In VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Vadim Vadimovich’s daughter Bel marries Charlie Everett who changes his name to Karl Ivanovich Vetrov and takes his wife to the Soviet Russia:
In the summer of 1960, Christine Dupraz, who ran the summer camp for disabled children between cliff and highway, just east of Larive, informed me that Charlie Everett, one of her assistants, had eloped with my Bel after burning--in a grotesque ceremony that she visualized more clearly than I--his passport and a little American flag (bought at a souvenir stall especially for that purpose) "right in the middle of the Soviet Consul's back garden"; whereupon the new "Karl Ivanovich Vetrov" and the eighteen-year-old Isabella, a ci-devant's daughter, had gone through some form of mock marriage in Berne and incontinently headed for Russia. (5.1)
The surname Vetrov comes from veter (wind). In the first sonnet of his cycle “Lermontov” (1921) Balmont calls Lermontov vetrov i bur’ bezdomnykh strannyi brat (a strange brother of homeless winds and storms):
Опальный ангел, с небом разлучённый,
Узывный демон, разлюбивший ад,
Ветров и бурь бездомных странный брат,
Душой внимавший песне звёзд всезвонной, —
На празднике как призрак похоронный,
В затишьи дней тревожащий набат,
Нет, не случайно он среди громад
Кавказских — миг узнал смертельно-сонный.
Где мог он так красиво умереть,
Как не в горах, где небо в час заката —
Расплавленное золото и медь, —
Где ключ, пробившись, должен звонко петь,
Но также должен в плаче пасть со ската,
Чтоб гневно в узкой пропасти греметь.
Bel’s husband has the same name and patronymic as Karl Ivanovich, in Tolstoy’s Detstvo (“Childhood,” 1852) and Otrochestvo (“Boyhood,” 1854) the young hero’s old German tutor. In VN’s novel Pnin (1957) Pnin tells Liza's son Victor (Vicror Wind) that the first description of box (sic) we find in a poem by Lermontov and the first description of tennis in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin:
"My name is Timofey," said Pnin, as they made themselves comfortable at a window table in the shabby old diner, "Second syllable pronounced as 'muff,' ahksent on last syllable, 'ey' as in 'prey' but a little more protracted. 'Timofey Pavlovich Pnin,' which means 'Timothy the son of Paul.' The pahtronymic has the ahksent on the first syllable and the rest is sloored--Timofey Pahlch. I have a long time debated with myself--let us wipe these knives and these forks--and have concluded that you must call me simply Mr. Tim or, even shorter, Tim, as do some of my extremely sympathetic colleagues. It is--what do you want to eat? Veal cutlet? O.K., I will also eat veal cutlet--it is naturally a concession to America, my new country, wonderful America which sometimes surprises me but always provokes respect. In the beginning I was greatly embarrassed--"
In the beginning Pnin was greatly embarrassed by the ease with which first names were bandied about in America: after a single party, with an iceberg in a drop of whisky to start and with a lot of whisky in a little tap water to finish, you were supposed to call a gray-templed stranger "Jim," while he called you "Tim" for ever and ever. If you forgot and called him next morning Professor Everett (his real name to you) it was (for him) a horrible insult. In reviewing his Russian friends throughout Europe and the United States, Timofey Pahlch could easily count at least sixty dear people whom he had intimately known since, say, 1920, and whom he never called anything but Vadim Vadimich, Ivan Hristoforovich, or Samuil Izrailevich, as the case might be, and who called him by his name and patronymic with the same effusive sympathy, over a strong warm handshake, whenever they met: "Ah, Timofey Pahlch! Nu kak? (Well how?) A vi, baten'ka, zdorovo postareli (Well, well, old boy, you certainly don't look any younger)!"
Pnin talked. His talk did not amaze Victor, who had heard many Russians speak English, and he was not bothered by the fact that Pnin pronounced the word "family" as if the first syllable were the French for "woman."
"I speak in French with much more facility than in English," said Pnin, "but you--vous comprenez le francais? Bien? Assez bien? Un peu?"
"Tres un peu," said Victor.
"Regrettable, but nothing to be done. I will now speak to you about sport. The first description of box in Russian literature we find in a poem by Mihail Lermontov, born 1814, killed 1841--easy to remember. The first description of tennis, on the other hand, is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875. In youth one day, in the Russian countryside, latitude of Labrador, a racket was given to me to play with the family of the Orientalist Gotovtsev, perhaps you have heard. It was, I recollect, a splendid summer day and we played, played, played until all the twelve balls were lost. You also will recollect the past with interest when old.
