Describing Hugh Person's courtship of Armande, the narrators of VN's novel Transparent Things (1972) mention fairy-tale element and its Gothic rose water:
Friday morning. A quick Coke. A belch. A hurried shave. He put on his ordinary clothes, throwing in the turtleneck for style. Last interview with the mirror. He plucked a black hair out of a red nostril.
The first disappointment of the day awaited him on the stroke of seven at their rendezvous (the post-office square), where he found her attended by three young athletes, Jack, Jake, and Jacques, whose copper faces he had seen grinning around her in one of the latest photographs of the fourth album. Upon noticing the sullen way his Adam's apple kept working she gaily suggested that perhaps he did not care to join them after all "because we want to walk up to the only cable car that works in summer and that's quite a climb if you're not used to it." White-toothed Jacques, half-embracing the pert maiden, remarked confidentially that monsieur should change into sturdier brogues, but Hugh retorted that in the States one hiked in any old pair of shoes, even sneakers. "We hoped," said Armande, "we might induce you to learn skiing: we keep all the gear up there, with the fellow who runs the place, and he's sure to find something for you. You'll be making tempo turns in five lessons. Won't you, Percy? I think you should also need a parka, it may be summer here, at two thousand feet, but you'll find polar conditions at over nine thousand." "The liittle one is right," said Jacques with feigned admiration, patting her on the shoulder. "It's a forty-minute saunter," said one of the twins. "Limbers you up for the slopes.'"
It soon transpired that Hugh would not be able to keep up with them and reach the four-thousand-foot mark to catch the gondola )ust north of Witt. The promised "stroll" proved to be a horrible hike, worse than anything he had experienced on school picnics in Vermont or New Hampshire. The trail consisted of very steep ups and very slippery downs, and gigantic ups again, along the side of the next mountain, and was full of old ruts, rocks, and roots. He labored, hot, wretched Hugh, behind Armande's blond bun, while she lightly followed light Jacques. The English twins made up the rear guard. Possibly, had the pace been a little more leisurely, Hugh might have managed that simple climb, but his heartless and mindless companions swung on without mercy, practically bounding up the steep bits and zestfully sliding down the declivities, which Hugh negotiated with outspread arms, in an attitude of entreaty. He refused to borrow the stick he was offered, but finally, after twenty minutes of torment, pleaded for a short breathing spell. To his dismay not Armande but Jack and Jake stayed with him as he sat on a stone, bending his head and panting, a pearl of sweat hanging from his pointed nose. They were taciturn twins and now merely exchanged silent glances as they stood a little above him on the trail, arms akimbo. He felt their sympathy ebbing and begged them to continue on their way, he would follow shortly. When they had gone he waited a little and then limped back to the village. At one spot between two forested stretches he rested again, this time on an open bluff where a bench, eyeless but eager, faced an admirable view. As he sat there smoking, he noticed his party very high above him, blue, gray, pink, red, waving to him from a cliff. He waved back and resumed his gloomy retreat.
But Hugh Person refused to give up. Mightily shod, alpenstocked, munching gum, he again accompanied them next morning. He begged them to let him set his own pace, without waiting for him anywhere, and he would have reached the cableway had he not lost his bearings and ended up in a brambly burn at the end of a logging road. Another attempt a day or two later was more successful. He almost reached timberline – but there the weather changed, a damp fog enveloped him, and he spent a couple of hours shivering all alone in a smelly shippon, waiting for the whirling mists to uncover the sun once more.
Another time he volunteered to carry after her a pair of new skis she had just acquired – weird-looking, reptile-green things made of metal and fiberglass. Their elaborate bindings looked like first cousins of orthopЙdie devices meant to help a cripple to walk. He was allowed to shoulder those precious skis, which at first felt miraculously light but soon grew as heavy as great slabs of malachite, under which he staggered in Armande's wake like a clown helping to change properties in a circus arena. His load was snatched from him as soon as he sat down for a rest. He was offered a paper bag (four small oranges) in exchange but he pushed it away without looking.
Our Person was obstinate and monstrously in love. A fairy-tale element seemed to imbue with its Gothic rose water all attempts to scale the battlements of her Dragon. Next week he made it and thereafter established himself as less of a nuisance. (Chapter 14)
In a letter of April 16, 1820, to John Murray (Byron's Scottish publisher) Byron (who stayed in Ravenna, a city where Dante lived in exile and where he died in 1321) says that revolutions are not to be made with rose-water, where there are foreigners as masters:
But I doubt, if any thing be done, it won't be so quietly as in Spain. To be sure, revolutions are not to be made with rose-water, where there are foreigners as masters.
Armande believes that Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu:
In a diary he kept in fits and starts Hugh wrote that night in Versex:
"Spoke to a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a romantic tumult never felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule aurait juré avec la dernière syllabe de mon prénom. I believe Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu. Charmingly sophisticated, yet marvelously naive. Chalet above Witt built by father. If you find yourself in those parages. Wished to know if I liked my job. My job! I replied: "Ask me what I can do, not what I do, lovely girl, lovely wake of the sun through semitransparent black fabric. I can commit to memory a whole page of the directory in three minutes flat but am incapable of remembering my own telephone number. I can compose patches of poetry as strange and new as you are, or as anything a person may write three hundred years hence, but I have never published one scrap of verse except some juvenile nonsense at college. I have evolved on the playing courts of my father's school a devastating return of service - a cut clinging drive - but am out of breath after one game. Using ink and aquarelle I can paint a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence with all the mountains of paradise reflected therein, but am unable to draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the blazing windows of a villa by Plam. I have taught French in American schools but have never been able to get rid of my mother's Canadian accent, though I hear it clearly when I whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Déjanire that I may mount sur mon bûcher. I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree. I possess a doctor's degree in philosophy, but have no German. I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius.' By a coincidence worthy of that other genius, his stepdaughter had given her the book she was reading. Julia Moore has no doubt forgotten that I possessed her a couple of years ago. Both mother and daughter are intense travelers. They have visited Cuba and China, and such-like dreary, primitive spots, and speak with fond criticism of the many charming and odd people they made friends with there. Parlez-moi de son stepfather. Is he très fasciste? Could not understand why I called Mrs. R.'s left-wingism a commonplace bourgeois vogue. Mais au contraire, she and her daughter adore radicals! Well, I said, Mr. R., lui, is immune to politics. My darling thought that was the trouble with him. Toffee-cream neck with a tiny gold cross and a grain de beauté. Slender, athletic, lethal!" (Chapter 9)
In his poem Opyat' belila, sepiya i sazha ("Again whiting, sepia and soot," 1921) G. Ivanov mentions the sunset's peacock fan:
Опять белила, сепия и сажа,
И трубы гениев гремят в упор.
Опять архитектурного пейзажа
Стеснённый раскрывается простор!
Горбатый мост прорезали лебедки,
Павлиний веер распустил закат,
И, лёгкие, как парусные лодки,
Над куполами облака летят,
На плоские ступени отблеск лунный
Отбросил зарево. И, присмирев,
На чёрном цоколе свой шар чугунный
Тяжёлой лапою сжимает лев.
In G. Ivanov's poem Kak v Gretsiyu Bayron, o, bez sozhalen'ya ("Like Byron to Greece, oh, without regret," 1927) the third-to-last line is Kak Bayron za blednym ognyom (Like Byron after a pale fire):
Как в Грецию Байрон, о, без сожаленья,
Сквозь звёзды и розы, и тьму,
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья:
- И ты не поможешь ему.
Сквозь звёзды, которые снятся влюблённым,
И небо, где нет ничего,
В холодную полночь - платком надушённым.
- И ты не удержишь его.
На голос бессмысленно-сладкого пенья,
Как Байрон за бледным огнём,
Сквозь полночь и розы, о, без сожаленья:
- И ты позабудешь о нём.
In Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) calls his poem "this transparent thingum:"
Came next; then Hebe's Cup, my final float
In that damp carnival, for now I term
Everything "Poems," and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.) (ll. 941-962)
Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a regicidal organization). In a letter of Feb. 20, 1816, to John Murray Byron says that he is heinously forgetful of his metres and his Gradus (Gradus ad Parnassum, a dictionary of Latin prosody):
Dear Sir, — To return to our business — your epistles are vastly agreeable. With regard to the observations on carelessness, etc., I think, with all humility, that the gentle reader has considered a rather uncommon, and designedly irregular versification for haste and negligence. The measure is not that of any of the other poems, which (I believe) were allowed to be tolerably correct, according to Byshe and the fingers — or ears — by which bards write, and readers reckon. Great part of The Siege is in (I think) what the learned call Anapests, (though I am not sure, being heinously forgetful of my metres and my Gradus) and many of the lines intentionally longer or shorter than its rhyming companion ; and the rhyme also occurring at greater or less intervals of caprice or convenience.
