Describing his near-fatal illness, Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974) mentions the pressed repeater that hissed in a pocket of his brain:
Now comes a snaggy bit: I do not know if my eyes remained always wide open "in a glazed look of arrogant stupor" as imagined by a reporter who got as far as the corridor desk. But I doubt very much I could blink--and without the oil of blinking the motor of sight could hardly have run. Yet, somehow, during my glide down those illusory canals and cloudways, and right over another continent, I did glimpse off and on, through subpalpebral mirages, the shadow of a hand or the glint of an instrument. As to my world of sound, it remained solid fantasy. I heard strangers discuss in droning voices all the books I had written or thought I had written, for everything they mentioned, titles, the names of characters, every phrase they shouted was preposterously distorted by the delirium of demonic scholarship. Louise regaled the company with one of her good stories--those I called "name hangers" because they only seemed to reach this or that point--a quid pro quo, say, at a party--but were really meant to introduce some high-born "old friend" of hers, or a glamorous politician, or a cousin of that politician. Learned papers were read at fantastic symposiums. In the year of grace 1798, Gavrila Petrovich Kamenev, a gifted young poet, was heard chuckling as he composed his Ossianic pastiche Slovo o polku Igoreve. Somewhere in Abyssinia drunken Rimbaud was reciting to a surprised Russian traveler the poem Le Tramway ivre (...En blouse rouge, à face en pis de vache, le bourreau me trancha la tête aussi...). Or else I’d hear the pressed repeater hiss in a pocket of my brain and tell the time, the rime, the meter that who could dream I’d hear again? (7.2)
As pointed out by Alain Champlain, the paragraph's last sentence mimics the first four lines of the Eugene Onegin stanza:
Or else I’d hear the pressed repeater
hiss in a pocket of my brain
and tell the time, the rime, the meter
that who could dream I’d hear again?
While the pressed repeater brings to mind Onegin's nedremlyushchiy (vigilant) Bréguet (One: XV: 13), in One: XXIX: 12 of Eugene Onegin Pushkin twice repeats the phrase ne to ("or else"):
Во дни веселий и желаний
Я был от балов без ума:
Верней нет места для признаний
И для вручения письма.
О вы, почтенные супруги!
Вам предложу свои услуги;
Прошу мою заметить речь:
Я вас хочу предостеречь.
Вы также, маменьки, построже
За дочерьми смотрите вслед:
Держите прямо свой лорнет!
Не то... не то, избави боже!
Я это потому пишу,
Что уж давно я не грешу.
In days of gaieties and desires
I was mad about balls:
there is no safer spot for declarations
and for the handing of a letter.
O you, respected husbands!
I'll offer you my services;
pray, mark my speech:
I wish to warn you.
You too, mammas: most strictly
follow your daughters with your eyes;
hold up your lorgnettes straight!
Or else... else - God forbid!
If this I write it is because
I have long ceased to sin.
Annenski's poem To i Eto ("That and This") from Trilistnik koshmarnyi ("The Nightmarish Trefoil") ends in the line Tol'ko Eto, a ne To (Only This, and not That):
Ночь не тает. Ночь как камень.
Плача, тает только лёд,
И струит по телу пламень
Свой причудливый полёт.
Но лопочут даром, тая,
Ледышки на голове:
Не запомнить им, считая,
Что подушек только две.
И что надо лечь в угарный,
В голубой туман костра,
Если тошен луч фонарной
На скользоте топора.
Но отрадной до рассвета
Сердце дрёмой залито,
Всё простит им... если это
Только Это, а не То.
In Annenski's poem Eto (This) is Pain and To (That) is Death. A surprised Russian traveler to whom drunken Rimbaud (the author of Le Bateau ivre) is reciting the poem Le Tramway ivre is, of course, Gumilyov (the author of "The Lost Tram," 1921). Annenski's pupil, Gumilyov is the author of Pamyati Annenskogo ("In Memory of Annenski," 1912):
К таким нежданным и певучим бредням
Зовя с собой умы людей,
Был Иннокентий Анненский последним
Из царскосельских лебедей.
Я помню дни: я, робкий, торопливый,
Входил в высокий кабинет,
Где ждал меня спокойный и учтивый,
Слегка седеющий поэт.
Десяток фраз, пленительных и странных,
Как бы случайно уроня,
Он вбрасывал в пространство безымянных
Мечтаний - слабого меня.
О, в сумрак отступающие вещи
И еле слышные духи,
И этот голос, нежный и зловещий,
Уже читающий стихи!
В них плакала какая-то обида,
Звенела медь и шла гроза,
А там, над шкафом, профиль Эврипида
Слепил горящие глаза.
...Скамью я знаю в парке; мне сказали,
Что он любил сидеть на ней,
Задумчиво смотря, как сини дали
В червонном золоте аллей.
Там вечером и страшно и красиво,
В тумане светит мрамор плит,
И женщина, как серна боязлива,
Во тьме к прохожему спешит.
Она глядит, она поёт и плачет,
И снова плачет и поёт,
Не понимая, что всё это значит,
Но только чувствуя - не тот.
Журчит вода, протачивая шлюзы,
Сырой травою пахнет мгла,
И жалок голос одинокой музы,
Последней - Царского Села.
