To the latest issue of the school magazine Victor Wind (a character in VN’s novel Pnin, 1957) had contributed a poem about painters, over the nom de guerre Moinet:
To the latest issue of the school magazine Victor had contributed a poem about painters, over the nom de guerre Moinet, and under the motto 'Bad reds should all be avoided; even if carefully manufactured, they are still bad' (quoted from an old book on the technique of painting but smacking of a political aphorism). The poem began:
Leonardo! Strange diseases
strike at madders mixed with lead:
nun-pale now are Mona Lisa's
lips that you had made so red. (Chapter Four, 5)
Victor’s nom de guerre Moinet blends moine (French for “monk”) with the names of two French impressionist painters: Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Édouard Manet (1832-83). Monakh (“The Monk,” 1813) is a frivolous poem by Pushkin. At the end of his epistle K Natalye (“To Natalia,” 1813) also written at the Lyceum Pushkin says: Znay, Natalya! – ya… monakh (“Oh my Natalia! I’m a monk!”):
— Кто же ты, болтун влюбленный? —
Взглянь на стены возвышенны,
Где безмолвья вечный мрак;
Взглянь на окна загражденны,
На лампады там зажженны…
Знай, Наталья! — я… монах!
In the late 1820s and early 1830s Pushkin signed some of his articles written against hostile critics (Faddey Bulgarin & Co.) Feofilakt Kosichkin. Liza Bogolepov (Victor’s mother) is a great-granddaughter of that singular genius, Feofilakt Bogolepov, whose only rival for the title of greatest Russian mathematician was Nikolay Lobachevski:
Both Eric and Liza Wind were morbidly concerned with heredity, and instead of delighting in Victor's artistic genius, they used to worry gloomily about its genetic cause. Art and science had been represented rather vividly in the ancestral past. Should one trace Victor's passion for pigments back to Hans Andersen (no relation to the bedside Dane), who had been a stained-glass artist in Lübeck before losing his mind (and believing himself to be a cathedral) soon after his beloved daughter married a grey-haired Hamburg jeweller, author of a monograph on sapphires, and Eric's maternal grandfather? Or was Victor's almost pathological precision of pencil and pen a by-product of Bogolepov's science? For Victor's mother's great-grandfather, the seventh son of a country pope, had been no other than that singular genius, Feofilakt Bogolepov, whose only rival for the title of greatest Russian mathematician was Nikolay Lobachevski. One wonders. (Chapter Four, 3)
In Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”), Chapter Four of VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937), Fyodor mentions rozovyi plashch toreadorshi na kartine Mane (the bullfighter’s pink cape in Manet’s picture that irritates the bourgeois bull more than if it were red; omitted in the English version) and Lobachevski:
Как и слова, вещи имеют свои падежи. Чернышевский всё видел в именительном. Между тем всякое подлинно-новое веяние есть ход коня, перемена теней, сдвиг, смещающий зеркало. Человека серьезного, степенного, уважающего просвещение, искусства, ремесла, накопившего множество ценностей в области мышления, - быть может выказавшего вполне передовую разборчивость во время их накопления, но теперь вовсе не желающего, чтобы они вдруг подверглись пересмотру, такого человека иррациональная новизна сердит пуще темноты ветхого невежества. Так розовый плащ торреадорши на картинке Манэ больше раздражал буржуазного быка, чем если бы он был красным. Так Чернышевский, который, подобно большинству революционеров, был совершенный буржуа в своих художественных и научных вкусах, приходил в бешенство от "возведения сапог в квадраты", от "извлечения кубических корней из голенищ". "Лобачевского знала вся Казань, - писал он из Сибири сыновьям, - вся Казань единодушно говорила, что он круглый дурак... Что такое "кривизна луча", или "кривое пространство"? Что такое "геометрия без аксиомы параллельных линий"? Можно ли писать по-русски без глаголов? Можно - для шутки. Шелест, робкое дыханье, трели соловья. Автор ее некто Фет, бывший в свое время известным поэтом. Идиот, каких мало на свете. Писал это серьезно, и над ним хохотали до боли в боках" (Фета, как и Толстого, он не терпел; в 56 году, любезничая с Тургеневым - ради "Современника", - он ему писал, "что никакие "Юности", ни даже стихи Фета... не могут настолько опошлить публику, чтобы она не могла..." - следует грубый комплимент).
