Vladimir Nabokov

Esmeralda and her Parandrus in LATH

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 10 July, 2020

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 (1947). Parandrus is an ox-sized animal of medieval bestiaries. Esmeralda must be the name of a Spanish nobleman’s little daughter who discovered the paintings in the cave of Altamira:

 

THINKING of that farcical interview, he wondered how long it would be till the next attempt. He still believed that so long as he kept lying low nothing harmful could happen. Oddly enough, at the end of the month his usual cheque arrived although for the time being the University had ceased to exist, at least on the outside. Behind the scenes there was an endless sequence of sessions, a turmoil of administrative activity, a regrouping of forces, but he declined either to attend these meetings or to receive the various delegations and special messengers that Azureus and Alexander kept sending to his house. He argued that, when the Council of Elders had exhausted its power of seduction, he would be left alone since the Government, while not daring to arrest him and being reluctant to grant him the luxury of exile, would still keep hoping with forlorn obstinacy that finally he might relent. The drab colour the future took matched well the grey world of his widowhood, and had there been no friends to worry about and no child to hold against his cheek and heart, he might have devoted the twilight to some quiet research: for example he had always wished to know more about the Aurignacian Age and those portraits of singular beings (perhaps Neanderthal half-men—direct ancestors of Paduk and his likes—used by Aurignacians as slaves) that a Spanish nobleman and his little daughter had discovered in the painted cave of Altamira. Or he might take up some dim problem of Victorian telepathy (the cases reported by clergymen, nervous ladies, retired colonels who had seen service in India) such as the remarkable dream a Mrs. Storie had of her brother’s death. And in our turn we shall follow the brother as he walks along the railway line on a very dark night: having gone sixteen miles, he felt a little tired (as who would not); he sat down to take off his boots and dozed off to the chirp of the crickets, and then a train lumbered by. Seventy-six sheep trucks (in a curious “count-sheep-sleep” parody) passed without touching him, but then some projection came in contact with the back of his head killing him instantly. And we might also probe the “illusions hypnagogiques” (only illusion?) of dear Miss Bidder who once had a nightmare from which a most distinct demon survived after she woke so that she sat up to inspect its hand which was clutching the bedrail but it faded into the ornaments over the mantelpiece. Silly, but I can’t help it, he thought as he got out of his armchair and crossed the room to rearrange the leering folds of his brown dressing gown which, as it sprawled across the divan, showed at one end a very distinct medieval face. (BS, Chapter 12)

 

The Altamira animals are also mentioned by Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962):

 

English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just complete Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proved with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?"--a beautiful and touching end. (note to Line 962)

 

The characters in Pale Fire include Gerald Emerald, a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus (Shade’s murderer) a lift to Kinbote’s house. In LATH Dolly Borg tells to Terry Todd (Dolly’s boyfriend who gives her his car for her trysts with Vadim but then informs Annette Blagovo, Vadim’s second wife, of her husband's infidelity):

 

"Oh, Terry: this is the writer, the man who wrote Emerald and the Pander." (3.2)

 

Terry Todd brings to mind “Todd Rodd, 999” (Pnin’s address in VN’s novel Pnin, 1957) and “the Toad” (Paduk’s nickname in Bend Sinister).

 

On the day of her death Iris Black (Vadim's first wife) dines with her husband and her brother, Ivor Black, at Paon d’Or (a restaurant in Paris that American tourists called "Pander" or "Pandora"):

 

The Paon d'Or no longer exists. Although not quite tops, it was a nice clean place, much patronized by American tourists, who called it "Pander" or "Pandora" and always ordered its "putty saw-lay," and that, I guess, is what we had. I remember more clearly a glazed case hanging on the gold-figured wall next to our table: it displayed four Morpho butterflies, two huge ones similar in harsh sheen but differently shaped, and  two smaller ones beneath them, the left of a  sweeter blue with  white stripes and the right gloaming like silvery satin. According to the headwaiter, they had  been caught by a convict in South America.

"And how's my friend Mata Hari?" inquired Ivor turning to us again, his spread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging toward the "bugs" under discussion.

We told him the poor ara sickened and had to be destroyed.  And what about his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was—

"In fact," Iris continued, touching my wrist, "we've decided to set off tomorrow for Cannice. Pity you can't join us, Ives, but perhaps you might come later."

I did not want to object, though I had never heard of that decision.

Ivor said that if ever we wanted to sell Villa Iris he knew someone who would snap it up any time. Iris, he said, knew him too: David Geller, the actor. "He was (turning to me) her  first beau before you blundered in. She must still have somewhere that photo of him and me in Troilus and Cressida ten years ago. He's Helen of Troy in it. I'm Cressida."

"Lies, lies," murmured Iris. (1.13)

 

The characters in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (and in Homer’s Iliad) include Pandarus (a Trojan aristocrat).

 

See also the updated versions of my two latest posts, “domusta barbarn kapusta in Bend Sinister” and “painted cave of Altamira in Bend Sinister; Altamira animals in Pale Fire.”