"Another game," continued Pnin, lavishly sugaring his coffee, "was naturally kroket. I was a champion of kroket. However, the favorite national recreation was so-called gorodki, which means "little towns." One remembers a place in the garden and the wonderful atmosphere of youth: I was strong, I wore an embroidered Russian shirt, nobody plays now such healthy games."
He finished his cutlet and proceeded with the subject:
"One drew," said Pnin, "a big square on the ground, one placed there, like columns, cylindrical pieces of wood, you know, and then from some distance one threw at them a thick stick, very hard, like a boomerang, with a wide, wide development of the arm--excuse me--fortunately it is sugar, not salt."
"I still hear," said Pnin, picking up the sprinkler and shaking his head a little at the surprising persistence of memory, "I still hear the trakh!, the crack when one hit the wooden pieces and they jumped in the air. Will you not finish the meat? You do not like it?"
"It's awfully good," said Victor, "but I am not very hungry."
"Oh, you must eat more, much more if you want to be a footballist."
"I'm afraid I don't care much for football. In fact, I hate football. Im not very good at any game, really."
"You are not a lover of football?" said Pnin, and a look of dismay crept over his large expressive face. He pursed his lips. He opened them--but said nothing. In silence he ate his vanilla ice cream, which contained no vanilla and was not made of cream.
"We will now take your luggage and a taxi," said Pnin. (Chapter Four, 8)
Professor Everett and Vadim Vadimich in Pnin bring to mind Charlie Everett (aka Karl Ivanovich Vetrov) and his father-in-law in LATH. Other books by the narrator in LATH include Dr. Olga Repnin (1946), a novel that corresponds to VN’s Pnin:
Her husband sat in a deep armchair, reading a London weekly bought at the Shopping Center. He had not bothered to take off his horrible black raincoat--a voluminous robe of oilskin that conjured up the image of a stagecoach driver in a lashing storm. He now removed however his formidable spectacles. He cleared his throat with a characteristic rumble. His purple jowls wobbled as he tackled the ordeal of rational speech:
GERRY Do you ever see this paper, Vadim (accenting "Vadim" incorrectly on the first syllable)? Mister (naming a particularly lively criticule) has demolished your Olga (my novel about the professorsha; it had come out only now in the British edition).
VADIM May I give you a drink? We'll toast him and roast him.
GERRY Yet he's right, you know. It is your worst book. Chute complète, says the man. Knows French, too.
LOUISE No drinks. We've got to rush home. Now heave out of that chair. Try again. Take your glasses and paper. There. Au revoir, Vadim. I'll bring you those pills tomorrow morning after I drive him to school. (4.1)
In his review in the Northern Bee (Mar. 22, 1830) of Chapter Seven of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin Bulgarin calls this chapter of EO “chute complète:”
Ни одной мысли в этой водянистой VII главе, ни одного чувствования, ни одной картины, достойной воззрения! Совершенное падение, chute complète…
Not one idea in this watery Chapter Seven, not one sentiment, not one picture worthy of contemplation! A complete comedown, chute complete…
In Chapter Seven of EO Tatiana leaves her dear countryside and goes to Moscow, “to the mart of brides.” In Moscow Tatiana and her mother visit their relatives:
И вот: по родственным обедам
Развозят Таню каждый день
Представить бабушкам и дедам
Её рассеянную лень.
Родне, прибывшей издалеча,
Повсюду ласковая встреча,
И восклицанья, и хлеб-соль.
“Как Таня выросла! Давно ль
Я, кажется, тебя крестила?
А я так на руки брала!
А я так за уши драла!
А я так пряником кормила!”
И хором бабушки твердят:
“Как наши годы-то летят!?”
And now, on rounds of family dinners
Tanya they trundle daily to present
to grandsires and to grandams
her abstract indolence.
For kin come from afar
there's everywhere a kind reception,
and exclamations, and good cheer.
“How Tanya's grown! Such a short while
It seems since I godmothered you!”
“And since I bore you in my arms!”
“And since I pulled you by the ears!”
“And since I fed you gingerbread!”
