In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Hugh Person kills his wife Armande in his sleep, dreaming of Giulia Romeo (a prostitute whom he had picked up on his first trip abroad):
He did not plan anything. He had slept throughout the horrible automatic act, waking up only when both had landed on the floor by the bed. He had mentioned dreaming the house was on fire? That's right. Flames spurted all around and whatever one saw came through scarlet strips of vitreous plastic. His chance bedmate had flung the window wide open. Oh, who was she? She came from the past - a streetwalker he had picked up on his first trip abroad, some twenty years ago, a poor girl of mixed parentage, though actually American and very sweet, called Giulia Romeo, the surname means "pilgrim" in archaic Italian, but then we all are pilgrims, and all dreams are anagrams of diurnal reality. He dashed after her to stop her from jumping out. The window was large and low; it had a broad sill padded and sheeted, as was customary in that country of ice and fire. Such glaciers, such dawns! Giulia, or Julie, wore a Doppler shift over her luminous body and prostrated herself on the sill, with outspread arms still touching the wings of the window. He glanced down across her, and there, far below, in the chasm of the yard or garden, the selfsame flames moved like those tongues of red paper which a concealed ventilator causes to flicker around imitation yule logs in the festive shopwindows of snowbound childhoods. To leap, or try to lower oneself on knotted ledgelinen (the knotting was being demonstrated by a medievalish, sort of Flemish, long-necked shopgirl in a speculum at the back of his dream), seemed to him madness, and poor Hugh did all he could to restrain Juliet. Trying for the best hold, he had clutched her around the neck from behind, his square-nailed thumbs digging into her violet-lit nape, his eight fingers compressing her throat. A writhing windpipe was being shown on a screen of science cinema across the yard or street, but for the rest everything had become quite secure and comfortable: he had clamped Julia nicely and would have saved her from certain death if in her suicidal struggle to escape from the fire she had not slipped somehow over the sill and taken him with her into the void. What a fall! What a silly Julia! What luck that Mr. Romeo still gripped and twisted and cracked that crooked cricoid as X-rayed by the firemen and mountain guides in the street. How they flew! Superman carrying a young soul in his embrace!
The impact of the ground was far less brutal than he had expected. This is a bravura piece and not a patient's dream, Person. I shall have to report you. He hurt his elbow, and her night table collapsed with the lamp, a tumbler, a book; but Art be praised - she was safe, she was with him, she was lying quite still. He groped for the fallen lamp and neatly lit it in its unusual position. For a moment he wondered what his wife was doing there, prone on the floor, her fair hair spread as if she were flying. Then he stared at his bashful claws. (Chapter 20)
In Italian the meaning of the name Romeo is “Pilgrim from Rome.” The spectral narrators in VN’s novel call Hugh Person’s fourth (and last) visit to Switzerland a pilgrimage:
What had you expected of your pilgrimage, Person? A mere mirror rerun of hoary torments? Sympathy from an old stone? Enforced re-creation of irrecoverable trivia? A search for lost time in an utterly distinct sense from Good-grief's dreadful "Je me souviens, je me souviens de la maison où je suis né" or, indeed, Proust's quest? He had never experienced here (save once at the end of his last ascent) anything but boredom and bitterness. Something else had made him revisit dreary drab Witt.
Not a belief in ghosts. Who would care to haunt half-remembered lumps of matter (he did not know that Jacques lay buried under six feet of snow in Chute, Colorado), uncertain itineraries, a club hut which some spell prevented him from reaching and whose name anyway had got hopelessly mixed with "Draconite," a stimulant no longer in production but still advertised on fences, and even cliff walls. Yet something connected with spectral visitations had impelled him to come all the way from another continent. Let us make this a little clearer.
Practically all the dreams in which she had appeared to him after her death had been staged not in the settings of an American winter but in those of Swiss mountains and Italian lakes. He had not even found the spot in the woods where a gay band of little hikers had interrupted an unforgettable kiss. The desideratum was a moment of contact with her essential image in exactly remembered surroundings.
Upon returning to the Ascot Hotel he devoured an apple, pulled off his clay-smeared boots with a snarl of rejection, and, ignoring his sores and dampish socks, changed to the comfort of his town shoes. Back now to the torturing task!
Thinking that some small visual jog might make him recall the number of the room that he had occupied eight years ago, he walked the whole length of the third-floor corridor - and after getting only blank stares from one number after another, halted: the expedient had worked. He saw a very black 313 on a very white door and recalled instantly how he had told Armande (who had promised to visit him and did not wish to be announced): "Mnemonically it should be imagined as three little figures in profile, a prisoner passing by with one guard in front of him and another behind." Armande had rejoined that this was too fanciful for her, and that she would simply write it down in the little agenda she kept in her bag.
