His chance bedmate had flung the
window wide open. Oh, who was she? She came from the past - a streetwalker he
[Hugh Person] had picked up on his first trip abroad,
some twenty years ago, a poor girl of mixed parentage, though actually American
and very sweet, called Giulia Romeo, the surname means "pilgrim" in archaic
Italian, but then we all are pilgrims, and all dreams are anagrams of diurnal
reality. (chapter 20)
In his article on Turgenev's story Asya
(1858), A Russian Man at a Rendezvous, Chernyshevski compares
the anonymous narrator and Asya to Romeo and Juliet:
Мы видим Ромео, мы видим Джульетту, счастью
которых ничто не мешает, и приближается минута, когда навеки решится их судьба,
- для этого Ромео должен только сказать: "Я люблю тебя, любишь ли ты меня?" - и
Джульетта прошепчет: "Да..." И что же делает наш Ромео (так мы будем называть
героя повести, фамилия которого не сообщена нам автором рассказа), явившись на
свидание с Джульеттой?
As she speaks to the narrator, Turgenev's Asya
misquotes Tatiana's words in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Eight: XLVI:
12-14):
- Ну, рассказывайте же, -
продолжала она, разглаживая полы своего платья и укладывая их себе на ноги,
точно она усаживалась надолго, - рассказывайте или прочитайте что-нибудь, как,
помните, вы нам читали из "Онегина"...
Она вдруг
задумалась...
Где нынче крест и тень
ветвей
Над бедной матерью моей!
-
проговорила она
вполголоса.
- У Пушкина не так, -
заметил я.
- А я хотела бы быть Татьяной, -
продолжала она всё так же задумчиво. (chapter
IX)
"Where there's a cross and the shade of
branches
over my poor mother!"
When the narrator points at her mistake, Asya says
pensively: "And I wish I were Tatiana."
In EO (Two: XXXVII) Lenski mournfully utters
at the grave of Dmitri Larin (Tatiana's and Olga's father): "Poor Yorick!" In a
note to EO Pushkin says: Poor Yorick! - Hamlet's
exclamation over the skull of the fool (see Shakespeare and
Sterne).
Parson Yorick is a character in Sterne's The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). According to Mr R., HP's
name is pronounced Parson:
"Insomnia and her sister Nocturia harry
me, of course, but otherwise I am as hale as a pane of stamps. I don't think you
met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth: like the English
breed of black-blotched swine."
"No," said Hugh, "it does not come from Parson, but
rather from Peterson." (chapter 10)
Armande's Russian mother "was the daughter of a
wealthy cattle dealer who had emigrated with his family to England
from Ryazan via Kharbin and Ceylon soon after the Bolshevist revolution."
(chapter 12)
Going back a number of seasons (not as
far, though, as Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and
then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction, we see graphite,
ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men.
(chapter 3)
In his essay Hamlet and Don Quixote (1860)
Turgenev points out that the first edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet
and the first part of Cervantes' Don Quixote appeared in the same year,
at the very beginning of the 17th century:
Первое издание трагедии
Шекспира "Гамлет" и первая часть сервантесовского "Дон-Кихота" явились
в один и тот же год, в самом начале XVII столетия.
Эта случайность нам
показалась знаменательною; сближение двух названных нами произведений навело нас
на целый ряд мыслей. Мы просим
позволения
поделиться с вами этими мыслями и заранее
рассчитываем на вашу снисходительность. "Кто хочет понять поэта,
должен вступить в его область", - сказал Гёте; - прозаик лишён всяких прав
на подобное требование; но он может надеяться, что его читатели - или
слушатели - захотят сопутствовать ему в его странствованиях, в его
изысканиях.
Turgenev quotes Goethe:
He who wants to understand a poet
must enter that poet's land.*
According to Turgenev, a prose writer can not demand this
of his readers. He can nevertheless hope that readers
will accompany him on his wanderings - will share his tour of
exploration."
