In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) the spectral narrators discuss the history of a pencil:
In his search for a commode to store his belongings Hugh Person, a tidy man, noticed that the middle drawer of an old desk relegated to a dark corner of the room, and supporting there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly by the lodger or servant (actually neither) who had been the last to check if it was empty (nobody had). My good Hugh tried to woggle it in; at first it refused to budge; then, in response to the antagony of a chance tug (which could not help profiting from the cumulative energy of several jogs) it shot out and spilled a pencil. This he briefly considered before putting it back.
It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never found. Now comes the act of attention.
In his shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath but one should be above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors). On the whole, it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned make. Going back a number of seasons (not as far, though, as Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction, we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is placed in a metal cylinder which has a blue eye, a sapphire with a hole drilled in it, and through this the caviar is forced. It issues in one continuous appetizing rodlet (watch for our little friend!), which looks as if it retained the shape of an earthworm's digestive tract (but watch, watch, do not be deflected!). It is now being cut into the lengths required for these particular pencils (we glimpse the cutter, old Elias Borrowdale, and are about to mouse up his forearm on a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in our haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.
Now let us not lose our precious bit of lead while we prepare the wood. Here's the tree! This particular pine! It Is cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark. We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here's the board that will yield the integument of the pencil in the shallow drawer (still not closed). We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes.
Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us! But he won't, oh no. (Chapter 3)
In his poem To Dawe, Esq. (1828) Pushkin mentions George Dawe’s divnyi karandash (wondrous pencil):
Зачем твой дивный карандаш
Рисует мой арапский профиль?
Хоть ты векам его предашь,
Его освищет Мефистофель.
Рисуй Олениной черты.
В жару сердечных вдохновений,
Лишь юности и красоты
Поклонником быть должен гений.
Why draw with your pencil sublime
My Negro profile? Though transmitted
By you it be to future time,
It will be by Mephisto twitted.
Draw fair Olenin's features, in the glow
Of heart-engendered inspiration:
Only on youth and beauty should bestow
A genius its adoration.
(VN’s translation)
Mephistopheles is the devil’s name in Goethe’s Faust (1808). In Goethe's tragedy (Scene 22: Walpurgis Night's Dream or the Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania) Teufel (devil) rhymes with Zweifel (doubt):
Dogmatiker.
Ich lasse mich nicht irre schreyn,
Nicht durch Critik noch Zweifel.
Der Teufel muß doch etwas seyn;
Wie gäb’s denn sonst auch Teufel?
Idealist.
Die Phantasie in meinem Sinn
Ist dießmal gar zu herrisch.
Fürwahr, wenn ich das alles bin,
So bin ich heute närrisch.
Realist.
Das Wesen ist mir recht zur Qual
Und muß mich baß verdrießen;
Ich stehe hier zum erstenmal
Nicht fest auf meinen Füßen.
Supernaturalist.
Mit viel Vergnügen bin ich da
Und freue mich mit diesen;
Denn von den Teufeln kann ich ja
Auf gute Geister schließen.
Skeptiker.
Sie gehn den Flämmchen auf der Spur,
Und glaub’n sich nah dem Schatze.
Auf Teufel reimt der Zweifel nur,
Da bin ich recht am Platze.
Dogmatist.
You'll not scream down my reason, though,
By criticism's cavils.
The devil's something, that I know,
Else how could there be devils?
Idealist.
Ah, phantasy, for once thy sway
Is guilty of high treason.
If all I see is I, to-day,
'Tis plain I've lost my reason.
Realist.
To me, of all life's woes and plagues,
Substance is most provoking,
For the first time I feel my legs
Beneath me almost rocking.
Supernaturalist.
I'm overjoyed at being here,
And even among these rude ones;
For if bad spirits are, 'tis clear,
There also must be good ones.
Skeptic.
Where'er they spy the flame they roam,
And think rich stores to rifle,
Here such as I are quite at home,
For Zweifel rhymes with Teufel.
The characters in Transparent Things include Mr. R. (an American writer of German descent whom Hugh Person visits in Switzerland). Mr. R.'s last letter to his publisher begins as follows:
Dear Phil,
This, no doubt, is my last letter to you. I am leaving you. I am leaving you for another even greater Publisher. In that House I shall be proofread by cherubim - or misprinted by devils, depending on the department my poor soul is assigned to. So adieu, dear friend, and may your heir auction this off most profitably. (Chapter 21)
Judging by the gross mistake in the novel’s last sentence (“Easy, you know, does it, son”), after his death Mr. R. goes straight to hell where he is misprinted by devils. The spectral narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils. VN's novel is one of the odd volumes out of the devils’ library mentioned by Pushkin in Chapter Four (XXX: 1-2) of Eugene Onegin:
Но вы, разрозненные томы
Из библиотеки чертей,
Великолепные альбомы,
Мученье модных рифмачей,
Вы, украшенные проворно
Толстого кистью чудотворной
Иль Баратынского пером,
Пускай сожжёт вас божий гром!
Когда блистательная дама
Мне свой in-quarto подаёт,
И дрожь и злость меня берёт,
И шевелится эпиграмма
Во глубине моей души,
А мадригалы им пиши!
But you, odd volumes
out of the devils' library,
the gorgeous albums,
the rack of fashionable rhymesters;
you, nimbly ornamented
by Tolstoy's wonder-working brush,
or Baratïnski's pen,
let the Lord's levin burn you!
Whenever her in-quarto a resplendent lady
proffers to me,
a tremor and a waspishness possess me,
and at the bottom of my soul
there stirs an epigram —
but madrigals you have to write for them!
In Chapter Eight (XXVI) of EO Pushkin describes a soirée at the house of Princess N (Tatiana Larin's married name) and mentions Saint-Priest (a caricaturist) and his pencils:
Тут был Проласов, заслуживший
Известность низостью души,
Во всех альбомах притупивший,
St.-Рriest, твои карандаши;
В дверях другой диктатор бальный
Стоял картинкою журнальной,
Румян, как вербный херувим,
Затянут, нем и недвижим,
И путешественник залётный,
Перекрахмаленный нахал,
В гостях улыбку возбуждал
Своей осанкою заботной,
И молча обмененный взор
Ему был общий приговор.
Here was Prolasov, who had gained
distinction by the baseness of his soul
and blunted in all albums,
Saint-P[riest], your pencils;
in the doorway another ball dictator
stood like a fashion plate,
as rosy as a Palm Week cherub,
tight-coated, mute and motionless;
and a far-flung traveler,
an overstarched jackanapes,
provoked a smile among the guests
by his studied deportment,
and an exchange of silent glances was
his universal condemnation.
Rumyan, kak verbnyi kheruvim (as rosy as a Palm Week cherub) brings to mind "proofread by cherubim" in Mr. R.'s last letter to his publisher.