In VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947) Dr. Alexander quotes the saying domusta barbarn kapusta (the ugliest wives are the truest):
“Eez eet zee verity,” said Beuret, suddenly shifting to English, which he knew Krug understood, and speaking it like a Frenchman in an English book, “eez eet zee verity zat, as I have been informed by zee reliably sources, zee disposed chef of the state has been captured together with a couple of other blokes (when the author gets bored by the process—or forgets) somewhere in the hills—and shot? But no, I ziss cannot credit—eet eez too orrible” (when the author remembers again).
“Probably a slight exaggeration,” observed Dr. Alexander in the vernacular. “Various kinds of ugly rumours are apt to spread nowadays, and although of course domusta barbarn kapusta [the ugliest wives are the truest], still I do not think that in this particular case,” he trailed off with a pleasant laugh and there was another silence.
Barbarn seems to be plural of barbara (“wife, woman” in the language spoken in Padukgrad). In the first line of his poem Vozrozhdenie (“Rebirth,” 1819) Pushkin mentions khudozhnik-varvar (the artist-barbarian) who with his somnolent brush senselessly blackens the painting of a genius:
Художник-варвар кистью сонной
Картину гения чернит
И свой рисунок беззаконный
Над ней бессмысленно чертит.
Но краски чуждые, с летами,
Спадают ветхой чешуей;
Созданье гения пред нами
Выходит с прежней красотой.
Так исчезают заблужденья
С измученной души моей,
И возникают в ней виденья
Первоначальных, чистых дней.
An artist-barbarian with his somnolent brush
Blackens the painting of a genius
And senselessly he covers it with
His own illegitimate drawing.
But with the passing years, the alien colours
Fall off like threadbare scales;
The creation of the genius emerges
before us in its former beauty
Thus vanish the illusions
From my tormented soul
And in it appear visions
Of original and innocent times.
(Tr. Tom Kennedy)
In the last line of his sonnet Madona (1830) Pushkin calls his future wife Natalia Goncharov chisteyshey prelesti chisteyshiy obrazets (the purest example of the purest beauty):
Не множеством картин старинных мастеров
Украсить я всегда желал свою обитель,
Чтоб суеверно им дивился посетитель,
Внимая важному сужденью знатоков.
В простом углу моем, средь медленных трудов,
Одной картины я желал быть вечно зритель,
Одной: чтоб на меня с холста, как с облаков,
Пречистая и наш божественный спаситель —
Она с величием, он с разумом в очах —
Взирали, кроткие, во славе и в лучах,
Одни, без ангелов, под пальмою Сиона.
Исполнились мои желания. Творец
Тебя мне ниспослал, тебя, моя Мадона,
Чистейшей прелести чистейший образец.
I’ve never wished to decorate my mean abode
With rows and rows of fine and celebrated pictures,
To draw from guests some fawning, superstitious rictures,
Attending as the experts’ clever views have flowed.
No, in the simple corner where my labour’s done,
I’ve only ever wanted but one painted witness,
And only one: as from the heavens, so from canvas,
The Virgin pure, presenting her beloved Son –
Majestic, she, and he with wisdom in his eyes –
There calmly watch in glory, under radiant skies,
Alone in Zion, with no angels in attendance.
They are enough for me. Madonna, you have been
Revealed to me by God Almighty’s sweet transcendence,
The purest model, of the purest joy the queen.
(tr. R. Moreton)
Domusta (“the ugliest” in the language spoken in Padukgrad) seems to hint at domashnim (Instr. of domashniy, “domestic”), a word used by Onegin as he speaks to Tatiana in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (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!
The name Krug (of the main character in Bend Sinister) means in Russian "circle" and brings to mind krugom (Instr. of krug), the next word in Onegin's speech. Adam Krug is a celebrated philosopher. In Chapter One (XXIII: 14) of EO Pushkin calls Onegin (who read Adam Smith) "a philosopher at eighteen years of age:"
Изображу ль в картине верной
Уединенный кабинет,
Где мод воспитанник примерный
Одет, раздет и вновь одет?
Все, чем для прихоти обильной
Торгует Лондон щепетильный
И по Балтическим волнам
За лес и сало возит нам,
Все, что в Париже вкус голодный,
Полезный промысел избрав,
Изобретает для забав,
Для роскоши, для неги модной, —
Все украшало кабинет
Философа в осьмнадцать лет.