And the grandmothers keep repeating
in chorus: “How our years do fly!” (Seven: XLIV)
The stanza’s last line, “Kak nashi gody-to letyat!” (“How our years do fly!”), was used by Apollon Maykov as the epigraph to his poem in octaves Knyazhna (“The Princess,” 1878). Maykov is the author of Arlekin (“The Harlequin,” 1854). Maykov’s narrative poem Mashen’ka (“Mary,” 1846) has the same title as VN’s first novel. VN’s Mashen’ka (1926) corresponds to Vadim’s Tamara (1925) in LATH. Showing to Vadim a lending library in the house that he rents for his business, Oks (Osip Lvovich Oksman) mentions Vadim’s Tamara:
He led me to a distant corner and triumphantly trained his flashlight on the gaps in my shelf of books.
"Look," he cried, "how many copies are out. All of Princess Mary is out, I mean Mary--damn it, I mean Tamara. I love Tamara, I mean your Tamara, not Lermontov's or Rubinstein's. Forgive me. One gets so confused among so many damned masterpieces." (2.4)
Knyazhna Mery (“Princess Mary”) is a novella in Lermontov’s Geroy nashego vremeni (“A Hero of Our Time,” 1840). The first novella in “A Hero of Our Time” is Bela. The heroine’s name brings to mind Vadim’s daughter Bel. Since Vadim is a Russian Prince, his daughter is knyazhna (a Princess). During their first meeting Bel tells her father that she and her mother (Annette Blagovo, Vadim’s second wife) had spent most of last summer with babushka (grandmother):
She and her mother (whom she mentioned as casually as if Annette were in the next room copying something for me on a soundless typewriter) had spent most of last summer at Carnavaux with babushka. I would like to have learned what room exactly Bel had occupied in the villa, but an oddly obtrusive, though irrelevant-looking, recollection somehow prevented me from asking: shortly before her death Iris had dreamed one night that she had given birth to a fat boy with dusky red cheeks and almond eyes and the blue shadow of mutton chops: "A horrible Omarus K." (4.2)
Describing a hurricane that killed Bel’s mother, Vadim mentions Dr. Olga Repnin:
The mad scholar in Esmeralda and her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her flowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks that tornadoes and floods are really sensational only in North America. On May 17, 1953, several papers printed a photograph of a family, complete with birdcage, phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it out on the roof of their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the picture of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man, a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver’s seat, stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the Weather Bureau was accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteen schoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animals donated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor’s widow, to the Rosedale Museum, were safe in the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twister struck. But the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drowned bodies of its two occupants were never retrieved. (ibid.)
"A horrible Omarus K." seems to hint at Homarus, a genus of lobsters, which include the common and commercially significant species Homarus americanus (the American lobster) and Homarus gammarus (the European lobster). In VN's novel Ada (1969) Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) tells Van that she always teeters on the tender border between sunburn and suntan — or between lobster and Obst as writes Herb, her beloved painter:
Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.
To Ardis, with him — came the prompt reply — for ever and ever. Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century before him, she would build for him, in the park, several pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of ‘Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up’ above dear Cordula’s and Tobak’s bed, in the suite ‘wangled in one minute flat’ from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life during sea voyages. Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain!
They met again in the afternoon.
To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts, and the wash of an old-fashioned swimming pool rhythmically flushed the green tiles, but Lucette was a hardy girl used to bracing winds no less than to the detestable sun. Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs, which looked lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom as the breeze dried her skin. With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse.
She returned after a brief swim to the sun terrace where Van lay and said:
‘You can’t imagine’ — (‘I can imagine anything,’ he insisted) — ‘you can imagine, okay, what oceans of lotions and streams of creams I am compelled to use — in the privacy of my balconies or in desolate sea caves — before I can exhibit myself to the elements. I always teeter on the tender border between sunburn and suntan — or between lobster and Obst as writes Herb, my beloved painter — I’m reading his diary published by his last duchess, it’s in three mixed languages and lovely, I’ll lend it to you. You see, darling, I’d consider myself a pied cheat if the small parts I conceal in public were not of the same color as those on show.’ (3.5)
VN's Ada corresponds to Vadim's novel Ardis (1970). The phrase "for ever and ever" (used by Lucette) occurs in Pnin:
In the beginning Pnin was greatly embarrassed by the ease with which first names were bandied about in America: after a single party, with an iceberg in a drop of whisky to start and with a lot of whisky in a little tap water to finish, you were supposed to call a gray-templed stranger "Jim," while he called you "Tim" for ever and ever. If you forgot and called him next morning Professor E verett (his real name to you) it was (for him) a horrible insult. (4.8)
On the other hand, Oma is German for "grandmother," and rus K. (horrible Omarus K.) may hint at russkiy (Russian). In Ada Van Veen (the narrator and main character) does not suspect that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, 'little violet," and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren.