Describing his last visit to one last Villa Venus, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) quotes the bawd's words ‘Smorchiama la secandela’ (let us snuff out the candle):
Van never regretted his last visit to one last Villa Venus. A cauliflowered candle was messily burning in its tin cup on the window ledge next to the guitar-shaped paper-wrapped bunch of long roses for which nobody had troubled to find, or could have found, a vase. On a bed, some way off, lay a pregnant woman, smoking, looking up at the smoke mingling its volutes with the shadows on the ceiling, one knee raised, one hand dreamily scratching her brown groin. Far beyond her, a door standing ajar gave on what appeared to be a moonlit gallery but was really an abandoned, half-demolished, vast reception room with a broken outer wall, zigzag fissures in the floor, and the black ghost of a gaping grand piano, emitting, as if all by itself, spooky glissando twangs in the middle of the night. Through a great rip in the marbleized brick and plaster, the naked sea, not seen but heard as a panting space separated from time, dully boomed, dully withdrew its platter of pebbles, and, with the crumbling sounds, indolent gusts of warm wind reached the unwalled rooms, disturbing the volutes of shadow above the woman, and a bit of dirty fluff that had drifted down onto her pale belly, and even the reflection of the candle in a cracked pane of the bluish casement. Beneath it, on a rump-tickling coarse couch, Van reclined, pouting pensively, pensively caressing the pretty head on his chest, flooded by the black hair of a much younger sister or cousin of the wretched florinda on the tumbled bed. The child’s eyes were closed, and whenever he kissed their moist convex lids the rhythmic motion of her blind breasts changed or stopped altogether, and was presently resumed.
He was thirsty, but the champagne he had bought, with the softly rustling roses, remained sealed and he had not the heart to remove the silky dear head from his breast so as to begin working on the explosive bottle. He had fondled and fouled her many times in the course of the last ten days, but was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained — she, and the other girl, and a third one (a maidservant, Princess Kachurin), who seemed to have been born in the faded bathing suit she never changed and would die in, no doubt, before reaching majority or the first really cold winter on the beach mattress which she was moaning on now in her drugged daze. And if the child really was called Adora, then what was she? — not Rumanian, not Dalmatian, not Sicilian, not Irish, though an echo of brogue could be discerned in her broken but not too foreign English. Was she eleven or fourteen, almost fifteen perhaps? Was it really her birthday — this twenty-first of July, nineteen-four or eight or even several years later, on a rocky Mediterranean peninsula?
A very distant church clock, never audible except at night, clanged twice and added a quarter.
‘Smorchiama la secandela,’ mumbled the bawd on the bed in the local dialect that Van understood better than Italian. The child in his arms stirred and he pulled his opera cloak over her. In the grease-reeking darkness a faint pattern of moonlight established itself on the stone floor, near his forever discarded half-mask lying there and his pump-shod foot. It was not Ardis, it was not the library, it was not even a human room, but merely the squalid recess where the bouncer had slept before going back to his Rugby-coaching job at a public school somewhere in England. The grand piano in the otherwise bare hall seemed to be playing all by itself but actually was being rippled by rats in quest of the succulent refuse placed there by the maid who fancied a bit of music when her cancered womb roused her before dawn with its first familiar stab. The ruinous Villa no longer bore any resemblance to Eric’s’ organized dream,’ but the soft little creature in Van’s desperate grasp was Ada. (2.3)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): smorchiama: let us snuff out the candle.
At the end of Turgenev's novel Ottsy i deti ("Fathers and Sons," 1862) Bazarov asks Mme Odintsov to breathe on the dying lamp and let it go out:
Он разом принял руку и приподнялся.
— Прощайте, — проговорил он с внезапной силой, и глаза его блеснули последним блеском. — Прощайте... Послушайте... ведь я вас не поцеловал тогда... Дуньте на умирающую лампаду, и пусть она погаснет...
Анна Сергеевна приложилась губами к его лбу.
— И довольно! — промолвил он и опустился на подушку. — Теперь... темнота...
He at once took his hand away and raised himself.
"Good-by," he said with sudden force, and his eyes flashed with a parting gleam. "Good-by . . . Listen . . . you know I never kissed you then . . . Breathe on the dying lamp and let it go out."
Anna Sergeyevna touched his forehead with her lips.