Goethe is the author of Faust. In A Russian
Man at a Rendezvous Chernyshevski mentions Turgenev's Faust,
a story in nine letters (1855), and compares it to Turgenev's
novel Rudin (1855):
В "Фаусте" герой старается ободрить себя тем,
что ни он, ни Вера не имеют друг к другу серьёзного чувства; сидеть с ней,
мечтать о ней -- это его дело, но по части решительности, даже в словах, он
держит себя так, что Вера сама должна сказать ему, что любит его; речь несколько
минут шла уже так, что ему следовало непременно сказать это, но он, видите ли,
не догадался и не посмел сказать ей этого; а когда женщина, которая должна
принимать объяснение, вынуждена, наконец, сама сделать объяснение, он, видите
ли, "замер", но почувствовал, что "блаженство волною пробегает по его сердцу",
только, впрочем, "по временам", а собственно говоря, он "совершенно потерял
голову" -- жаль только, что не упал в обморок, да и то было бы, если бы не
попалось кстати дерево, к которому можно было прислониться... Это в "Фаусте";
почти то же и в "Рудине".
Faust in Moscow is the provisional title of
a rudimentary novel by a Russian writer
of the previous century who, on his way to Italy, had sojourned in a
hotel room to which Giulia Romeo takes HP:
She took him to one of the better beds in a hideous old
roominghouse - to the precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two,
nearly ninety-three years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on his way to
Italy. The bed - a different one, with brass knobs - was made, unmade, covered
with a frock coat, made again; upon it stood a half-open green-checkered grip,
and the frock coat was thrown over the shoulders of the night-shirted,
bare-necked, dark-tousled traveler whom we catch in the act of deciding what to
take out of the valise (which he will send by mail coach ahead) and transfer to
the knapsack (which he will carry himself across the mountains to the Italian
frontier). He expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter, to join him here any
moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that romantics would
undertake even during a drizzly spell in August; it rained even more in those
uncomfortable times; his boots are still wet from a ten-mile ramble to the
nearest casino. They stand outside the door in the attitude of expulsion, and he
has wrapped his feet in several layers of German-language newspaper, a language
which incidentally he finds easier to read than French. The main
problem now is whether to confide to his knapsack or mail in his grip his
manuscripts: rough drafts of letters, an unfinished short story in a Russian
copybook bound in black cloth, parts of a philosophical essay in a blue cahier
acquired in Geneva, and the loose sheets of a rudimentary novel under the
provisional title of Faust in Moscow. (chapter
6)
When HP meets in Witt Armande and Julia Moore (Mr R.'s
step-daughter), the latter prepares for a trip to Moscow:
Armande informed Percy that Julia had come all the way
from Geneva to consult her about the translation of a number of phrases with
which she, Julia, who was going tomorrow to Moscow, desired to "impress" her
Russian friends. Percy, here, worked for her stepfather.
"My former stepfather, thank Heavens," said
Julia. "By the way, Percy, if that's your nom de voyage, perhaps you
may help. As she explained, I want to dazzle some people in Moscow, who promised
me the company of a famous young Russian poet. Armande has supplied me with a
number of darling words, but we got stuck at - " (taking a slip of paper from
her bag) - "I want to know how to say:
'What a cute little church, what a big snowdrift.' You
see we do it first into French and she thinks 'snowdrift' is rafale de
neige, but I'm sure it can't be rafale in French and
rafalovich in Russian, or whatever they call a snowstorm."
"The word you want," said our Person, "is
congère, feminine gender, I learned it from my mother."
"Then it's sugrob in Russian," said Armande
and added dryly: "Only there won't be much snow there in August."
Julia laughed. Julia looked happy and healthy. Julia
had grown even prettier than she had been two years ago. Shall I now see her in
dreams with those new eyebrows, that new long hair? How fast do dreams catch up
with new fashions? Will the next dream still stick to her Japanese-doll hairdo?
(chapter 13)
HP's nom de voyage seems to hint
at Percival, one of King Arthur's legendary Knights of the Round
Table. The poor hidalgo Alonso Quixano decides to become
a knight-errant and names himself Don Quixote after reading too
many tales of medieval chivalry.
*In Turgenev's novel Nov' ("The
Virgin Soil," 1875) Paklin quotes in the original the same lines from
Goethe's Westöstlicher Divan and adds: Wer die Feinde will
verstehen, / Muss in Feindes Lande gehen (He who wants to understand his
enemy must enter his enemy's land). In TT VN makes a sortie, as it
were, in the hereafter.
Alexey Sklyarenko