Describing his life in Paris, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) mentions the poet Basilevski:
It was good to see old Morozov's rough-hewn clever face with its shock of dingy hair and bright frosty eyes; and for a special reason I closely observed podgy dour Basilevski--not because he had just had or was about to have a row with his young mistress, a feline beauty who wrote doggerel verse and vulgarly flirted with me, but because I hoped he had already seen the fun I had made of him in the last issue of a literary review in which we both collaborated. Although his English was inadequate for the interpretation of, say, Keats (whom he defined as "a pre-Wildean aesthete in the beginning of the Industrial Era") Basilevski was fond of attempting just that. In discussing recently the "not altogether displeasing preciosity" of my own stuff, he had imprudently quoted a popular line from Keats, rendering it as:
Vsegda nas raduet krasivaya veshchitsa
which in retranslation gives:
"A pretty bauble always gladdens us."
Our conversation, however, turned out to be much too brief to disclose whether or not he had appreciated my amusing lesson. He asked me what I thought of the new book he was telling Morozov (a monolinguist) about--namely Maurois' "impressive work on Byron," and upon my answering that I had found it to be impressive trash, my austere critic muttered, "I don't think you have read it," and went on educating the serene old poet. (2.1)
In his review of Vadim’s stuff Basilevski mistranslated the first line of Keats’s Endymion (1818), “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” Keats is the author of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818), a narrative poem adapted from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron (IV, 5). In the last line of his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881) Oscar Wilde mentions Isabella and her Basil-tree:
RID of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water----it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
Keats’ Isabella and La Belle Dame Sans Merci (a poem translated into Russian by VN) bring to mind Isabel (“Bel”), the daughter of Vadim and his second wife, Annette Blagovo. In a conversation with Basilevski (overheard by Vadim from behind a more or less Doric column) Annette mentions the too big and too slow tears rolling down the faces:
I might have been displeased by the tolerance she showed Basilevski (knowing none of his works and only vaguely aware of his preposterous reputation) had it not occurred to me that the theme of her sympathy was repeating, as it were, the friendly phase of my own initial relations with that faux bonhomme. From behind a more or less Doric column I overheard him asking my naive gentle Annette had she any idea why I hated so fiercely Gorki (for whom he cultivated total veneration). Was it because I resented the world fame of a proletarian? Had I really read any of that wonderful writer's books? Annette had looked puzzled but all at once a charming childish smile illumined her whole face and she recalled The Mother, a corny Soviet film that I had criticized, she said, "because the tears rolling down the faces were too big and too slow."
"Aha! That explains a lot," proclaimed Basilevski with gloomy satisfaction. (2.9)
“A more or less Doric column” seems to foreshadow Dora, Bel’s friend whom Vadim meets near the monument of Pushkin in Leningrad. During this meeting Vadim Vadimovich dissolves in tears at once (and Dora’s eyes are also wet). A lame lady, Dora tells Vadim Vadimovich that as a girl she dreamt of becoming a female clown, ‘Madam Byron’ or ‘Trek Trek.’
