Compared to the reality of Armande, his meeting with Mr. R. seems to Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) all sham and waxworks:
He did do something about it, despite all that fond criticism of himself. He wrote her a note from the venerable Versex Palace where he was to have cocktails in a few minutes with our most valuable author whose best book you did not like. Would you permit me to call on you, say Wednesday, the fourth? Because I shall be by then at the Ascot Hotel in your Witt, where I am told there is some excellent skiing even in summer. The main object of my stay here, on the other hand, is to find out when the old rascal's current book will be finished. It is queer to recall how keenly only the day before yesterday I had looked forward to seeing the great man at last in the flesh.
There was even more of it than our Person had expected on the strength of recent pictures. As he peeped through a vestibule window and watched him emerge from his car, no clarion of repute, no scream of glamour reverbed through his nervous system, which was wholly occupied with the bare-thighed girl in the sun-shot train. Yet what a grand sight R. presented - his handsome chauffeur helping the obese old boy on one side, his black-bearded secretary supporting him on the other, and two chasseurs from the hotel going through a mimicry of tentative assistance on the porch steps. The reporter in Person noted that Mr. R. wore Wallabees of a velvety cocoa shade, a lemon shirt with a lilac neck scarf, and a rumpled gray suit that seemed to have no distinction whatever - at least, to a plain American. Hullo, Person! They sat down in the lounge near the bar.
The illusory quality of the entire event was enhanced by the appearance and speech of the two characters. That monumental man with his clayey makeup and false grin, and Mr. Tamworth of the brigand's beard, seemed to be acting out a stiffly written scene for the benefit of an invisible audience from which Person, a dummy, kept turning away as if moved with his chair by Sherlock's concealed landlady, no matter how he sat or where he looked in the course of the brief but boozy interview. It was indeed all sham and waxworks as compared to the reality of Armande, whose image was stamped on the eye of his mind and shone through the show at various levels, sometimes upside down, sometimes on the teasing marge of his field of vision, but always there, always, true and thrilling. The commonplaces he and she had exchanged blazed with authenticity when placed for display against the forced guffaws in the bogus bar.
"Well, you certainly look remarkably fit," said Hugh with effusive mendacity after the drinks had been ordered.
Baron R. had coarse features, a sallow complexion, a lumpy nose with enlarged pores, shaggy bellicose eyebrows, an unerring stare, and a bulldog mouth full of bad teeth. The streak of nasty inventiveness so conspicuous in his writings also appeared in the prepared parts of his speech, as when he said, as he did now, that far from "looking fit" he felt more and more a creeping resemblance to the cinema star Reubenson who once played old gangsters in Florida-staged films; but no such actor existed.
"Anyway - how are you?" asked Hugh, pressing his disadvantage.
"To make a story quite short," replied Mr. R. (who had an exasperating way not only of trotting out hackneyed formulas in his would-be colloquial thickly accented English, but also. of getting them wrong), "I had not been feeling any too healthy, you know, during the winter. My liver, you know, was holding something against me."
He took a long sip of whiskey, and, rinsing his mouth with it in a manner Person had never yet witnessed, very slowly replaced his glass on the low table. Then, à deux with the muzzled stuff, he swallowed it and shifted to his second English style, the grand one of his most memorable characters:
"Insomnia and her sister Nocturia harry me, of course, but otherwise I am as hale as a pane of stamps. I don't think you met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth: like the English breed of black-blotched swine."
"No," said Hugh, "it does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson."
"O.K., son. And how's Phil?"
They discussed briefly R.'s publisher's vigor, charm, and acumen.
"Except that he wants me to write the wrong books. He wants - " assuming a coy throaty voice as he named the titles of a competitor's novels, also published by Phil - "he wants A Boy for Pleasure but would settle for The Slender Slut, and all I can offer him is not Tralala but the first and dullest tome of my Tralatitions."
"I assure you that he is waiting for the manuscript with utmost impatience. By the way - "
By the way, indeed! There ought to exist some rhetorical term for that twist of nonlogic. A unique view through a black weave ran by the way. By the way, I shall lose my mind if I do not get her.
" - by the way, I met a person yesterday who has just seen your stepdaughter - "
"Former stepdaughter," corrected Mr. R. "Quite a time no see, and I hope it remains so. Same stuff, son" (this to the barman).
"The occasion was rather remarkable. Here was this young woman, reading - "
"Excuse me," said the secretary warmly, and folding a note he had just scribbled, passed it to Hugh.
"Mr. R. resents all mention of Miss Moore and her mother."
And I don't blame him. But where was Hugh's famous tact? Giddy Hugh knew quite well the whole situation, having got it from Phil, not Julia, an impure but reticent little girl.
This part of our translucing is pretty boring, yet we must complete our report.
Mr. R. had discovered one day, with the help of a hired follower, that his wife Marion was having an affair with Christian Pines, son of the well-known cinema man who had directed the film Golden Windows (precariously based on the best of our author's novels). Mr. R. welcomed the situation since he was assiduously courting Julia Moore, his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, and now had plans for the future, well worthy of a sentimental lecher whom three or four marriages had not sated yet. Very soon, however, he learned from the same sleuth, who is at present dying in a hot dirty hospital on Formosa, an island, that young Pines, a handsome frog-faced playboy, soon also to die, was the lover of both mother and daughter, whom he had serviced in Cavaliere, Cal., during two summers. Hence the separation acquired more pain and plenitude than R. had expected. In the midst of all this, our Person, in his discreet little way (though actually he was half an inch taller than big R.), had happened to nibble, too, at the corner of the crowded canvas. (Chapter 10)
"Waxworks" bring to mind Tynyanov's story Voskovaya persona ("The Wax Persona," 1930), about the wax effigy of Peter the First. According to Hugh Person, his name does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson. Mr. R.’s novel Figures in a Golden Window seems to hint at okno (the window) and zolotye nebesa (the golden skies) mentioned by Pushkin in the Introduction to his poem Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman,” 1833):
На берегу пустынных волн
Стоял он, дум великих полн,
И вдаль глядел. Пред ним широко
Река неслася; бедный чёлн
По ней стремился одиноко.
По мшистым, топким берегам
Чернели избы здесь и там,
Приют убогого чухонца;
И лес, неведомый лучам
В тумане спрятанного солнца,
Кругом шумел.
И думал он:
Отсель грозить мы будем шведу,
Здесь будет город заложен
На зло надменному соседу.
Природой здесь нам суждено
В Европу прорубить окно,1
Ногою твердой стать при море.
Сюда по новым им волнам
Все флаги в гости будут к нам,
И запируем на просторе.
1Альгаротти где-то сказал: «Pétersbourg est la fenêtre par laquelle la Russie regarde en Europe».
On a deserted, wave-swept shore,
He stood – in his mind great thoughts grow –
And gazed afar. The northern river
Sped on its wide course him before;
One humble skiff cut the waves’ silver.
On banks of mosses and wet grass
Black huts were dotted here and there –
The miserable Finn’s abode;
The wood unknown to the rays
Of the dull sun, by clouds stowed,
Hummed all around. And he thought so:
‘The Swede from here will be frightened;
Here a great city will be wrought
To spite our neighborhood conceited.
From here by Nature we’re destined
To cut a window on to Europe, 1
To step with a strong foot by waters.
Here, by the new for them sea-paths,
Ships of all flags will come to us –
And on all seas our great feast opens.’
(tr. E. Bonver)
[1] Algarotti says somewhere: ‘St. Petersburg is the window through which Russia looks on to Europe.’
Люблю тебя, Петра творенье,
Люблю твой строгий, стройный вид,
Невы державное теченье,
Береговой ее гранит,
Твоих оград узор чугунный,
Твоих задумчивых ночей
Прозрачный сумрак, блеск безлунный,
Когда я в комнате моей
Пишу, читаю без лампады,
И ясны спящие громады
Пустынных улиц, и светла
Адмиралтейская игла,
И, не пуская тьму ночную
На золотые небеса,
Одна заря сменить другую
Спешит, дав ночи полчаса.
I love you, Peter’s great creation,
I love your view of stern and grace,
The Neva wave’s regal procession,
The grayish granite – her bank’s dress,
The airy iron-casting fences,
The gentle transparent twilight,
The moonless gleam of your nights restless,
When I so easy read and write
Without a lamp in my room lone,
And seen is each huge buildings’ stone
Of the left streets, and is so bright
The Admiralty spire’s flight,
And when, not letting the night’s darkness
To reach the golden heaven’s height,
The dawn after the sunset hastens –
And a half-hour’s for the night.2
(tr. E. Bonver)
[2] See Prince Vyazemski’s verses to Countess Z***.
Zdes’ i tam (here and there), a phrase used by Pushkin, brings to mind Mr. Tamworth (whom Mr. R. calls “Tom Tam” in his last letter to his publisher). In Pushkin's little tragedy Kamennyi gost' ("The Stone Guest," 1830) Leporello uses the word tam (there) and Don Guan (who just returned to Madrit from Paris) calls French women kukly voskovye (the wax dolls) and says that he would not exchange the last Andalusian peasant woman na pervykh tamoshnikh krasavits (for the first beauties down there):
Лепорелло.
Ну то-то же!
Сидели б вы себе спокойно там.
Дон Гуан.
