In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) the spectral narrators discuss the history of a pencil:
In his search for a commode to store his belongings Hugh Person, a tidy man, noticed that the middle drawer of an old desk relegated to a dark corner of the room, and supporting there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly by the lodger or servant (actually neither) who had been the last to check if it was empty (nobody had). My good Hugh tried to woggle it in; at first it refused to budge; then, in response to the antagony of a chance tug (which could not help profiting from the cumulative energy of several jogs) it shot out and spilled a pencil. This he briefly considered before putting it back.
It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never found. Now comes the act of attention.
In his shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath but one should be above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors). On the whole, it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned make. Going back a number of seasons (not as far, though, as Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction, we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is placed in a metal cylinder which has a blue eye, a sapphire with a hole drilled in it, and through this the caviar is forced. It issues in one continuous appetizing rodlet (watch for our little friend!), which looks as if it retained the shape of an earthworm's digestive tract (but watch, watch, do not be deflected!). It is now being cut into the lengths required for these particular pencils (we glimpse the cutter, old Elias Borrowdale, and are about to mouse up his forearm on a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in our haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.
Now let us not lose our precious bit of lead while we prepare the wood. Here's the tree! This particular pine! It Is cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark. We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here's the board that will yield the integument of the pencil in the shallow drawer (still not closed). We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes.
Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us! But he won't, oh no. (Chapter 3)
In his poem To Dawe, Esq. (1828) Pushkin mentions George Dawe’s divnyi karandash (sublime pencil):
Зачем твой дивный карандаш
Рисует мой арапский профиль?
Хоть ты векам его предашь,
Его освищет Мефистофель.
Рисуй Олениной черты.
В жару сердечных вдохновений,
Лишь юности и красоты
Поклонником быть должен гений.
Why draw with your pencil sublime
My Negro profile? Though transmitted
By you it be to future time,
It will be by Mephisto twitted.
Draw fair Olenin's features, in the glow
Of heart-engendered inspiration:
Only on youth and beauty should bestow
A genius its adoration.
(VN’s translation)
Mephistopheles is the devil’s name in Goethe’s Faust (1808). In VN's story Zanyatoy chelovek ("A Busy Man," 1931) Graf It (Graf Ytski in the English version) quotes Faust's famous words in Goethe's tragedy:
В тихую летнюю ночь ему минуло тридцать три года. Он сидел у себя в комнате, моргающий, без очков, в арестантских подштанниках, и один торжествовал непрошенную годовщину. Гостей он не пригласил, боясь тех случайностей (разбитое зеркальце, разговор о бренности жизни), которые впоследствии чужая память непременно бы возвела в чин предзнаменований и предчувствий. Остановись, остановись, мгновение,-- ты не очень прекрасно, но, все-таки, остановись,-- вот ведь неповторимая личность в неповторимой среде,-- бурелом растрепанных книг на полках, стеклянный горшочек из-под югурта, удлиняющего жизнь, шерстистая проволока для прочищения трубки, толстый альбом цвета золы, в который Графом вклеено все, начиная с собственных стихов, вырезанных из газет, и кончая русским трамвайным билетиком,-- вот это сочетание вещей окружает Графа Ита (псевдоним, выдуманный давно, дождливой ночью, в ожидании парома), ушастого, кряжистого человечка, сидящего на краю постели с фиолетовым, дырявым, только что снятым носком в руке.
On a quiet summer night he turned thirty-three. Alone in his room, clad in long underpants, striped like those of a convict, glassless and blinking, he celebrated his unbidden birthday. He had not invited anybody because he feared such contingencies as a broken pocket mirror or some talk about life’s fragility, which the retentive mind of a guest would be sure to promote to the rank of an omen. Stay, stay, moment—thou art not as fair as Goethe’s—but nevertheless stay. Here we have an unrepeatable individual in an unrepeatable medium: the storm-felled worn books on the shelves, the little glass pot of yogurt (said to lengthen life), the tufted brush for cleaning one’s pipe, the stout album of an ashen tint in which Graf pasted everything, beginning with the clippings of his verse and finishing with a Russian tram ticket—these are the surroundings of Graf Ytski (a pen name he had thought up on a rainy night while waiting for the next ferry), a butterfly-eared, husky little man who sat on the edge of his bed holding the holey violet sock he had just taken off.
In his story VN mentions bessmertnyi Karan d’Ash” (the immortal Caran d'Ache):
Теперь: вот он,-- тридцатидвухлетний, маленький, но широкоплечий мужчина, с отстающими, прозрачными ушами, полуактер, полулитератор, помещающий в зарубежных газетах юмористические стишки,-- под не очень острым псевдонимом (неприятно напоминающим бессмертного Каран д'Аша). Вот он. Лицо его состоит из темных, со слепым бликом, очков в роговой оправе и шелковистой бородавки на щеке. Он лысеет, и в прямых, белесых, зачесанных назад волосах череп сквозит бледно-розовой замшей.