Shall I present a faithful picture
of the secluded cabinet,
where fashions' model pupil
is dressed, undressed, and dressed again?
Whatever, for the lavish whim,
London the trinkleter deals in
and o'er the Baltic waves to us
ships in exchange for timber and for tallow;
whatever hungry taste in Paris,
choosing a useful trade,
invents for pastimes,
for luxury, for modish mollitude;
all this adorned the cabinet
of a philosopher at eighteen years of age.
In Chapter Eight (XLVII: 14) of EO Tatiana tells Onegin that she will be fauthful to her husband all her life:
«А счастье было так возможно,
Так близко!.. Но судьба моя
Уж решена. Неосторожно,
Быть может, поступила я:
Меня с слезами заклинаний
Молила мать; для бедной Тани
Все были жребии равны…
Я вышла замуж. Вы должны,
Я вас прошу, меня оставить;
Я знаю: в вашем сердце есть
И гордость, и прямая честь.
Я вас люблю (к чему лукавить?),
Но я другому отдана;
Я буду век ему верна».
“Yet happiness had been so possible,
so near!... But my fate is already
settled. Imprudently,
perhaps, I acted.
My mother with tears of conjurement
beseeched me. For poor Tanya
all lots were equal.
I married. You must,
I pray you, leave me;
I know: in your heart are
both pride and genuine honor.
I love you (why dissimulate?);
but to another I belong:
to him I shall be faithful all my life.”
The dictator of Padukgrad, Paduk brings to mind Padu li ya, streloy pronzyonnyi (Whether I fall, struck by an arrow), a line in Lenski's last poem (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.
In the language spoken in Padukgrad kapusta means “the truest.” Kapusta is Russian for “cabbage.” Zaretski (Lenski’s second in his duel with Onegin) kapustu sadit, kak Goratsiy (plants cabbages like Horace):
Sed alia tempora! Удалость
(Как сон любви, другая шалость)
Проходит с юностью живой.
Как я сказал, Зарецкий мой,
Под сень черемух и акаций
От бурь укрывшись наконец,
Живет, как истинный мудрец,
Капусту садит, как Гораций,
Разводит уток и гусей
И учит азбуке детей.
Sed alia tempora! Daredevilry
(like love's dream, yet another caper)
passes with lively youth.
As I've said, my Zarétski,
beneath the racemosas and the pea trees
having at last found shelter
from tempests, lives like a true sage,
plants cabbages like Horace,
breeds ducks and geese,
and teaches [his] children the A B C.
(Six: VII: 5-14)
In his EO Commentary VN points out that in the description of Onegin’s duel with Lenski Pushkin predicted his own death.
A namesake of Tatiana's younger sister (who is untrue to her woe and marries an uhlan after Lenski's death), Krug’s wife Olga is a regular radabarbara (full-blown handsome woman):
“Landscapes as yet unpolluted with conventional poetry, and life, that self-conscious stranger, being slapped on the back and told to relax.” He had written this upon his return, and Olga, with devilish relish, had pasted into a shagreen album indigenous allusions to the most original thinker of our times. Ember evoked her ample being, her thirty-seven resplendent years, the bright hair, the full lips, the heavy chin which went so well with the cooing undertones of her voice—something ventriloquial about her, a continuous soliloquy following in willowed shade the meanderings of her actual speech. He saw Krug, the ponderous dandruffed maestro, sitting there with a satisfied and sly smile on his big swarthy face (recalling that of Beethoven in the general correlation of its rugged features)—yes, lolling in that old rose armchair while Olga buoyantly took charge of the conversation—and how vividly one remembered the way she had of letting a sentence bounce and ripple over the three quick bites she took at the raisin cake she held, and the brisk triple splash of her plump hand over the sudden stretch of her lap as she brushed the crumbs away and went on with her story. Almost extravagantly healthy, a regular radabarbára [full-blown handsome woman]: those wide radiant eyes, that flaming cheek to which she would press the cool back of her hand, that shining white forehead with a whiter scar—the consequence of an automobile accident in the gloomy Lagodan mountains of legendary fame. Ember could not see how one might dispose of the recollection of such a life, the insurrection of such a widowhood. With her small feet and large hips, with her girlish speech and her matronly bosom, with her bright wits and the torrents of tears she shed that night, while dripping with blood herself, over the crippled crying doe that had rushed into the blinding lights of the car, with all this and with many other things that Ember knew he could not know, she would lie now, a pinch of blue dust in her cold columbarium. (Chapter 3)
In the language spoken in Padukgrad rada seems to mean "beautiful." In Russian rad means "glad." Pushkin's poem Priznanie ("Confession," 1828) ends in the line Ya sam obmanyvat'sya rad (I'm glad myself to be deceived):
Я вас люблю, - хоть я бешусь,
Хоть это труд и стыд напрасный,
И в этой глупости несчастной
У ваших ног я признаюсь!