I mean not to say that this is right or good, but merely that I could have been smoother, had it appeared to me of advantage; and that I was not otherwise without being aware of the deviation, though I now feel sorry for it, as I would undoubtedly rather please than not. My wish has been to try at something different from my former efforts ; as I endeavoured to make them differ from each other. The versification of The Corsair is not that of Lara ; nor The Giaour that of The Bride; Childe Harold is again varied from these; and I strove to vary the last somewhat from all of the others. Excuse all this damned nonsense and egotism. The fact is, that I am rather trying to think on the subject of this note, than really thinking on it. I did not know you had called ; you are always admitted and welcome when you choose.
Yours, etc., etc.,
Bn.
Byron is the author of Don Juan (1819-24), an unfinished satirical epic poem. In Pushkin's little tragedy Kamennyi gost' ("The Stone Guest," 1830) Don Guan mentions bednaya Ineza (poor Inez) and Leporello mentions lukavyi (the devil; the invisible anonymous narrators of Transparent Things seem to be the devils):
Дон Гуан
(задумчиво)
Бедная Инеза!
Ее уж нет! как я любил ее!
Лепорелло
Инеза! — черноглазая… о, помню.
Три месяца ухаживали вы,
За ней; насилу-то помог лукавый.
Дон Гуан
В июле… ночью. Странную приятность
Я находил в ее печальном взоре
И помертвелых губах. Это странно.
Ты, кажется, ее не находил
Красавицей. И точно, мало было
В ней истинно прекрасного. Глаза,
Одни глаза. Да взгляд… такого взгляда
Уж никогда я не встречал. А голос
У ней был тих и слаб — как у больной —
Муж у нее был негодяй суровый,
Узнал я поздно… Бедная Инеза!..
DON JUAN (pensively): … Poor Inez!
She’s gone now! How I loved her!
LEPORELLO: Inez! The black-eyed one … Now I remember,
For three months you were paying court
To her; it was all the devil could do to help.
DON JUAN: July it was … at night. I found strange pleasure
In gazing at her sorrowful eyes
And death-pale lips. It’s strange,
You apparently didn’t think she was
A beauty. And in fact, there wasn’t
Much beautiful about her. Her eyes,
Just her eyes. And her glance … I’ve never seen
Another glance like that. And her voice
Was quiet, feeble – like a sick woman’s –
Her husband was a worthless wretch, and stern –
I found that out too late – Poor Inez!… (Scene I)
Poor Inez brings to mind Comrade Inessa Armand (born Elisabeth-Inès Stéphane d'Herbenville, 1874-1920), a French-Russian politician, Lenin's mistress. Lenin famously said: "You cannot make a Revolution in white gloves." A reveler in VN's story Drakon ("The Dragon," 1924; cf. "the battlements of Armande's Dragon") calls the dragon "the hydra of couterrevolution:"
Он выпроваживал из кабака пятерых старых рабочих, в лоск пьяных. Выйдя на улицу, они, вероятно, увидели нечто весьма любопытное, ибо все рассмеялись.
- О-го-го, - загрохотал голос одного из них. - Я, должно быть, выпил лишнего, если вижу наяву гидру контрр...
He was bundling off five thoroughly soused old laborers. They must have seen something highly curious outdoors, for they all broke out laughing--
"Oh-ho-ho," rumbled one of the voices, "I must have had one glass too many, if I see, big as life, the hydra of counterrevo--"
At the end of The Stone Guest, just before he and Donna Anna fall through, Don Guan says: "O, tyazhelo pozhat'ye kamennoy ego desnitsy (Oh, heavy is the clasp of his stone right hand)!" In Pushkin's little tragedy Don Guan calls foreign women he met in Paris kukly voskovye (the wax dolls):
Дон Гуан
Слуга покорный! я едва-едва
Не умер там со скуки. Что за люди,
Что за земля! А небо?.. точный дым.
А женщины? Да я не променяю,
Вот видишь ли, мой глупый Лепорелло,
Последней в Андалузии крестьянки
На первых тамошних красавиц — право.
