Nadezhda Gordonovna Starov was the wife of
a leytenant Starov (Christian name unimportant), who had served under
General Wrangel and now had some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in
London recently, as fellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose
bastard or "adopted nephew" (whatever that meant), he was said
to be. (1.11)
When Vadim meets Dora (a friend of Vadim's daughter
Bel) in Leningrad, near the monument of Pushkin, she tells
him:
"It's a pity A.B. is in Riga till the end
of the month. You saw very little of him. Yes, it's a pity, he's a freak
and a dear (chudak i dushka) with four nephews
in Israel, which sounds, he says, as 'the dramatic persons in a pseudoclassical
play.' One of them was my husband. Life
gets sometimes very complicated, and the more complicated the happier it
should be, one would think, but in reality 'complicated' always means
for some reason grust' i toska (sorrow and heartache)."
(5.2)
A. B.'s four nephews seem to correspond
to the four sons of staraya grafinya (the old
Countess) in Pushkin's Queen of Spades:
"What!"
said Narumov, "you have a grandmother who knows how to hit upon three lucky
cards in succession, and you have never yet succeeded in getting the secret of
it out of her?"
"That's
the deuce of it!" replied Tomsky: "she had four sons, one of whom was my father;
all four were determined gamblers, and yet not to one of them did she ever
reveal her secret, although it would not have been a bad thing either for them
or for me. (Chapter I)
Like the four sons of Pushkin's old Countess, Vadim's
(putative?) father was a gambler (2.5).
Before marrying Vadim, Iris Black had three
lovers:
The three lovers (a figure I wrested from her with the fierceness
of Pushkin's mad gambler and with even less luck) whom she had had in her teens
remained nameless, and therefore spectral; devoid of any individual traits, and
therefore identical. (1.10)
According to Iris, Jules (a
character in the detective novel never completed by Vadim's first
wife) did not make love to Diana Vane:
One afternoon, in
March or early April, 1930, she [Iris] peeped into my room and, being admitted, handed
me the duplicate of a typewritten sheet, numbered
444. It was, she said, a tentative episode in her interminable
tale, which would soon display more deletions than insertions. She was stuck,
she said. Diana Vane, an incidental but on
the whole nice girl, sojourning in Paris, happened
to meet, at a riding school, a strange Frenchman, of
Corsican, or perhaps Algerian, origin, passionate, brutal, unbalanced. He
mistook Diana--and kept on mistaking her despite her amused
remonstrations--for his former sweetheart, also an English girl, whom he had
last seen ages ago. We had here, said the author, a sort of
hallucination, an obsessive fancy, which Diana, a delightful flirt
with a keen sense of humor, allowed Jules to entertain during some twenty
riding lessons; but then his attentions grew more realistic, and she
stopped seeing him. There had been nothing between them, and yet he simply
could not be dissuaded from confusing her with the girl he once had
possessed or thought he had, for that girl, too, might well have been only the
afterimage of a still earlier romance or remembered delirium.
(1.12)
But it seems that one of
Iris's three lovers (their number corresponds to Hermann's three
cards) whom she knew before her marriage was lieutenant Starov,
alias Blagidze, who eventually murders
her:
The
story that appeared among other faits-divers in the Paris dailies after
an investigation by the police--whom Ivor and I contrived to mislead
thoroughly--amounted to what follows--I translate: a White Russian,
Wladimir Blagidze, alias Starov, who was subject to paroxysms of
insanity, ran amuck Friday night in the middle of a calm street, opened fire at
random, and after killing with one pistol shot an English tourist Mrs. [name
garbled], who chanced to be passing by, blew his brains out beside
her.
(1.13).
4 + 3
= 7
That afternoon--a sunny and
windy September afternoon--I had decided, with the unaccountable suddenness of
genuine inspiration, that 1969-1970 would be my last term at Quirn University. I
had, in fact, interrupted my siesta that day to request an immediate
interview with the Dean. I thought his secretary sounded a little
grumpy on the phone; true, I declined to explain anything
beforehand, beyond confiding to her, in an informal
bantering manner, that the numeral "7" always reminded me of the flag an
explorer sticks in the cranium of the North Pole.
(6.1)
"Three, seven,
ace," soon drove out of Hermann's mind the thought of the dead Countess. "Three,
seven, ace," were perpetually running through his head and continually being
repeated by his lips. If he saw a young girl, he would say: "How slender she is!
quite like the three of hearts." If anybody asked: "What is the time?" he would
reply: "Five minutes to seven." Every stout man that he saw reminded him of the
ace. "Three, seven, ace" haunted him in his sleep, and assumed all possible
shapes. The threes bloomed before him in the forms of magnificent flowers, the
sevens were represented by Gothic portals, and the aces became transformed into
gigantic spiders. (The Queen of Spades, chapter
6)
It seems that
I was the first to reach the North Pole! Born in 1970, I'm
forty three (43), the age of Robert Scott (1868-1912) when he reached the
South Pole (see VN's drama Polyus, "The Pole,"
1923).
Btw.,
grust'-toska gnaws Prince Gvidon, the
hero of Pushkin's Skazka o tsare Saltane ("The Fairy Tale about Tsar
Saltan," 1831) who wants to see his father:
"Грусть-тоска меня съедает,
Одолела
молодца:
Видеть я б хотел отца".
I wonder, if Pushkin's old Countess, who is afraid of drowned
bodies,* would have enjoyed LATH - the novel in which the drowned bodies of
Annette Blagovo (Vadim's second wife) and Ninel Langley (a friend of
Annette Blagovo) are never
found:
But the prettiest lakeside cottage got
swept away, and the drowned bodies of its two occupants were never
retrieved. (4.2)?
Note that in Pushkin's Bronze Horseman the drowned
bodies of Parasha and her mother are never retrieved either.
"You have glimpsed," he [Oks] added, "the parturition of a new literary
review, Prime Numbers; at least they think they are
parturiating: actually, they are boozing and gossiping."
(2.4)
Chisla ("Numbers") is a literary magazine that
appeared in Paris in 1930-34. 3, 7 and 11 (ace) are prime
numbers.
In the first week of January, 1822, near Kishinev Pushkin
had a pistol duel with Colonel Starov, commander of the Chasseur
Regiment.
*"Paul," cried the Countess
from behind the screen," send me some new novel, only pray don't let it be one
of the present day style."
"What do you mean, grandmother?"
"That is, a novel, in which the hero
strangles neither his father nor his mother, and in which there are no drowned
bodies. I have a great horror of drowned persons."
"There are no such novels nowadays. Would
you like a Russian one?"
"Are there any Russian novels? Send me
one, my dear, pray send me one!" (
The Queen of Spades, chapter
II)
Alexey Sklyarenko