In VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) Krug's parents died in a railway accident:
He got rid of her furs, of all her photographs, of her huge English sponge and supply of lavender soap, of her umbrella, of her napkin ring, of the little porcelain owl she had bought for Ember and never given him — but she refused to be forgotten. When (some fifteen years before) both his parents had been killed in a railway accident, he had managed to alleviate the pain and the panic by writing Chapter III (Chapter IV in later editions) of his 'Mirokonzepsia' wherein he looked straight into the eyesockets of death and called him a dog and an abomination. With one strong shrug of his burly shoulders he shook off the burden of sanctity enveloping the monster, and as with a thump and a great explosion of dust the thick old mats and carpets and things fell, he had experienced a kind of hideous relief. But could he do it again? (Chapter 10)
The narrator in Chekhov's story Zhena ("The Wife," 1892) is writing “A History of Railways:”
Я получил такое письмо:
«Милостивый государь, Павел Андреевич! Недалеко от вас, а именно в деревне Пестрове, происходят прискорбные факты, о которых считаю долгом сообщить. Все крестьяне этой деревни продали избы и всё свое имущество и переселились в Томскую губернию, но не доехали и возвратились назад. Здесь, понятно, у них ничего уже нет, всё теперь чужое; поселились они по три и четыре семьи в одной избе, так что население каждой избы не менее 15 человек обоего пола, не считая малых детей, и в конце концов есть нечего, голод, поголовная эпидемия голодного или сыпного тифа; все буквально больны. Фельдшерица говорит: придешь в избу и что видишь? Все больны, все бредят, кто хохочет, кто на стену лезет; в избах смрад, ни воды подать, ни принести ее некому, а пищей служит один мёрзлый картофель. Фельдшерица и Соболь (наш земский врач) что могут сделать, когда им прежде лекарства надо хлеба, которого они не имеют? Управа земская отказывается тем, что они уже выписаны из этого земства и числятся в Томской губернии, да и денег нет. Сообщая об этом вам и зная вашу гуманность, прошу, не откажите в скорейшей помощи. Ваш доброжелатель».
Очевидно, писала сама фельдшерица или этот доктор, имеющий звериную фамилию. Земские врачи и фельдшерицы в продолжение многих лет изо дня в день убеждаются, что они ничего не могут сделать, и всё-таки получают жалованье с людей, которые питаются одним мёрзлым картофелем, и всё-таки почему-то считают себя вправе судить, гуманен я или нет.
Обеспокоенный анонимным письмом и тем, что каждое утро какие-то мужики приходили в людскую кухню и становились там на колени, и тем, что ночью из амбара вытащили двадцать кулей ржи, сломав предварительно стену, и общим тяжелым настроением, которое поддерживалось разговорами, газетами и дурною погодой, — обеспокоенный всем этим, я работал вяло и неуспешно. Я писал «Историю железных дорог»; нужно было прочесть множество русских и иностранных книг, брошюр, журнальных статей, нужно было щёлкать на счетах, перелистывать логарифмы, думать и писать, потом опять читать, щёлкать и думать; но едва я брался за книгу или начинал думать, как мысли мои путались, глаза жмурились, я со вздохом вставал из-за стола и начинал ходить по большим комнатам своего пустынного деревенского дома. Когда надоедало ходить, я останавливался в кабинете у окна и, глядя через свой широкий двор, через пруд и голый молодой березняк, и через большое поле, покрытое недавно выпавшим, тающим снегом, я видел на горизонте на холме кучу бурых изб, от которых по белому полю спускалась вниз неправильной полосой черная грязная дорога. Это было Пестрово, то самое, о котором писал мне анонимный автор. Если бы не вороны, которые, предвещая дождь или снежную погоду, с криком носились над прудом и полем, и если бы не стук в плотницком сарае, то этот мирок, о котором теперь так много шумят, казался бы похожим на Мертвое озеро — так всё здесь тихо, неподвижно, безжизненно, скучно!
I RECEIVED the following letter:
“DEAR SIR, PAVEL ANDREICH!
“Not far from you—that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo—very distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which I feel it my duty to write to you. All the peasants of that village sold their cottages and all their belongings, and set off for the province of Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting there, and have come back. Here, of course, they have nothing now; everything belongs to other people. They have settled three or four families in a hut, so that there are no less than fifteen persons of both sexes in each hut, not counting the young children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing to eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence of hunger, or spotted, typhus; literally every one is stricken. The doctor’s assistant says one goes into a cottage and what does one see? Every one is sick, every one delirious, some laughing, others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no one to fetch them water, no one to give them a drink, and nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor) and his lady assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need bread which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them, on the ground that their names have been taken off the register of this district, and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants of Tomsk; and, besides, the Zemstvo has no money.