Слуга покорный! я едва, едва
Не умер там со скуки. Что за люди,
Что за земля! А небо?... точный дым.
А женщины? Да я не променяю,
Вот видишь ли, мой глупый Лепорелло,
Последней в Андалузии крестьянки
На первых тамошних красавиц - право.
Они сначала нравилися мне
Глазами синими да белизною
Да скромностью - а пуще новизною;
Да слава богу скоро догадался -
Увидел я, что с ними грех и знаться -
В них жизни нет, всё куклы восковые;
А наши!.... Но послушай, это место
Знакомо нам; узнал ли ты его?
Leporello
Well, that's it!
You should sit quietly there.
Don Guan
Your humble servant! I barely
Didn't die of boredom. What kind of people
What a land! And the sky?.. It is like smoke.
What about women? Yes, I will not change
You see, my stupid Leporello,
The last peasant woman in Andalusia
On the first local beauties - right.
I liked them at first
Blue eyes, and whiteness,
and modesty - and even more novelty;
But, thank God, I soon guessed -
I saw that it was a sin to know them -
There is no life in them, all wax dolls;
And ours!.. But listen, this place
familiar to us; did you recognize him? (Scene I)
Don Guan calls the northern sky tochnyi dym (exact smoke). It is smoke that kills Hugh Person (who chokes to death in a hotel fire) at the end of VN's novel. At the end of Pushkin's little tragedy Don Guan and Donna Anna fall to hell. After his death Mr. R. (one of the spectral narrators in Transparent Things) goes to hell (where he is misprinted by the devils) and becomes a devil himself.
Don Juan (1665) is a comedy by Molière. Molière's wife (twenty-three years younger than her husband), Armande Béjart (1645-1700) was a French stage actress, also known under her stage name Mademoiselle Molière. Béjart rhymes with pozhar (fire in Russian), Chamar (Armande's surname) and koshmar (Russian for "nightmare"). The venerable Versex Palace where Hugh Person meets with Mr. R. brings to mind the Palace of Versailles (the residence of the king Louis XIV, Molière's patron). In Pushkin's poem Graf Nulin ("Count Null," 1825) Natalia Pavlovna, "a Russian Lucrece, who boxes the ears of a transient Tarquin (while quietly cuckolding her husband, a landed gentleman, with his twenty-three-year-old neighbor)," asks the Count about the French theater:
«А что театр?» — О! сиротеет,
C’est bien mauvais, ça fait pitié
Тальма совсем оглох, слабеет,
И мамзель Марс — увы! стареет…
За то Потье, le grand Potier!
Он славу прежнюю в народе
Доныне поддержал один. —
The theater? Put it on relief.
C'est bien mauvais. Ça fait pitié.
Talma's completely deaf, in fact,
and Mamzelle Mars? An artefact.
But still Potier, le grand Potier,
Yes, he's superb in any part,
without discredit to his art,
at forty-five can play eighteen.
(tr. Betsy Hulick)
In Pushkin's poem Natalia Pavlovna is reading the fourth volume of a sentimental novel, The Love of Eliza and Arman, or the Correspondence of Two Families:
Она сидит перед окном;
Пред ней открыт четвёртый том
Сентиментального романа:
Любовь Элизы и Армана,
Иль переписка двух семей. —
Роман классической, старинный,
Отменно длинный, длинный, длинный,
Нравоучительный и чинный,
Без романтических затей.
She sits beside the window;
In front of her the fourth volume
of a sentimental novel is open:
The Love of Eliza and Arman,
or the Correspondence of Two Families.
A classical, old novel,
perfectly long, long, long,
moralistic and proper,
without romantic embellishments.
According to Pushkin, in his poem (written on Dec. 13-14, 1825, on the day of the Decembrists's rising) he wanted to parody Shakespeare and history. The name Julia Moore (of Mr. R.'s step-daughter who gave Armande a copy of Figures in a Golden Window for her twenty-third birthday) hints at Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet.
