In the second stanza of his poem Vlyublyonnost' (“Being in Love”) composed on the night of July 20, 1922, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) mentions luch (a moonbeam):
Pokuda snitsya, snis', vlyublyonnost',
No probuzhdeniem ne much',
I luchshe nedogovoryonnost'
Chem eta shchel' i etot luch.
While the dreaming is good--in the sense of 'while the going is good'--do keep appearing to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost', but do not torment us by waking us up or telling too much: reticence is better than that chink and that moonbeam. (1.5)
In a jingle composed in his old age, as he recovers from a mysterious and near-fatal illness, Vadim Vadimovich mentions naklonnyi luch (a slanting ray):
There remained other problems. Where was I? What about a little light? How did one tell by touch a lamp's button from a bell's button in the dark. What was, apart from my own identity, that other person, promised to me, belonging to me? I could locate the bluish blinds of twin windows. Why not uncurtain them?
Tak, vdol' naklonnogo luchа
Ya vyshel iz paralichа.
Along a slanting ray, like this
I slipped out of paralysis.
--if "paralysis" is not too strong a word for the condition that mimicked it (with some obscure help from the patient): a rather quaint but not too serious psychological disorder--or at least so it seemed in lighthearted retrospect. (7.3)
Vlyublyonnost' (1905) is a poem by Alexander Blok. In a letter of July 18, 1907, to Blok Innokentiy Annenski says that Vlyublyonnost' is adski trudna (diabolically difficult):
«Влюбленность» — адски трудна, а …зелёный зайчик В догоревшем хрустале чудный символ рассветного утомления.
At the end of his poem Svechku vnesli (They Have Brought in a Candle,” 1906) Annenski mentions the shadows that run down from the eyes into blue fire po naklonam lucha (along the slants of a ray):
Не мерещится ль вам иногда,
Когда сумерки ходят по дому,
Тут же возле иная среда,
Где живём мы совсем по-другому?
С тенью тень там так мягко слилась,
Там бывает такая минута,
Что лучами незримыми глаз
Мы уходим друг в друга как будто.
И движеньем спугнуть этот миг
Мы боимся, иль словом нарушить,
Точно ухом кто возле приник,
Заставляя далекое слушать.
Но едва запылает свеча,
Чуткий мир уступает без боя,
Лишь из глаз по наклонам луча
Тени в пламя сбегут голубое.
In his memoir essay Innokentiy Annenski (1955) S. Makovski quotes this poem in full. According to Makovski, Annenski used to repeat to young writers that a poet’s first task is to invent himself:
Анненский говорил молодым писателям "Аполлона" и мне повторял не раз: "Первая задача поэта -- выдумать себя". На этом парадоксе он настаивал, но сам-то выдумать себя никак не умел и вероятно поэтому даже сомневался как будто в собственной поэзии, говоря о ней условно и шутливо:
Я завожусь на тридцать лет,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Чтоб жить, волнуясь и скорбя
Над тем, чего, гляди, и нет...
И был бы, верно, я поэт,
Когда бы выдумал себя.
["Человек"]
Makovski adds that Annenski could not invent himself and quotes Annenski’s lines: “I probably would be a poet, / if I had invented myself.” At the beginning of LATH Vadim Vadimovich quotes the words of his extravagant grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, who summoned him to look at the harlequins:
I saw my parents infrequently. They divorced and remarried and redivorced at such a rapid rate that had the custodians of my fortune been less alert, I might have been auctioned out finally to a pair of strangers of Swedish or Scottish descent, with sad bags under hungry eyes. An extraordinary grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, amply replaced closer blood. As a child of seven or eight, already harboring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) unduly sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in a most outrageous fashion.
"Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!”
"What harlequins? Where?"
"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes, images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"
I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my grand-aunt in honor of my first daydreams, and now, down the marble steps of memory's front porch, here she slowly comes, sideways, sideways, the poor lame lady, touching each step edge with the rubber tip of her black cane. (1.2)
It seems that Vadim Vadimovich invented not only his grant-aunt, but also himself. In an interview VN calls John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) by far the greatest of invented poets (Strong Opinions, p. 59).
Another good poet, Vasiliy Travnikov, was invented by Hodasevich, the author of Zhizn' Vasiliya Travnikova ("The Life of Vasiliy Travnikov," 1936). In his essay Ob Annenskom ("On Annenski," 1921) Hodasevich compares Annenski to Ivan Ilyich Golovin, the main character of Tolstoy's story Smert' Ivana Ilyicha ("The Death of Ivan Ilyich," 1886):
Толстовский герой Иван Ильич Головин, член судебной палаты, прожил всю жизнь совершенно прилично, как все: учился, женился, делал карьеру, рожал детей, -- и не думал о том, к чему он все это делает и чем это кончится. В особенности не думал он о конце, о смерти, даже когда заболел и слег. Только подслушав разговор жены с шурином, узнал он, что ему, Ивану Ильичу, тоже предстоит умереть, как всем прочим, -- и не когда-то там вообще, а очень скоро. И с тех пор каждая минута его жизни была отравлена мыслью о надвигающейся смерти.
