In VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947) mouches volantes (“flying flies,” entoptic phenomena) are mentioned:
On the other hand, if (as some of the wiser neo-mathematicians thought) the physical world could be said to consist of measure groups (tangles of stresses, sunset swarms of electric midgets) moving like mouches volantes on a shadowy background that lay outside the scope of physics, then, surely, the meek restriction of one's interest to measuring the measurable smacked of the most humiliating futility. Take yourself away, you, with your ruler and scales! For without your rules, in an Unscheduled event other than the paper chase of science, barefooted Matter does overtake Light. (Chapter 14)
In a letter of Apr. 28, 1896, to Elena Shavrov-Yust Chekhov compares the minor characters in Shavrov’s story Musenka Messer to mouches volantes that prevent one from seeing things clearly:
Никша, Тополев, Кошеварова и проч. и проч. — ведь всё это mouches volantes, мешающие ясно видеть. На чердак их!! Я отправил бы туда даже барышню Горленко, которая иначе не представляется мне, как с пуговкой вместо носа. Заняться одной семьей Мессеров — разве это не благодарная, не приятная задача? А Мусенька, если допустить, что на Кавказе она не была жертвой случайности, а увлеклась серьезно, и если не бросать ее к концу рассказа — разве это не интересное лицо? Ох, не загромождайте! Говорил Вам — не загромождайте Ваших рассказов!
In a letter of Feb. 25, 1895, to Suvorin Chekhov mentions mertsayshchaya skotoma (scintillating scotoma, a common visual aura that was first described by 19th-century physician Hubert Airy):
У меня стали часто повторяться головные боли с мерцанием в глазах. Болезнь эта называется так: мерцающая скотома. Не скотина, а скотома. И теперь вот, то лежу, то брожу и не знаю, что делать со своей особой. Лечиться же нечем. По-прежнему всюду преследует меня звон и по-прежнему мне никто никогда не дарит ни подушек, ни брелок, ни галстуков. Вероятно, и не женат я до сих пор только по той причине, что жены имеют привычку дарить мужьям туфли. Но жениться я не прочь, хотя бы на рябой вдове. Становится скучно.
The Party of the Average Man instituted by Paduk (the dictator of Padukgrad) was based on a book by Skotoma:
When young Paduk instituted the Party of the Average Man as based on Skotoma’s book, the metamorphosis of Ekwilism had only just started and the frustrated boys who conducted those dismal meetings in a malodorous classroom were still groping for the means to make the contents of the human vessel conform to an average scale. That year a corrupt politician had been assassinated by a college student called Emrald (not Amrald, as his name is usually misspelled abroad), who at the trial came out quite irrelevantly with a poem of his own composition, a piece of jagged neurotic rhetorism extolling Skotoma because he
… taught us to worship the Common Man,
and showed us that no tree
can exist without a forest,
no musician without an orchestra,
no wave without an ocean,
and no life without death.
Poor Skotoma, of course, had done nothing of the kind, but this poem was now sung to the tune of “Ustra mara, donjet domra” (a popular ditty lauding the intoxicating properties of gooseberry wine) by Paduk and his friends and later became an Ekwilist classic. In those days a blatantly bourgeois paper happened to be publishing a cartoon sequence depicting the home life of Mr. and Mrs. Etermon (Everyman). With conventional humour and sympathy bordering upon the obscene, Mr. Etermon and the little woman were followed from parlour to kitchen and from garden to garret through all the mentionable stages of their daily existence, which, despite the presence of cosy armchairs and all sorts of electric thingumbobs and one thing-in-itself (a car), did not differ essentially from the life of a Neanderthal couple. Mr. Etermon taking a z-nap on the divan or stealing into the kitchen to sniff with erotic avidity the sizzling stew, represented quite unconsciously a living refutation of individual immortality, since his whole habitus was a dead-end with nothing in it capable or worthy of transcending the mortal condition. Neither, however, could one imagine Etermon actually dying, not only because the rules of gentle humour forbade his being shown on his deathbed, but also because not a single detail of the setting (not even his playing poker with life-insurance salesmen) suggested the fact of absolutely inevitable death; so that in one sense Etermon, while personifying a refutation of immortality, was immortal himself, and in another sense he could not hope to enjoy any kind of afterlife simply because he was denied the elementary comfort of a death chamber in his otherwise well planned home. Within the limits of this airtight existence, the young couple were as happy as any young couple ought to be: a visit to the movies, a raise in one’s salary, a yum-yum something for dinner—life