On the bridge across the Kur (in VN's novel Bend Sinister, 1947, the river that flows in Padukgrad and Omigod) one of the soldiers says that his cousin, the gardener, lives in Bervok and Krug mentions Bervok's grand apples:
Another soldier came up idly juggling with a flashlight and again Krug had a glimpse of a pale-faced little man standing apart and smiling.
'I want some fun too,' the third soldier said.
'Well, well,' said Krug. 'Fancy seeing you here. How is your cousin, the gardener?'
The newcomer, an ugly, ruddy-cheeked country lad, looked at Krug blankly and then pointed to the fat soldier.
'It is his cousin, not mine.'
'Yes, of course,' said Krug quickly. 'Exactly what I meant. How is he, that gentle gardener? Has he recovered the use of his left leg?'
'We have not seen each other for some time,' answered the fat soldier moodily. 'He lives in Bervok.'
'A fine fellow,' said Krug. 'We were all so sorry when he fell into that gravel pit. Tell him, since he exists, that Professor Krug often recalls the talks we had over a jug of cider. Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past. Grand apples in Bervok.'
'This is his permit,' said the fat moody one to the rustic ruddy one, who took the paper gingerly and at once handed it back.
'You had better call that ved'min syn [son of a witch] there,' he said.
It was then that the little man was brought forward. He seemed to labour under the impression that Krug was some sort of superior in relation to the soldiers for he started to complain in a thin almost feminine voice, saying that he and his brother owned a grocery store on the other side and that both had venerated the Ruler since the blessed seventeenth of that month. The rebels were crushed, thank God, and he wished to join his brother so that a Victorious People might obtain the delicate foods he and his deaf brother sold.
'Cut it out,' said the fat soldier, 'and read this.'
The pale grocer complied. Professor Krug had been given full liberty by the Committee of Public Welfare to circulate after dusk. To cross from the south town to the north one. And back. The reader desired to know why he could not accompany the professor across the bridge. He was briskly kicked back into the darkness. Krug proceeded to cross the black river. (Chapter 2)
Bervok seems to hint at Brekov Castle, a ruined Gothic and Renaissance era stone castle above the village of Brekov in east Slovakia. It is a hilltop castle located on a cone-shaped hill with a limestone bedrock, in an altitude of approximately 480 m above sea level. The eponymous village at the foot of the castle hill was founded as an adjoined castle settlement, similarly to several other villages in the region.
Das Schloß (The Castle) is the last novel by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer based in Prague. Its protagonist known only as "K." arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Count Westwest. The Count's name and grand apples in Bervok make one think of the Golden Apples in the Garden of Hesperides (the "Daughters of the Evening" or "Nymphs of the West"). It was rumored that those apples (stealing three of them is Hercules' Eleventh Labor) gave immortal life to anyone who ate them.
Kafka is the author of Der Process (The Trial), a novel written in 1914-15 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. It tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. In his Open Letter to Stalin (dated Aug. 17, 1939, and published by Kerenski in the Russian émigré magazine Novaya Rossiya, Oct. 1, 1939) Fyodor Raskolnikov (who died in a hospital in Nice on Sept. 12, 1939) mentions srednevekovye protsessy ved'm (the medieval witch trials):
С помощью грязных подлогов вы инсценировали судебные процессы, превосходящие вздорностью обвинения знакомые вам по семинарским учебникам средневековые процессы ведьм.
With the help of dirty forgeries, you staged trials that surpassed in absurdity the medieval witch trials familiar to you from your seminary textbooks .
One of the soldiers on the bridge across the Kur river calls the grocer ved'min syn (son of a witch). In his Open Letter to Stalin Raskolnikov famously calls Stalin (who was born in Gori, a Caucasian city on the Kura river) "a chef preparing spicy dishes:"
Вы - повар, готовящий острые блюда, для нормального человеческого желудка они не съедобны.
You are a chef preparing spicy dishes, for a normal human stomach they are not edible.
There was in Krug's household a male cook who had left a week ago, disapproving of what he had neatly described as its 'subversive atmosphere:'
He entered the dining-room. A plate of cold tongue garnished with cucumber slices and the painted cheek of a cheese were quietly expecting him.
The woman had a remarkable ear. She slipped out of her room next to the nursery and joined Krug. Her name was Claudina and for the last week or so she had been the sole servant in Krug's household: the male cook had left, disapproving of what he had neatly described as its 'subversive atmosphere'. (Chapter 3)
Cucumber slices make one think of Gurk (Gurke is German for "cucumber"), a soldier on the bridge across the Kur whose name the grocer puts on Krug's pass. Grand apples in Bervok also bring to mind the apples that in Kafka's story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915) Gregor's father (who sees his metamorphosed son as a threat) throws at Gregor. Kafka's story begins as follows:
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt. Er lag auf seinem panzerartig harten Rücken und sah, wenn er den Kopf ein wenig hob, seinen gewölbten, braunen, von bogenförmigen Versteifungen geteilten Bauch, auf dessen Höhe sich die Bettdecke, zum gänzlichen Niedergleiten bereit, kaum noch erhalten konnte. Seine vielen, im Vergleich zu seinem sonstigen Umfang kläglich dünnen Beine flimmerten ihm hilflos vor den Augen.
