In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Hugh Person’s wife Armande calls her mother, to her face, skotina ("brute"):
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle. She called her mother, to her face, skotina, "brute" – not being aware, naturally, that she would never see her again after leaving with Hugh for New York and death. She liked to give carefully planned parties, and no matter how long ago this or that gracious gathering had taken place (ten months, fifteen months, or even earlier before her marriage, at her mother's house in Brussels or Witt) every party and topic remained for ever preserved in the humming frost of her tidy mind. She visualized those parties in retrospect as stars on the veil of the undulating past, and saw her guests as the extremities of her own personality: vulnerable points that had to be treated thenceforth with nostalgic respect. If Julia or June remarked casually that they had never met art critic C. (the late Charles Chamar's cousin), whereas both Julia and June had attended the party, as registered in Armande's mind, she might get very nasty, denouncing the mistake in a disdainful drawl, and adding, with belly-dance contortions: "In that case you must have forgotten also the little sandwiches from Père Igor" (some special shop) "which you enjoyed so much." Hugh had never seen such a vile temper, such morbid amour-propre, so self-centered a nature. Julia, who had skied and skated with her, thought her a darling, but most women criticized her, and in telephone chats with one another mimicked her rather pathetic little tricks of attack and retort. If anybody started to say "Shortly before I broke my leg – " she would chime in with the triumphant: "And I broke both in my childhood!" For some occult reason she used an ironic and on the whole disagreeable tone of voice when addressing her husband in public. (Chapter 17)
An abusing word when applied to a person, skotina means "cattle, livestock." Armande's mother, née Anastasia Petrovna Potapov, is the daughter of a wealthy cattle dealer who had emigrated with his family to England from Ryazan via Kharbin and Ceylon soon after the Bolshevist revolution. In the albums that Armande’s mother shows to Hugh Person there is a photograph of the late Potapov, in his seventies, looking very dapper with his gray little imperial and his Chinese house jacket, making the wee myopic sign of the Russian cross over an invisible baby in its deep cot:
The albums were quite as candid as the house, though less depressing. The Armande series, which exclusively interested our voyeur malgré lui, was inaugurated by a photograph of the late Potapov, in his seventies, looking very dapper with his gray little imperial and his Chinese house jacket, making the wee myopic sign of the Russian cross over an invisible baby in its deep cot. Not only did the snapshots follow Armande through all the phases of the past and all the improvements of amateur photography, but the girl also came in various states of innocent undress. Her parents and aunts, the insatiable takers of cute pictures, believed in fact that a girl child of ten, the dream of a Lutwidgean, had the same right to total nudity as an infant. The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest from anybody overhead on the landing, and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess. (Chapter 12)
The spectral narrators in VN’s novel seem to be the devils (who are supposed to fear the sign of the cross). In his poem Das Ewig-Weibliche (“The Eternal Feminine,” 1898) subtitled “A Word of Admonition to the Sea Devils” Vladimir Solovyov says that it depends on the devils to become bozh’ya skotinka (God’s flocks) again:
Черти морские меня полюбили,
Рыщут за мною они по следам:
В Финском поморье недавно ловили,
В Архипелаг я — они уже там!
Ясно, что черти хотят моей смерти,
Как и по чину прилично чертям.
Бог с вами, черти! Однако, поверьте,
Вам я себя на съеденье не дам.
Лучше вы сами послушайтесь слова,—
Доброе слово для вас я припас:
Божьей скотинкою сделаться снова,
Милые черти, зависит от вас.
Помните ль вы, как у этого моря,
Там, где стоял Амафунт и Пафос,
Первое в жизни нежданное горе
Некогда вам испытать довелось?
Помните ль розы над пеною белой,
Пурпурный отблеск в лазурных волнах?
Помните ль образ прекрасного тела,
Ваше смятенье, и трепет, и страх?
Та красота своей первою силой,
Черти, не долго была вам страшна;
Дикую злобу на миг укротила,
Но покорить не умела она.
В ту красоту, о коварные черти,
Путь себе тайный вы скоро нашли,
Адское семя растленья и смерти
В образ прекрасный вы сеять могли.
Знайте же: вечная женственность ныне
В теле нетленном на землю идет.
В свете немеркнущем новой богини
Небо слилося с пучиною вод.
Всё, чем красна Афродита мирская,
Радость домов, и лесов, и морей,—
Всё совместит красота неземная
Чище, сильней, и живей, и полней.
К ней не ищите напрасно подхода!
Умные черти, зачем же шуметь?
То, чего ждет и томится природа,
Вам не замедлить и не одолеть.
Гордые черти, вы всё же мужчины,—
С женщиной спорить не честь для мужей.
