The main character in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947), the philosopher Adam Krug is the author of the Komparatiwn Stuhdar en Sophistat tuen Pekrekh:
Ember put down his pen again and sat lost in thought. He too had participated in that brilliant career. An obscure scholar, a translator of Shakespeare in whose green, damp country he had spent his studious youth — he innocently shambled into the limelight when a publisher asked him to apply the reverse process to the Komparatiwn Stuhdar en Sophistat tuen Pekrekh or, as the title of the American edition had it, a little more snappily, The Philosophy of Sin (banned in four states and a best seller in the rest). What a strange trick of chance — this masterpiece of esoteric thought endearing itself at once to the middle-class reader and competing for first honours during one season with that robust satire Straight Flush, and then, next year, with Elisabeth Ducharme's romance of Dixieland, When the Train Passes, and for twenty-nine days (leap year) with the book club selection Through Towns and Villages, and for two consecutive years with that remarkable cross between a certain kind of wafer and a lollipop, Louis Sontag's Annunciata, which started so well in the Caves of St Barthelemy and ended in the funnies. (Chapter 3)
Pekrekh seems to combine péché (sin in French) with grekh (sin in Russian). La Pécheresse (1912; The Sinner) is a novel by Henri de Régnier (1864-1936); Greshnitsa (1857; The Sinner) is a poem by A. K. Tolstoy (1817-75). A son-in-law of José-Maria de Heredia (1842-1905) and brother-in-law of Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925), Henri de Régnier was a friend of Stéphan Mallarmé (1842-98), an uncle of Krug's mother:
In the classroom where the final examination was being held, young Paduk, his sleek hair resembling a wig too small for his shaven head, sat between Brun the Ape and a lacquered dummy representing an absentee. Adam Krug, wearing a brown dressing gown, sat directly behind. Somebody on his left asked him to pass a book to the family of his right-hand neighbour, and this he did. The book, he noticed, was in reality a rosewood box shaped and painted to look like a volume of verse and Krug understood that it contained some secret commentaries that would assist an unprepared student's panic-stricken mind. Krug regretted that he had not opened the box or book while it passed through his hands. The theme to be tackled was an afternoon with Mallarmé, an uncle of his mother, but the only part he could remember seemed to be 'le sanglot dont j'étais encore ivre'. (Chapter 5)
Count Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy was a nephew of Alexey Perovski (1787-1836), the author (under the penname Antoniy Pogorelski) of Chyornaya kuritsa, ili Podzemnye zhiteli ("The Little Black Hen, or the Underground People," 1829). This fairy tale influenced Vladimir Odoevski (it was Odoevski who wrote Pushkin's obituary that begins with the words "The sun of the Russian poetry has gone down"), the author of Gorodok v tabakerke ("The Little Town in the Snuffbox," 1834). Its title brings to mind Maxim Gorki's novella Gorodok Okurov ("The Town of Okurov," 1909). It has an epigraph from Dostoevski:
«...уездная, звериная глушь». Ф. М. Достоевский
“... provincial, bestial wilderness.” F. M. Dostoevski
In the late 1860s Dostoevski intended to write a big novel (as long as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace) entitled Zhitie velikogo greshnika ("The Life of a Great Sinner"). Leo Tolstoy (who stopped writing fiction because he thought the process sinful) said:
Грешить — дело человеческое, оправдывать свой грех — дело дьявольское.
Половое чувство во всех животных и в человеке вложено для великого дела продолжения рода, и потому грех думать, что чувство это дано человеку только для удовольствия.
To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.
The sexual feeling is given to all animals and humans for the great business of procreation, therefore it is a sin to think that the sexual feeling is given to man only for pleasure.
At the beginning of VN's novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert calls Lolita "My sin, my soul:"
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. (1.1)
A brilliant helper to Krug in his brilliant career, Krug’s wife Olga was a regular radabarbara (full-blown handsome woman):
“Landscapes as yet unpolluted with conventional poetry, and life, that self-conscious stranger, being slapped on the back and told to relax.” He had written this upon his return, and Olga, with devilish relish, had pasted into a shagreen album indigenous allusions to the most original thinker of our times. Ember evoked her ample being, her thirty-seven resplendent years, the bright hair, the full lips, the heavy chin which went so well with the cooing undertones of her voice—something ventriloquial about her, a continuous soliloquy following in willowed shade the meanderings of her actual speech. He saw Krug, the ponderous dandruffed maestro, sitting there with a satisfied and sly smile on his big swarthy face (recalling that of Beethoven in the general correlation of its rugged features)—yes, lolling in that old rose armchair while Olga buoyantly took charge of the conversation—and how vividly one remembered the way she had of letting a sentence bounce and ripple over the three quick bites she took at the raisin cake she held, and the brisk triple splash of her plump hand over the sudden stretch of her lap as she brushed the crumbs away and went on with her story. Almost extravagantly healthy, a regular radabarbára [full-blown handsome woman]: those wide radiant eyes, that flaming cheek to which she would press the cool back of her hand, that shining white forehead with a whiter scar—the consequence of an automobile accident in the gloomy Lagodan mountains of legendary fame. Ember could not see how one might dispose of the recollection of such a life, the insurrection of such a widowhood. With her small feet and large hips, with her girlish speech and her matronly bosom, with her bright wits and the torrents of tears she shed that night, while dripping with blood herself, over the crippled crying doe that had rushed into the blinding lights of the car, with all this and with many other things that Ember knew he could not know, she would lie now, a pinch of blue dust in her cold columbarium. (Chapter 3)
Le Secret de la comtesse Barbara (1913) is a story by Henri de Régnier. On the other hand, radabarbara seems to hint at rabarbar, a vernacular name of reven' (rhubarb, a vegetable derived from cultivated plants in the genus Rheum). In his humorous poem "The History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev" (1868) A. K. Tolstoy (a close friend of Alexander II) describes the reign of the tsar Peter I and says that he does not blame Peter, because it is healthy to give reven' (a decoction of rhubarb) to a sick stomach:
Царь Петр любил порядок,
Почти как царь Иван,
И так же был не сладок,
Порой бывал и пьян.
Он молвил: «Мне вас жалко,
Вы сгинете вконец;
Но у меня есть палка,
И я вам всем отец!..
Не далее как к святкам
Я вам порядок дам!»
И тотчас за порядком
Уехал в Амстердам.
Вернувшися оттуда,
Он гладко нас обрил,
А к святкам, так что чудо,
В голландцев нарядил.
Но это, впрочем, в шутку,
Петра я не виню:
Больному дать желудку
Полезно ревеню.