According to Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974), he had first looked at the harlequins in the arbor of his favorite manor of Marevo:
No ambition, no honors tainted the fanciful future. The President of the Russian Academy advanced toward me to the sound of slow music with a wreath on the cushion he held--and had to retreat growling as I shook my graying head. I saw myself correcting the page proof of a new novel which was to change the destiny of Russian literary style as a matter of course--my course (with no self-love, no smugness, no surprise on my part)--and reworking so much of it in the margin--where inspiration finds its sweetest clover--that the whole had to be set anew. When the book made its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining a few dear sycophantic friends in the arbor of my favorite manor of Marevo (where I had first "looked at the harlequins") with its alley of fountains and its shimmering view of a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. It had to be that way. (1.5)
Harlequin is a character in Alexander Blok’s play Balaganchik (“The Puppet Show,” 1906). In the penultimate line of his poem Rus’ moya, zhizn’ moya, vmeste l’ nam mayatsya? (“My Russia, my life, will we suffer together?” 1910) Blok mentions sonnoe marevo (somnolent haze):
Русь моя, жизнь моя, вместе ль нам маяться?
Царь, да Сибирь, да Ермак, да тюрьма!
Эх, не пора ль разлучиться, раскаяться…
Вольному сердцу на что твоя тьма?
Знала ли что? Или в Бога ты верила?
Что́ там услышишь из песен твоих?
Чудь начуди́ла, да Меря намерила
Гатей, дорог да столбов верстовых…
Лодки да грады по рекам рубила ты,
Но до Царьградских святынь не дошла…
Со́колов, ле́бедей в степь распустила ты —
Кинулась из степи чёрная мгла…
За́ море Черное, за́ море Белое
В чёрные ночи и в белые дни
Дико глядится лицо онемелое,
Очи татарские мечут огни…
Тихое, долгое, красное зарево
Каждую ночь над стано́вьем твоим…
Что же маячишь ты, сонное марево?
Вольным играешься духом моим?
Sonnoe marevo brings to mind dva sonnykh yabloka (two sleepy eyeballs) mentioned by Mandelshtam in his poem Net, nikogda nichey ya ne byl sovremennik... ("No, I was never anyone's contemporary..." 1924) and sonnoe tsarstvo (“sleepy realm,” when everybody is asleep), a phrase cited by Dahl in his dictionary:
Сонный, что мёртвый. Сонный хлеба не просит. Сонное царство (все спят).
Dobrolyubov’s famous essay on Ostrovski’s play Groza (“The Thunderstorm,” 1859), in which the action takes place in the invented Volgan town Kalinov, is entitled Luch sveta v tyomnom tsarstve (“A Ray of Light in the Realm of Darkness”). In the second stanza of his poem Vlyublyonnost' (“Being in Love”) composed on the night of July 20, 1922, Vadim Vadimovich mentions eta shchel’ i etot luch (that clink and that 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 Blok’s poem Vlyublyonnost' (1905) luchi (the rays) are mentioned:
И вечернюю грусть тишиной отражает вода,
И над лесом погасли лучи.
And the still water reflects the evening sadness,
And the rays above the forest are extinguished.
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.
The adverb adski (hellishly) comes from ad (hell) and brings to mind VN's novel Ada (1969) that corresponds to Vadim's Ardis (1970) and Vadim’s cousin Ada Bredow:
I am reduced--a sad confession!--to something I have also used before, and even in this book--the well-known method of degrading one species of art by appealing to another. I am thinking of Serov's Five-petaled Lilac, oil, which depicts a tawny-haired girl of twelve or so sitting at a sun-flecked table and manipulating a raceme of lilac in search of that lucky token. The girl is no other than Ada Bredow, a first cousin of mine whom I flirted with disgracefully that very summer, the sun of which ocellates the garden table and her bare arms. What hack reviewers of fiction call "human interest" will now overwhelm my reader, the gentle tourist, when he visits the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, where I have seen with my own rheumy eyes, on a visit to Sovietland a few years ago, that picture which belonged to Ada's grandmother before being handed over to the People by a dedicated purloiner. I believe that this enchanting little girl was the model of my partner in a recurrent dream of mine with a stretch of parquetry between two beds in a makeshift demonic guest room. Bel's resemblance to her--same cheekbones, same chin, same knobby wrists, same tender flower—can be only alluded to, not actually listed. (4.3)
It was Ada's grandmother who summoned Vadim 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 (the main harlequin in LATH) invented not only his grant-aunt, but also himself. In his memoir essay Innokentiy Annenski (1955) Sergey Makovski says that 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 quotes the lines from Annenski’s sonnet Chelovek (“The Man”) in which luchi ot prizrachnykh planet (the rays from ghostly planets) are mentioned:
Я завожусь на тридцать лет,
Чтоб жить, мучительно дробя
Лучи от призрачных планет
На «да» и «нет», на «ах!» и «бя»,
Чтоб жить, волнуясь и скорбя
Над тем, чего, гляди, и нет…
И был бы, верно, я поэт,
Когда бы выдумал себя.
В работе ль там не без прорух,
Иль в механизме есть подвох,
Но был бы мой свободный дух —
Теперь не дух, я был бы Бог…
Когда б не пиль да не тубо,
Да не тю-тю после бо-бо!..
At the end of his poem Svechku vnesli (They Have Brought in a Candle,” 1906) quoted in full by Makovski Annenski uses the phrase 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 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.
I was prepared by certain indices for spells of dizziness and nausea but I did not expect my legs to misbehave as they did, when--unbuckled and alone--I blithely stepped out of bed on that first night of recovery. Beastly gravity humiliated me at once: my legs telescoped under me. The crash brought in the night nurse, and she helped me back into bed. After that I slept. Never before or since did I sleep more deliciously.