“Laying these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg you not to refuse immediate help.
“Your well-wisher.”
Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal name or his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their assistants go on for years growing more and more convinced every day that they can do nothing, and yet continue to receive their salaries from people who are living upon frozen potatoes, and consider they have a right to judge whether I am humane or not.
Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants came every morning to the servants’ kitchen and went down on their knees there, and that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen at night out of the barn, the wall having first been broken in, and by the general depression which was fostered by conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather—worried by all this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing “A History of Railways”; I had to read a great number of Russian and foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then again to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a book or began to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes began blinking, I would get up from the table with a sigh and begin walking about the big rooms of my deserted country-house. When I was tired of walking about I would stand still at my study window, and, looking across the wide courtyard, over the pond and the bare young birch-trees and the great fields covered with recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the horizon a group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road ran down in an irregular streak through the white field. That was Pestrovo, concerning which my anonymous correspondent had written to me. If it had not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated cawing over the pond and the fields, and the tapping in the carpenter’s shed, this bit of the world about which such a fuss was being made would have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all so still, motionless, lifeless, and dreary! (Chapter I)
The narrator in Chekhov's story (who had given up his post in the Ministry of Railways and had come into the country to live in peace and to devote himself to writing on social questions) compares mirok (this bit of the world around him) to Myortvoe ozero (the Dead Sea). Historical English names of the Dead Sea include the Salt Sea, Lake of Sodom from the biblical account of its destruction and Lake Asphaltites from Greek and Latin. Because of the large volume of ancient trade in the lake's naturally occurring free-floating bitumen, its usual names in ancient Greek and Roman geography were some form of Asphalt Lake or Sea. At the beginning of Bend Sinister an oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt is mentioned:
An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size. (Chapter 1)
In Mirokonzepsia ("The World-Conception;" the writing of this book had helped Krug to allay grief after his parents' death) there is mirok, a word (in the language spoken in Padukgrad it means "small pink potato") used by Krug as he speaks to the soldiers on the bridge across the Kur:
He yielded, with what pleasure there was in the act, to the soft warm pressure of tears. The sense of relief did not last, for as soon as he let them flow they became atrociously hot and abundant so as to interfere with his eyesight and respiration. He walked through a spasmodic fog down the cobbled Omigod Lane towards the embankment. Tried clearing his throat but it merely led to another gasping sob. He was sorry now he had yielded to that temptation for he could not stop yielding and the throbbing man in him was soaked. As usual he discriminated between the throbbing one and the one that looked on: looked on with concern, with sympathy, with a sigh, or with bland surprise.
This was the last stronghold of the dualism he abhorred. The square root of I is I. Footnotes, forget-me-nots. The stranger quietly watching the torrents of local grief from an abstract bank. A familiar figure, albeit anonymous and aloof. He saw me crying when I was ten and led me to a looking glass in an unused room (with an empty parrot cage in the corner) so that I might study my dissolving face. He has listened to me with raised eyebrows when I said things which I had no business to say. In every mask I tried on, there were slits for his eyes. Even at the very moment when I was rocked by the convulsion men value most. My saviour. My witness. And now Krug reached for his handkerchief which was a dim white blob somewhere in the depths of his private night. Having at last crept out of a labyrinth of pockets, he mopped and wiped the dark sky and amorphous houses; then he saw he was nearing the bridge.
On other nights it used to be a line of lights with a certain lilt, a metrical incandescence with every foot rescanned and prolonged by reflections in the black snaky water. This night there was only a diffused glow where a Neptune of granite loomed upon his square rock which rock continued as a parapet which parapet was lost in the mist. As Krug, trudging steadily, approached, two Ekwilist soldiers barred his way. More were lurking around, and when a lantern moved, knight-wise, to check him, he noticed a little man dressed as a meshchaniner [petty bourgeois] standing with folded arms and smiling a sickly smile. The two soldiers (both, oddly enough, had pock-marked faces) were asking, Krug understood, for his (Krug's) papers. While he was fumbling for the pass they bade him hurry and mentioned a brief love affair they had had, or would have, or invited him to have with his mother.
'I doubt,' said Krug as he went through his pockets, 'whether these fancies which have bred maggot-like from ancient taboos could be really transformed into acts — and this for various reasons. Here it is' (it almost wandered away while I was talking to the orphan — I mean, the nurse).
