In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Mr. R.’s publisher receives Mr. R.’s last letter on the day of Mr. R.’s death:
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.
Its holographical nature is explained by the fact that I prefer it not to be read by Tom Tam or one of his boy typists. I am mortally sick after a botched operation in the only private room of a Bolognese hospital. The kind young nurse who will mail it has told me with dreadful carving gestures something I paid her for as generously as I would her favors if I still were a man. Actually the favors of death knowledge are infinitely more precious than those of love. According to my almond-eyed little spy, the great surgeon, may his own liver rot, lied to me when he declared yesterday with a "deathhead's grin that the operazione had been perfetta. Well, it had been so in the sense Euler called zero the perfect number. Actually, they ripped me open, cast one horrified look at my decayed fegato, and without touching it sewed me up again. I shall not bother you with the Tamworth problem. You should have seen the smug expression of the oblong fellow's bearded lips when he visited me this morning. As you know - as everybody, even Marion, knows - he gnawed his way into all my affairs, crawling into every cranny, collecting every German-accented word of mine, so that now he can boswell the dead man just as he had bossed very well the living one. I am also writing my and your lawyer about the measures I would like to be taken after my departure in order to thwart Tamworth at every turn of his labyrinthian plans.
The only child I have ever loved is the ravishing, silly, treacherous little Julia Moore. Every cent and centime I possess as well as all literary remains that can be twisted out of Tamworth's clutches must go to her, whatever the ambiguous obscurities contained in my will: Sam knows what I am hinting at and will act accordingly.
The last two parts of my Opus are in your hands. I am very sorry that Hugh Person is not there to look after its publication. When you acknowledge this letter do not say a word of having received it, but instead, in a kind of code that would tell me you bear in mind this letter, give me, as a good old gossip, some information about him - why, for example, was he jailed, for a year - or more? - if he was found to have acted in a purely epileptic trance; why was he transferred to an asylum for the criminal insane after his case was reviewed and no crime found? And why was he shuttled between prison and madhouse for the next five or six years before ending up as a privately treated patient? How can one treat dreams, unless one is a quack? Please tell me all this because Person was one of the nicest persons I knew and also because you can smuggle all kinds of secret information for this poor soul in your letter about him.
Poor soul is right, you know. My wretched liver is as heavy as a rejected manuscript; they manage to keep the hideous hyena pain at bay by means of frequent injections but somehow or other it remains always present behind the wall of my flesh like the muffled thunder of a permanent avalanche which obliterates there, beyond me, all the structures of my imagination, all the landmarks of my conscious self. It is comic - but I used to believe that dying persons saw the vanity of things, the futility of fame, passion, art, and so forth. I believed that treasured memories in a dying man's mind dwindled to rainbow wisps; but now I feel just the contrary: my most trivial sentiments and those of all men have acquired gigantic proportions. The entire solar system is but a reflection in the crystal of my (or your) wrist watch. The more I shrivel the bigger I grow. I suppose this is an uncommon phenomenon. Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one big book, that book would become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new creed. Fortunately for my self-esteem that book will not be written - not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately.
Note added by the recipient:
Received on the day of the writer's death. File under Repos - R. (Chapter 21)
“File under Repos” brings to mind Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel Ubezhishche Monrepo (“Mon Repos Haven,” 1879) and Vladimir Solovyov’s poem Monrepo (Monrepos, 1894):
Серое небо и серое море
Сквозь золотых и пурпурных листов,
Словно тяжелое старое горе
Смолкло в последнем прощальном уборе
Светлых, прозрачных и радужных снов.
The gray sky and the gray sea,
through the golden and purple leaves,
like a heavy old grief,
became silent in the last farewell dress
of bright, transparent and iridescent dreams.
Mon Repos or Monrepos is an extensive English landscape park in the northern part of the rocky island of Linnasaari (Tverdysh, Slottsholmen) outside Vyborg, Russia. From 1788 (when it was acquired by Baron Ludwig Heinrich von Nicolay, 1737-1820, a poet and mentor of the future Emperor Paul I of Russia) to 1944 (when Vyborg was subsumed into the Soviet Union) the estate of Mon Repos belonged to the Nicolay family.
In the second part of his essay on Leonid Andreyev (the writer who spent his last years and died, in 1919, in Finland), Nekto v serom ("Someone in Gray," 1914), Amfiteatrov mentions the supernaturalist Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811), a target of Goethe's attack in Faust (1808):
Стихотворение Бальмонта вдохновлено известным магическим рисунком, где цельность Божества символизируется белою фигурою и ее точнейшим прямым, отвесным черным обратным отражением. Байронический эффект стихотворения -- в том, что отражение принимает себя за бытие, а бытие почитает своим отражением. Это по-своему красиво, мрачно и зло. Но для меня в этой статье не важно, где бытие, где отражение. Важно то, что Бальмонт принимает в богоборстве своем одинаково и бытие, и отражение, считается с ними как с фактом. Подобно каждому русскому каиниту, он проходит в данном случае тот трагикомический процесс мысли, что высмеял Гёте в четверостишии "Сна в Вальпургиеву ночь", обращенном против супернатуралиста Николаи:
Mit viel Vergnügen bin ich da
Und freue mich mit diesen;
Denn von den Teufeln kann ich ja
Auf gute Geister schließen.
Amfiteatrov quotes four lines from "Walpurgis Night's Dream or the Golden Wedding of Oberon and Titania" (Faust, Scene 22):
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.
By "bad spirits" the devils are meant. The spectral narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils. After his death Mr. R. goes straight to hell where he is misprinted by devils (and becomes a devil himself, as Hugh Person later does). A German Baron, Mr. R. brings to mind Princess R., Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov’s late mistress in Turgenev's novel Ottsy i deti ("Fathers and Sons," 1862). Turgenev is the author of Faust, a story in nine letters (1856). After the death of Person Senior, a prostitute takes Hugh Person to a hotel room where a Russian novelist ninety-three years ago had worked on a novel under the provisional title of Faust in Moscow:
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. 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 surname Kandidatov comes from kandidat (candidate). At the beginning of "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 inspection, and came with his wife to live in Petersburg. (chapter 1)
The main character in “Father and Sons” 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 to 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.
According to Amfiteatrov, Chekhov in jest called him Byron. Describing in his diary his first meeting with Armande, Hugh Person mentions Byron:
In a diary he kept in fits and starts Hugh wrote that night in Versex:
"Spoke to a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a romantic tumult never felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule aurait juré avec la dernière syllabe de mon prénom. I believe Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu. Charmingly sophisticated, yet marvelously naive. Chalet above Witt built by father. If you find yourself in those parages. Wished to know if I liked my job. My job! I replied: "Ask me what I can do, not what I do, lovely girl, lovely wake of the sun through semitransparent black fabric. I can commit to memory a whole page of the directory in three minutes flat but am incapable of remembering my own telephone number. I can compose patches of poetry as strange and new as you are, or as anything a person may write three hundred years hence, but I have never published one scrap of verse except some juvenile nonsense at college. I have evolved on the playing courts of my father's school a devastating return of service - a cut clinging drive - but am out of breath after one game. Using ink and aquarelle I can paint a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence with all the mountains of paradise reflected therein, but am unable to draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the blazing windows of a villa by Plam. I have taught French in American schools but have never been able to get rid of my mother's Canadian accent, though I hear it clearly when I whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Déjanire that I may mount sur mon bûcher. I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree. I possess a doctor's degree in philosophy, but have no German. I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius.' By a coincidence worthy of that other genius, his stepdaughter had given her the book she was reading. Julia Moore has no doubt forgotten that I possessed her a couple of years ago. Both mother and daughter are intense travelers. They have visited Cuba and China, and such-like dreary, primitive spots, and speak with fond criticism of the many charming and odd people they made friends with there. Parlez-moi de son stepfather. Is he très fasciste? Could not understand why I called Mrs. R.'s left-wingism a commonplace bourgeois vogue. Mais au contraire, she and her daughter adore radicals! Well, I said, Mr. R., lui, is immune to politics. My darling thought that was the trouble with him. Toffee-cream neck with a tiny gold cross and a grain de beauté. Slender, athletic, lethal!" (Chapter 9)
Btw., every turn of Tamworth's labyrinthian plans (mentioned by Mr. R. in his last letter to his publisher) brings to mind Der Schmerz wird neu, es wiederholt die Klage / Des Lebens labyrinthisch irren Lauf (Pain is renewed, and sorrow: all the ways, / Life wanders in its labyrinthine flight), the lines in Goethe's "Dedication to Faust." In 1932 Goethe's Zueignung was translated into Russian by VN. A word that rhymes with Teufel (devil), Zweifel (doubt) is related to Verzweiflung (despair). Otchayanie ("Despair," 1934) is a novel by VN.