Анненский был не Иван Ильич. С ним не случилось так, что узнал он о смерти накануне её как о чём-то неслыханном. Напротив, он знал и помнил о ней всегда, во всяком случае -- все те годы, которые находятся в поле нашего зрения, будучи отражены его лирикой. Но, будучи, так сказать, растворён в большей дозе времени, яд этой мысли оказался и для Анненского не менее сильным, чем для Ивана Ильича. Поэт был отравлен ею не менее, чем толстовский герой. Он был ею пропитан. Смерть -- основной, самый стойкий мотив его поэзии, упорно повторяющийся в неприкрытом виде и более или менее уловимый всегда, всюду, как острый и терпкий запах циана, веющий над его стихами. Неизвестно, когда впервые поразила Анненского мысль о смерти. Но несомненно, что она -- главный и постоянный двигатель его поэзии. Он не сводит глаз с неё. Ещё в "Тихих песнях" Анненский увидел смерть как стену, которая преграждает путь и всё приближается, вырастая перед ним:
А там стена, к закату ближе,
Такая страшная на взгляд...
Она всё выше... Мы всё ниже...
"Постой-ка, дядя!" -- "Не велят". (II)
According to Hodasevich, Annenski saw death as a wall that blocks one's way and that gets ever nearer and higher as one approaches it. Vadim Vadimovich collapses during his evening stroll at a stone parapet:
A low wall of gray stone, waist-high, paunch-thick, built in the general shape of a transversal parapet, put an end to whatever life the road still had as a town street. A narrow passage for pedestrians and cyclists divided the parapet in the middle, and the width of that gap was preserved beyond it in a path which after a flick or two slithered into a fairly dense young pinewood. You and I had rambled there many times on gray mornings, when lakeside or poolside lost all attraction; but that evening, as usual, I terminated my stroll at the parapet, and stood in perfect repose, facing the low sun, my spread hands enjoying the smoothness of its top edge on both sides of the passage. A tactile something, or the recent ra-ta-tac, brought back and completed the image of my 733, twelve centimeters by ten-and-a-half Bristol cards, which you would read chapter by chapter whereupon a great pleasure, a parapet of pleasure, would perfect my task: in my mind there arose, endowed with the clean-cut compactness of some great solid--an altar! a mesa!--the image of the shiny photocopier in one of the offices of our hotel. My trustful hands were still spread, but my soles no longer sensed the soft soil. I wished to go back to you, to life, to the amethyst lozenges, to the pencil lying on the veranda table, and I could not. What used to happen so often in thought, now had happened for keeps: I could not turn. To make that movement would mean rolling the world around on its axis and that was as impossible as traveling back physically from the present moment to the previous one. Maybe I should not have panicked, should have waited quietly for the stone of my limbs to regain some tingle of flesh. Instead, I performed, or imagined performing, a wild wrenching movement--and the globe did not bulge. I must have hung in a spread-eagle position for a little while longer before ending supine on the intangible soil. (6.2)
The name Bredow comes from bred (delirium; gibberish; nonsense). In the opening line of his poem Smychok i struny (“The Bow and the Strings”) Annenski mentions tyazhyolyi, tyomnyi bred (“heavy, dark delirium”):
Какой тяжёлый, тёмный бред!
Как эти выси мутно-лунны!
Касаться скрипки столько лет
И не узнать при свете струны!
Кому ж нас надо? Кто зажёг
Два жёлтых лика, два унылых...
И вдруг почувствовал смычок,
Что кто-то взял и кто-то слил их.
"О, как давно! Сквозь эту тьму
Скажи одно: ты та ли, та ли?"
И струны ластились к нему,
Звеня, но, ластясь, трепетали.
"Не правда ль, больше никогда
Мы не расстанемся? довольно?.."
И скрипка отвечала да,
Но сердцу скрипки было больно.
Смычок всё понял, он затих,
А в скрипке эхо всё держалось...
И было мукою для них,
Что людям музыкой казалось.
Но человек не погасил
До утра свеч... И струны пели...
Лишь солнце их нашло без сил
На чёрном бархате постели.
What heavy, dark delirium!
What dim and moonlit heights!
To touch the violin for years
And not to know the strings by light!
Who needs us now? And who lit up
Two hollow, melancholy faces...
And suddenly the bow felt
Someone take them up, unite them.
