Describing his meeting with Lucette in Kingston, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) compares a philosopher’s orbitless eye to a peeled hard-boiled egg:
Van, Vanichka, we are straying from the main point. The point is that the writing desk or if you like, secretaire —’
‘I hate both, but it stood at the opposite end of the black divan.’
Now mentioned for the first time — though both had been tacitly using it as an orientator or as a right hand painted on a transparent signboard that a philosopher’s orbitless eye, a peeled hard-boiled egg cruising free, but sensing which of its ends is proximal to an imaginary nose, sees hanging in infinite space; whereupon, with Germanic grace, the free eye sails around the glass sign and sees a left hand shining through — that’s the solution! (Bernard said six-thirty but I may be a little late.) The mental in Van always rimmed the sensuous: unforgettable, roughish, villous, Villaviciosa velour.
‘Van, you are deliberately sidetracking the issue —’
‘One can’t do that with an issue.’
‘— because at the other end, at the heel end of the Vaniada divan — remember? — there was only the closet in which you two locked me up at least ten times.’
‘Nu uzh i desyat’ (exaggeration). Once — and never more. It had a keyless hole as big as Kant’s eye. Kant was famous for his cucumicolor iris.’
Whatever it is called.
‘She and I challenged you to find the secret chuvstvilishche (sensorium) and make it work. It was the summer Belle sprained her backside, and we were left to our own devices, which had long lost the particule in your case and Ada’s, but were touchingly pure in mine. You groped around, and felt, and felt for the little organ, which turned out to be a yielding roundlet in the rosewood under the felt you felt — I mean, under the felt you were feeling: it was a felted thumb spring, and Ada laughed as the drawer shot out.’ (2.5)
In her memoir essay on Andrey Bely, Plennyi dukh (“A Captive Spirit,” 1934), Marina Tsvetaev describes her meeting with Bely in Berlin and says that Bely compared man’s eye to a peeled hard-boiled egg:
И вдруг через все - через всех - протянутые руки - кудри - сияние: - Вы? Вы? (Он так и не знал, как меня зовут.) Здесь? Как я счастлив! Давно приехали? Навсегда приехали? А за вами, по дороге, не следили? Не было такого... (скашивает глаза)... брюнета? Продвижения за вами брюнета по вагонному ущелью, по вокзальным сталактитовым пространствам... Пристукиванья тросточкой... не было? Заглядывания в купе: «Виноват, ошибся!» И через час опять «виноват», а на третий раз уж вы - ему:
«Виноваты: ошиблись!» Нет? Не было? Вы... хорошо помните, что не было?
- Я очень близорука.
- А он в очках. Да-с. В том-то и суть, что вы, которая не видит, без очков, а он, который видит, - в очках. Угадываете?
- Значит, он тоже ничего не видит.
- Видит. Ибо стекла не для видения, а для видоизменения... видимости. Простые. Или даже - пустые. Вы понимаете этот ужас: пустые стекла, нечаянно ткнешь пальцем - и теплый глаз, как только что очищенное, облупленное подрагивающее крутое яйцо. И такими глазами - вкрутую сваренными - он осмеливается глядеть в ваши: ясные, светлые, с живым зрачком. Удивительной чистоты цвет. Где я такие видел? Когда? (II)
Marina Tsvetaev is the author of Zhivoe o zhivom (“The Living Word about the Living Man,” 1932), a memoir essay about Maximilian Voloshin. In his poem Evropa (“Europe,” 1919) included in Rossiya raspyataya (“The Crucified Russia”) Voloshin mentions Europe's maternie organy (maternal organs), her chuvstvilishche (sensorium) and pokhotnik (clitoris):
Полярным льдам уста её открыты,
У пояса, среди сапфирных влаг,
Как пчельный рой у чресел Афродиты,
Раскинул острова Архипелаг.
Сюда ведут страстных желаний тропы,
Здесь матерние органы Европы,
Здесь, жгучие дрожанья затая, -
В глубоких влуминах укрытая стихия,
Чувствилище и похотник ея...
At Kingston Lucette reminds Van of a game of Flavita (Russian Scrabble) in which she failed to compose the word klitor (clitoris) because she did not know it:
‘One day, in the library, kneeling on a yellow cushion placed on a Chippendale chair before an oval table on lion claws —’
[The epithetic tone strongly suggests that this speech has an epistolary source. Ed.]
'- I got stuck with six Buchstaben in the last round of a Flavita game. Mind you, I was eight and had not studied anatomy, but was doing my poor little best to keep up with two Wunderkinder. You examined and fingered my groove and quickly redistributed the haphazard sequence which made, say, LIKROT or ROTIKL and Ada flooded us both with her raven silks as she looked over our heads, and when you had completed the rearrangement, you and she came simultaneously, si je puis le mettre comme ca (Canady French), came falling on the black carpet in a paroxysm of incomprehensible merriment; so finally I quietly composed ROTIK ('little mouth') and was left with my own cheap initial. I hope I've thoroughly got you mixed up, Van, because la plus laide fille au monde peut donner beaucoup plus qu'elle n'a, and now let us say adieu, yours ever.'
'Whilst the machine is to him,' murmured Van.
'Hamlet,' said the assistant lecturer's brightest student. (2.5)