Describing Hugh Person's meeting with Armande in Witt (a Swiss mountain resort), the narrators of VN's novel Transparent Things (1972) mention the hero's interview with the mirror:
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." (Chapter 14)
Friday morning is August 6, 1965 (Hugh Person first meets Armande on a Swiss local train on Thursday, July 29, 1965). The novel's spectral narrators seem to be the devils. Interv'yu u chorta ("An Interview with the Devil") is an essay by Lunacharski (the future minister of education in Lenin's government). Signed Anton Levyi, it appeared in the Bolshevist magazine Vestnik zhizni ("The Herald of Life," No. 3, 1906). Anton Levyi ("left, leftist") brings to mind Anton Krayniy ("extreme, last, outermost"), Zinaida Hippius's pseudonym. Hippius's husband, Dmitri Merezhkovski (1865-1941) is the author of Gogol' i chort ("Gogol and the Devil," 1906). The epigraph to Gogol's play Revizor ("The Inspector," 1836) is the Russian saying Na zerkalo necha penyat', koli rozha kriva (Don't blame the mirror, if your face is faulty). A character in Gogol's play, Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovski (the town mayor) has the same name-and-patronymic as Delvig (1798-1831, Pushkin's best friend at the Lyceum). According to Vera Nabokov, the Russian title of Transparent Things should have been Skvoznyak is proshlogo ("A Draft from the Past"). Skvoznyak (a draft) brings to mind the first part of Gogol's town mayor's surname. In his poem Nerodivshemusya chitatelyu ("To an Unborn Reader," 1930) VN addresses a lucid inhabitant of the centuries to come, mentions his own blurred photograph in an oval crowning, the sixteen lines in an old anthology of thoroughly forgotten verses and, in the poem's closing lines, compares the feeling experienced by the reader to skvoznyak iz proslago (a draft from the past):
Ты, светлый житель будущих веков,
ты, старины любитель, в день урочный
откроешь антологию стихов,
забытых незаслуженно, но прочно.
И будешь ты, как шут, одет на вкус
моей эпохи фрачной и сюртучной.
Облокотись. Прислушайся. Как звучно
былое время -- раковина муз.
Шестнадцать строк, увенчанных овалом
с неясной фотографией... Посмей
побрезговать их слогом обветшалым,
опрятностью и бедностью моей.
Я здесь с тобой. Укрыться ты не волен.
К тебе на грудь я прянул через мрак.
Вот холодок ты чувствуешь: сквозняк
из прошлого... Прощай же. Я доволен.
At the end of Transparent Things Hugh Person dies (chokes to death) in a hotel fire. It happens in the summer of 1973, a year after the novel was completed and published.
In Lunacharski's Interview with the Devil the Devil compares his kukly (dolls) to lunatiki (sleepwalkers) who can walk along the narrowest ledge:
Мои куклы пройдут по самому узкому карнизу, уверенно ступая профессорской ногой. Они как лунатики, их тянет луна «великой народной политики», великой политики по принципам: «и нашим и вашим», «и овцы целы и волки сыты», «поспешишь — людей насмешишь», и прочим догматам самой научной этики и социологии.