A dog yapped on the inner side of the door: the mark, he told himself, of substantial occupancy. Nevertheless, he carried away a feeling of satisfaction, the sense of having recovered an important morsel of that particular past.
Next, he proceeded downstairs and asked the fair receptionist to ring up the hotel in Stresa and find out if they could let him have for a couple of days the room where Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Person had stayed eight years ago. Its name, he said, sounded like "Beau Romeo." She repeated it in its correct form but said it might take a few minutes. He would wait in the lounge. (Chapter 25)
The Pilgrim's Progress From This World, to That Which is to Come (1678) is a Christian allegory by John Bunyan. In Pushkin’s poem Strannik (“The Wanderer,” 1835), an adaptation in Alexandrines of the first chapter of Bunyan’s work, the hero twice exclaims O gore, gore! (“O woe, woe!”):
«О горе, горе нам! Вы, дети, ты, жена! —
Сказал я, — ведайте: моя душа полна
Тоской и ужасом, мучительное бремя
Тягчит меня. Идет! уж близко, близко время:
Наш город пламени и ветрам обречен;
Он в угли и золу вдруг будет обращен,
И мы погибнем все, коль не успеем вскоре
Обресть убежище; а где? о горе, горе!»
In VN's novel Priglashenie na kazn' ("Invitation to a Beheading," 1935) Cincinnatus's father-in-law proclaims gore, gore! (“Woe, woe!”):
Между тем все продолжали прибывать мебель, утварь, даже отдельные части стен. Сиял широкий зеркальный шкап, явившийся со своим личным отражением (а именно: уголок супружеской спальни, -- полоса солнца на полу, оброненная перчатка и открытая в глубине дверь). Вкатили невеселый, с ортопедическими ухищрениями, велосипедик. На столе с инкрустациями лежал уже десять дет плоский гранатовый флакон и шпилька. Марфинька села на свою черную, вытканную розами, кушетку.
-- Горе, горе! -- провозгласил тесть и стукнул тростью.
Старички испуганно улыбнулись.
-- Папенька, оставьте, ведь тысячу раз пересказано, -- тихо проговорила Марфинька и зябко повела плечом. Ее молодой человек подал ей бахромчатую шаль, но она, нежно усмехнувшись одним уголком тонких губ, отвела его чуткую руку. ("Я первым делом смотрю мужчине на руки".) Он был в шикарной черной форме телеграфного служащего и надушен фиалкой.
-- Горе! -- с силой повторил тесть и начал подробно и смачно проклинать Цинцинната. Взгляд Цинцинната увело зеленое, в белую горошинку, платье Полины: рыженькая, косенькая, в очках, не смех возбуждающая, а грусть этими горошинками и круглотой, тупо передвигая толстые ножки в коричневых шерстяных чулках и сапожках на пуговках, она подходила к присутствующим и словно каждого изучала, серьезно и молчаливо глядя своими маленькими темными глазами, которые сходились за переносицей. Бедняжка была обвязана салфеткой, -- забыли, видимо, снять после завтрака.
Meanwhile, furniture, household utensils, even individual sections of walls continued to arrive. There came a mirrored wardrobe, bringing with it its own private reflection (namely, a corner of the connubial bedroom with a stripe of sunlight across the floor, a dropped glove, and an open door in the distance.) A cheerless little tricycle with orthopedic attachments was rolled in. It was followed by the inlaid table which had supported a flat garnet flacon and a hairpin for the last ten years. Marthe sat down on her black couch, embroidered with roses.
"Woe, woe!" proclaimed the father-in-law, striking the floor with his cane. Frightened little smiles appeared on the faces of the oldsters. "Don't, daddy, we've been through it a thousand times," Marthe said quietly, and shrugged a chilly shoulder. Her young man offered her a fringed shawl but she, forming the rudiment of a tender smile with one corner of her thin lips, waved away his sensitive hand. ("The first thing I look at in a man is his hands.") He was dressed in the smart black uniform of a telegraph employee and perfumed with violet scent.