So here he is—a thirty-two-year-old, smallish, but broad-shouldered man, with protruding transparent ears, half-actor, half-literatus, author of topical jingles in the émigré papers over a not very witty pen name (unpleasantly reminding one of the “Caran d’Ache” adopted by an immortal cartoonist). Here he is. His face consists of horn-framed dark glasses, with a blindman’s glint in them, and of a soft-tufted wart on the left cheek. His head is balding and through the straight strands of brushed-back dunnish hair one discerns the pale-pink chamois of his scalp.
Caran d’Ache is a play on karandash (Russian for "pencil"). The penname Graf It (Graf Ytski) is a play on grafit (Russian for "graphite"). The characters in VN's story A Busy Man include Ivan Ivanovich Engel, Graf Ytski's odd neighbor. The action in the story takes place in Berlin. A character in Transparent Things, Mr. R. (an American writer whom Hugh Person visits in Switzerland) is German. Pushkin's Scene from Faust (1825) begins with Faust's words Mne skuchno, bes ("I'm bored, the devil"). Besy ("The Demons") is a poem (1830) by Pushkin and a novel (1872) by Dostoevski. In a letter of Apr. 30, 1823, to Alexander Turgenev Vyazemski calls Pushkin bes arabskiy (the Arabian devil), a pun on Bessarabskiy (the Bessarabian). In his poem Sankt-Peterburg – uzornyi iney (“St. Petersburg – the patterned rime,” 1923) VN calls St. Petersburg “ex libris besa” (the devil’s ex libris), mentions Pushkin and his Olenina:
Санкт-Петербург - узорный иней,
ex libris беса, может быть,
но дивный... Ты уплыл, и ныне
мне не понять и не забыть.
Мой Пушкин бледной ночью, летом,
сей отблеск объяснял своей
Олениной, а в пенье этом
сквозная тень грядущих дней.
И ныне: лепет любопытных,
прах, нагота, крысиный шурк
в книгохранилищах гранитных;
и ты уплыл, Санкт-Петербург.
И долетая сквозь туманы
с воздушных площадей твоих,
меня печалит музы пьяной
скуластый и осипший стих.
In Olenin (to whom Pushkin, on a pale summer night, explained the mystery of St. Petersburg) there is Lenin. According to VN, in Pushkin’s melodious words there is a transparent shadow of the days to come. The action in Transparent Things ends in the future (at the end of 1973 or at the beginning of 1974).
Ex libris is a bookplate inscribed to show the name of the book's owner. VN's novel is one of the odd volumes out of 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
out of 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!
In Chapter Eight (XXVI: 4) of EO Pushkin mentions Saint-Priest (a caricaturist) and his pencils:
Тут был Проласов, заслуживший
Известность низостью души,
Во всех альбомах притупивший,
St.-Рriest, твои карандаши;
В дверях другой диктатор бальный
Стоял картинкою журнальной,
Румян, как вербный херувим,
Затянут, нем и недвижим,
И путешественник залётный,
Перекрахмаленный нахал,
В гостях улыбку возбуждал
Своей осанкою заботной,
И молча обмененный взор
Ему был общий приговор.
Here was Prolasov, who had gained
distinction by the baseness of his soul
and blunted in all albums,
Saint-P[riest], your pencils;
in the doorway another ball dictator
stood like a fashion plate,
as rosy as a Palm Week cherub,
tight-coated, mute and motionless;
and a far-flung traveler,
an overstarched jackanapes,
provoked a smile among the guests
by his studied deportment,
and an exchange of silent glances was
his universal condemnation.
Verbnyi kheruvim (a Palm Week cherub) brings to mind cherubim mentioned by Mr. R. in his last letter to his publisher:
Dear Phil,
This, no doubt, is my last letter to you. I am leaving you. I am leaving you for another even greater Publisher. In that House I shall be proofread by cherubim - or misprinted by devils, depending on the department my poor soul is assigned to. So adieu, dear friend, and may your heir auction this off most profitably. (Chapter 21)
Judging by the gross mistake in the novel’s last sentence (“Easy, you know, does it, son”), Mr. R. goes straight to hell where he is misprinted by devils. The spectral narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils.
Pushkin's Onegin (who was born on the Neva's banks) read Adam Smith:
Высокой страсти не имея
Для звуков жизни не щадить,
Не мог он ямба от хорея,
Как мы ни бились, отличить.
Бранил Гомера, Феокрита;
Зато читал Адама Смита
И был глубокой эконом,
То есть умел судить о том,
Как государство богатеет,
И чем живет, и почему
Не нужно золота ему,
Когда простой продукт имеет.
Отец понять его не мог
И земли отдавал в залог.
Lacking the lofty passion not to spare
life for the sake of sounds,
an iamb from a trochee —
no matter how we strove — he could not tell apart.
Theocritus and Homer he disparaged,
but read, in compensation, Adam Smith,
and was a deep economist:
that is, he could assess the way
a state grows rich,
what it subsists upon, and why
it needs not gold
when it has got the simple product.
His father could not understand him,
and mortgaged his lands. (One: VII)
The characters in Mr. R.'s novel Tralatitions include Adam von Librikov (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), a rival author whose surname brings to mind "the devil's ex libris."
See also the updated version of my previous post, “Tralala, Tralatitions & Adam von Librikov in Transparent Things.”