was positively crammed with these and similar delights, whereas the worst that might befall one was hitting a traditional thumb with a traditional hammer or mistaking the date of the boss’s birthday. Poster pictures of Etermon showed him smoking the brand that millions smoke, and millions could not be wrong, and every Etermon was supposed to imagine every other Etermon, up to the President of the State, who had just replaced dull, stolid Theodore the Last, returning at the close of the office day to the (rich) culinary and (meagre) connubial felicities of the Etermon home. Skotoma, quite apart from the senile divagations of his Ekwilism (and even they implied some kind of drastic change, some kind of dissatisfaction with given conditions), had viewed what he called “the petty bourgeois” with the wrath of orthodox anarchism and would have been appalled, just as Emrald the terrorist would have been, to know that a group of youths was worshiping Ekwilism in the guise of a cartoon-engendered Mr. Etermon. Skotoma, however, had been the victim of a common delusion: his “petty bourgeois” existed only as a printed label on an empty filing box (the iconoclast, like most of his kind, relied entirely upon generalizations and was quite incapable of noting, say, the wallpaper in a chance room or talking intelligently to a child). Actually, with a little perspicacity, one might learn many curious things about Etermons, things that made them so different from one another that Etermon, except as a cartoonist’s transient character, could not be said to exist. All of a sudden transfigured, his eyes narrowly glowing, Mr. Etermon (whom we have just seen mildly pottering about the house) locks himself up in the bathroom with his prize—a prize we prefer not to name; another Etermon, straight from his shabby office, slips into the silence of a great library to gloat over certain old maps of which he will not speak at home; a third Etermon with a fourth Etermon’s wife anxiously discusses the future of a child she has managed to bear him in secret during the time her husband (now back in his armchair at home) was fighting in a remote jungle land where, in his turn, he has seen moths the size of a spread fan, and trees at night pulsating rhythmically with countless fireflies. No, the average vessels are not as simple as they appear: it is a conjuror’s set and nobody, not even the enchanter himself, really knows what and how much they hold. (Chapter 5)
The intoxicating properties of gooseberry wine bring to mind Chekhov’s story Kryzhovnik (“The Gooseberries,” 1898). In a letter of Nov. 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov compares his story “Ward Six” (1892) to a lemonade and says that the works of modern artists lack the alcohol that would intoxicate the reader/viewer:
Вас нетрудно понять, и Вы напрасно браните себя за то, что неясно выражаетесь. Вы горький пьяница, а я угостил Вас сладким лимонадом, и Вы, отдавая должное лимонаду, справедливо замечаете, что в нём нет спирта. В наших произведениях нет именно алкоголя, который бы пьянил и порабощал, и это Вы хорошо даете понять. Отчего нет? Оставляя в стороне "Палату № 6" и меня самого, будем говорить вообще, ибо это интересней. Будем говорить об общих причинах, коли Вам не скучно, и давайте захватим целую эпоху. Скажите по совести, кто из моих сверстников, т. е. людей в возрасте 30 — 45 лет дал миру хотя одну каплю алкоголя? Разве Короленко, Надсон и все нынешние драматурги не лимонад? Разве картины Репина или Шишкина кружили Вам голову? Мило, талантливо, Вы восхищаетесь и в то же время никак не можете забыть, что Вам хочется курить. Наука и техника переживают теперь великое время, для нашего же брата это время рыхлое, кислое, скучное, сами мы кислы и скучны, умеем рождать только гуттаперчевых мальчиков, и не видит этого только Стасов, которому природа дала редкую способность пьянеть даже от помоев. Причины тут не в глупости нашей, не в бездарности и не в наглости, как думает Буренин, а в болезни, которая для художника хуже сифилиса и полового истощения. У нас нет "чего-то", это справедливо, и это значит, что поднимите подол нашей музе, и Вы увидите там плоское место. Вспомните, что писатели, которых мы называем вечными или просто хорошими и которые пьянят нас, имеют один общий и весьма важный признак: они куда-то идут и Вас зовут туда же, и Вы чувствуете не умом, а всем своим существом, что у них есть какая-то цель, как у тени отца Гамлета, которая недаром приходила и тревожила воображение. У одних, смотря по калибру, цели ближайшие - крепостное право, освобождение родины, политика, красота или просто водка, как у Дениса Давыдова, у других цели отдаленные - бог, загробная жизнь, счастье человечества и т. п. Лучшие из них реальны и пишут жизнь такою, какая она есть, но оттого, что каждая строчка пропитана, как соком, сознанием цели, Вы, кроме жизни, какая есть, чувствуете еще ту жизнь, какая должна быть, и это пленяет Вас.
It is easy to understand you, and there is no need for you to abuse yourself for obscurity of expression. You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade, and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is lacking in our productions — the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state that very well. Why not? Putting aside “Ward No. 6” and myself, let us discuss the matter in general, for that is more interesting. Let ms discuss the general causes, if that won’t bore you, and let us include the whole age. Tell me honestly, who of my contemporaries — that is, men between thirty and forty-five — have given the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Repin’s or Shishkin’s pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but at the same time you can’t forget that you want to smoke. Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time. We are stale and dull ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys, and the only person who does not see that is Stasov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack “something,” that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects — the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects — God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.
Etermon and Paduk’s Party of the Average Man remind one of anthropos (“man” in Greek), Belikov’s favorite word in Chekhov’s story Chelovek v futlyare (“The Man in a Case,” 1898). In Chekhov’s story Kovalenko nicknamed Belikov (the man in a case) glitay abozh pauk:
Он даже название дал Беликову «глитай абож паук». И, понятно, мы избегали говорить с ним о том, что сестра его Варенька собирается за «абож паука». И когда однажды директорша намекнула ему, что хорошо бы пристроить его сестру за такого солидного, всеми уважаемого человека, как Беликов, то он нахмурился и проворчал:
— Не мое это дело. Пускай она выходит хоть за гадюку, а я не люблю в чужие дела мешаться.
"He even gave Belikov a nickname, 'The Spider.' And it will readily be understood that we avoided talking to him of his sister's being about to marry 'The Spider.'
"And on one occasion, when the headmaster's wife hinted to him what a good thing it would be to secure his sister's future with such a reliable, universally respected man as Belikov, he frowned and muttered:
" 'It's not my business; let her marry a reptile if she likes. I don't like meddling in other people's affairs.'
In a letter of Feb. 25, 1899, to Olga Vasiliev Chekhov explains that Glitay abozh pauk is the title of an Ukrainian play and means “Spider, or Spider” (glitay means in Ukrainian what pauk means in Russian: “spider”):
Многоуважаемая Ольга Родионовна, «Глитай, абож паук» — это название одной малороссийской пьесы. Глитай значит паук, а вся фраза значит «паук, или паук», т. е. объясняется, что значит глитай. Это непереводимо на иностранный язык.
Abozh (abo zh, “anyway”) is almost zhaba (toad) and zhopa (ass) in reverse. Paduk (who was nicknamed ‘the Toad' by Krug) does not resemble a toad, but looks as if he had undergone one of those facial operations when the skin is borrowed from some other part of the body:
It is not known how the nickname “toad” originated, for there was nothing in his face suggestive of that animal. It was an odd face with all its features in their proper position but somehow diffuse and abnormal as if the little fellow had undergone one of those facial operations when the skin is borrowed from some other part of the body. The impression was due perhaps to the motionless cast of his features: he never laughed and when he happened to sneeze he had a way of doing it with a minimum of contraction and no sound at all. His small dead-white nose and neat blue galatea made him resemble en laid the wax schoolboys in the shop windows of tailors, but his hips were much plumper than those of mannikins, and he walked with a slight waddle and wore sandals which used to provoke a good deal of caustic comment. Once, when he was being badly mauled it was discovered that he had right against the skin a green undershirt, green as a billiard cloth and apparently made of the same texture. His hands were permanently clammy. He spoke in a curiously smooth nasal voice with a strong north-western accent and had an irritating trick of calling his classmates by anagrams of their names—Adam Krug for instance was Gumakrad or Dramaguk; this he did not from any sense of humour, which he totally lacked, but because, as he carefully explained to new boys, one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed. (Chapter 5)