Они сначала нравилися мне
Глазами синими, да белизною,
Да скромностью — а пуще новизною;
Да, слава богу, скоро догадался —
Увидел я, что с ними грех и знаться —
В них жизни нет, всё куклы восковые;
А наши!.. Но послушай, это место
Знакомо нам; узнал ли ты его?
Kukly voskovye bring to mind Voskovaya persona ("The Wax Persona," 1930), a story by Yuri Tynyanov about the wax effigy of Peter the First. According to Hugh Person, his name does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson:
He did do something about it, despite all that fond criticism of himself. He wrote her a note from the venerable Versex Palace where he was to have cocktails in a few minutes with our most valuable author whose best book you did not like. Would you permit me to call on you, say Wednesday, the fourth? Because I shall be by then at the Ascot Hotel in your Witt, where I am told there is some excellent skiing even in summer. The main object of my stay here, on the other hand, is to find out when the old rascal's current book will be finished. It is queer to recall how keenly only the day before yesterday I had looked forward to seeing the great man at last in the flesh.
There was even more of it than our Person had expected on the strength of recent pictures. As he peeped through a vestibule window and watched him emerge from his car, no clarion of repute, no scream of glamour reverbed through his nervous system, which was wholly occupied with the bare-thighed girl in the sun-shot train. Yet what a grand sight R. presented - his handsome chauffeur helping the obese old boy on one side, his black-bearded secretary supporting him on the other, and two chasseurs from the hotel going through a mimicry of tentative assistance on the porch steps. The reporter in Person noted that Mr. R. wore Wallabees of a velvety cocoa shade, a lemon shirt with a lilac neck scarf, and a rumpled gray suit that seemed to have no distinction whatever - at least, to a plain American. Hullo, Person! They sat down in the lounge near the bar.
The illusory quality of the entire event was enhanced by the appearance and speech of the two characters. That monumental man with his clayey makeup and false grin, and Mr. Tamworth of the brigand's beard, seemed to be acting out a stiffly written scene for the benefit of an invisible audience from which Person, a dummy, kept turning away as if moved with his chair by Sherlock's concealed landlady, no matter how he sat or where he looked in the course of the brief but boozy interview. It was indeed all sham and waxworks as compared to the reality of Armande, whose image was stamped on the eye of his mind and shone through the show at various levels, sometimes upside down, sometimes on the teasing marge of his field of vision, but always there, always, true and thrilling. The commonplaces he and she had exchanged blazed with authenticity when placed for display against the forced guffaws in the bogus bar.
"Well, you certainly look remarkably fit," said Hugh with effusive mendacity after the drinks had been ordered.
Baron R. had coarse features, a sallow complexion, a lumpy nose with enlarged pores, shaggy bellicose eyebrows, an unerring stare, and a bulldog mouth full of bad teeth. The streak of nasty inventiveness so conspicuous in his writings also appeared in the prepared parts of his speech, as when he said, as he did now, that far from "looking fit" he felt more and more a creeping resemblance to the cinema star Reubenson who once played old gangsters in Florida-staged films; but no such actor existed.
"Anyway - how are you?" asked Hugh, pressing his disadvantage.
"To make a story quite short," replied Mr. R. (who had an exasperating way not only of trotting out hackneyed formulas in his would-be colloquial thickly accented English, but also. of getting them wrong), "I had not been feeling any too healthy, you know, during the winter. My liver, you know, was holding something against me."
He took a long sip of whiskey, and, rinsing his mouth with it in a manner Person had never yet witnessed, very slowly replaced his glass on the low table. Then, à deux with the muzzled stuff, he swallowed it and shifted to his second English style, the grand one of his most memorable characters:
"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."
"O.K., son. And how's Phil?"
They discussed briefly R.'s publisher's vigor, charm, and acumen.
"Except that he wants me to write the wrong books. He wants - " assuming a coy throaty voice as he named the titles of a competitor's novels, also published by Phil - "he wants A Boy for Pleasure but would settle for The Slender Slut, and all I can offer him is not Tralala but the first and dullest tome of my Tralatitions."
"I assure you that he is waiting for the manuscript with utmost impatience. By the way - "
By the way, indeed! There ought to exist some rhetorical term for that twist of nonlogic. A unique view through a black weave ran by the way. By the way, I shall lose my mind if I do not get her.