One of the windows was wide open when I woke up. My mind and my eye were by now sufficiently keen to make out the medicaments on my bedside table. Amidst its miserable population I noticed a few stranded travelers from another world: a transparent envelope with a nonmasculine handkerchief found and laundered by the staff; a diminutive golden pencil belonging to the eyelet of a congeric agenda in a vanity bag; a pair of harlequin sunglasses, which for some reason suggested not protection from a harsh light but the masking of tear-swollen lids. The combination of those ingredients resulted in a dazzling pyrotechny of sense; and next moment (coincidence was still on my side) the door of my room moved: a small soundless move that came to a brief soundless stop and then was continued in a slow, infinitely slow sequence of suspension dots in diamond type. I emitted a bellow of joy, and Reality entered. (7.3)
Reality (or “You,” Vadim’s fourth and last wife) brings to mind “invent reality!”, the words of Baroness Bredow (Vadim’s extravagant grand-aunt who summoned him to look at the harlequins). In his poem Bred ("Delirium," 1905) Blok describes his own funeral.
In his essay Peterburgskie povesti Pushkina ("Pushkin's St. Petersburg Tales") Hodasevich mentions marevo (mirage):
Тою же осенью 1830 года, там же, в Болдине, почти одновременно с "Домиком в Коломне" написаны "Каменный Гость" и "Гробовщик". Прямая связь между последними двумя произведениями зорко замечена была ещё А.С. Искозом в его статье о "Повестях Белкина", хотя и была истолкована несколько иначе. В самом деле: вызов пьяного и глупого гробовщика совершенно тождествен с вызовом Дон Жуана: и тот и другой в порыве дерзости зовут мертвецов к себе на ужин. Мертвецы приходят. Но сознательно дерзкий Жуан погибает: ожившая статуя губит его, как погубил оживший Всадник Евгения. А дерзнувший спьяна, по глупости гробовщик принимает у себя целую толпу мёртвых, но потом просыпается -- и всё оказывается вздором, маревом, сном, и он мирно садится пить чай.
Hodasevich compares the hero of Pushkin's story Grobovshchik ("The Coffin-Maker," 1830) to Don Guan, the hero of Pushkin’s little tragedy Kamennyi gost' ("The Stone Guest," 1830). Both Adrian Prokhorov and Don Guan recklessly invite the dead to supper. But while Don Juan perishes, killed by the live statue, the stupid coffin-maker (who was drunk when he invited his clients) is visited by a whole crowd of the dead; but on the morning he wakes up and everything turns out to be nonsense, a mirage [marevo], a dream and he quietly sits down to drink his tea.
Like Pushkin's Grobovshchik, LATH ends in tea drinking:
"I had been promised some rum with my tea--Ceylon and Jamaica, the sibling islands (mumbling comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away)--" (7.4)
The name Ostrovski comes from ostrov (islande). The names Chernyshevski and Dobrolyubov are spoonerized by Annette Blagovo (Vadim’s second wife, Bel’s mother):
I am giving this summary to exemplify what even the poorest reader of my Dare must surely retain, unless electrolysis destroys some essential cells soon after he closes the book. Now part of Annette's frail charm lay in her forgetfulness which veiled everything toward the evening of everything, like the kind of pastel haze that obliterates mountains, clouds, and even its own self as the summer day swoons. I know I have seen her many times, a copy of Patria in her languid lap, follow the printed lines with the pendulum swing of eyes suggestive of reading, and actually reach the "To be continued" at the end of the current installment of The Dare. I also know that she had typed every word of it and most of its commas. Yet the fact remains that she retained nothing--perhaps in result of her having decided once for all that my prose was not merely "difficult" but hermetic ("nastily hermetic," to repeat the compliment Basilevski paid me the moment he realized--a moment which came in due time--that his manner and mind were being ridiculed in Chapter Three by my gloriously happy Victor). I must say I forgave her readily her attitude to my work. At public readings, I admired her public smile, the "archaic" smile of Greek statues. When her rather dreadful parents asked to see my books (as a suspicious physician might ask for a sample of semen), she gave them to read by mistake another man's novel because of a silly similarity of titles. The only real shock I experienced was when I overheard her informing some idiot woman friend that my Dare included biographies of "Chernolyubov and Dobroshevski"! She actually started to argue when I retorted that only a lunatic would have chosen a pair of third-rate publicists to write about--spoonerizing their names in addition! (2.5)
Anyuta Blagovo is a character in Chekhov's story Moya zhizn’ (“My Life,” 1896). In his poem Viola tricolor (1921) VN mentions anyutiny glazki (the pansies) and ugryumoe marevo (the morose mirage) of our deserts:
Анютины глазки, весёлые глазки,
в угрюмое марево наших пустынь
глядите вы редко из ласковой сказки,
из мира забытых святынь...
Anyuta's eyes, the merry eyes of pansies,
from an affectionate fairy tale,
from the world of forgotten sacred places
you seldom look into the morose mirage of our deserts...
Chekhov is the author of Bab'ye tsarstvo ("A Woman's Kingdom," 1894) and Skripka Rotshil’da (“Rothschild’s Violin,” 1894). According to Vadim, spying had been his clystère de Tchékhov even before he married Iris Black (Vadim's 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)
A play on kal (excrement) and kakat' (to defecate), Kalikakov also brings to mind Kalinov, the setting of Ostrovski's play "The Thunderstorm." Clystère de Tchékhov is a play on violon d’Ingres (“a hobby”). In the first 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!
What heavy, dark delirium!
What dim and moonlit heights!
To touch the violin for years
And not to know the strings by light!
“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). 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).