The poem's penultimate stanza ends in the words ne tot (not him). Pevuchie bredni (melodious nonsense) in the first line of Gumilyov's poem brings to mind prozaicheskie bredni (prosy devigations) mentioned by Pushkin in "The Fragments of Onegin's Journey."
At the end of his poem Svechku vnesli (They Have Brought in a Candle,” 1906) Annenski mentions the shadows that run down from the eyes into blue fire po naklonam lucha (along the slants of a ray):
Не мерещится ль вам иногда,
Когда сумерки ходят по дому,
Тут же возле иная среда,
Где живём мы совсем по-другому?
С тенью тень там так мягко слилась,
Там бывает такая минута,
Что лучами незримыми глаз
Мы уходим друг в друга как будто.
И движеньем спугнуть этот миг
Мы боимся, иль словом нарушить,
Точно ухом кто возле приник,
Заставляя далекое слушать.
Но едва запылает свеча,
Чуткий мир уступает без боя,
Лишь из глаз по наклонам луча
Тени в пламя сбегут голубое.
Describing his recovery, Vadim Vadimovich mentions naklonnyi luch (a slanting ray):
There remained other problems. Where was I? What about a little light? How did one tell by touch a lamp's button from a bell's button in the dark. What was, apart from my own identity, that other person, promised to me, belonging to me? I could locate the bluish blinds of twin windows. Why not uncurtain them?
Tak, vdol' naklonnogo luchа
Ya vyshel iz paralichа.
Along a slanting ray, like this
I slipped out of paralysis.
--if "paralysis" is not too strong a word for the condition that mimicked it (with some obscure help from the patient): a rather quaint but not too serious psychological disorder--or at least so it seemed in lighthearted retrospect. (7.3)
The intonation in Vadim's jingle mimics the closing couplet of the EO stanza. In "The Fragments of Onegin's Journey" ([XIV: 9-10) Onegin regrets that he is not lying paralyzed, like a councilman from Tula:
Питая горьки размышленья,
Среди печальной их семьи,
Онегин взором сожаленья
Глядит на дымные струи
И мыслит, грустью отуманен:
Зачем я пулей в грудь не ранен?
Зачем не хилый я старик,
Как этот бедный откупщик?
Зачем, как тульский заседатель,
Я не лежу в параличе?
Зачем не чувствую в плече
Хоть ревматизма? — ах, создатель!
Я молод, жизнь во мне крепка;
Чего мне ждать? тоска, тоска!..
Onegin, nursing bitter meditations,
among their sorry tribe,
with a gaze of regret
looks at the smoking streams and muses,
bedimmed with rue: Why in the breast
am I not wounded by a bullet?
Why am I not a feeble oldster
like that poor farmer-general?
Why like a councilman from Tula
am I not lying paralyzed?
Why in the shoulder do I not
at least feel rheumatism? Ah, Lord,
I'm young, life is robust in me,
what have I to expect? Ennui, ennui!...
In the second stanza of his poem Vlyublyonnost' (“Being in Love”) composed for Iris Black (Vadim's first wife) in July 1922 Vadim mentions eta shchel' i etot luch (that chink and that moonbeam):
Pokuda snitsya, snis', vlyublyonnost',
No probuzhdeniem ne much',
I luchshe nedogovoryonnost'
Chem eta shchel' i etot luch.
While the dreaming is good--in the sense of 'while the going is good'--do keep appearing to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost', but do not torment us by waking us up or telling too much: reticence is better than that chink and that moonbeam. (1.5)
Vlyublyonnost' (1905) is a poem by Alexander Blok. In a letter of July 18, 1907, to Blok Annenski says that Vlyublyonnost' is adski trudna (diabolically difficult):
«Влюбленность» — адски трудна, а …зелёный зайчик В догоревшем хрустале чудный символ рассветного утомления.
In his memoir essay Innokentiy Annenski (1955) S. Makovski says that Annenski used to repeat to young writers that a poet’s first task was to invent himself:
Анненский говорил молодым писателям "Аполлона" и мне повторял не раз: "Первая задача поэта -- выдумать себя". На этом парадоксе он настаивал, но сам-то выдумать себя никак не умел и вероятно поэтому даже сомневался как будто в собственной поэзии, говоря о ней условно и шутливо:
Я завожусь на тридцать лет,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Чтоб жить, волнуясь и скорбя
Над тем, чего, гляди, и нет...
И был бы, верно, я поэт,
Когда бы выдумал себя.
["Человек"]
Makovski adds that Annenski could not invent himself and quotes Annenski’s lines: “I probably would be a poet, / if I had invented myself.” At the beginning of LATH Vadim quotes the words of his extravagant grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, who summoned him to look at the harlequins:
I saw my parents infrequently. They divorced and remarried and redivorced at such a rapid rate that had the custodians of my fortune been less alert, I might have been auctioned out finally to a pair of strangers of Swedish or Scottish descent, with sad bags under hungry eyes. An extraordinary grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, amply replaced closer blood. As a child of seven or eight, already harboring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) unduly sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in a most outrageous fashion.
"Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!”
"What harlequins? Where?"
"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes, images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"
I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my grand-aunt in honor of my first daydreams, and now, down the marble steps of memory's front porch, here she slowly comes, sideways, sideways, the poor lame lady, touching each step edge with the rubber tip of her black cane. (1.2)
It seems that Vadim Vadimovich invented not only his grant-aunt, but also himself.