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a gigantic insect. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes. (Chapter I)
According to Olga (Krug's late wife), during his American lecture tour Krug experienced togliwn ochnat divodiv [the daily surprise of awakening]:
In the beginning, Krug, although professing to be amused, was greatly annoyed by the whole business, while Ember felt abashed and apologetic and covertly wondered whether perhaps his particular brand of rich synthetic English had contained some outlandish ingredient, some dreadful additional spice that might account for the unexpected excitement; but with a greater perspicacity than the two puzzled scholars showed, Olga prepared herself to enjoy thoroughly, far years to come, the success of a work whose very special points she knew better than its ephemeral reviewers could know. She it was who made the horrified Ember persuade Krug to go on that American lecture tour, as if she foresaw that its plangent reverberations would win him at home the esteem which his work in its native garb had neither wrung from academic stolidity nor induced in the comatose mass of amorphous readerdom. Not that the trip itself had been displeasing. Far from it. Although Krug, being as usual chary of squandering in idle conversation such experiences as might undergo unpredictable metamorphoses later on (if left to pupate quietly in the alluvium of the mind), had spoken little of his tour, Olga had managed to recompose it in full and to relay it gleefully to Ember who had vaguely expected a flow of sarcastic disgust. 'Disgust?' cried Olga. 'Why, he has known enough of that here. Disgust, indeed! Elation, delight, a quickening of the imagination, a disinfection of the mind, togliwn ochnat divodiv [the daily surprise of awakening]!' (Chapter 3)
Amerika is Kafka's incomplete first novel, also known as The Man Who Disappeared, The Missing Person and as Lost in America (Germ., Der Verschollene), written between 1911 and 1914 and published posthumously in 1927. Kafka named Max Brod (1884-1968) as his literary executor, instructing Brod to burn his unpublished work upon his death. Brod refused and had Kafka's works published instead. Brod is Russian for "ford." At the end of Krylov's fable Lzhets ("The Liar," 1811) the Liar (who insist that he saw in Rome a cucumber as big as a mountain) tells his friend: Chem nam na most itti, poishchem luchshe brodu ('Instead of going on bridge, it's better looking for a ford! '). The Liar in Krylov's fable uses the phrase kruglyi bozhiy god (the whole year):
Из дальних странствий возвратясь,
Какой-то дворянин (а может быть, и князь),
С приятелем своим пешком гуляя в поле,
Расхвастался о том, где он бывал,
И к былям небылиц без счету прилыгал.
«Нет», говорит: «что я видал,
Того уж не увижу боле.
Что́ здесь у вас за край?
То холодно, то очень жарко,
То солнце спрячется, то светит слишком ярко.
Вот там-то прямо рай!
И вспомнишь, так душе отрада!
Ни шуб, ни свеч совсем не надо:
Не знаешь век, что есть ночная тень,
И круглый божий год все видишь майский день.
From distant travelling on his return to home,
One nobleman (perhaps, he was a Prince) ,
While walking through the field, was bragging over
The places, where he had been,
and alternated truth with lie.
'Wow! - he said, - What I had seen there,
I'll never see again. Look at your land!
It has the cold winter and hot summer,
Your sun always hides, or shines so bright to dazzle.
But if you take the place,
where I was feeling a delight,
That was the real Paradise!
You have no any need to wear fur-coat,
And it is so bright, you need not any candle in the night,
The whole year you are fond of weather,
Which here is only in May.
In the adjective kruglyi (round) there is krug (circle). According to Krug, anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past. In his story Der Nachhause Weg (The Way Home) Kafka mentions his past and his future:
Ich schätze meine Vergangenheit gegen meine Zukunft, finde aber beide vortrefflich, kann keiner von beiden den Vorzug geben und nur die Ungerechtigkeit der Vorsehung, die mich so begünstigt, muß ich tadeln. Nur als ich in mein Zimmer trete, bin ich ein wenig nachdenklich, aber ohne daß ich während des Treppensteigens etwas Nachdenkenswertes gefunden hätte. Es hilft mir nicht viel, daß ich das Fenster gänzlich öffne und daß in einem Garten die Musik noch spielt.
I weigh my past against my future, but find both of them admirable, cannot give either the preference, and find nothing to grumble at save the injustice of providence that has so clearly favored me. Only as I come into my room I feel a little meditative, without having met anything on the stairs worth meditating about. It doesn't help me much to open the window wide and hear music still playing in a garden.