Мне не к лицу и не по летам...
Пора, пора мне быть умней!
Но узнаю по всем приметам
Болезнь любви в душе моей:
Без вас мне скучно, - я зеваю;
При вас мне грустно, - я терплю;
И, мочи нет, сказать желаю,
Мой ангел, как я вас люблю!
Когда я слышу из гостиной
Ваш легкий шаг, иль платья шум,
Иль голос девственный, невинный,
Я вдруг теряю весь свой ум.
Вы улыбнетесь, - мне отрада;
Вы отвернетесь, - мне тоска;
За день мучения - награда
Мне ваша бледная рука.
Когда за пяльцами прилежно
Сидите вы, склонясь небрежно,
Глаза и кудри опустя, -
Я в умиленье, молча, нежно
Любуюсь вами, как дитя!..
Сказать ли вам мое несчастье,
Мою ревнивую печаль,
Когда гулять, порой, в ненастье,
Вы собираетеся вдаль?
И ваши слезы в одиночку,
И речи в уголку вдвоем,
И путешествия в Опочку,
И фортепьяно вечерком?..
Алина! сжальтесь надо мною.
Не смею требовать любви.
Быть может, за грехи мои,
Мой ангел, я любви не стою!
Но притворитесь! Этот взгляд
Все может выразить так чудно!
Ах, обмануть меня не трудно!..
Я сам обманываться рад!
I love you, though I rage at it,
Though it is shame and toil misguided,
And to my folly self-derided
Here at your feet I will admit!
It ill befits my years, my station,
Good sense has long been overdue!
And yet, by every indication,
Love's plague has stricken me anew:
You're out of sight, I fall to yawning;
You're here, I suffer and feel blue,
And barely keep myself from owning,
Dear elf, how much I care for you!
Why, when your guileless girlish chatter
Drifts from next door, your airy tread,
Your rustling dress, my senses scatter
And I completely lose my head.
You smile, I flush with exaltation;
You turn away, I'm plunged in gloom;
Your pallid hand is compensation
For a whole day of fancied doom.
When to the frame with artless motion
You bend to cross-stitch, all devotion,
Your eyes and ringlets down-beguiled,
My heart goes out in mute emotion
Rejoicing in you like a child!
Dare I confess to you my sighing,
How jealously I chafe and balk
When you set forth, at times defying
Bad weather, on a lengthy walk?
And then your solitary crying,
Those twosome whispers out of sight,
Your carriage to Opochka plying,
And the piano late at night...
Aline! I ask but to be pitied,
I do not dare to plead for love;
Love, for the sins I have committed,
I am perhaps not worthy of.
But make believe! Your gaze, dear elf,
Is fit to conjure with, believe me!
Ah, it is easy to deceive me...
I long to be deceived myself!
(tr. B. Deutsch)
In Chapter One (LVI: 3-4) of EO Pushkin says that he is vsegda rad (always glad) to mark the difference between Onegin and himself:
Цветы, любовь, деревня, праздность,
Поля! я предан вам душой.
Всегда я рад заметить разность
Между Онегиным и мной,
Чтобы насмешливый читатель
Или какой-нибудь издатель
Замысловатой клеветы,
Сличая здесь мои черты,
Не повторял потом безбожно,
Что намарал я свой портрет,
Как Байрон, гордости поэт, —
Как будто нам уж невозможно
Писать поэмы о другом,
Как только о себе самом?
Flowers, love, the country, idleness,
ye fields! my soul is vowed to you.
I'm always glad to mark the difference
between Onegin and myself,
lest a sarcastic reader
or else some publisher
of complicated calumny,
collating here my traits,
repeat thereafter shamelessly
that I have scrawled my portrait
like Byron, the poet of pride
— as if we were no longer able
to write long poems
on any other subject than ourselves!
