In VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947) Paduk (the dictator of Padukgrad) is compared to Roman emperors Titus and Nero:
Truganini, the last Tasmanian, died in 1877, but the last Kruganini could not remember how this was linked up with the fact that the edible Galilean fishes in the first century A.D. would be principally chromids and barbels although in Raphael’s representation of the miraculous draught we find among nondescript piscine forms of the young painter’s fancy two specimens which obviously belong to the skate family, never found in fresh water. Speaking of Roman venationes (shows with wild beasts) of the same epoch, we note that the stage, on which ridiculously picturesque rocks (the later ornaments of “romantic” landscapes) and an indifferent forest were represented, was made to rise out of the crypts below the urine-soaked arena with Orpheus on it among real lions and bears with gilded claws; but this Orpheus was acted by a criminal and the scene ended with a bear killing him, while Titus or Nero, or Paduk, looked on with that complete pleasure which “art” shot through with “human interest” is said to produce. (Chapter 12)
In his poem K portretu Delviga (“To the Portrait of Delvig,” 1819) Pushkin mentions Neron i Tit (Nero and Titus):
Се самый Дельвиг тот, что нам всегда твердил,
Что, коль судьбой ему даны б Нерон и Тит,
То не в Нерона меч, но в Тита сей вонзил —
Нерон же без него правдиву смерть узрит.
This is that very Delvig who always told us
that, if fate would give him Nero and Titus,
he would have thrust his sword not in Nero, but in Titus –
for Nero without him will see the rightful death.
At the end of his Poslanie Delvigu (“Epistle to Delvig,” 1827) Pushkin compares Baratynski, the author of Cherep (“The Skull,” 1824), to Hamlet:
Прими ж сей череп, Дельвиг, он
Принадлежит тебе по праву.
Обделай ты его, барон,
В благопристойную оправу.
Изделье гроба преврати
В увеселительную чашу,
Вином кипящим освяти
Да запивай уху да кашу.
Певцу Корсара подражай
И скандинавов рай воинский
В пирах домашних воскрешай,
Или как Гамлет-Баратынский
Над ним задумчиво мечтай:
О жизни мертвый проповедник,
Вином ли полный, иль пустой,
Для мудреца, как собеседник,
Он стоит головы живой.
In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Two: XXXVII: 6) Lenski exclaims “Poor Yorick!” at the grave of Dmitri Larin (Tatiana’s and Olga’s father):
Restored to his penates,
Vladimir Lenski visited
his neighbor's humble monument,
and to the ashes consecrated
a sigh, and long his heart was melancholy.
“Poor Yorick!”16 mournfully he uttered, “he
hath borne me in his arms.
How oft I played in childhood
with his Ochákov medal!
He destined Olga to wed me;
he used to say: ‘Shall I be there
to see the day?’ ” and full of sincere sadness,
Vladimir there and then set down for him
a gravestone madrigal.
In Bend Sinister Olga is the name of Krug’s late wife. The name Krug seems to hint at kogda by zhizn' domashnim krugom (if life by the domestic circle), a phrase used by Onegin as he speaks to Tatiana (Four: XIII: 1):
Когда бы жизнь домашним кругом
Я ограничить захотел;
Когда б мне быть отцом, супругом
Приятный жребий повелел;
Когда б семейственной картиной
Пленился я хоть миг единый, —
То верно б, кроме вас одной,
Невесты не искал иной.
Скажу без блесток мадригальных:
Нашед мой прежний идеал,
Я верно б вас одну избрал
В подруги дней моих печальных,
Всего прекрасного в залог,
И был бы счастлив… сколько мог!
“If I by the domestic circle
had wanted to bound life;
if to be father, husband,
a pleasant lot had ordered me;
if with the familistic picture
I were but for one moment captivated;
then, doubtlessly, save you alone
no other bride I'd seek.
I'll say without madrigal spangles:
my past ideal having found,
I'd doubtlessly have chosen you alone
for mate of my sad days, in gage
of all that's beautiful, and would have been
happy — in so far as I could!
