In VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947) mouches volantes (“flying flies,” entoptic phenomena) are mentioned:
He had never indulged in the search for the True Substance, the One, the Absolute, the Diamond suspended from the Christmas Tree of the Cosmos. He had always felt the faint ridicule of a finite mind peering at the iridescence of the invisible through the prison bars of integers. And even if the Thing could be caught, why should he, or anybody else for that matter, wish the phenomenon to lose its curls, its mask, its mirror, and become the bald noumenon?
On the other hand, if (as some of the wiser neo-mathematicians thought) the physical world could be said to consist of measure groups (tangles of stresses, sunset swarms of electric midgets) moving like mouches volantes on a shadowy background that lay outside the scope of physics, then, surely, the meek restriction of one's interest to measuring the measurable smacked of the most humiliating futility. Take yourself away, you, with your ruler and scales! For without your rules, in an Unscheduled event other than the paper chase of science, barefooted Matter does overtake Light. (Chapter 14)
In a letter of April 28, 1896, to Elena Shavrov Chekhov (Shavrov's "cher maître") compares the minor characters in Shavrov’s story Musenka Messer to mouches volantes that prevent one from seeing things clearly:
Никша, Тополев, Кошеварова и проч. и проч. - ведь всё это mouches volantes, мешающие ясно видеть. На чердак их!! Я отправил бы туда даже барышню Горленко, которая иначе не представляется мне, как с пуговкой вместо носа. Заняться одной семьей Мессеров - разве это не благодарная, не приятная задача? А Мусенька, если допустить, что на Кавказе она не была жертвой случайности, а увлеклась серьезно, и если не бросать ее к концу рассказа - разве это не интересное лицо? Ох, не загромождайте! Говорил Вам - не загромождайте Ваших рассказов!
In the same letter to Shavrov Chekhov complains that it is cold and that lyutyi nord-ost (the fierce northeaster) is blowing in Melikhovo (Chekhov's country seat in the Province of Moscow):
Бррр! Холодно чертовски. Дует лютый норд-ост. А вина нет, нечего пить. В одном заштатном городе полицейский надзиратель сказал мне: "Хорош наш город, только любить здесь нечего!" Так и я скажу: хорошо в деревне жить, только в дурную погоду пить нечего!
In his poem Gerb (“The Blazon,” 1925) VN mentions nord-ost (the northeaster):
Лишь отошла земля родная,
в солёной тьме дохнул норд-ост,
как меч алмазный, обнажая
средь облаков стремнину звёзд.
Мою тоску, воспоминанья
клянусь я царственно беречь
с тех пор, как принял герб изгнанья:
на чёрном поле звёздный меч.
As soon as my native land had receded
in the briny dark the northeaster struck,
like a sword of diamond revealing
among the clouds a chasm of stars.
My yearning ache, my recollections
I swear to preserve with royal care
ever since I adopted the blazon of exile:
on a field of sable a starry sword.
According to VN, the term 'bend sinister' means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for 'general ideas' or 'human interest' (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one. (Introduction)
Zvyozdnyi mech (a starry sword) in VN's poem The Blazon brings to mind the Diamond suspended from the Christmas Tree of the Cosmos. Gerb izgnan'ya (the blazon of exile) makes one think of Gerb, one of the eleven generals in VN's play Izobretenie Val'sa ("The Waltz Invention," 1938). As he speaks to Krug, Ember (the Shakespeare scholar and translator) mentions an actor who played Metternich in The World Waltzes and who is cast as Polonius:
Here Ember suddenly raises his voice to a petulant scream of distress. He says that instead of this authentic Ophelia the impossible Gloria Bellhouse, hopelessly plump, with a mouth like the ace of hearts, has been selected for the part. He is especially incensed at the greenhouse carnations and lilies that the management gives her to play with in the 'mad' scene. She and the producer, like Goethe, imagine Ophelia in the guise of a canned peach: 'her whole being floats in sweet ripe passion,' says Johann Wolfgang, Ger. poet, nov., dram. & phil. Oh, horrible.
'Or her father... We all know him and love him, don't we? and it would be so simple to have him right: Polonius-Pantolonius, a pottering dotard in a padded robe, shuffling about in carpet slippers and following the sagging spectacles at the end of his nose, as he waddles from room to room, vaguely androgynous, combining the pa and the ma, a hermaphrodite with the comfortable pelvis of a eunuch — instead of which they have a stiff tall man who played Metternich in The World Waltzes and insists on remaining a wise and wily statesman for the rest of his days. Oh, most horrible.'
But there is worse to come. Ember asks his friend to hand him a certain book - no, the red one. Sorry, the other red one. (chapter 7)
In Chapter Five (XLI) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin describes Tatiana’s name-day party and mentions the waltz's noisy whirl, odnoobraznyi i bezumnyi (monotonous and mad), like young life's whirl:
Однообразный и безумный,
Как вихорь жизни молодой,
Кружится вальса вихорь шумный;
Чета мелькает за четой.
К минуте мщенья приближаясь,
Онегин, втайне усмехаясь,
Подходит к Ольге. Быстро с ней
Вертится около гостей,
Потом на стул её сажает,
Заводит речь о том о сём;
Спустя минуты две потом
Вновь с нею вальс он продолжает;
Все в изумленье. Ленский сам
Не верит собственным глазам.
Monotonous and mad
like young life's whirl,
the waltz's noisy whirl revolves,
pair after pair flicks by.
Nearing the minute of revenge,
Onegin, chuckling secretly,
goes up to Olga, rapidly with her
twirls near the guests,
then seats her on a chair,
proceeds to speak of this and that;
a minute or two having lapsed, then
again with her he goes on waltzing;
all in amazement are. Lenski himselfnter
does not believe his proper eyes.
Olga is the name of Krug's late wife:
We shall imagine then a prism or prison where rainbows are but octaves of ethereal vibrations and where cosmogonists with transparent heads keep walking into each other and passing through each other's vibrating voids, while, all around, various frames of reference pulsate with Fitz-Gerald contractions. Then we give a good shake to the telescopoid kaleidoscope (for what is your cosmos but an instrument containing small bits of coloured glass which, by an arrangement of mirrors, appear in a variety of symmetrical forms when rotated — mark: when rotated) and throw the damned thing away. How many of us have begun building anew — or thought they were building anew! Then they surveyed their construction. And lo: Heraclitus the Weeping Willow was shimmering by the door and Parmenides the Smoke was coming out of the chimney and Pythagoras (already inside) was drawing the shadows of the window frames on the bright polished floor where the flies played (I settle and you buzz by; then I buzz up and you settle; then jerk-jerk-jerk; then we both buzz up).
Long summer days. Olga playing the piano. Music, order. (Chapter 14)
Save me the Waltz (1932) is a novel by Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. At the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922) the hero says: "His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours." Krug is the author of the Komparatiwn Stuhdar en Sophistat tuen Pekrekh (The Philosophy of Sin in the American edition), a book that was translated into English by Krug's friend Ember:
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)