A dreadful building of gray stone and brown wood, it [the Ascot Hotel] sported
cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut) which by some mnemoptical trick
he [Hugh Person] remembered as apple
green. (Transparent Things,
2)
Mme Chamar: "He [R.] lives somewhere in Switzerland, I think?"
HP: "Yes, at Diablonnet, near Versex."
Mme Chamar:
"Diablonnet always reminds me of the Russian for 'apple trees':
yabloni." (TT, 12)
Mme Chamar (née
Anastasia Petrovna Potapov) comes from Ryazan (a city in European Russia SE
of Moscow). A famous 1921 poem by Sergey Esenin (who was born in a village
in the province of Ryazan and committed suicide, at thirty, in the
Angleterre Hotel in St. Petersburg, not far from the Nabokovs House in the
Bolshaya Morskaya street) begins:
Не жалею, не зову, не плачу,
Всё пройдёт как с белых яблонь дым.
I feel no regret, I do not call you or shed
tears.
All,
like haze off apple-trees, must pass.
The
poem's penultimate stanza goes:
Я теперь скупее стал в
желаньях,
Жизнь моя, иль ты приснилась мне?
Словно я весенней гулкой
ранью
Проскакал на розовом коне.
I'm
austerer now in my desiring.
Life, were you real, or of fancy born?
It's
as if in spring I've been out riding
On a pink horse in the vibrant
dawn.
It is
said that young VN served as a model for Kuz'ma Petrov-Vodkin's famous
painting Bathing of a Red Horse
(1912):
Petrov-Vodkin was a protégé and close
friend of the famous St. Petersburg architect Roman Melzer (foster-father of
Petrov-Vodkin's first cousin I. I. Trofimov), the author of palazzoes and
mansions in "hygienic" style. Madame Chamar's late husband was the architect
Charles Chamar (Le Corbusier's namesake) who built above Witt the
transparent Villa Nastia (TT, 9).
Alexey Sklyarenko