Adam Krug has the same first name as Adam Smith, Onegin's favorite author:
Высокой страсти не имея
Для звуков жизни не щадить,
Не мог он ямба от хорея,
Как мы ни бились, отличить.
Бранил Гомера, Феокрита;
Зато читал Адама Смита
И был глубокий эконом,
То есть умел судить о том,
Как государство богатеет,
И чем живёт, и почему
Не нужно золота ему,
Когда простой продукт имеет.
Отец понять его не мог
И земли отдавал в залог.
Lacking the lofty passion not to spare
life for the sake of sounds,
an iamb from a trochee —
no matter how we strove — he could not tell apart.
Theocritus and Homer he disparaged,
but read, in compensation, Adam Smith,
and was a deep economist:
that is, he could assess the way
a state grows rich,
what it subsists upon, and why
it needs not gold
when it has got the simple product.
His father could not understand him,
and mortgaged his lands. (One: VII)
In his ‘Notes to Eugene Onegin’ (Note 16) Pushkin says:
«Бедный Иорик!» — восклицание Гамлета над черепом шута. (См. Шекспира и Стерна.)
Poor Yorick! — Hamlet's exclamation over the skull of the fool (see Shakespeare and Sterne).
In Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-61) the term bend-sinister is mentioned several times:
We'll go in the coach, said my father—Prithee, have the arms been altered, Obadiah?—It would have made my story much better to have begun with telling you, that at the time my mother's arms were added to the Shandy's, when the coach was re-painted upon my father's marriage, it had so fallen out that the coach-painter, whether by performing all his works with the left hand, like Turpilius the Roman, or Hans Holbein of Basil—or whether 'twas more from the blunder of his head than hand—or whether, lastly, it was from the sinister turn which every thing relating to our family was apt to take—it so fell out, however, to our reproach, that instead of the bend-dexter, which since Harry the Eighth's reign was honestly our due—a bend-sinister, by some of these fatalities, had been drawn quite across the field of the Shandy arms. 'Tis scarce credible that the mind of so wise a man as my father was, could be so much incommoded with so small a matter. The word coach—let it be whose it would—or coach-man, or coach-horse, or coach-hire, could never be named in the family, but he constantly complained of carrying this vile mark of illegitimacy upon the door of his own; he never once was able to step into the coach, or out of it, without turning round to take a view of the arms, and making a vow at the same time, that it was the last time he would ever set his foot in it again, till the bend-sinister was taken out—but like the affair of the hinge, it was one of the many things which the Destinies had set down in their books ever to be grumbled at (and in wiser families than ours)—but never to be mended.
—Has the bend-sinister been brush'd out, I say? said my father.—There has been nothing brush'd out, Sir, answered Obadiah, but the lining. We'll go o'horseback, said my father, turning to Yorick—Of all things in the world, except politicks, the clergy know the least of heraldry, said Yorick.—No matter for that, cried my father—I should be sorry to appear with a blot in my escutcheon before them.—Never mind the bend-sinister, said my uncle Toby, putting on his tye-wig.—No, indeed, said my father—you may go with my aunt Dinah to a visitation with a bend-sinister, if you think fit—My poor uncle Toby blush'd. My father was vexed at himself.—No—my dear brother Toby, said my father, changing his tone—but the damp of the coach-lining about my loins, may give me the sciatica again, as it did December, January, and February last winter—so if you please you shall ride my wife's pad—and as you are to preach, Yorick, you had better make the best of your way before—and leave me to take care of my brother Toby, and to follow at our own rates. (Chapter 2.LX.)
The characters in Bend Sinister include Krug’s friend Ember (Shakespeare’s translator). In Ember’s version Hamlet’s famous monologue begins as follows:
Ubit' il' ne ubit'? Vot est' oprosen.