In his youth Hugh Person suffered attacks of somnambulism:
In the nights of his youth when Hugh had suffered attacks of somnambulism, he would walk out of his room hugging a pillow, and wander downstairs. He remembered awakening in odd spots, on the steps leading to the cellar or in a hall closet among galoshes and storm coats, and while not overly frightened by those barefoot trips, the boy did not care "to behave like a ghost" and begged to be locked up in his bedroom. This did not work either, as he would scramble out of the window onto the sloping roof of a gallery leading to the schoolhouse dormitories. The first time he did it the chill of the slates against his soles roused him, and he traveled back to his dark nest avoiding chairs and things rather by ear than otherwise. An old and silly doctor advised his parents to cover the floor near his bed with wet towels and place basins with water at strategic points, and the only result was that having circumvented all obstacles in his magic sleep, he found himself shivering at the foot of a chimney with the school cat for companion. Soon after that sally the spectral fits became rarer; they practically stopped in his late adolescence. As a penultimate echo came the strange case of the struggle with a bedside table. This was when Hugh attended college and lodged with a fellow student, Jack Moore (no relation), in two rooms of the newly built Snyder Hall. Jack was awakened in the middle of the night, after a weary day of cramming, by a burst of crashing sounds coming from the bed-sitting room. He went to investigate. Hugh, in his sleep, had imagined that his bedside table, a little three-legged affair (borrowed from under the hallway telephone), was executing a furious war dance all by itself, as he had seen a similar article do at a seance when asked if the visiting spirit (Napoleon) missed the springtime sunsets of St. Helena. Jack Moore found Hugh energetically leaning from his couch and with both arms embracing and crushing the inoffensive object, in a ludicrous effort to stop its inexistent motion. Books, an ashtray, an alarm clock, a box of cough drops, had all been shaken off, and the tormented wood was emitting snaps and crackles in the idiot's grasp. Jack Moore pried the two apart. Hugh silently turned over and went to sleep. (Chapter 7)
Svyataya Elena, malen'kiy ostrov (Saint Helena, Little Island, 1921) is a novel by Mark Aldanov (a Russian writer, 1886-1957). In VN's short novel Soglyadatay ("The Eye," 1930) Lenin and Turgenev appear at the séances arranged by Vikentiy Lvovich Weinstock (the spiritualist):
Викентий Львович Вайншток, у которого Смуров служил в приказчиках (сменив негодного старика), знал о нем меньше, чем кто-либо. В характере у Вайнштока была доля приятной азартности. Этим, вероятно, объясняется, что он дал у себя место малознакомому человеку. Его подозрительность требовала постоянной пищи. Как у иных нормальных и совершенно почтенных людей вдруг оказывается страсть к собиранию стрекоз или гравюр, так и Вайншток, внук старьевщика, сын антиквара, солидный, уравновешенный Вайншток, всю свою жизнь занимавшийся книжным делом, устроил себе некий отдельный маленький мир. Там, в полутьме, происходили таинственные события.
Индия вызывала в нем мистическое уважение; он был одним из тех, кто при упоминании Бомбея представляет себе не английского чиновника, багрового от жары, а непременно факира. Он верил в чох и в жох, в чет и в черта, верил в символы, в силу начертаний и в бронзовые, голопузые изображения. По вечерам он клал руки, как застывший пианист на легонький столик о трех ножках: столик начинал нежно трещать, цыкать кузнечиком и затем, набравшись сил, медленно поднимался одним краем и неуклюже, но сильно ударял ножкой об пол. Вайншток вслух читал азбуку. Столик внимательно следил и на нужной букве стучал. Являлся Цезарь, Магомет, Пушкин и двоюродный брат Вайнштока. Иногда столик начинал шалить, поднимался и повисал в воздухе, а не то предпринимал атаку на Вайнштока, бодал его в живот, и Вайншток добродушно успокаивал духа, словно укротитель, нарочно поддающийся игривости зверя, отступал по всей комнате, продолжая держать пальцы на столике, шедшем вперевалку. Употреблял он для разговоров также и блюдечко с сеткой и еще какое-то сложное приспособленьице с торчавшим вниз карандашом. Разговоры записывались в особые тетрадки. Это были диалоги такого рода:
В а й н ш т о к
Нашел ли ты успокоение?
Л е н и н
Нет. Я страдаю.
В а й н ш т о к
Желаешь ли ты мне рассказать о загробной жизни?
Л е н и н (после паузы)
Нет...
В а й н ш т о к
Почему?
Л е н и н
Там ночь.
Тетрадок было множество, и Вайншток говорил, что когда-нибудь опубликует наиболее значительные разговоры. И очень был забавен некий дух Абум, неизвестного происхождения, глуповатый и безвкусный, который играл роль посредника, устраивая Вайнштоку свидания с разными знаменитыми покойниками. К самому Вайнштоку он относился с некоторым амикошонством:
Вайншток. Дух, кто ты?