" - by the way, I met a person yesterday who has just seen your stepdaughter - "
"Former stepdaughter," corrected Mr. R. "Quite a time no see, and I hope it remains so. Same stuff, son" (this to the barman).
"The occasion was rather remarkable. Here was this young woman, reading - "
"Excuse me," said the secretary warmly, and folding a note he had just scribbled, passed it to Hugh.
"Mr. R. resents all mention of Miss Moore and her mother."
And I don't blame him. But where was Hugh's famous tact? Giddy Hugh knew quite well the whole situation, having got it from Phil, not Julia, an impure but reticent little girl.
This part of our translucing is pretty boring, yet we must complete our report.
Mr. R. had discovered one day, with the help of a hired follower, that his wife Marion was having an affair with Christian Pines, son of the well-known cinema man who had directed the film Golden Windows (precariously based on the best of our author's novels). Mr. R. welcomed the situation since he was assiduously courting Julia Moore, his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, and now had plans for the future, well worthy of a sentimental lecher whom three or four marriages had not sated yet. Very soon, however, he learned from the same sleuth, who is at present dying in a hot dirty hospital on Formosa, an island, that young Pines, a handsome frog-faced playboy, soon also to die, was the lover of both mother and daughter, whom he had serviced in Cavaliere, Cal., during two summers. Hence the separation acquired more pain and plenitude than R. had expected. In the midst of all this, our Person, in his discreet little way (though actually he was half an inch taller than big R.), had happened to nibble, too, at the corner of the crowded canvas. (Chapter 10)
Mr. R. is an American writer of German descent. Vladimir Solovyov's poem Drakon ("The Dragon," 1900) is addredd to Siegfried (Sigurd or Siegfried is a legendary hero of Germanic heroic legend, who killed a dragon known in Nordic tradition as Fafnir). The epigraph to the fifth (last) poem of Alexander Blok's cycle Na pole Kulikovom ("In the Field of Kulikovo," 1908) is from Solovyov's poem Drakon:
И мглою бед неотразимых
Грядущий день заволокло.
Вл. Соловьев
Опять над полем Куликовым
Взошла и расточилась мгла,
И, словно облаком суровым,
Грядущий день заволокла.
За тишиною непробудной,
За разливающейся мглой
Не слышно грома битвы чудной,
Не видно молньи боевой.
Но узнаю тебя, начало
Высоких и мятежных дней!
Над вражьим станом, как бывало,
И плеск, и трубы лебедей.
Не может сердце жить покоем,
Недаром тучи собрались.
Доспех тяжел, как перед боем.
Теперь твой час настал. — Молись!
In the seventh poem of Blok's cycle Zhizn’ moego priyatelya ("The Life of my Pal," 1915), Greshi, poka tebya volnuyut... ("Do sin, while you innocent sins..."), the devils speak:
Сверкнут ли дерзостные очи -
Ты их сверканий не отринь,
Грехам, вину и страстной ночи
Шепча заветное «аминь».
...И станешь падать — но толпою
Мы все, как ангелы, чисты,
Тебя подхватим, чтоб пятою
О камень не преткнулся ты...
Should the daring eyes sparkle at you,
do not reject their sparkling,
whispering "amen"
to sins, wine and the amorous night.
...And you'll begin to fall, but in a crowd
we all, pure as angels,
shall pick you up in order to prevent
you to stumble on the stone...
See why Hugh Person (who chokes to death in his hotel room) does not fall from the window, as one would expect him to do? It is the smoke that kills Hugh Person. In Pushkin's little tragedy Don Guan compares the northern sky of Paris to smoke (a nebo - tochnyi dym). Dym ("Smoke," 1867) is a novel by Turgenev, the author of Faust (1856), a story in nine letters, and Ottsy i deti ("Fathers and Sons," 1862) who appears in Transparent Things:
Of the two thrills young Hugh experienced, one was general, the other specific. The general sense of liberation came first, as a great breeze, ecstatic and clean, blowing away a lot of life's rot. Specifically, he was delighted to discover three thousand dollars in his father's battered, but plump, wallet. Like many a young man of dark genius who feels in a wad of bills all the tangible thickness of immediate delights, he had no practical sense, no ambition to make more money, and no qualms about his future means of subsistence (these proved negligible when it transpired that the cash had been more than a tenth of the actual inheritance). That same day he moved to much finer lodgings in Geneva, had homard à l'américaine for dinner, and went to find his first whore in a lane right behind his hotel.
