Speaking of Zoshchenko, the hero of his
Vozvrashchyonnaya molodost' ("Retrieved Youthfulness", 1933) is ageing
professor who marries a young woman only to be struck down by
paralysis soon afterwards. This reminded me of Vadim, the hero of VN's
LATH, who gets paralyzed soon after marrying his last
love (forty-three years younger than her husband).
Nearly all his life Vadim Vadimovich suffered from
a mysterious mental illness. Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko
(1895-1958), the writer famous for his humorous stories (who is mentioned in
Chapter Four of The Gift), was, at the beginning of his career, a
neurotic. In his "Before the Sunrise" (1944, 1972) he tells how
he once spent 24 hours lying supine on the floor of his hotel room in
Tuapse (a spa on the Caucasian Black sea coast). Tuapse is mentioned in
LATH when the hero nearly drowns during a moonlight swim: "I was too upset in
all senses to tell whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse" (Part One, 7). Cf.
Nochnaya panika plovtsa (a swimmer's panic in the night), a line from
Vadim's poem Vlyublyonnost'.
Alexey Sklyarenko