The title of VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) bring to mind the words often attributed to Conficius, "Signs and symbols rule the world, not words nor laws." In the draft of Eugene Onegin (One: VII: 1-5) Pushkin mentions Confucius (a Chinese philosopher, K'ung Fu-Tzu, c. 551 – 479 B.C.) and calls him mudrets Kitaya (the Chinese sage):
Конфуций... мудрец Китая
Нас учит юность уважать,
От заблуждений охраняя,
Не торопиться осуждать...
Она одна дает надежды...
Confucius, the Chinese sage,
teaches us that youth we should respect
from errors guarding it
not hastening to condemn it
alone it holds our hope...
In Chapter Two of EO Pushkin describes Lenski and mentions nebo Shillera i Gete (the sky of Schiller and of Goethe):
Негодованье, сожаленье,
Ко благу чистая любовь
И славы сладкое мученье
В нем рано волновали кровь.
Он с лирой странствовал на свете;
Под небом Шиллера и Гете
Их поэтическим огнём
Душа воспламенилась в нём;
И муз возвышенных искусства,
Счастливец, он не постыдил:
Он в песнях гордо сохранил
Всегда возвышенные чувства,
Порывы девственной мечты
И прелесть важной простоты.
Indignation, compassion,
pure love of Good,
and fame's delicious torment
early had stirred his blood.
He wandered with a lyre on earth.
Under the sky of Schiller and of Goethe,
with their poetic fire
his soul had kindled;
and the exalted Muses of the art
he, happy one, did not disgrace:
he proudly in his songs retained
always exalted sentiments,
the surgings of a virgin fancy, and the charm
of grave simplicity. (Two: IX)
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN dubs his and his brother's Odessa-born Jewish tutor Lenski. The two main characters in VN's story Signs and Symbols are the elderly Jewish couple who fled at first Lenin's Russia and then Hitler's Germany (where their son was born) and who finally settled in New York. At the end of his poem Die Weltweisen ("The Philosophers," 1795) Friedrich Schiller (a German poet, 1759-1805) famously says that love and hunger rule the world:
Ist in Moralsystemen
Ausführlich zu vernehmen.
»Der Mensch bedarf des Menschen sehr
Zu seinem großen Ziele;
Nur in dem Ganzen wirket er,
Viel Tropfen geben erst das Meer,
"Viel Wasser treibt die Mühle.
Drum flieht der wilden Wölfe Stand
Und knüpft des Staates dauernd Band.«
So lehren vom Katheder
Herr Puffendorf und Feder.
Doch weil, was ein Professor spricht,
Nicht gleich zu Allen dringet,
So übt Natur die Mutterpflicht
Und sorgt, daß nie die Kette bricht
Und daß der Reif nie springet.
Einstweilen, bis den Bau der Welt
Philosophie zusammenhält,
Erhält sie das Getriebe
Durch Hunger und durch Liebe.
"When man would seek his destiny,
Man's help must then be given;
Save for the whole, ne'er labors he,—
Of many drops is formed the sea,—
By water mills are driven;
Therefore the wolf's wild species flies,—
Knit are the state's enduring ties."
Thus Puffendorf and Feder, each
Is, ex cathedra, wont to teach.
Yet, if what such professors say,
Each brain to enter durst not,
Nature exerts her mother-sway,
Provides that ne'er the chain gives way,
And that the ripe fruits burst not.
Meanwhile, until earth's structure vast
Philosophy can bind at last,
'Tis she that bids its pinion move,
By means of hunger and of love!
Hunger brings to mind the jellies in Signs and Symbols:
The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to ring. He stood in the middle of the room, groping with his foot for one slipper that had come off, and childishly, toothlessly, gaped at his wife. Since she knew more English than he, she always attended to the calls.
”Can I speak to Charlie?” a girl’s dull little voice said to her now.
“What number do you want? . . . No. You have the wrong number.”
She put the receiver down gently and her hand went to her heart. “It frightened me,” she said.
He smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his excited monologue. They would fetch him as soon as it was day. For his own protection, they would keep all the knives in a locked drawer. Even at his worst, he presented no danger to other people.
The telephone rang a second time.
The same toneless, anxious young voice asked for Charlie.
“You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing. You are turning the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero.” She hung up again.
They sat down to their unexpected, festive midnight tea. He sipped noisily; his face was flushed; every now and then he raised his glass with a circular motion, so as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald head stood out conspicuously, and silvery bristles showed on his chin. The birthday present stood on the table. While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reexamined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the telephone rang again. (3)
The sky of Schiller and of Goethe under which Pushkin's Lenski wandered brings to mind zvyozdnoe nebo (the starry sky) mentioned by Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937):
Если в те дни ему пришлось бы отвечать перед каким-нибудь сверхчувственным судом (помните, как Гёте говаривал, показывая тростью на звёздное небо: "Вот моя совесть!"), то вряд ли бы он решился сказать, что любит её, -- ибо давно догадывался, что никому и ничему всецело отдать душу неспособен: оборотный капитал ему был слишком нужен для своих частных дел; но зато, глядя на нее, он сразу добирался (чтобы через минуту скатиться опять) до таких высот нежности, страсти и жалости, до которых редкая любовь доходит.
If, during those days, he had had to answer before some pretersensuous court (remember how Goethe said, pointing with his cane at the starry sky: “There is my conscience!”) he would scarcely have decided to say that he loved her—for he had long since realized that he was incapable of giving his entire soul to anyone or anything: its working capital was too necessary to him for his own private affairs; but on the other hand, when he looked at her he immediately reached (in order to fall off again a minute later) such heights of tenderness, passion and pity as are reached by few loves. (Chapter Three)
In his story The Assistant Producer (1943) VN pairs conscience with death:
But I have seen the toad in her eyes. We have a saying in Russian: vsevo dvoe i est; smert' da sovest'-- which may be rendered thus: "There are only two things that really exist--one's death and one's conscience." The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong. A very horrible criminal, whose wife had been even a worse one, once told me in the days when I was a priest that what had troubled him all through was the inner shame of being stopped by a still deeper shame from discussing with her the puzzle: whether perhaps in her heart of hearts she despised him or whether she secretly wondered if perhaps in his heart of hearts he despised her. And that is why I know perfectly well the kind of face General Golubkov and his wife had when the two were at last alone. (5)
The old man in Signs and Symbols tells his wife that they should take the boy (who suffers from "referential mania" and who several times attempted to take his life) from the hospital, otherwise they will be responsible. But it seems that the boy's last suicide attempt was successful and that, when the story begins, the boy is already dead. The third last telephone call in the story is not from the girl who wants to speak to Charlie, but from the author himself (it is the reader who should pick up the receiver).