair was matted, and she sat quite straight and motionless, surrounded by the curious, while, next to her, also motionless, stood her boy, in a bloodstained shirt, covering his face with his fist, a kind of tableau. A policeman, mistaking Lik for a doctor, escorted him into the room. The dead man lay on the floor amid broken crockery, his face blasted by a gunshot in the mouth, his widespread feet in new, white—
“Those are mine,” said Lik in French.
Lik is an actor. In his Essais (Vol. One, Chapter XVIII) Montaigne says: à se dernier rôle de la mort et de nous il n’y a plus que feindre, il faut parler français (in this last role of death one should not pretend anymore, one should speak French). At the end of his "Essays" Montaigne says:
La gentille inscription de quoy les Atheniens honorerent la venue de Pompeius en leur ville, se conforme à mon sens:
D’autant es tu Dieu comme
Tu te recognois homme.
The pretty inscription wherewith the Athenians honoured the entry of Pompey into their city is conformable to my sense: "By so much thou art
a god, as thou confessest thee a man." (Book III, chapter 13 "Of Experience")
The public fountain at the end of Lik brings to mind a tall white fountain that Shade saw during his heart attack:
I also called on Coates.
He was afraid he had mislaid her notes.
He took his article from a steel file:
"It's accurate. I have not changed her style.
There's one misprint - not that it matters much:
Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch."
Life Everlasting - based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss? (ll. 797-805)
Shade's abyss brings to mind L'Abîme (The Abyss), Suire's play in which Lik plays a young Russian named Igor:
Есть пьеса "Бездна" (L'Abîme) известного французского писателя Suire. Она уже сошла со сцены, прямо в Малую Лету (т. е. в ту, которая обслуживает театр,-- речка, кстати сказать, не столь безнадежная, как главная, с менее крепким раствором забвения, так что режиссёрская удочка иное ещё вылавливает спустя много лет). В этой пьесе, по существу идиотской, даже идеально идиотской, иначе говоря -- идеально построенной на прочных условностях общепринятой драматургии, трактуется страстной путь пожилой женщины, доброй католички и землевладелицы, вдруг загоревшейся греховной страстью к молодому русскому, Igor, -- Игорю, случайно попавшему к ней в усадьбу и полюбившему её дочь Анжелику.
There is a play of the 1920s, called L'Abîme (The Abyss), by the well-known French author Suire. It has already passed from the stage straight into the Lesser Lethe (the one, that is, that serves the theater – a stream, incidentally, not quite as hopeless as the main river, and containing a weaker solution of oblivion, so that angling producers may still fish something out many years later). This play – essentially idiotic, even ideally idiotic, or, putting it another way, ideally constructed on the solid conventions of traditional dramaturgy – deals with the torments of a middle-aged, rich, and religious French lady suddenly inflamed by a sinful passion for a young Russian named Igor, who has turned up at her château and fallen in love with her daughter Angélique.
The playwright's name seems to hint at the French phrase à suivre (to be continued). In his poem Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman,” 1833) Pushkin mentions bezdna (the abyss) and lik derzhavtsa polumira (the face of the half-planet's ruler):
О мощный властелин судьбы!
Не так ли ты над самой бездной
На высоте, уздой железной
Россию поднял на дыбы?
Кругом подножия кумира
Безумец бедный обошёл
И взоры дикие навёл
На лик державца полумира.
Oh, mighty sovereign of destiny!
Haven’t you similarly reared Russia
With an iron bridle on the eminence
Before the abyss?
The poor madman walked around
The idol’s pedestal
And looked wildly at the face
Of the half-planet’s ruler.
(Part Two)
The main character of "The Bronze Horseman," Eugene is a namesake of Pushkin's Onegin and of Eugenia Lalande, a character in E. A. Poe's "Spectacles." Ochki being Russian for "glasses," Ochkovoe ozero (in the Russian Lolita the name of Hourglass Lake) brings to mind the title of Poe's story.
Let me draw your attention to the updated versions of my two previous posts on VN’s story “Perfection.”