Когда однажды, в 55 году, расписавшись о Пушкине, он захотел дать пример "бессмысленного сочетания слов", то привел мимоходом тут же выдуманное "синий звук", - на свою голову напророчив пробивший через полвека блоковский "звонко-синий час". "Научный анализ показывает вздорность таких сочетаний", - писал он, - не зная о физиологическом факте "окрашенного слуха". "Не всё ли равно, - спрашивал он (у радостно соглашавшегося с ним бахмучанского или новомиргородского читателя), - голубоперая щука или щука с голубым пером (конечно второе, крикнули бы мы, - так оно выделяется лучше, в профиль!), ибо настоящему мыслителю некогда заниматься этим, особенно если он проводит на народной площади больше времени, чем в своей рабочей комнате". Другое дело - "общий план". Любовь к общему (к энциклопедии), презрительная ненависть к особому (к монографии) и заставляли его упрекать Дарвина в недельности, Уоллеса в нелепости ("... все эти ученые специальности от изучения крылышек бабочек до изучения наречий кафрского языка"). У самого Чернышевского был в этом смысле какой-то опасный размах, какое-то разудалое и самоуверенное "всё сойдет", бросающее сомнительную тень на достоинства как раз специальных его трудов. "Общий интерес" он понимал, однако, по-своему: исходил из мысли, что больше всего читателя интересует "производительность". Разбирая в 55 году какой-то журнал, он хвалит в нем статьи "Термометрическое состояние земли" и "Русские каменноугольные бассейны", решительно бракуя, как слишком специальную, ту единственную, которую хотелось бы прочесть: "Географическое распространение верблюда".
Like words, things also have their cases. Chernyshevski saw everything in the nominative. Actually, of course, any genuinely new trend is a knight’s move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror. A serious man, moderate, respecting education, art and crafts, a man who has accumulated a profusion of values in the sphere of thought—who perhaps has shown a fully progressive discrimination during the period of their accumulation but now has no desire whatsoever for them to be suddenly subjected to a reconsideration—such a man is much more angered by irrational innovation than by the darkness of antiquated ignorance. Thus Chernyshevski, who like the majority of revolutionaries was a complete bourgeois in his artistic and scientific tastes, was enraged by “the squaring of boots” or “the extraction of cubic roots from boot tops.” “All Kazan knew Lobachevski,” he wrote to his sons from Siberia in the seventies, “all Kazan was of the unanimous opinion that the man was a complete fool…. What on earth is ‘the curvature of a ray’ or ‘curved space’? What is ‘geometry without the axiom of parallel lines’? Is it possible to write Russian without verbs? Yes, it is—for a joke. Whispers, timid respiration, trills of nightingale. Written by a certain Fet, a well-known poet in his time. An idiot with few peers. He wrote this seriously, and people laughed at him till their sides ached.” (Fet he detested as he also did Tolstoy; in 1856, while buttering up Turgenev—whom he wanted in The Contemporary—he wrote him “that no ‘Youth’s’ [Tolstoy’s Childhood and Adolescence] nor even Fet’s poetry… can sufficiently vulgarize the public for its not being able to …”—there follows a vulgar compliment.)