Ну, хоть бы только для этой причины,
Милые черти, сдавайтесь скорей!
The sea-devils grew fond of me;
Everywhere they traced my steps.
Yesterday in the Bay of Finland,
Today in the Aegean they lie in wait.
Clearly the devils seek my death,
As becomes them, befitting their nature;
God be with you, O devilish ones,
But I’ll not let you devour me!
It’s better that you listen to me,
For you I have some good advice:
– To become once more God’s flocks
Dear devils, – this depends on you…
The philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyov died on July 31, 1900. In his essay Pervoe avgusta (“August the First”) included in his collection Kruglyi god (“The Whole Year,” 1879) Saltykov-Shchedrin quotes the saying bylo by boloto, a cherti budut (if there is a bog, there would be devils in it):
Я очень хорошо помню пословицу: было бы болото, а черти будут, и признаю ее настолько правильною, что никаких вариантов в обратном смысле не допускаю. Воистину болото родит чертей, а не черти созидают болото. Жалкие черти! как им очиститься, просветлеть, перестать быть чертями, коль скоро их насквозь пронизывают испарения болота! Жалкие и смешные черти! как не смеяться над ними, коль скоро они сами принимают свое болото всурьез и устроивают там целый нелепый мир отношений, в котором бесцельно кружатся и мятутся, совершенно искренно веря, что делают какое-то прочное дело! Да, смешны и жалки эти кинутые в болото черти, но само болото — не жалко и не смешно...
In 1858 Saltykov-Shchedrin was appointed deputy governor of Ryazan where later he's got a nickname "the vice-Robespierre.” In his fairy tale Medved’ na voevodstve ("The Bear on Office of Voevode," 1884) Saltykov says that the bear was not evil, but was skotina (brute):
И точно: не успели мужики оглянуться, а Топтыгин уж тут как тут. Прибежал он на воеводство ранним утром, в самый Михайлов день, и сейчас же решил: "Быть назавтра кровопролитию". Что заставило его принять такое решение -- неизвестно: ибо он, собственно говоря, не был зол, а так, скотина.
И непременно бы он свой план выполнил, если бы лукавый его не попутал. (“Toptygin the First”)
When at a big dinner an old general asked young Turgenev (who sat eating his soup at a separate little table and refused to give place to the general) “do you know the difference between man and skot (animal),” Turgenev replied: “I do. Man eats sitting and skotina (cattle), standing.” Mr. R. (the writer in Transparent Things) brings to mind Princess R., a character in Turgenev's novel Ottsy i deti ("Fathers and Sons," 1862). The Russian writer who appears in VN’s novel seems to be Turgenev (the author of Faust, a story in nine letters, 1856):
For optical and animal reasons sexual love is less transparent than many other much more complicated things. One knows, however, that in his home town Hugh had courted a thirty-eight-year-old mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter but had been impotent with the first and not audacious enough with the second. We have here a banal case of protracted erotic itch, of lone practice for its habitual satisfaction, and of memorable dreams. The girl he accosted was stumpy but had a lovely, pale, vulgar face with Italian eyes. She took him to one of the better beds in a hideous old roominghouse – to the precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two, nearly ninety-three years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on his way to Italy. The bed – a different one, with brass knobs – was made, unmade, covered with a frock coat, made again; upon it stood a half-open green-checkered grip, and the frock coat was thrown over the shoulders of the night-shirted, bare-necked, dark-tousled traveler whom we catch in the act of deciding what to take out of the valise (which he will send by mail coach ahead) and transfer to the knapsack (which he will carry himself across the mountains to the Italian frontier). He expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter, to join him here any moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that romantics would undertake even during a drizzly spell in August; it rained even more in those uncomfortable times; his boots are still wet from a ten-mile ramble to the nearest casino. They stand outside the door in the attitude of expulsion, and he has wrapped his feet in several layers of German-language newspaper, a language which incidentally he finds easier to read than French. The main problem now is whether to confide to his knapsack or mail in his grip his manuscripts: rough drafts of letters, an unfinished short story in a Russian copybook bound in black cloth, parts of a philosophical essay in a blue cahier acquired in Geneva, and the loose sheets of a rudimentary novel under the provisional title of Faust in Moscow. As he sits at that deal table, the very same upon which our Person's whore has plunked her voluminous handbag, there shows through that bag, as it were, the first page of the Faust affair with energetic erasures and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green ink. The sight of his handwriting fascinates him; the chaos on the page is to him order, the blots are pictures, the marginal jottings are wings. Instead of sorting his papers, he uncorks his portable ink and moves nearer to the table, pen in hand. But at that minute there comes a joyful banging on the door. The door flies open and closes again. (Chapter 6)
The writer’s friend Kandidatov makes one think of Saltykov’s story Kandidat v stolpy (“A Candidate for the Pillars,” 1874). On the other hand, at the beginning of Turgenev’s "Fathers and Sons" kandidat (a University degree) is mentioned:
В 1835 году Николай Петрович вышел из университета кандидатом, и в том же году генерал Кирсанов, уволенный в отставку за неудачный смотр, приехал в Петербург с женою на житьё.
