In VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Vadim Vadimovich mentions Professor Moody and the "numerical nimbus" syndrome:
A familiar symptom of my complaint, not its gravest one but the toughest to get rid of after every relapse, belongs to what Moody, the London specialist, was the first to term the "numerical nimbus" syndrome. His account of my case has been recently reprinted in his collected works. It teems with ludicrous inaccuracies. That "nimbus" means nothing. "Mr. N., a Russian nobleman" did not display any "signs of degeneracy." He was not "32" but 22 when he consulted that fatuous celebrity. Worst of all, Moody lumps me with a Mr. V. S. who is less of a postscriptum to the abridged description of my "nimbus" than an intruder whose sensations are mixed with mine throughout that learned paper. True, the symptom in question is not easy to describe, but I think I can do better than either Professor Moody or my vulgar and voluble fellow sufferer. (1.4)
Nimbus: A Magazine of Literature, the Arts, and New Ideas began publication in December 1951 as a quarterly magazine of new writing. Tristram Hull, son of R. F. C. Hull, poet and translator of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, acted as editor for the magazine's four volumes of thirteen issues.
On the other hand, in his poem On spal, i Ofeliya snilas' emu ("He slept and dreamt of Ophelia") G. Ivanov (the author of a rude article on Sirin in the Paris émigré review "Numbers") compares the glowworms above Ophelia to nimb (a nimbus):
Он спал, и Офелия снилась ему
В болотных огнях, в подвенечном дыму.
Она музыкальной спиралью плыла,
Как сон, отражали её зеркала.
Как нимб, окружали её светляки,
Как лес, вырастали за ней васильки...
...Как просто страдать. Можно душу отдать
И всё-таки сна не уметь передать.
И зная, что гибель стоит за плечом,
Грустить ни о ком, мечтать ни о чём...
The poem's last line, Grustit' ni o kom, mechtat' ni o chyom (To be sad for nobody, to dream about nothing), brings to mind Neochomsk in Vadim's novel Ardis:
"A knowledge of Russian," writes George Oakwood in his astute essay on my Ardis, 1970, "will help you to relish much of the wordplay in the most English of the author's English novels; consider for instance this: 'The champ and the chimp came all the way from Omsk to Neochomsk.' What a delightful link between a real round place and 'ni-o-chyom,' the About-Nothing land of modern philosophic linguistics!" (2.10)
At the beginning of LATH Vadim Vadimovich mentions the Glowworm Group directed by Ivor Black, a fine amateur actor:
I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy conspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim of the plot.
Some time during the Easter Term of my last Cambridge year (1922) I happened to be consulted, "as a Russian," on certain niceties of make-up in an English version of Gogol's Inspector which the Glowworm Group, directed by Ivor Black, a fine amateur actor, intended to stage. He and I had the same tutor at Trinity, and he drove me to distraction with his tedious miming of the old man's mincing ways--a performance he kept up throughout most of our lunch at the Pitt. The brief business part turned out to be even less pleasant. Ivor Black wanted Gogol's Town Mayor to wear a dressing gown because "wasn't it merely the old rascal's nightmare and didn't Revizor, its Russian title, actually come from the French for ‘dream,' rêve?" I said I thought it a ghastly idea. (1.1)
Before vanishing, the Ghost (a character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet) mentions the glow-worm that shows the morning to be near and begins to pale his uneffectual fire:
If thou hast nature in thee bear it not,
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damnéd incest...
But howsomever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once,
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me. (Act One, scene 5)
In his story Usta k ustam (“Lips to Lips,” 1931) VN makes fun of the editors of the Chisla (“Numbers”) magazine. The story's main character, Ilya Borisovich wants to publish his novel under the penname I. Annenski. Svetlyi nimb ("The Light Nimbus") is a sonnet by Annenski included in Kiparisovyi larets ("The Cypress Box," 1910):
Зыбким прахом закатных полос
Были свечи давно облиты,
А куренье, виясь, все лилось,
Все, бледнея, сжимались цветы.
И так были безумны мечты
В чадном море молений и слез,
На развившемся нимбе волос
И в дыму ее черной фаты,
Что в ответ замерцал огонек
В аметистах тяжелых серег.
Синий сон благовонных кадил
Разошелся тогда ж без следа…
Отчего ж я фату навсегда,
Светлый нимб навсегда полюбил?
According to Vadim, Professor Junker’s wife asked him if he liked boys or girls:
The appointment was with Professor Junker, a double personage, consisting of husband and wife. They had been practicing as a team for thirty years now, and every Sunday, in a secluded, though consequently rather dirty, corner of the beach, the two analyzed each other. They were supposed by their patients to be particularly alert on Mondays, but I was not, having got frightfully tight in one or two pubs before reaching the mean quarter where the Junkers and other doctors lived, as I seemed to have gathered. The front entrance was all right being among the flowers and fruit of a market place, but wait till you see the back. I was received by the female partner, a squat old thing wearing trousers, which was delightfully daring in 1922. That theme was continued immediately outside the casement of the WC (where I had to fill an absurd vial large enough for a doctor's purpose but not for mine) by the performance that a breeze was giving above a street sufficiently narrow for three pairs of long drawers to cross over on a string in as many strides or leaps. I commented on this and on a stained-glass window in the consulting room featuring a mauve lady exactly similar to the one on the stairs of Villa Iris. Mrs. Junker asked me if I liked boys or girls, and I looked around saying guardedly that I did not know what she had to offer. She did not laugh. The consultation was not a success. Before diagnosing neuralgia of the jaw, she wanted me to see a dentist when sober. It was right across, she said. I know she rang him up to arrange my visit but do not remember if I went there the same afternoon or the next. His name was Molnar with that n like a grain in a cavity; I used him some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea. (1.4)
In his Foreword to Shade’s poem Kinbote (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) mentions “a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy:”
A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and four or five other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include - lowering my voice - the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questionsmere fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy; but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hurley, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed.
July 21 (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ birthday) is the 202nd day of the year. Professor Junker makes one think of Kozma Prutkov’s famous poem about Junker Schmidt:
Вянет лист. Проходит лето.
Иней серебрится…
Юнкер Шмидт из пистолета
Хочет застрелиться.
Погоди, безумный, снова
Зелень оживится!
Юнкер Шмидт! честно́е слово,
Лето возвратится!
In his essay on Blok and Bryusov, Tvorchestvo i remeslo ("Creative Work and Handicraft," 1917), G. Ivanov mentions Prutkov's aphorisms:
Новая книга Брюсова, помимо разделения на семь соответствующих цветов, — распадается на двадцать один подотдел. Заглавие каждого из них — обязательно строка или часть строки какого-нибудь поэта, иногда самого автора.
Соответствующий эпиграф стоит тут же. Так, напр<имер>, подотдел называется «Перед тобою я», и ниже мы читаем строки Державина:
Но что мной зримая вселенна
И что перед тобою я.
Аккуратно, размеренно, перенумеровано с тщательностью чисто канцелярской. Механически отторгнутые от своих живых стеблей, эти подзаголовки напоминают несколько прутковские афоризмы:«Перед тобою я. Высоких зрелищ зритель».