Krug is a non-smoker:
“I cannot drive much faster,” said Dr. Alexander steadily looking ahead, “because the wrestle-cap of the lower slammer is what they call muckling. If you will put your hand into my right-hand pocket, Professor, you will find some cigarettes.”
“I am a non-smoker,” said Krug. “And anyway I do not believe there are any there.”
They drove on for some time in silence.
“Why?” asked Dr. Alexander, gently treading, gently releasing.
“A passing thought,” said Krug. (Chapter 3)
At the beginning of his Introduction to BS (1963) VN says that in the winter and spring of 1945–1946, when he worked on the novel, his dayly consumption of cigarettes had reached the four-package mark:
BEND SINISTER was the first novel I wrote in America, and that was half a dozen years after she and I had adopted each other. The greater part of the book was composed in the winter and spring of 1945–1946, at a particularly cloudless and vigorous period of life. My health was excellent. My daily consumption of cigarettes had reached the four-package mark. I slept at least four or five hours, the rest of the night walking pencil in hand about the dingy little flat in Craigie Circle, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I lodged under an old lady with feet of stone and above a young woman with hypersensitive hearing. Every day including Sundays, I would spend up to 10 hours studying the structure of certain butterflies in the laboratorial paradise of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology; but three times a week I stayed there only till noon and then tore myself away from microscope and camera lucida to travel to Wellesley (by tram and bus, or subway and railway), where I taught college girls Russian grammar and literature.
Perhaps, VN is closer to Krug's friend Ember (the translator of Shakespeare). Ember rhymes with "remember." Remember Thee! (1812) is a poem by Byron, gordosti poet (the poet of pride):
Remember thee! Remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life's burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!
Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!
In a conversation with Krug Ember compares Ophelia (a character in Shakespeare's Hamlet) to a mermaid of Lethe:
Krug’s anecdote has the desired effect. Ember stops sniffling. He listens. Presently he smiles. Finally, he enters into the spirit of the game. Yes, she was found by a shepherd. In fact her name can be derived from that of an amorous shepherd in Arcadia. Or quite possibly it is an anagram of Alpheios, with the “S” lost in the damp grass—Alpheus the rivergod, who pursued a long-legged nymph until Artemis changed her into a stream, which of course suited his liquidity to a tee (cp. Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition). Or again we can base it on the Greek rendering of an old Danske serpent name. Lithe, lithping, thin-lipped Ophelia, Amleth’s wet dream, a mermaid of Lethe, a rare water serpent, Russalka letheana of science (to match your long purples). While he was busy with German servant maids, she at home, in an embayed window, with the icy spring wind rattling the pane, innocently flirted with Osric. Her skin was so tender that if you merely looked at it a rosy spot would appear. The uncommon cold of a Botticellian angel tinged her nostrils with pink and suffused her upperlip—you know, when the rims of the lips merge with the skin. She proved to be a kitchen wench too—but in the kitchen of a vegetarian. Ophelia, serviceableness. Died in passive service. The fair Ophelia. A first Folio with some neat corrections and a few bad mistakes. “My dear fellow” (we might have Hamlet say to Horatio), “she was as hard as nails in spite of her physical softness. And slippery: a posy made of eels. She was one of those thin-blooded pale-eyed lovely slim slimy ophidian maidens that are both hotly hysterical and hopelessly frigid. (Chapter 7)
In an apologetic note to Lucette Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) calls his and Ada's half-sister "our Esmeralda and mermaid" and mentions embers:
Poor L.
We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. (2.8)
In VN's novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) other books by the narrator include Esmeralda and her Parandrus (1941), Vadim's novel that seems to correspond to VN's Bend Sinister. According to Vadim, the mad scholar in Esmeralda and Her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her flowers:
The mad scholar in Esmeralda and Her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her flowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks that tornadoes and floods are really sensational only in North America. On May 17, 1953, several papers printed a photograph of a family, complete with birdcage, phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it out on the roof of their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the picture of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man, a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver's seat, stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the Weather Bureau was accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteen schoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animals donated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor's widow, to the Rosedale Museum, were safe in the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twister struck. But the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drowned bodies of its two occupants were never retrieved. (4.2)