"Woe!" repeated the father-in-law forcefully and began to curse Cincinnatus in detail and with relish. Cincinnatus's gaze was drawn to Pauline's green polka-dotted dress: red-haired, cross-eyed, bespectacled, arousing not laughter but sadness with those polka dots and that plumpness, dully moving her fat legs in brown wool stockings and button shoes, she would approach those present and study each, gazing gravely and silently with her small dark eyes, which seemed to meet behind the bridge of her nose. The poor thing had a napkin tied around her neck--evidently they had forgotten to take it off after breakfast. (Chapter Nine)
A prisoner, Cincinnatus brings to mind 313, the number that, according to Hugh Person, should be imagined as three little figures in profile, a prisoner passing by with one guard in front of him and another behind. On the eve of his death, Hugh Person moves to room 313 where he perishes (chokes to death) in a hotel fire.
Gore is Russian for “grief, woe.” The English title of Griboedov’s play in verse Gore ot uma (“Woe from Wit,” 1824) brings to mind Witt, a place in Switzerland where Hugh Person strangles Armande. Eight years later Hugh Person revisits Witt. The last eight years of Hugh Person's life are engrained by grief:
As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted "Peterson" and pronounced "Parson" by some) extricated his angular bulk from the taxi that had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort from Trux, and while his head was still lowered in an opening meant for emerging dwarfs, his eyes went up - not to acknowledge the helpful gesture sketched by the driver who had opened the door for him but to check the aspect of the Ascot Hotel (Ascot! ) against an eight-year-old recollection, one fifth of his life, engrained by grief. A dreadful building of gray stone and brown wood, it sported cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut) which by some mnemoptical trick he remembered as apple green. The steps of the porch were flanked with electrified carriage lamps on a pair of iron posts. Down those steps an aproned valet came tripping to take the two bags, and (under one arm) the shoebox, all of which the driver had alertly re-moved from the yawning boot. Person pays alert driver. (Chapter 2)
Describing Hugh Person’s first visit to Switzerland, the narrators mention the annals of European tours, recommended by the family doctors of retired old parties to allay lone grief:
This was his fourth visit to Switzerland. The first one had been eighteen years before when he had stayed for a few days at Trux with his father. Ten years later, at thirty-two, he had revisited that old lakeside town and had successfully courted a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by going to see their hotel. A steep lane and a flight of old stairs led to it from lake level where the local train had brought him to a featureless station. He had retained the hotel's name, Locquet, because it resembled the maiden name of his mother, a French Canadian, whom Person Senior was to survive by less than a year. He also remembered that it was drab and cheap, and abjectly stood next to another, much better hotel, through the rez-de-chaussee windows of which you could make out the phantoms of pale tables and underwater waiters. Both hotels had gone now, and in their stead there rose the Banque Bleue, a steely edifice, all polished surfaces, plate glass, and potted plants.
He had slept in a kind of halfhearted alcove, separated by an archway and a clothes tree from his father's bed. Night is always a giant but this one was especially terrible. Hugh had always had his own room at home, he hated this common grave of sleep, he grimly hoped that the promise of separate bedchambers would be kept at subsequent stops of their Swiss tour shimmering ahead in a painted mist. His father, a man of sixty, shorter than Hugh and also pudgier, had aged unappetizingly during his recent widowhood; his things let off a characteristic foresmell, faint but unmistakable, and he grunted and sighed in his sleep, dreaming of large unwieldy blocks of blackness, which had to be sorted out and removed from one's path or over which one had to clamber in agonizing attitudes of debility and despair. We cannot find in the annals of European tours, recommended by the family doctors of retired old parties to allay lone grief, even one trip which achieved that purpose. (Chapter 4)
Hugh Person picks up his first whore on the next day after his father’s death (who dies in a fitting room when trying on new trousers). The girl takes Hugh to a hotel room where a Russian novelist had once stayed:
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. (Chapter 6)
In his essay A Russian Man at a Rendezvous (1858) Chernyshevski mentions Turgenev's Faust, a story in nine letters (1855), and compares it to Turgenev's novel Rudin (1855):
В "Фаусте" герой старается ободрить себя тем, что ни он, ни Вера не имеют друг к другу серьёзного чувства; сидеть с ней, мечтать о ней -- это его дело, но по части решительности, даже в словах, он держит себя так, что Вера сама должна сказать ему, что любит его; речь несколько минут шла уже так, что ему следовало непременно сказать это, но он, видите ли, не догадался и не посмел сказать ей этого; а когда женщина, которая должна принимать объяснение, вынуждена, наконец, сама сделать объяснение, он, видите ли, "замер", но почувствовал, что "блаженство волною пробегает по его сердцу", только, впрочем, "по временам", а собственно говоря, он "совершенно потерял голову" -- жаль только, что не упал в обморок, да и то было бы, если бы не попалось кстати дерево, к которому можно было прислониться... Это в "Фаусте"; почти то же и в "Рудине".
