In VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947) the soldier asks Krug (who just learned that his son David was sadistically murdered at the hospital) "Yablochko, kuda-zh ty tak kotishsa [little apple, whither are you rolling]:"
Krug was caught by a friendly soldier.
'Yablochko, kuda-zh ty tak kotishsa [little apple, whither are you rolling]?' asked the soldier and added:
'A po zhabram, milaĭ, khochesh [want me to hit you, friend]?' (Chapter 17)
The allusion is to a popular song and sailor dance Yablochko:
Эх, яблочко,
Да куда котишься?
Ко мне в рот попадёшь —
Да не воротишься!
Little apple,
whither are you rolling?
You will get into my mouth
and will never come back again!
In VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) a Red Army soldier at the frontier asks Vadim the same question:
I thought I had crossed the frontier when a bare-headed Red Army soldier with a Mongol face who was picking whortleberries near the trail challenged
me: "And whither," he asked picking up his cap from a stump, "may you be rolling (kotishsya), little apple (yablochko)? Pokazyvay-ka dokumentiki (Let me see your papers)."
I groped in my pockets, fished out what I needed, and shot him dead, as he lunged at me; then he fell on his face, as if sunstruck on the parade ground, at the feet of his king. None of the serried tree trunks looked his way, and I fled, still clutching Dagmara's lovely little revolver. Only half an hour later, when I reached at last another part of the forest in a more or less conventional republic, only then did my calves cease to quake. (1.2)
Vadim’s flight from Russia is a parody of a scene in “Boris Godunov” when Otrepiev crosses the Lithuanian border. At the end of Pushkin's drama an incidental character quotes the saying yabloko ot yabloni nedaleko padaet (“like parents, like children,” literally: “an apple falls not far from the apple-tree”):
Один из народа
Брат да сестра! бедные дети, что пташки в к летке.
Другой
Есть о ком жалеть? Проклятое племя!
Первый
Отец был злодей, а детки невинны.
Другой
Яблоко от яблони недалеко падает.
One of the people
Brother and sister! Poor children, like birds in a cage.
Second person
Are you going to pity them? Goddamned family!
First person
Their father was a villain, but the children are innocent.
Second person
Like parents, like children.
Vadim’s surname (that he never tells the reader) seems to be Yablonski. It comes from yablonya (apple-tree) and brings to mind Jablonec nad Nisou, a city in northern Bohemia (the name Jablonec is of Czech origin and means "little apple tree"). On the bridge across the Kur (in Bend Sinister the river that flows in Padukgrad and Omigod) one of the soldiers says that his cousin, the gardener, lives in Bervok and Krug mentions Bervok's grand apples:
Another soldier came up idly juggling with a flashlight and again Krug had a glimpse of a pale-faced little man standing apart and smiling.
'I want some fun too,' the third soldier said.
'Well, well,' said Krug. 'Fancy seeing you here. How is your cousin, the gardener?'
The newcomer, an ugly, ruddy-cheeked country lad, looked at Krug blankly and then pointed to the fat soldier.
'It is his cousin, not mine.'
'Yes, of course,' said Krug quickly. 'Exactly what I meant. How is he, that gentle gardener? Has he recovered the use of his left leg?'
'We have not seen each other for some time,' answered the fat soldier moodily. 'He lives in Bervok.'
'A fine fellow,' said Krug. 'We were all so sorry when he fell into that gravel pit. Tell him, since he exists, that Professor Krug often recalls the talks we had over a jug of cider. Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past. Grand apples in Bervok.'
'This is his permit,' said the fat moody one to the rustic ruddy one, who took the paper gingerly and at once handed it back.
'You had better call that ved'min syn [son of a witch] there,' he said.
It was then that the little man was brought forward. He seemed to labour under the impression that Krug was some sort of superior in relation to the soldiers for he started to complain in a thin almost feminine voice, saying that he and his brother owned a grocery store on the other side and that both had venerated the Ruler since the blessed seventeenth of that month. The rebels were crushed, thank God, and he wished to join his brother so that a Victorious People might obtain the delicate foods he and his deaf brother sold.
'Cut it out,' said the fat soldier, 'and read this.'
The pale grocer complied. Professor Krug had been given full liberty by the Committee of Public Welfare to circulate after dusk. To cross from the south town to the north one. And back. The reader desired to know why he could not accompany the professor across the bridge. He was briskly kicked back into the darkness. Krug proceeded to cross the black river. (Chapter 2)
Bervok seems to hint at Brekov Castle, a ruined Gothic and Renaissance era stone castle above the village of Brekov in east Slovakia. It is a hilltop castle located on a cone-shaped hill with a limestone bedrock, in an altitude of approximately 480 m above sea level. The eponymous village at the foot of the castle hill was founded as an adjoined castle settlement, similarly to several other villages in the region. Das Schloß (The Castle) is the last novel by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer based in Prague. Its protagonist known only as "K." arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Count Westwest. The Count's name and grand apples in Bervok make one think of the Golden Apples in the Garden of Hesperides (the "Daughters of the Evening" or "Nymphs of the West"). It was rumored that those apples (stealing three of them is Hercules' Eleventh Labor) gave immortal life to anyone who ate them.
On the other hand, grand apples in Bervok bring to mind the apples that in Kafka's story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915) Gregor's father (who sees his metamorphosed son as a threat) throws at Gregor. In LATH metamorphoza is one of the first words uttered by the last of Vadim's four successive wives:
Crouching, smiling, you helped me to cram everything again into the folder and then asked me how my daughter was--she and you had been schoolmates some fifteen years ago, and my wife had given you a lift several times. I then remembered your name and in a photic flash of celestial color saw you and Bel looking like twins, silently hating each other, both in blue coats and white hats, waiting to be driven somewhere by Louise. Bel and you would both be twenty-eight on January 1, 1970.
A yellow butterfly settled briefly on a clover head, then wheeled away in the wind.
"Metamorphoza," you said in your lovely, elegant Russian.
Would I care to have some snapshots (additional snapshots) of Bel? Bel feeding a chipmunk? Bel at the school dance? (Oh, I remember that dance--she had chosen for escort a sad fat Hungarian boy whose father was assistant manager of the Quilton Hotel--I can still hear Louise snorting!)
We met next morning in my carrel at the College Library, and after that I continued to see you every day. I will not suggest, LATH is not meant to suggest, that the petals and plumes of my previous loves are dulled or coarsened when directly contrasted with the purity of your being, the magic, the pride, the reality of your radiance. Yet "reality" is the key word here; and the gradual perception of that reality was nearly fatal to me. (6.2)
Vadim's third wife, Louise Adamson reminds one of Adam Krug.