They grabbed it as if it had been a hundred krun note. While they were subjecting the pass to an intense examination, he blew his nose and slowly put back his handkerchief into the left-hand pocket of his overcoat; but on second thought transferred it to his right-hand trouser pocket.
'What's this?' asked the fatter of the two, marking a word with the nail of the thumb he was pressing against the paper. Krug, holding his reading spectacles to his eyes, peered over the man's hand. 'University,' he said. 'Place where things are taught — nothing very important. '
'No, this,' said the soldier.
'Oh, "philosophy. " You know. When you try to imagine a mirok [small pink potato] without the least reference to any you have eaten or will eat.' He gestured vaguely with his glasses and then slipped them into their lecture-hall nook (vest pocket).
'What is your business? Why are you loafing near the bridge?' asked the fat soldier while his companion tried to decipher the permit in his turn.
'Everything can be explained,' said Krug. 'For the last ten days or so I have been going to the Prinzin Hospital every morning. A private matter. Yesterday my friends got me this document because they foresaw that the bridge would be guarded after dark. My home is on the south side. I am returning much later than usual.
'Patient or doctor?' asked the thinner soldier.
'Let me read you what this little paper is meant to convey,' said Krug, stretching out a helpful hand.
'Read on while I hold it,' said the thin one, holding it upside down.
'Inversion,' said Krug, 'does not trouble me, but I need my glasses. ' He went through the familiar nightmare of overcoat — coat — trouser pockets, and found an empty spectacle case. He was about to resume his search.
'Hands up,' said the fatter soldier with hysterical suddenness.
Krug obeyed, holding the case heavenward. (Chapter 2)
In Chekhov's story "The Wife" Ivan Ivanych Bragin says Smert' ne kartoshka ("Death is not a potato"):
— Да... — забормотал Иван Иваныч некстати. — У купца Бурова тысяч четыреста есть, а может, и больше. Я ему и говорю: «Отвали-ка, тезка, голодающим тысяч сто или двести. Все равно помирать будешь, на тот свет с собой не возьмешь». Обиделся. А помирать-то ведь надо. Смерть не картошка.
“Yes...” Ivan Ivanych muttered inappropriately. “Burov, the merchant, must have four hundred thousand at least. I said to him: ‘My namesake, hand over one or two thousand to the famine. You can’t take it with you when you die, anyway.’ He was offended. But we all have to die, you know. Death is not a potato.” (II)
In July 1904 Chekhov died in Badenweiler, a Kurort in SW Germany. According to his wife, Olga Knipper, after Chekhov's death a huge black butterfly flew into the room:
Пришёл доктор, велел дать шампанского. Антон Павлович сел и как-то значительно, громко сказал доктору по-немецки (он очень мало знал по-немецки): "Их стербе". Потом взял бокал, повернул ко мне лицо, улыбнулся своей удивительной улыбкой, сказал: "Давно я не пил шампанского…", покойно выпил всё до дна, тихо лёг на левый бок и вскоре умолкнул навсегда… И страшную тишину ночи нарушала только, как вихрь, ворвавшаяся огромных размеров чёрная ночная бабочка, которая мучительно билась о горящие электрические лампочки и металась по комнате... ("The Last Years")
Bend Sinister ends in the sentence "A good night for mothing:"
Across the lane, two windows only were still alive. In one, the shadow of an arm was combing invisible hair; or perhaps it was a movement of branches; the other was crossed by the slanting black trunk of a poplar. The shredded ray of a streetlamp brought out a bright green section of wet boxhedge. I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing. (Chapter 18)
In his Mirokonzepsia Krug called death a dog and an abomination. The grandparents of Box II, the Nabokovs's dachshund that followed its masters into exile, were Dr. Anton Chekhov's Quina and Brom. Dachs is German for "badger." In "The Wife" the narrator calls Dr. Sobol (whose name means in Russian "sable-marten") "Monsieur Raccoon:"
— Мосье Енот, — обратился я к доктору, — сколько у нас в уезде больниц?
— Соболь… — поправила жена.
— Две-с, — ответил Соболь.
— А сколько покойников приходится ежегодно на долю каждой больницы?
— Павел Андреич, мне нужно поговорить с вами, — сказала мне жена.
Она извинилась пред гостями и вышла в соседнюю комнату. Я встал и пошел за ней.
“Monsieur Raccoon,” I said, addressing the doctor, “how many hospitals have we in the district?”
“Sobol,” my wife corrected.
“Two,” answered Sobol.
“And how many deaths are there every year in each hospital?”
“Pavel Andreich, I want to speak to you,” said my wife.
She apologized to the visitors and went to the next room. I got up and followed her. (III)