Once in 1855, when expatiating on Pushkin and wishing to give an example of “a senseless combination of words,” he hastily cited a “blue sound” of his own invention—prophetically calling down upon his own head Blok’s “blue-ringing hour” that was to chime half a century later. “A scientific analysis shows the absurdity of such combinations,” he wrote, unaware of the physiological fact of “colored hearing.” “Isn’t it all the same,” he asked (of the reader in Bakhmuchansk or Novomirgorod, who joyfully agreed with him), “whether we have a blue-finned pike or [as in a Derzhavin poem] a pike with a blue fin [of course the second, we would have cried—that way it stands out better, in profile!], for the genuine thinker has no time to worry about such matters, especially if he spends more time in the public square than he does in his study?” The “general outline” is another matter. It was a love of generalities (encyclopedias) and a contemptuous hatred of particularities (monographs) which led him to reproach Darwin for being puerile and Wallace for being inept (“… all these learned specialties, from the study of butterfly wings to the study of Kaffir dialects”). Chernyshevski had on the contrary a dangerously wide range, a kind of reckless and self-confident “anything-will-do” attitude which casts a doubtful shadow over his own specialized work. “The general interest,” however, was given his own interpretation: his premise was that the reader was most of all interested in the “productive” side of things. Reviewing a magazine (in 1855), he praises such items as “The Thermometric Condition of the Earth” and “Russian Coalfields,” while decisively rejecting as too special the only article one would want to read, “The Geographical Distribution of the Camel.”
In his Commentary 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) quotes Arnor’s poem about a miragarl (mirage girl), for which a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give tri stana verbalala (three hundred camels) ut tri phantana (and three fountains):
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
Verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána
(I have marked the stress accents).
The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin.
The forty days between Queen Blenda's death and his coronation was perhaps the most trying stretch of time in his life. He had had no love for his mother, and the hopeless and helpless remorse he now felt degenerated into a sickly physical fear of her phantom. The Countess, who seemed to be near him, to be rustling at his side, all the time, had him attend table-turning séances with an experienced American medium, séances at which the Queen's spirit, operating the same kind of planchette she had used in her lifetime to chat with Thormodus Torfaeus and A. R. Wallace, now briskly wrote in English: "Charles take take cherish love flower flower flower." An old psychiatrist so thoroughly bribed by the Countess as to look, even on the outside, like a putrid pear, assured him that his vices had subconsciously killed his mother and would continue "to kill her in him" if he did not renounce sodomy. A palace intrigue is a special spider that entangles you more nastily at every desperate jerk you try. Our Prince was young, inexperienced, and half-frenzied with insomnia. He hardly struggled at all. The Countess spent a fortune on buying his kamergrum (groom of the chamber), his bodyguard, and even the greater part of the Court Chamberlain. She took to sleeping in a small antechamber next to his bachelor bedroom, a splendid spacious circular apartment at the top of the high and massive South West Tower. This had been his father's retreat and was still connected by a jolly chute in the wall with a round swimming pool in the hall below, so that the young Prince could start the day as his father used to start it by slipping open a panel beside his army cot and rolling into the shaft whence he whizzed down straight into bright water. For other needs than sleep Charles Xavier had installed in the middle of the Persian rug-covered floor a so-called patifolia, that is, a huge, oval, luxuriously flounced, swansdown pillow the size of a triple bed. It was in this ample nest that Fleur now slept, curled up in its central hollow, under a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur that had just been rushed from Tibet by a group of Asiatic well-wishers on the occasion of his ascension to the throne. The antechamber, where the Countess was ensconced, had its own inner staircase and bathroom, but also communicated by means of a sliding door with the West Gallery. I do not know what advice or command her mother had given Fleur; but the little thing proved a poor seducer. She kept trying, as one quietly insane, to mend a broken viola d'amore or sat in dolorous attitudes comparing two ancient flutes, both sad-tuned and feeble. Meantime, in Turkish garb, he lolled in his father's ample chair, his legs over its arm, flipping through a volume of Historia Zemblica, copying out passages and occasionally fishing out of the nether recesses of his seat a pair of old-fashioned motoring goggles, a black opal ring, a ball of silver chocolate wrapping, or the star of a foreign order. (note to Line 80)
According to Fyodor (the narrator and main character in “The Gift”), a love of generalities (encyclopedias) and a contemptuous hatred of particularities (monographs) led Chernyshevski to reproach Darwin for being puerile and Wallace (a scientist, 1823-1913, who was strongly attracted to unconventional ideas, such as evolution, and advocated spiritualism) for being inept. In one of his conversations with Zina Mertz, Fyodor mentions the fountains in the cities:
"Милый мой, радость моя, - воскликнула она. - Неужели это всё правда, - этот забор и мутненькая звезда? Когда я была маленькой, я не любила рисовать ничего некончающегося, так что заборов не рисовала, ведь это на бумаге не кончается, нельзя себе представить кончающийся забор, - а всегда что-нибудь завершенное, - пирамиду, дом на горе".
