"I cannot understand," continued Tomski,
"how it is that my grandmother does not punt."
"What is there remarkable about an old
lady of eighty not punting?" said Narumov. (Chapter I)
Vadim's benefactor (who can be his real father), Count Starov, brings
to mind staraya grafinya (the old Countess) in The Queen
of Spades.
On the other
hand, Nikifor Starov is a namesake of Nikifor, blagorodneyshiy starik
(the noble old man) in Tarakan (The
Cockroach), the fable by Ignat Lebyadkin,* a character in Dostoevski's
Besy (The Possessed, 1872):
Но пока у них шёл крик,
Подошёл
Никифор,
Благороднейший старик ...
While they [the flies] quarrelled,
Nikifor, the noble old man,
came near...
Accordig to Lebyadkin, Nikifor represents Nature. The flies in Lebyadkin's
fable complain to Jupiter:
Место занял таракан,
Мухи возроптали,
Полон очень
наш стакан,
К Юпитеру закричали.
The cockroach occupied the
place,
The flies protested:
Our glass is too full,
They cried to Jupiter.
Jupiter's other name is Jove. As he speaks of his extravagant grand-aunt,
Baroness Bredow, Vadim mentions Jove:
"Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the
harlequins!
"What harlequins? Where?"
"Oh, everywhere. All around you.
Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put
two things together--jokes, images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on!
Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"
I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my
grand-aunt in honor of my first daydreams, and now, down the marble steps of
memory's front porch, here she slowly comes, sideways, sideways, the
poor lame lady, touching each step edge with the rubber tip
of her black cane. (1.2)
Dora, the lady whom Vadim meets in Leningrad (5.2), is also lame and walks
a cane. And so is Maria Lebyadkin (khromonozhka, lame woman), Ignat's
mad sister in The Possessed.
As he speaks to Vadim, Oleg Orlov (who unbeknowst to Vadim
accompanied him in his trip to Leningrad) mentions a namesake of F. M.
Dostoevski:
"Two courses presented themselves. We had to choose.
Fyodor Mihaylovich [?] himself had to choose. Either to welcome you po
amerikanski (the American way) with
reporters, interviews,
photographers, girls, garlands, and, naturally, Fyodor Mihaylovich himself
[President of the Union of Writers? Head of the 'Big House'?]; or else
to ignore you--and that's what we did." (5.3)
Dostoevski is the author of Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (Notes
from the House of the Dead, 1860) and The Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor (in The Brothers Karamazov, 1880). Omsk, the city where
Dostoevski spent four years in prison, is mentioned in LATH (2.10). Dementia is
one of the characters in Vadim's story (2.3). Many of Dostoevski's
characters are mad. The hero of Vadim's Dare, Victor finds
Dostoevski's politics hateful and condemns his novels as "absurd with their
black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ's conventional
image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age."
(2.5)
When Vadim meets him in Switzerland, Charlie Everett (the future Karl
Ivanovich Vetrov with whom Vadim's daughter Bel elopes to the Soviet Union) is
"Christ-haired" (4. 7). According to Dora, Karl has no sense of ownership
and will be shot some day like a common thief (5.2). Dostoevski is the author of
Chestnyi vor (A Honest Thief, 1848).
In Blok's poem Retribution (1910-21) Dostoevski compares the
hero's father to Byron. "He is a Byron, ergo he is Demon," decides the
beau mond. Demon is the society nickname of Vadim's (official) father who was
portrayed by Vrubel (2.5). Vadim's father died in a pistol duel with a
young Frenchman on October 22, 1898 (six months before Vadim was born), after a
card-table fracas at Deauville, some resort in gray Normandy. (ibid.)
Like Vadim, Frédéric Moreau (the hero of Flaubert's novel
L'Éducation sentimentale, 1869) was born afer his father's death
in a duel. Flaubert's "strange inheritance,
Éducation
sentimentale," and Vrubel's
Demon are mentioned in
Chapter Three of Blok's
Retribution:
И жаль отца, безмерно жаль:
Он тоже получил
от детства
Флобера странное наследство -
Education
sentimentale.
Его опустошает
Демон,
Над коим Врубель изнемог...
He [the father] is
devastated by Demon
Over whom Vrubel was exhausted...
Dostoevski is the author of The Double (1848). Vadim Vadimovich
N. is a double ("nonidentical twin, parody, inferior variant") of
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, the author of LATH.
*The author of "Pushkin's St. Petersburg Tales" (with The Queen of
Spades being one of them), Hodasevich published the essay "The Poetry
of Ignat Lebyadkin" (1931).
Alexey Sklyarenko