Ответ. Иван Сергеевич.
Вайншток. Какой Иван Сергеевич?
Ответ. Тургенев.
Вайншток. Продолжаешь ли ты творить?
Ответ. Дурак.
Вайншток. За что ты меня ругаешь?
Ответ (столик буйствует). Надул. Я – Абум.
Vikentiy Lvovich Weinstock, for whom Smurov worked as salesman (having replaced the helpless old man), knew less about him than anyone. There was in Weinstock’s nature an attractive streak of recklessness. This is probably why he hired someone he did not know well. His suspiciousness required regular nourishment. Just as there are normal and perfectly decent people who unexpectedly turn out to have a passion for collecting dragonflies or engravings, so Weinstock, a junk dealer’s grandson and an antiquarian’s son, staid, well-balanced Weinstock who had been in the book business all his life, had constructed a separate little world for himself. There, in the penumbra, mysterious events took place.
India aroused a mystical respect in him: he was one of those people who, at the mention of Bombay, inevitably imagine not a British civil servant, crimson from the heat, but a fakir. He believed in the jinx and the hex, in magic numbers and the Devil, in the evil eye, in the secret power of symbols and signs, and in bare-bellied bronze idols. In the evenings, he would place his hands, like a petrified pianist, upon a small, light, three-legged table. It would start to creak softly, emitting cricketlike chirps, and, having gathered strength, would rise up on one side and then awkwardly but forcefully tap a leg against the floor. Weinstock would recite the alphabet. The little table would follow attentively and tap at the proper letters. Messages came from Caesar, Mohammed, Pushkin, and a dead cousin of Weinstock’s. Sometimes the table would be naughty: it would rise and remain suspended in mid-air, or else attack Weinstock and butt him in the stomach. Weinstock would good-naturedly pacify the spirit, like an animal tamer playing along with a frisky beast; he would back across the whole room, all the while keeping his fingertips on the table waddling after him. For his talks with the dead, he also employed a kind of marked saucer and some other strange contraption with a pencil protruding underneath. The conversations were recorded in special notebooks. A dialog might go thus:
WEINSTOCK: Have you found rest?
LENIN: This is not Baden-Baden.
WEINSTOCK: Do you wish to tell me of life beyond the grave?
LENIN (after a pause): I prefer not to.
WEINSTOCK: Why?
LENIN: Must wait till there is a plenum.
A lot of these notebooks had accumulated, and Weinstock used to say that someday he would have the more significant conversations published. Very entertaining was a ghost called Abum, of unknown origin, silly and tasteless, who acted as intermediary, arranging interviews between Weinstock and various dead celebrities. He treated Weinstock with vulgar familiarity.
WEINSTOCK: Who art thou, O Spirit?
REPLY: Ivan Sergeyevich.
WEINSTOCK: Which Ivan Sergeyevich?
REPLY: Turgenev.
WEINSTOCK: Do you continue to create masterpieces?
REPLY: Idiot.
WEINSTOCK: Why do you abuse me?
REPLY (table convulsed): Fooled you! This is Abum. (Chapter 3)
Lenin is the author of Lev Tolstoy kak zerkalo russkoy revolyutsii ("Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution," 1908). Tolstoy is the author of at least one story and one play whose characters include chertyonok (a young devil).
A Russian novelist who appears in Transparent Things seems to be Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), the author of Faust, a story in nine letters (1856):
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)
Hugh Person was born in 1933 (the year Hitler came to power in Germany). For the first time Hugh Person visits Switzerland in 1955 with his father who dies during this visit (Hugh Person's mother died a year before). On the day of his father's death Hugh Person moves to much finer lodgings in Geneva, has a homard à l'américaine for dinner, and goes to find his first whore in a lane right behind his hotel. In 1973, when he visits Switzeland for the fourth (and last) time, Hugh Person is forty.