Describing his life with Iris Black (the first of his three or four successive wives), Vadim Vadimovich, the narrator and main character in VN's novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974), quotes his poem Vlyublyonnost':
The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal with her actual, unique traits--the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to see the point of her joke, or the way it developed a totally different set of soft folds as she frowned over the Tauchnitz in which she searched for the passage she wanted to share with me. My instrument, however, was still too blunt and immature; it could not express the divine detail, and her eyes, her hair became hopelessly generalized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes.
None of those descriptive and, let us be frank, banal pieces, were good enough (particularly when nakedly Englished without rhyme or treason) to be shown to Iris; and, besides, an odd shyness--which I had never felt before when courting a girl in the brisk preliminaries of my carnal youth--kept me back from submitting to Iris a tabulation of her charms. On the night of July 20, however, I composed a more oblique, more metaphysical little poem which I decided to show her at breakfast in a literal translation that took me longer to write than the original. The title, under which it appeared in an émigré daily in Paris (October 8, 1922, after several reminders on my part and one please-return request) was, and is, in the various anthologies and collections that were to reprint it in the course of the next fifty years, Vlyublyonnost', which puts in a golden nutshell what English needs three words to express.
My zabyvаem chto vlyublyonnost'
Ne prosto povorot litsа,
A pod kupаvami bezdonnost',
Nochnаya pаnika plovtsа.
Pokuda snitsya, snis', vlyublyonnost',
No probuzhdeniem ne much',
I luchshe nedogovoryonnost'
Chem eta shchel' i etot luch.
Napominаyu chto vlyublyсnnost'
Ne yаv', chto metiny ne te,
Chto mozhet-byt' potustoronnost'
Priotvorilas' v temnote.
"Lovely," said Iris. "Sounds like an incantation. What does it mean?"
"I have it here on the back. It goes like this. We forget--or rather tend to forget--that being in love (vlyublyonnost') does not depend on the facial angle of the loved one, but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars, a swimmer's panic in the night (here the iambic tetrameter happens to be rendered--last line of the first stanza, nochnаya pаnika plovtsа).
Next stanza: While the dreaming is good--in the sense of 'while the going is good'--do keep appearing to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost', but do not torment us by waking us up or telling too much: reticence is better than that chink and that moonbeam. Now comes the last stanza of this philosophical love poem."
"This what?"
"Philosophical love poem. Napominаyu, I remind you, that vlyublyonnost' is not wide-awake reality, that the markings are not the same (a moon-striped ceiling, polosatyy ot luny potolok, is, for instance, not the same kind of reality as a ceiling by day), and that, maybe, the hereafter stands slightly ajar in the dark. Voilà."
"Your girl," remarked Iris, "must be having a jolly good time in your company. Ah, here comes our breadwinner. Bonjour, Ives. The toast is all gone, I'm afraid. We thought you'd left hours ago."
She fitted her palm for a moment to the cheek of the teapot. And it went into Ardis, it all went into Ardis, my poor dead love. (1.5)
Vadim's novel Ardis (1970) corresponds to VN's novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). Like Lermontov's poem Son ("A Dream," 1841), VN's Ada is a triple dream (a dream within a dream within a dream). In her poem Troynoe ("Threefoldian," 1927) Zinaida Hippius (a Russian poet and memoirist, 1869-1945) mentions troynaya bezdonnost' (a triple bottomlessness):
Тройною бездонностью мир богат.
Тройная бездонность дана поэтам.
Но разве поэты не говорят
Только об этом?
Только об этом?
Тройная правда — и тройной порог.
Поэты, этому верному верьте.
Только об этом думает Бог:
О Человеке.
Любви.
И Смерти.
The world is abundant with a triple bottomlessness.
The triple bottomlessness is given to poets.
But do not all poets speak
Only about this? Only about this?
The triple truth - and the threfold threshold.
Poets, believe in this true thing!
God is thinking only of this:
About man. About Love. And about Death.
In the first stanza of Vadim's poem, vlyublyonnost' rhymes with bezdonnost' (bottomlessness). Vlyublyonnost' (1904) is an essay on sex-related issue by Zinaida Hippius (a good poet who wrote the worst prose imaginable). Hippius's troynaya bezdonnost' (triple bottomlessness) brings to mind Merezhkovski's famous poem Dvoynaya bezdna ("Double Abyss," 1901):
Не плачь о неземной отчизне,
И помни,— более того,
Что есть в твоей мгновенной жизни,
Не будет в смерти ничего.
И жизнь, как смерть необычайна…
Есть в мире здешнем — мир иной.
Есть ужас тот же, та же тайна —
И в свете дня, как в тьме ночной.
И смерть и жизнь — родные бездны;
Они подобны и равны,
Друг другу чужды и любезны,
Одна в другой отражены.
Одна другую углубляет,
Как зеркало, а человек
Их съединяет, разделяет
Своею волею навек.
И зло, и благо,— тайна гроба.
И тайна жизни — два пути —
Ведут к единой цели оба.
И все равно, куда идти.
Будь мудр,— иного нет исхода.
