After his father's sudden death Hugh Person (the main character in VN's novel Transparent Things, 1972) moves to Geneva, has homard à l'américaine for dinner and goes to find his first whore in a lane right behind his hotel:
This Henry Emery Person, our Person's father, might be described as a well-meaning, earnest, dear little man, or as a wretched fraud, depending on the angle of light and the position of the observer. A lot of handwringing goes about in the dark of remorse, in the dungeon of the irreparable. A schoolboy, be he as strong as the Boston strangler - show your hands, Hugh - cannot cope with all his fellows when all keep making cruel remarks about his father. After two or three clumsy fights with the most detestable among them, he had adopted a smarter and meaner attitude of taciturn semiacquiescence which horrified him when he remembered those times; but by a curious twist of conscience the awareness of his own horror comforted him as proving he was not altogether a monster. He now had to do something about a number of recollected unkindnesses of which he had been guilty up to that very day; they were to be as painfully disposed of as had been the dentures and glasses which the authorities left with him in a paper bag. The only kinsman he could turn up, an uncle in Scranton, advised him over the ocean to have the body cremated abroad rather than shipped home; actually, the less recommended course proved to be the easier one in many respects, and mainly because it allowed Hugh to get rid of the dreadful object practically at once.
Everybody was very helpful. One would like in particular to express one's gratitude to Harold Hall, the American consul in Switzerland, who was instrumental in extending all possible assistance to our poor friend.
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)
The name of the painter whom a young Russian novelist expects, Kandidatov brings to mind Le Candidat ("The Candidate," written in 1873), a play (a satirical comedy in four acts, exploring themes of political ambition and social hypocrisy) by Gustave Flaubert. It premiered on March 11, 1874, in the théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris. In a letter of March 9, 1874, either to Paul Bourget (a French writer, 1852-1935) or to Paul Segond (a French surgeon, 1851-1912) Ivan Turgenev (the author of Faust, a Story in Nine Letters, 1856, Fathers and Sons, 1862, and Ghosts, 1864) mentions la répétition générale du "Candidat:"
Mon cher Paul,
Si vous voulez assister à la répétition générale du "Candidat" qui a lieu demain mardi, soyez à midi et demi très précis à la porte du Vaudeville (ou au café idem) et attendez-moi. Salut et fraternité!
In a letter of February 24, 1874, to Hjalmar Boyesen (an American writer of Norwegian descent, 1848-95, who visited Turgenev in Paris and published an interview with him) Turgenev says that the New World is to the Old one what Future is to Present or to Past:
One of my strongest wishes is to go myself and visit your country -- the New World which is to the Old one what Future is to Present or to Past -- and I do hope, before quitting this earth, I shall fulfil this wish of mine. But in the meanwhile allow me to express to you through this letter the assurance of my affectionate sentiments and my warm remembrances to all known and unknown friends I may have on the other side of the Atlantic.
A character in Transparent Things, Mr. R. (an American writer of German descent whom Hugh Person visits in Switzerland) is the author of Three Tenses:
"Let me order something for you," said Armande to Percy, not making, however, the offering gesture that usually goes with that phrase.
Percy thought he would like a cup of hot chocolate. The dreadful fascination of meeting an old flame in public! Armande had nothing to fear, naturally. She was in a totally different class, beyond competition. Hugh recalled R.'s famous novella Three Tenses.
"There was something else we didn't quite settle, Armande, or did we?"
"Well, we spent two hours at it," remarked Armande, rather grumpily – not realizing, perhaps, that she had nothing to fear. The fascination was of a totally different, purely intellectual or artistic order, as brought out so well in Three Tenses: a fashionable man in a night-blue tuxedo is supping on a lighted veranda with three bare-shouldered beauties, Alice, Beata, and Claire, who have never seen one another before. A. is a former love, B. is his present mistress, C. is his future wife. (Chapter 13)
Mr. R. brings to mind Princess R., a character in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons. Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov (Arkadiy's uncle) 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 Turgenev's novel Arkady Kirsanov 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 Nikolai Petrovich, touching Arkady now on the shoulder, now on the knee. "At last!" (chapter III)