For optical and animal reasons sexual love is less transparent than many other much more complicated things. One knows, however, that in his home town Hugh had courted a thirty-eight-year-old mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter but had been impotent with the first and not audacious enough with the second. We have here a banal case of protracted erotic itch, of lone practice for its habitual satisfaction, and of memorable dreams. The girl he accosted was stumpy but had a lovely, pale, vulgar face with Italian eyes. 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. As he sits at that deal table, the very same upon which our Person's whore has plunked her voluminous handbag, there shows through that bag, as it were, the first page of the Faust affair with energetic erasures and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green ink. The sight of his handwriting fascinates him; the chaos on the page is to him order, the blots are pictures, the marginal jottings are wings. Instead of sorting his papers, he uncorks his portable ink and moves nearer to the table, pen in hand. But at that minute there comes a joyful banging on the door. The door flies open and closes again. Hugh Person followed his chance girl down the long steep stairs, and to her favorite street corner where they parted for many years. He had hoped that the girl would keep him till morn -- and thus spare him a night at the hotel, with his dead father present in every dark corner of solitude; but when she saw him inclined to stay she misconstrued his plans, brutally said it would take much too long to get such a poor performer back into shape, and ushered him out. It was not a ghost, however, that prevented him from falling asleep, but the stuffiness. He opened wide both casements; they gave on a parking place four floors below; the thin meniscus overhead was too wan to illumine the roofs of the houses descending toward the invisible lake; the light of a garage picked out the steps of desolate stairs leading into a chaos of shadows; it was all very dismal and very distant, and our acrophobic Person felt the pull of gravity inviting him to join the night and his father. He had walked in his sleep many times as a naked boy but familiar surroundings had guarded him, till finally the strange disease had abated. Tonight, on the highest floor of a strange hotel, he lacked all protection. He closed the windows and sat in an armchair till dawn. (Chapter 6)
A Baron, Mr. R. brings to mind Princess R., a character in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons. Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov (who, as a young man, fell in love with Princess R.) gave her a ring with a sphinx engraved in the stone:
Он однажды подарил ей кольцо с вырезанным на камне сфинксом.
-- Что это? -- спросила она, -- сфинкс?
-- Да, -- ответил он, -- и этот сфинкс -- вы.
-- Я? -- спросила она и медленно подняла на него свой загадочный взгляд.
He once gave her a ring which had a sphinx engraved in the stone.
"What is this?" she asked. "A sphinx?"
"Yes," he answered, "and that sphinx is--you."
"Me?" she asked, and slowly looked at him with her enigmatic eyes. (chapter VII)
After Princess R.'s death Pavel Petrovich received a packet with the ring he had once given her. There was a cross over the sphinx:
Однажды, за обедом, в клубе, Павел Петрович узнал о смерти княгини Р. Она скончалась в Париже, в состоянии близком к помешательству. Он встал из-за стола и долго ходил по комнатам клуба, останавливаясь как вкопанный близ карточных игроков, но не вернулся домой раньше обыкновенного. Через несколько времени он получил пакет, адресованный на его имя: в нём находилось данное им княгине кольцо. Она провела по сфинксу крестообразную черту и велела ему сказать, что крест -- вот разгадка.
One day when he was dining at his club, Pavel Petrovich heard that Princess R. was dead. She had died in Paris in a state bordering on insanity. He rose from the table and paced about the rooms for a long time, occasionally standing motionless behind the cardplayers, but he returned home no earlier than usual. A few weeks later he received a packet on which his name had been written; it contained the ring which he had given to the Princess. She had drawn lines in the shape of a cross over the sphinx and sent him a message to say that the solution of the enigma was the cross. (ibid.)
In Tugenev's novel, Arkady Kirsanov (Pavel Petrovich's nephew) returns home as kandidat (a graduate):
-- Так вот как, наконец ты кандидат и домой приехал, -- говорил Николай Петрович, потрогивая Аркадия то по плечу, то по колену. -- Наконец!
"So here you are, a graduate at last - and home again," said Nikolay Petrovich, touching Arkady now on the shoulder, now on the knee. "At last!" (chapter III)