Кто цепь последнюю расторг,
Тот знает, что в цепях свобода
И что в мучении — восторг.
Ты сам — свой Бог, ты сам свой ближний.
О, будь же собственным Творцом,
Будь бездной верхней, бездной нижней,
Своим началом и концом.
A fragile little man in a sloppy suit, Vasiliy Sokolovski (a character in LATH) is a recognizable portrait of Dmitri Merezhkovski (Zinaida Hippius's husband, a writer and poet, 1865-1941):
Ivan Shipogradov, eminent novelist and recent Nobel Prize winner, would also be present, radiating talent and charm, and--after a few jiggers of vodka--delighting his intimates with the kind of Russian bawdy tale that depends for its artistry on the rustic gusto and fond respect with which it treats our most private organs. A far less engaging figure was I. A. Shipogradov's old rival, a fragile little man in a sloppy suit, Vasiliy Sokolovski (oddly nicknamed "Jeremy" by I. A.), who since the dawn of the century had been devoting volume after volume to the mystical and social history of a Ukrainian clan that had started as a humble family of three in the sixteenth century but by volume six (1920) had become a whole village, replete with folklore and myth. It was good to see old Morozov's rough-hewn clever face with its shock of dingy hair and bright frosty eyes; and for a special reason I closely observed podgy dour Basilevski--not because he had just had or was about to have a row with his young mistress, a feline beauty who wrote doggerel verse and vulgarly flirted with me, but because I hoped he had already seen the fun I had made of him in the last issue of a literary review in which we both collaborated. Although his English was inadequate for the interpretation of, say, Keats (whom he defined as "a pre-Wildean aesthete in the beginning of the Industrial Era") Basilevski was fond of attempting just that. In discussing recently the "not altogether displeasing preciosity" of my own stuff, he had imprudently quoted a popular line from Keats, rendering it as:
Vsegda nas raduet krasivaya veshchitsa
which in retranslation gives:
“A pretty bauble always gladdens us." (2.1)
Vlyublyonnost' (1907) is a poem by Alexander Blok (a Russian poet, 1880-1921), a friend of the Merezhkovski couple:
Королевна жила на высокой горе,
И над башней дымились прозрачные сны облаков.
Темный рыцарь в тяжелой кольчуге шептал о любви на заре,
В те часы, когда Рейн выступал из своих берегов,
Над зелеными рвами текла, розовея, весна.
Непомерность ждала в синевах отдаленной черты.
И влюбленность звала — не дала отойти от окна,
Не смотреть в роковые черты, оторваться от светлой мечты.
"Подними эту розу", — шепнула — и ветер донес
Тишину улетающих лат, бездыханный ответ.
"В синем утреннем небе найдешь Купину расцветающих роз", -
Он шепнул, и сверкнул, и взлетел, и она полетела вослед.
И за облаком плыло и пело мерцание тьмы,
И влюбленность в погоне забыла, забыла свой щит.
И она, окрылясь, полетела из отчей тюрьмы -
На воздушном пути королевна полет свой стремит.
Уж в стремнинах туман, и рога созывают стада,
И заветная мгла протянула плащи и скрестила мечи,
И вечернюю грусть тишиной отражает вода,
И над лесом погасли лучи.
Не смолкает вдали властелинов борьба,
Распри дедов над ширью земель.
Но различна Судьба: здесь — мечтанье раба,
Там — воздушной Влюбленности хмель.
И в воздушный покров улетела на зов
Навсегда... О, Влюбленность! Ты строже Судьбы!
Повелительней древних законов отцов!
Слаще звука военной трубы!
In her reminiscences of Blok, “Alexander Blok. A Biographical Sketch” (1930), Maria Beketov (the poet’s aunt) mentions Basilevski, a composer who set to music Blok’s drama Roza i krest (“The Rose and the Cross,” 1912):
В конце мая Александр Александрович узнал, что "Роза и Крест" пропущена цензурой без всяких ограничений. Около этого времени он сообщал матери, что написал краткие сведения о "Розе и Кресте" для композитора Базилевского, который написал музыку на его драму и собирался исполнять её в Москве. Сведения нужны были для концертной программы. Тут же Александр Александрович прибавляет: "Базилевский пишет, что Свободный театр думает о постановке "Розы и Креста". (Chapter 11)
At the beginning of “The Rose and the Cross” Bertrand mentions yabloni staryi stvol (the old trunk of an apple-tree):
Яблони старый ствол,
Расшатанный бурей февральской!
Жадно ждёшь ты весны...
Тёплый ветер дохнёт, и нежной травою
Зазеленеет замковый вал...
Чем ты, старый, ответишь тогда
Ручьям и птицам певучим?
Лишь две-три бледно-розовых ветви протянешь
В воздух, омытый дождями,
Чёрный, бурей измученный ствол!
Vadim Vadimovich's surname that he forgets in his old age and tries to remember at the end of the novel seems to be Yablonski. Prince Vadim Yablonski and his first three wives (Iris Black, Annette Blagovo and Louise Adamson) seem to be the children of Count Nikifor Nikodimovich Starov (a retired diplomat). The surname Starov comes from staryi (old).