"Enough," he murmured, and fell back on the pillow. "And now . . . darkness . . ." (Chapter XXVII)
In his deathbed delirium Bazarov sees red dogs:
— Ну, это дудки. Но не в том дело. Я не ожидал, что так скоро умру; это случайность, очень, по правде сказать, неприятная. Вы оба с матерью должны теперь воспользоваться тем, что в вас религия сильна; вот вам случай поставить ее на пробу. — Он отпил еще немного воды. — А я хочу попросить тебя об одной вещи... пока еще моя голова в моей власти. Завтра или послезавтра мозг мой, ты знаешь, в отставку подаст. Я и теперь не совсем уверен, ясно ли я выражаюсь. Пока я лежал, мне все казалось, что вокруг меня красные собаки бегали, а ты надо мной стойку делал, как над тетеревом. Точно я пьяный. Ты хорошо меня понимаешь?
"Oh, that's rubbish. And it's not the point. I never expected to die so soon; it's a chance, a very unpleasant one, to tell the truth. You and mother must now take advantage of your strong religious faith; here's an opportunity of putting it to the test." He drank a little more water. "But I want to ask you one thing--while my brain is still under control. Tomorrow or, the day after, you know, my brain will cease to function. I'm not quite certain even now, if I'm expressing myself clearly. While I was lying here I kept on imagining that red dogs were running round me, and you made them point at me, as if I were a blackcock. I thought I was drunk. Do you understand me all right?" (ibid.)
Before he falls asleep and dreams of Villa Venus (Eric Veen's floramors), Van mentions one hund, red dog:
A sense of otiose emptiness was all Van derived from those contacts with Literature. Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains. He decided that after completing his medical studies at Kingston (which he found more congenial than good old Chose) he would undertake long travels in South America, Africa, India. As a boy of fifteen (Eric Veen’s age of florescence) he had studied with a poet’s passion the time-table of three great American transcontinental trains that one day he would take — not alone (now alone). From Manhattan, via Mephisto, El Paso, Meksikansk and the Panama Chunnel, the dark-red New World Express reached Brazilia and Witch (or Viedma, founded by a Russian admiral). There it split into two parts, the eastern one continuing to Grant’s Horn, and the western returning north through Valparaiso and Bogota. On alternate days the fabulous journey began in Yukonsk, a two-way section going to the Atlantic seaboard, while another, via California and Central America, roared into Uruguay. The dark blue African Express began in London and reached the Cape by three different routes, through Nigero, Rodosia or Ephiopia. Finally, the brown Orient Express joined London to Ceylon and Sydney, via Turkey and several Chunnels. It is not clear, when you are falling asleep, why all continents except you begin with an A.
Those three admirable trains included at least two carriages in which a fastidious traveler could rent a bedroom with bath and water closet, and a drawing room with a piano or a harp. The length of the journey varied according to Van’s predormient mood when at Eric’s age he imagined the landscapes unfolding all along his comfortable, too comfortable, fauteuil. Through rain forests and mountain canyons and other fascinating places (oh, name them! Can’t — falling asleep), the room moved as slowly as fifteen miles per hour but across desertorum or agricultural drearies it attained seventy, ninety-seven night-nine, one hund, red dog — (2.2)
On the other hand, smorchiama la secandela makes one think of khochu more morshchit' (I want to wrinkle the sea), Balda's words to the old devil in Pushkin's "Tale of the Priest and his Workman Balda" (1830-31):
Балда, с попом понапрасну не споря,
Пошел, сел у берега моря;
Там он стал веревку крутить
Да конец ее в море мочить.
Вот из моря вылез старый Бес:
«Зачем ты, Балда, к нам залез?»
- «Да вот веревкой хочу море морщить.
Да вас, проклятое племя, корчить.»
Беса старого взяла тут унылость.
«Скажи, за что такая немилость?»
- «Как за что? Вы не плотите оброка,
Не помните положеного срока;
Вот ужо будет нам потеха,
Вам, собакам, великая помеха».
- «Балдушка, погоди ты морщить море,
Оброк сполна ты получишь вскоре.
Погоди, вышлю к тебе внука».
Балда мыслит: «Этого провести не штука!»
Вынырнул подосланный бесенок,
Замяукал он как голодный котенок:
«Здравствуй, Балда мужичок;
Какой тебе надобен оброк?
Об оброке век мы не слыхали,
Не было чертям такой печали.
Balda, goes out and sits by the sea,
And there to twisting a rope he sets
And its further end in the sea he wets.
And an ancient fiend from the sea comes out:
"Balda, why sneakest thou hereabout?"
"I mean with the rope the sea to wrinkle
And your cursed race to cramp and crinkle."
And the ancient then is grieved in mind:
"Oh why, oh why, art thou thus unkind?" –
"Are ye asking why? and have not you
Forgotten the time when the rent was due?
But now, you dogs, we shall have our joke,
And you soon will find in your wheel a spoke."
"O dear Balda, let the sea stop wrinkling,
And all the rent is thine in a twinkling.
I will send thee my grandson -wait awhile."
(tr. Oliver Elton)