"А я любил больше всего горизонт и такие штрихи - всё мельче и мельче:
получалось солнце за морем. А самое большое детское мученье: неочиненный или сломанный цветной карандаш".
"Но зато очиненные... Помнишь - белый? Всегда самый длинный, - не то, что красные и синие, - оттого, что он мало работал, - помнишь?".
"Но как он хотел нравиться! Драма альбиноса. L'inutile beaute'. Положим, он у меня потом разошелся всласть. Именно потому, что рисовал невидимое. Можно было массу вообразить. Вообще - неограниченные возможности. Только без ангелов, - а если уж ангел, то с громадной грудной клеткой и с крыльями, как помесь райской птицы с кондором, и душу младую чтоб нес не в объятьях, а в когтях".
"Да, я тоже думаю, что нельзя на этом кончить. Не представляю себе, чтобы мы могли не быть. Во всяком случае, мне бы не хотелось ни во что обращаться".
"В рассеянный свет? Как ты насчет этого? Не очень, по моему? Я-то убежден, что нас ждут необыкновенные сюрпризы. Жаль, что нельзя себе представить то, что не с чем сравнить. Гений, это - негр, который во сне видит снег. Знаешь, что больше всего поражало самых первых русских паломников, по пути через Европу?"
"Музыка?"
"Нет, - городские фонтаны, мокрые статуи".
Мне иногда досадно, что ты не чувствуешь музыки. У моего отца был такой слух, что он, бывало, лежит на диване и напевает целую оперу, с начала до конца. Раз он так лежал, а в соседнюю комнату кто-то вошел и заговорил там с мамой, - и он мне сказал: Этот голос принадлежит такому-то, двадцать лет тому назад я его видел в Карлсбаде, и он мне обещал когда-нибудь приехать. Вот какой был слух".
“My darling, my joy,” she exclaimed, “can all this be true—this fence and that blurry star? When I was little I didn’t like drawing anything that didn’t finish, so I didn’t draw fences because they don’t finish on paper; you can’t imagine a fence that finishes, but I always did something complete, a pyramid, or a house on a hill.”
“And I liked horizons most of all, and diminishing dashes beneath it—to represent the wake of the sun setting beyond the sea. And the greatest childhood torment of all was an unsharpened or broken crayon pencil.”
“But then the sharpened ones…. Do you remember the white one? Always the longest—not like the red and blue ones—because it didn’t do much work, do you remember?”
“But how much it wanted to please! The drama of the albino. L’inutile beauté. Anyhow, later I let it have its fill. Precisely because it drew the invisible and one could imagine lots of things. In general there await us unlimited possibilities. Only no angels, or if there must be an angel, then with a huge chest cavity, and wings like a hybrid between a bird of paradise and a condor, and talons to carry the young soul away—not ‘embraced’ as Lermontov has it.”
“Yes, I also think that we can’t end here. I can’t imagine that we could cease to exist. In any case I wouldn’t like to turn into anything.”
“Into diffused light? What do you think of that? Not too good, I’d say. I am convinced that extraordinary surprises await us. It’s a pity one can’t imagine what one can’t compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow. Do you know what it was that most amazed the very first Russian pilgrims when they were crossing Europe?”
“The music?”
“No, the fountains in the cities, the wet statues.”