Don Juan (1819-24) is a satirical epic poem by Lord Byron. Its characters include Donna Julia (Don Juan's mistress). In his diary Hugh Person mentions Byron who, as Hugh thinks, uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu:
In a diary he kept in fits and starts Hugh wrote that night in Versex:
"Spoke to a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a romantic tumult never felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule aurait juré avec la dernière syllabe de mon prénom. I believe Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu. Charmingly sophisticated, yet marvelously naive. Chalet above Witt built by father. If you find yourself in those parages. Wished to know if I liked my job. My job! I replied; "Ask me what I can do, not what I do, lovely girl, lovely wake of the sun through semitransparent black fabric. I can commit to memory a whole page of the directory in three minutes flat but am incapable of remembering my own telephone number. I can compose patches of poetry as strange and new as you are, or as anything a person may write three hundred years hence, but I have never published one scrap of verse except some juvenile nonsense at college. I have evolved on the playing courts of my father's school a devastating return of service - a cut clinging drive - but am out of breath after one game. Using ink and aquarelle I can paint a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence with all the mountains of paradise reflected therein, but am unable to draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the blazing windows of a villa by Plam. I have taught French in American schools but have never been able to get rid of my mother's Canadian accent, though I hear it clearly when I whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Déjanire that I may mount sur mon bûcher. I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree. I possess a doctor's degree in philosophy, but have no German. I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius.' By a coincidence worthy of that other genius, his stepdaughter had given her the book she was reading. Julia Moore has no doubt forgotten that I possessed her a couple of years ago. Both mother and daughter are intense travelers. They have visited Cuba and China, and such-like dreary, primitive spots, and speak with fond criticism of the many charming and odd people they made friends with there. Parlez-moi de son stepfather. Is he très fasciste? Could not understand why I called Mrs. R.'s left-wingism a commonplace bourgeois vogue. Mais au contraire, she and her daughter adore radicals! Well, I said, Mr. R., lui, is immune to politics. My darling thought that was the trouble with him. Toffee-cream neck with a tiny gold cross and a grain de beauté. Slender, athletic, lethal!" (Chapter 9)
Armande Chamar = Arman de Chamar. The last syllable of Armande's name (with which the nobility particle would clash) brings to mind zhenskie i muzheskie slogi (feminine and masculine syllables) and kazhdyi slog (each syllable) mentioned by Pushkin in his mock epic in octaves Domik v Kolomne (“A Small Cottage in Kolomna,” 1830):
Ну, женские и мужеские слоги!
Благословясь, попробуем: слушай!
Равняйтеся, вытягивайте ноги
И по три в ряд в октаву заезжай!
Не бойтесь, мы не будем слишком строги;
Держись вольней и только не плошай,
А там уже привыкнем, слава богу,
И выедем на ровную дорогу.
Как весело стихи свои вести
Под цифрами, в порядке, строй за строем,
Не позволять им в сторону брести,
Как войску, в пух рассыпанному боем!
Тут каждый слог замечен и в чести,
Тут каждый стих глядит себе героем,
А стихотворец... с кем же равен он?
Он Тамерлан иль сам Наполеон. (IV, V)
Pushkin compares the poet to Tamerlane or even Napoleon himself. In one of the Sherlock stories Holmes describes Professor Moriarty (a criminal mastermind) as "the Napoleon of crime." Hugh Person witnessed Napoleon's appearance at a seance:
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)
In his story Chetvyortoe izmerenie ("The Fourth Dimension," 1929) G. Ivanov mentions Conan Doyle, the author of "immortal" Sherlock Holmes, as the Grand Master of the spiritualists:
Над спиритами смеются - и действительно, спириты всегда смешноваты. Таинственное у них тесно перепутано с комическим. Чего стоит хотя бы король бульварных романистов, автор "бессмертного" Шерлока Холмса в роли их великого магистра, объявивший, кстати, недавно спиритизм на каком-то конгрессе - excusez du peu - религией.
In his poem Opyat’ belila, sepiya i sazha (“Again the whiting, sepia and soot," 1921) G. Ivanov mentions the sunset's peacock fan (pavliniy veyer):
Опять белила, сепия и сажа,
И трубы гениев гремят в упор.
Опять архитектурного пейзажа
Стеснённый раскрывается простор!
Горбатый мост прорезали лебедки,
Павлиний веер распустил закат,
И, лёгкие, как парусные лодки,
Над куполами облака летят,
На плоские ступени отблеск лунный
Отбросил зарево. И, присмирев,
На чёрном цоколе свой шар чугунный
Тяжёлой лапою сжимает лев.
The poem's last word, lev (lion) brings to mind Leo, Armande's zodiac sign. The characters in Leo Tolstoy's story Fal'shivyi kupon ("The Forged Coupon," 1911) include the devils. In Tolstoy's story Makhin (Mitya's friend who forges the coupon) mentions eta persona (this person):
— Ну, вот теперь пойдем в магазин. Вот тут на углу: фотографические принадлежности. Мне кстати рамка нужна, вот на эту персону.
Он достал фотографическую карточку большеглазой девицы с огромными волосами и великолепным бюстом.
— Какова душка? А?
“Now let us go to the shop across the road; they sell photographers’ materials there. I just happen to want a frame—for this young person here.” He took out of his pocket a photograph of a young lady with large eyes, luxuriant hair, and an uncommonly well-developed bust.
“Is she not sweet? Eh?” (II)