Vto bude edler: v rasume tzerpieren
Ogneprashchi i strely zlovo roka – (Chapter 7)
A play on byt’ ili ne byt’ (to be or not to be), ubit’ il’ ne ubit’ means “to kill or not to kill.” In his essay on Garshin in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers” Yuli Ayhenvald says that Gamlet ubivayushchiy (Hamlet who kills) is a very sinister (zloveshchee) and tragic phenomenon of life:
Самый красный цветок - это цветок зла. Ничто не требует такой душевной силы, такого напряжения и действенности, как именно убийство. В нём - высшая потенция человеческой энергии, оно являет собою дело по преимуществу. Рождающая сила - в двух существах; убиваем же только мы сами, мы одни. И когда Гамлет перешёл от размышления к действию, когда он стал делать, он стал убивать. Гамлет убивающий - это очень зловещее и трагическое явление жизни.
A reviewer of Semiradsky’s painting Svetochi khristianstva. Fakely Nerona (“Leading Light of Christianity. Nero's Torches,” 1877), Garshin committed suicide by throwing himself over the banisters. Paduk brings to mind Pripadok (“A Nervous Breakdown,” 1888), Chekhov’s story dedicated to the memory of Garshin (who died in St. Petersburg). Krug’s strange native town (whose narrow lanes where the Roman once passed dream in the night of other things than do the evanescent creatures that tread its stones), Padukgrad seems to blend Rome with Leningrad (St. Petersburg’s name in 1924-91).
Onegin (who was born upon the Neva's banks, i. e. in St. Petersburg) kept in his memory the anecdotes of days gone by from Romulus (the founder of Rome) to our days:
Латынь из моды вышла ныне:
Так, если правду вам сказать,
Он знал довольно по-латыне,
Чтоб эпиграфы разбирать,
Потолковать об Ювенале,
В конце письма поставить vale,
Да помнил, хоть не без греха,
Из Энеиды два стиха.
Он рыться не имел охоты
В хронологической пыли
Бытописания земли;
Но дней минувших анекдоты,
От Ромула до наших дней,
Хранил он в памяти своей.
Latin has gone at present out of fashion;
still, to tell you the truth,
he had enough knowledge of Latin
to make out epigraphs,
expatiate on Juvenal,
put at the bottom of a letter vale,
and he remembered, though not without fault,
two lines from the Aeneid.
He had no inclination
to rummage in the chronological
dust of the earth's historiography,
but anecdotes of days gone by,
from Romulus to our days,
he did keep in his memory. (One: VI)
On the other hand, Paduk brings to mind Padu li ya, streloy pronzyonnyi (Whether I fall, struck by an arrow), a line in Lenski's last poem (EO, Six: XXI: 9-14):
Паду ли я, стрелой пронзенный,
Иль мимо пролетит она,
Всё благо: бдения и сна
Приходит час определенный;
Благословен и день забот,
Благословен и тьмы приход!
Whether I fall, or death wings by,
All is well: our moments fly,
Sleep and waking have their hour,
Blessed the day of toil and care,
Blessed the tomb’s darkness there.
Pushkin compares Lenski reading aloud his verses to drunken Delvig:
Домой приехав, пистолеты
Он осмотрел, потом вложил
Опять их в ящик и, раздетый,
При свечке, Шиллера открыл;
Но мысль одна его объемлет;
В нем сердце грустное не дремлет:
С неизъяснимою красой
Он видит Ольгу пред собой.
Владимир книгу закрывает,
Берет перо; его стихи,
Полны любовной чепухи,
Звучат и льются. Их читает
Он вслух, в лирическом жару,
Как Дельвиг пьяный на пиру.
On coming home his pistols he inspected,
then back into their case
he put them, and, undressed,
by candle opened Schiller;
but there's one thought infolding him;
the sad heart in him does not slumber:
Olga, in beauty
ineffable, he sees before him.
Vladimir shuts the book,
takes up his pen; his verses —
full of love's nonsense — sound
and flow. Aloud
he reads them in a lyric fever,
like drunken D[elvig] at a feast. (Six: XX)
See also the full version of my previous post, “Paduk & Skotoma in Bend Sinister.”