“It sometimes annoys me that you have no feeling for music. My father had such an ear that sometimes he would lie on the sofa and hum a whole opera, from beginning to end. Once he was lying like that and someone came into the next room and began talking to Mother—and he said to me: That voice belongs to so-and-so, I saw him twenty years ago in Carlsbad and he promised to come and see me one day.’ That’s what his ear was like.” (Chapter Three)
Like Fleur de Fyler, Zina Merts places her ankles very close together in her walk:
Ожидание ее прихода. Она всегда опаздывала - и всегда приходила другой дорогой, чем он. Вот и получилось, что даже Берлин может быть таинственным. Под липовым цветением мигает фонарь. Темно, душисто, тихо. Тень прохожего по тумбе пробегает, как соболь пробегает через пень. За пустырем как персик небо тает: вода в огнях, Венеция сквозит, - а улица кончается в Китае, а та звезда над Волгою висит. О, поклянись, что веришь в небылицу, что будешь только вымыслу верна, что не запрешь души своей в темницу, не скажешь, руку протянув: стена.
Из темноты, для глаз всегда нежданно, она как тень внезапно появлялась, от родственной стихии отделясь. Сначала освещались только ноги, так ставимые тесно, что казалось, она идет по тонкому канату. Она была в коротком летнем платье ночного цвета - цвета фонарей, теней, стволов, лоснящейся панели: бледнее рук ее, темней лица. Посвящено Георгию Чулкову. Федор Константинович целовал ее в мягкие губы, и затем она на мгновение опускала голову к нему на ключицу и, быстро высвободившись, шла рядом с ним, сперва с такой грустью на лице, словно за двадцать часов их разлуки произошло какое-то небывалое несчастье, но мало-по-малу она приходила в себя, и вот улыбалась - так, как днем не улыбалась никогда. Что его больше всего восхищало в ней? Ее совершенная понятливость, абсолютность слуха по отношению ко всему, что он сам любил. В разговорах с ней можно было обходиться без всяких мостиков, и не успевал он заметить какую-нибудь забавную черту ночи, как уже она указывала ее. И не только Зина была остроумно и изящно создана ему по мерке очень постаравшейся судьбой, но оба они, образуя одну тень, были созданы по мерке чего-то не совсем понятного, но дивного и благожелательного, бессменно окружавшего их.
Waiting for her arrival. She was always late—and always came by another road than he. Thus it transpired that even Berlin could be mysterious. Within the linden’s bloom the streetlight winks. A dark and honeyed hush envelops us. Across the curb one’s passing shadow slinks: across a stump a sable ripples thus. The night sky melts to peach beyond that gate. There water gleams, there Venice vaguely shows. Look at that street—it runs to China straight, and yonder star above the Volga glows! Oh, swear to me to put in dreams your trust, and to believe in fantasy alone, and never let your soul in prison rust, nor stretch your arm and say: a wall of stone.
She always unexpectedly appeared out of the darkness, like a shadow leaving its kindred element. At first her ankles would catch the light: she moved them close together as if she walked along a slender rope. Her summer dress was short, of night’s own color, the color of the streetlights and the shadows, of tree trunks and of shining pavement—paler than her bare arms and darker than her face. This kind of blank verse Blok dedicated to Georgi Chulkov. Fyodor kissed her on her soft lips, she leaned her head for a moment on his collarbone and then, quickly freeing herself, walked beside him, at first with such sorrow on her face as if during their twenty hours of separation an unheard-of disaster had taken place, but then little by little she came to herself and now smiled—smiled as she never did during the day. What was it about her that fascinated him most of all? Her perfect understanding, the absolute pitch of her instinct for everything that he himself loved? In talking to her one could get along without any bridges, and he would barely have time to notice some amusing feature of the night before she would point it out. And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them. (ibid.)
According to Kinbote (the author of a book on surnames), Fleur de Fyler is “defiler of flowers.” In Chapter One (XXXI-XXXII) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin eulogizes female feet and wonders where they now trample vernant blooms:
Когда ж и где, в какой пустыне,
Безумец, их забудешь ты?