According to Vadim, he made a rhymed Russian translation of Keats’ To Autumn (1819):
I would be a cad to describe our last meeting (March 1 of the same year). Suffice it to say that in the middle of typing a rhymed Russian translation that I had made of Keats' To Autumn ("Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness") she [Lyuba Savich, Vadim’s typist] broke down, and tormented me till at least eight P.M. with her confessions and tears. When at last she left, I lost another hour composing a detailed letter asking her never to come back. Incidentally, it was the first time that an unfinished leaf was left by her in my typewriter. I removed it and rediscovered it several weeks later among my papers, and then deliberately preserved it because it was Annette who completed the job, with a couple of typos and an x-ed erasure in the last lines--and something about the juxtaposition appealed to my combinational slant. (2.2)
The hazel shells and gathering swallows mentioned by Keats in his ode To Autumn bring to mind Hazel Shade (the poet’s daughter) and Sybil Swallow (as Kinbote calls the poet’s wife), the characters in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962). Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s almost finished 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”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok. Vadim's novel The Dare (1950) includes a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoevski. In her memoirs about Blok (“Alexander Blok. A Biographical Sketch,” 1930) Maria Beketov (the poet’s aunt) mentions Basilevski, a composer who set to music Blok’s drama Roza i krest (“The Rose and the Cross,” 1912):
В конце мая Александр Александрович узнал, что "Роза и Крест" пропущена цензурой без всяких ограничений. Около этого времени он сообщал матери, что написал краткие сведения о "Розе и Кресте" для композитора Базилевского, который написал музыку на его драму и собирался исполнять её в Москве. Сведения нужны были для концертной программы. Тут же Александр Александрович прибавляет: "Базилевский пишет, что Свободный театр думает о постановке "Розы и Креста". (Chapter 11)
At the beginning of “The Rose and the Cross” Bertrand mentions yabloni staryi stvol (the old trunk of an apple-tree):
Яблони старый ствол,
Расшатанный бурей февральской!
Жадно ждёшь ты весны...
Тёплый ветер дохнёт, и нежной травою
Зазеленеет замковый вал...
Чем ты, старый, ответишь тогда
Ручьям и птицам певучим?
Лишь две-три бледно-розовых ветви протянешь
В воздух, омытый дождями,
Чёрный, бурей измученный ствол!
Prince Vadim Vadimovich Yablonski and his first three wives (Iris Black, Annette Blagovo and Louise Adamson) seem to be the children of Count Starov, a retired diplomat whose name comes from staryi (old). Dr Starov is a character in VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). In his sonnet The Grave of Keats Oscar Wilde compares Keats to Saint Sebastian, an early Christian saint and martyr. "The youngest of the martyrs here is lain, / Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain" in Wilde's sonnet brings to mind the first (and the penultimate) line of Shade's poem and Shade's sensual love for the consonne d'appui (intrusive consonant):
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life. (ll. 967-970)
Basilevski is a satire on G. Ivanov, a poet who attacked VN in the Paris émigré review Chisla (“Numbers,” #1, 1930). In his memoirs Peterburgskie zimy (“The St. Petersburg Winters,” 1931) G. Ivanov describes his first visit to Blok in the fall of 1909. According to Ivanov, to his question “does a sonnet need a coda” Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is. Telling about an old Russian doctor who visited him in New York soon upon his arrival in America, Vadim Vadimovich mentions a coda (using this term in a “musical,” rather than poetical, sense):
The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing, in a charming New York apartment (it was leant to Annette and me by a generous relative of mine and faced the sunset flaming beyond Central Park). The neuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid black headache that no pill could pierce. Annette rang up James Lodge, and he, out of the misdirected kindness of his heart, had an old little physician of Russian extraction examine me. The poor fellow drove me even crazier than I was by not only insisting on discussing my symptoms in an execrable version of the language I was trying to shed, but on translating into it various irrelevant terms used by the Viennese Quack and his apostles (simbolizirovanie, mortidnik). Yet his visit, I must confess, strikes me in retrospect as a most artistic coda. (2.10)
Alexander Blok was a symbolist poet. In G. Ivanov’s poetry the fear of death (cf. mortidnik) is the main theme.
In the first quatrain of his sonnet with a coda Paris diurne ("Paris by Day," 1873) Tristan Corbière mentions l’arlequin:
Vois aux cieux le grand rond de cuivre rouge luire,
Immense casserole où le Bon Dieu fait cuire
La manne, l’arlequin, l'éternel plat du jour.
C’est trempé de sueur et c’est poivré d’amour.
G. Ivanov's rude article on Sirin was a retaliation for VN's review of Isolde (1929), a novel by Irina Odoevtsev (G. Ivanov's literary wife).
See also the updated version of my previous post, “Cypress & Bat in Pale Fire” (the insertion about D. G. Rossetti’s drawing “Alfred Tennyson Reading Maud”).