In 1835 Nikolay Petrovich graduated from the university, and in the same year General Kirsanov was put on the retired list after an unsuccessful review, and came with his wife to live in Petersburg. (chapter 1)
The main character in Turgenev's novel is Eugene Bazarov. In his reminiscences of Chekhov, Iz zapisnoy knizhki (o Chekhove), "From a Notebook. On Chekhov" (1914), Amfiteatrov (who signed some of his newspaper articles Moskovskiy Faust, "the Moscow Faust") calls Chekhov "a grandson of Bazarov:"
Медик и физиолог, внук Базарова, сидел в нём крепко и не допускал самообманов.
According to Amfiteatrov, in order to understand Chekhov's attitude to women one must reread Fathers and Sons and seriously think over Bazarov's love for Mme Odintsov:
Кто хочет понять Чехова в его ясном и естественном взгляде на женщину, тот должен перечитать "Отцов и детей" и серьёзно вдуматься в любовь Базарова к Одинцовой. Там, в намёке тургеневского проникновения, зарыты корни и
исходные точки прекрасной женской галереи, которую завещал нам великий художник Чехов.
In his memoir essay Amfiteatrov quotes what Chekhov once told him: "if the devils exist in nature, let the devils write about the devils:"
Потерпев полное любовное крушение, разбитый по всему фронту, мой Демон произносил над прахом своей погибшей возлюбленной весьма трогательный монолог, в котором, между прочим, имелась такая аттестация:
Была ты,
Как изумруд, душой светла!
Чехов оживился:
- Как? что? как?
- "Как изумруд, душой светла..."
- Послушайте, Байрон: почему же ваш Демон уверен, что у неё душа - зелёная?
Рассмешил меня - и стих умер. А после сказал:
- Стихи красивые, а что не печатаете, ей-ей, хорошо делаете, право... Ни к чему все эти черти с чувствами... И с человеками сущее горе, а ещё черти страдать начнут.
- Так символ же, Антон Павлович!
- Слушайте: что же - символ? Человек должен писать человеческую правду. Если черти существуют в природе, то о чертях пусть черти и пишут.
The action in Transparent Things ends in the future (in 1974). In VN's novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Vadim Vadimovich mentions a critic who was nicknamed by his rival "Prostakov-Skotinin":
I smoked my pipe and observed the feeding habits of two major novelists, three minor ones, one major poet, five minor ones of both sexes, one major critic (Demian Basilevski), and nine minor ones, including the inimitable "Prostakov-Skotinin," a Russian comedy name (meaning "simpleton and brute") applied to him by his archrival Hristofor Boyarski. (1.11)
In Fonfizin's comedy Nedorosl' ("The Minor", 1782) Mitrofan is the son of Mrs. Prostakov, born Skotinin. Prostak means "simpleton." Hugh Person is rather simple as lovers go:
He was still rather simple as lovers go. One might have said to fat, vulgar Madame Chamar: how dare you exhibit your child to sensitive strangers? But our Person vaguely imagined that this was a case of modern immodesty current in Madame Chamar's set. What "set," good Lord? The lady's mother had been a country veterinary's daughter, same as Hugh's mother (by the only coincidence worth noting in the whole rather sad affair). Take those pictures away, you stupid nudist! (Chapter 12)
According to Armande's mother, Diablonnet (a place where Mr. R. lives) always reminds her of the Russian for 'apple trees:' yabloni:
Madame Chamar answered in the noncommittal negative – though she might have consulted the telltale book marker, but out of a mother's instinctive prudence refrained from doing so. Instead she popped the paperback into her garden bag. Automatically, Hugh mentioned that he had recently visited its author.
"He lives somewhere in Switzerland, I think?"
"Yes, at Diablonnet, near Versex."
"Diablonnet always reminds me of the Russian for 'apple trees': yabloni. He has a nice house?"
"Well, we met in Versex, in a hotel, not at his home. I'm told it's a very large and a very old-fashioned place. We discussed business matters. Of course the house is always full of his rather, well, frivolous guests. I shall wait for a little while and then go." (ibid.)
In LATH Vadim Vadimovich's princely surname seems to be Yablonski.