Ах, ножки, ножки! где вы ныне?
Где мнете вешние цветы?
Взлелеяны в восточной неге,
На северном, печальном снеге
Вы не оставили следов:
Любили мягких вы ковров
Роскошное прикосновенье.
Давно ль для вас я забывал
И жажду славы и похвал,
И край отцов, и заточенье?
Исчезло счастье юных лет,
Как на лугах ваш легкий след.
Дианы грудь, ланиты Флоры
Прелестны, милые друзья!
Однако ножка Терпсихоры
Прелестней чем-то для меня.
Она, пророчествуя взгляду
Неоцененную награду,
Влечет условною красой
Желаний своевольный рой.
Люблю ее, мой друг Эльвина,
Под длинной скатертью столов,
Весной на мураве лугов,
Зимой на чугуне камина,
На зеркальном паркете зал,
У моря на граните скал.
So when and where, in what desert, will you
forget them, madman? Little feet,
ah, little feet! Where are you now?
Where do you trample vernant blooms?
Brought up in Oriental mollitude,
on the Northern sad snow
you left no prints:
you liked the sumptuous contact
of yielding rugs.
Is it long since I would forget for you
the thirst for fame and praises,
the country of my fathers, and confinement?
The happiness of youthful years has vanished
as on the meadows your light trace.
Diana's bosom, Flora's cheeks, are charming,
dear friends! Nevertheless, for me
something about it makes more charming
the small foot of Terpsichore.
By prophesying to the gaze
an unpriced recompense,
with token beauty it attracts the willful
swarm of desires.
I like it, dear Elvina,
beneath the long napery of tables,
in springtime on the turf of meads,
in winter on the hearth's cast iron,
on mirrory parquet of halls,
by the sea on granite of rocks.
Moy drug Elvina (dear Elvina) brings to mind Elvina Krummholz, Gordon Krummholz’s mother (Joe Lavender's famous sister). Mlle Baud (Gordon’s governess) tells Gradus (Shade's murderer) that Gordon is a musical prodigy. According to Zina Mertz, it sometimes annoys her that Fyodor has no feeling for music.
Zemblan for "camels," verbalala seems to hint not only at verblyud (camel in Russian), but also at verbnaya halva (cloying stuff) mentioned by Fyodor in Chapter Four of "The Gift:"
Таким образом, борясь с чистым искусством, шестидесятники, и за ними хорошие русские люди вплоть до девяностых годов, боролись, по неведению своему, с собственным ложным понятием о нем, ибо точно также как двадцать лет спустя Гаршин видел "чистого художника" в Семирадском(!), -- или как аскету снится пир, от которого бы чревоугодника стошнило, -- так и Чернышевский, будучи лишен малейшего понятия об истинной сущности искусства, видел его венец в искусстве условном, прилизанном (т. е. в антиискусстве), с которым и воевал, -- поражая пустоту. При этом не следует забывать, что другой лагерь, лагерь "художников", -- Дружинин с его педантизмом и дурного тона небесностью, Тургенев с его чересчур стройными видениями и злоупотреблением Италией, -- часто давал врагу как раз ту вербную халву, которую легко было хаять.
Thus in denouncing “pure art” the men of the sixties, and good Russian people after them right up to the nineties, were denouncing—in result of misinformation—their own false conception of it, for just as twenty years later the social writer Carshin saw “pure art” in the paintings of Semiradski (a rank academician)—or as an ascetic may dream of a feast that would make an epicurean sick—so Chernyshevski, having not the slightest notion of the true nature of art, saw its crown in conventional, slick art (i.e., anti-art), which he combated—lunging at nothing. At the same time one must not forget that the other camp, the camp of the “aesthetes”—the critic Druzhinin with his pedantry and tasteless lambency, or Turgenev with his much too elegant “visions” and misuse of Italy—often provided the enemy with exactly that cloying stuff which it was so easy to condemn.