"How long it's been! Amidst this gloom
Just tell me this: are you still the same?"
The strings caressed the bow,
Rang out, caressed it slightly trembling.
"Is it not true, that we will never more
Be parted. It's enough..."
Yes, replied the violin,
But pain was throbbing in her heart.
The bow discerned it and grew mute,
The echo still continued in the violin...
What was a torture to them both
The people heard as music.
But the violinist didn't snuff
The candles out 'til dawn...The strings sang on...
The sun found them worn out
On the black velvet of their bed.
“To touch the violin for years and not to know the strings by light!” Vadim never finds out that the three of his three or four successive wives are the daughters of Count Starov (a retired diplomat who seems to be Vadim’s real father). Skripka Rotshil’da (“Rothschild’s Violin,” 1894) is a story by Chekhov. According to Vadim, spying had been his “clystère de Tchékhov” (a play on violon d’Ingres, “a hobby”) even before he married his first wife:
Brushing all my engagements aside, I surrendered again--after quite a few years of abstinence!--to the thrill of secret investigations. Spying had been my clystère de Tchékhov even before I married Iris Black whose later passion for working on an interminable detective tale had been sparked by this or that hint I must have dropped, like a passing bird's lustrous feather, in relation to my experience in the vast and misty field of the Service. In my little way I have been of some help to my betters. The tree, a blue-flowering ash, whose cortical wound I caught the two "diplomats," Tornikovski and Kalikakov, using for their correspondence, still stands, hardly scarred, on its hilltop above San Bernardino. But for structural economy I have omitted that entertaining strain from this story of love and prose. Its existence, however, helped me now to ward off--for a while, at least--the madness and anguish of hopeless regret. (5.1)
In a letter of October 22, 1896, to Suvorin Chekhov mentions gromadnye klistiry (huge clystères) that he made to a rich peasant whose rectum was blocked with kal (faeces):
Вчера у одного богатого мужика заткнуло калом кишку, и мы ставили ему громадные клистиры. Ожил.
In the same letter to Suvorin Chekhov speaks of the flop of the first performance of his play Chayka (“The Seagull,” 1896) at the Aleksandrinsky Theater and compares himself to a man who made a proposal and received a refusal:
Я поступил так же разумно и холодно, как человек, который сделал предложение, получил отказ и которому ничего больше не остаётся, как уехать. Да, самолюбие моё было уязвлено, но ведь это не с неба свалилось; я ожидал неуспеха и уже был подготовлен к нему, о чём и предупреждал Вас с полною искренностью.
I acted as coldly and reasonably as a man who has made an offer, received a refusal, and has nothing left but to go. Yes, my vanity was stung, but you know it was not a bolt from the blue; I was expecting a failure, and was prepared for it, as I warned you with perfect sincerity beforehand.
One of the main characters in “The Seagull” is Nina Zarechnyi. Her name brings to mind Mme de Rechnoy (alias Nina Lecerf), Sebastian’s mistress in VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Describing his first meeting with Iris Black, Vadim mentions Nina Lecerf:
Ivor had gone to fetch my whisky. Iris and I stood on the terrace in the saintly dusk. I was lighting my pipe while Iris nudged the balustrade with her hip and pointed out with mermaid undulations--supposed to imitate waves--the shimmer of seaside lights in a parting of the india-ink hills. At that moment the telephone rang in the drawing room behind us, and she quickly turned around--but with admirable presence of mind transformed her dash into a nonchalant shawl dance. In the meantime Ivor had already skated phoneward across the parquetry to hear what Nina Lecerf or some other neighbor wanted. We liked to recall, Iris and I, in our later intimacy that revelation scene with Ivor bringing us drinks to toast her fairy-tale recovery and she, without minding his presence, putting her light hand on my knuckles: I stood gripping the balustrade in exaggerated resentment and was not prompt enough, poor dupe, to acknowledge her apology by a Continental hand kiss. (1.3)
Vadim’s full name (that he forgets during his illness) seems to be Prince Vadim Vadimovich Yablonski. At the beginning of Blok’s play Roza i krest (“The Rose and the Cross,” 1912) Bertrand mentions yabloni staryi stvol (the old trunk of an apple tree). One of Annenski’s poems begins Pod yablon’koy, pod vishneyu… (“Under the apple tree, under the cherry tree”). Chekhov is the author of Vishnyovyi sad (“The Cherry Orchard," 1904).
At the end of his poem Serebryanyi polden’ (“Silver Noon”) Annenski mentions Harlequin and Pierrot who stand at the coffin holding candles:
Подумать,— что помпа бюро,
Огней и парчи серебром
Должна потускнеть в фимиаме:
Пришли Арлекин и Пьеро,
О белая помпа бюро,
И стали у гроба с свечами!