In his article Chernyshevski compares the anonymous narrator in Turgenev's story Asya (1858) to Romeo and Asya, to Juliet:
Мы видим Ромео, мы видим Джульетту, счастью которых ничто не мешает, и приближается минута, когда навеки решится их судьба, - для этого Ромео должен только сказать: "Я люблю тебя, любишь ли ты меня?" - и Джульетта прошепчет: "Да..." И что же делает наш Ромео (так мы будем называть героя повести, фамилия которого не сообщена нам автором рассказа), явившись на свидание с Джульеттой?
In Turgenev's story Asya, as she speaks to the narrator, misquotes Tatiana's words in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Eight: XLVI: 12-14):
- Ну, рассказывайте же, - продолжала она, разглаживая полы своего платья и укладывая их себе на ноги, точно она усаживалась надолго, - рассказывайте или прочитайте что-нибудь, как, помните, вы нам читали из "Онегина"...
Она вдруг задумалась...
Где нынче крест и тень ветвей
Над бедной матерью моей! -
проговорила она вполголоса.
- У Пушкина не так, - заметил я.
- А я хотела бы быть Татьяной, - продолжала она всё так же задумчиво. (chapter IX)
"Where there's a cross and the shade of branches
over my poor mother!"
When the narrator points at her mistake (in Pushkin's novel Tatiana says "over my poor nurse"), Asya says pensively: "And I wish I were Tatiana."
In EO (Two: XXXVII) Lenski mournfully utters at the grave of Dmitri Larin (Tatiana's and Olga's father): "Poor Yorick!" In a note to EO Pushkin says: “Poor Yorick! - Hamlet's exclamation over the skull of the fool (see Shakespeare and Sterne).” Parson Yorick is a character in Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). According to Mr R., HP's name is pronounced Parson:
"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." (Chapter 10)
In the interview with Mr. R. Hugh Person mentions R.’s step-daughter Julia Moore:
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 Cavalière, 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. (ibid.)
Moore is an anagram of Romeo. According to the narrators of Transparent Things, all dreams are anagrams of diurnal reality. Hugh Person’s fatal dream of Giulia Romeo brings to mind Tatiana’s wondrous dream in Chapter Five of Eugene Onegin. In Chapter One of EO (XXII) Pushkin describes Onegin’s visit to a theater and mentions amury, cherti, zmei (amors, devils, and dragons):
Еще амуры, черти, змеи
На сцене скачут и шумят;
Еще усталые лакеи
На шубах у подъезда спят;
Еще не перестали топать,
Сморкаться, кашлять, шикать, хлопать;
Еще снаружи и внутри
Везде блистают фонари;
Еще, прозябнув, бьются кони,
Наскуча упряжью своей,
И кучера, вокруг огней,
Бранят господ и бьют в ладони:
А уж Онегин вышел вон;
Домой одеться едет он.
Amors, devils, and dragons
still on the stage jump and make noise;
still at the carriage porch the weary footmen
on the pelisses are asleep;
still people have not ceased to stamp,
blow noses, cough, hiss, clap;
still, outside and inside,
lamps glitter everywhere;
still, chilled, the horses fidget,
bored with their harness,
and round the fires the coachmen curse their masters
and beat their palms together;
and yet Onegin has already left;
he's driving home to dress.
Russian for “amor,” amur rhymes with Moore. The spectral narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils. VN’s novel is razroznennyi tom (an odd volume) from the devils’ library mentioned by Pushkin in Chapter Four (XXX: 1-2) of Eugene Onegin:
Но вы, разрозненные томы
Из библиотеки чертей,
Великолепные альбомы,
Мученье модных рифмачей,
Вы, украшенные проворно
Толстого кистью чудотворной
Иль Баратынского пером,
Пускай сожжёт вас божий гром!
Когда блистательная дама
Мне свой in-quarto подаёт,
И дрожь и злость меня берёт,
И шевелится эпиграмма
Во глубине моей души,
А мадригалы им пиши!
But you, odd volumes
from the devils’ library,
the gorgeous albums,
the rack of fashionable rhymesters;
you, nimbly ornamented
by Tolstoy's wonder-working brush,
or Baratïnski's pen,
let the Lord's levin burn you!
Whenever her in-quarto a resplendent lady
proffers to me,
a tremor and a waspishness possess me,
and at the bottom of my soul
there stirs an epigram —
but madrigals you have to write for them!