The narrator and main character in VN's novel Otchayanie ("Despair," 1934), Hermann Karlovich wonders if it is indeed a crime in itself for two people to be as alike as two drops of blood:
Я желаю во что бы то ни стало, и я этого добьюсь, убедить всех вас, заставить вас, негодяев, убедиться, – но боюсь, что, по самой природе своей, слово не может полностью изобразить сходство двух человеческих лиц, – следовало бы написать их рядом не словами, а красками, и тогда зрителю было бы ясно, о чем идет речь. Высшая мечта автора: превратить читателя в зрителя, – достигается ли это когда-нибудь? Бледные организмы литературных героев, питаясь под руководством автора, наливаются живой читательской кровью; гений писателя состоит в том, чтобы дать им способность ожить благодаря этому питанию и жить долго. Но сейчас мне нужна не литература, а простая, грубая наглядность живописи. Вот мой нос – крупный, северного образца, с крепкой костью и почти прямоугольной мякиной. Вот его нос – точь-в-точь такой же. Вот эти две резкие бороздки по сторонам рта и тонкие, как бы слизанные губы. Вот они и у него. Вот скулы… Но это – паспортный, ничего не говорящий перечень черт, и в общем ерундовая условность. Кто-то когда-то мне сказал, что я похож на Амундсена. Вот он тоже похож на Амундсена. Но не все помнят Амундсеново лицо, я сам сейчас плохо помню. Нет, ничего не могу объяснить.
Жеманничаю. Знаю, что доказал. Все обстоит великолепно. Читатель, ты уже видишь нас. Одно лицо! Но не думай, я не стесняюсь возможных недостатков, мелких опечаток в книге природы. Присмотрись: у меня большие желтоватые зубы, у него они теснее, светлее, – но разве это важно? У меня на лбу надувается жила, как недочерченная «мысль», но когда я сплю, у меня лоб так же гладок, как у моего дупликата. А уши… изгибы его раковин очень мало изменены против моих: спрессованы тут, разглажены там. Разрез глаз одинаков, узкие глаза, подтянутые, с редкими ресницами, – но они у него цветом бледнее. Вот, кажется, и все отличительные приметы, которые в ту первую встречу я мог высмотреть. В тот вечер, в ту ночь я памятью рассудка перебирал эти незначительные погрешности, а глазной памятью видел, вопреки всему, себя, себя, в жалком образе бродяги, с неподвижным лицом, с колючей тенью – как за ночь у покойников – на подбородке и щеках… Почему я замешкал в Праге? С делами было покончено, я свободен был вернуться в Берлин. Почему? Почему на другое утро я опять отправился на окраину и пошел по знакомому шоссе? Без труда я отыскал место, где он вчера валялся. Я там нашел золотой окурок, кусок чешской газеты и еще – то жалкое, безличное, что незатейливый пешеход оставляет под кустом. Несколько изумрудных мух дополняли картину. Куда он ушел, где провел ночь? Праздные, неразрешимые вопросы. Мне стало нехорошо на душе, смутно, тягостно, словно все, что произошло, было недобрым делом. Я вернулся в гостиницу за чемоданом и поспешил на вокзал. У выхода на дебаркадер стояли в два ряда низкие, удобные, по спинному хребту выгнутые скамейки, там сидели люди, кое-кто дремал. Мне подумалось: вот сейчас увижу его, спящим, с раскрытыми руками, с последней уцелевшей фиалкой в петлице. Нас бы заметили рядом, вскочили, окружили, потащили бы в участок. Почему? Зачем я это пишу? Привычный разбег пера? Или в самом деле есть уже преступление в том, чтобы как две капли крови походить друг на друга?
How I long to convince you! And I will, I will convince you! I will force you all, you rogues, to believe ... though I am afraid that words alone, owing to their special nature, are unable to convey visually a likeness of that kind: the two faces should be pictured side by side, by means of real colors, not words, then and only then would the spectator see my point. An author's fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained? The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that--not very appetizing--food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries. But at the present moment it is not literary methods that I need, but the plain, crude obviousness of the painter's art.
Look, this is my nose; a big one of the northern type, with a hard bone somewhat arched and the fleshy part tipped up and almost rectangular. And that is his nose, a perfect replica of mine. Here are the two sharply drawn furrows on both sides of my mouth with lips so thin as to seem licked away. He has got them, too. Here are the cheekbones--but this is a passport list of facial features meaning nothing; an absurd convention. Somebody told me once that I looked like Amundsen, the Polar explorer. Well, Felix, too, looked like Amundsen. But it is not every person that can recall Amundsen's face. I myself recall it but faintly, nor am I sure whether there had not been some mix-up with Nansen. No, I can explain nothing.
Simpering, that is what I am. Well do I know that I have proved my point. Going on splendidly. You now see both of us, reader. Two, but with a single face. You must not suppose, however, that I am ashamed of possible slips and type errors in the book of nature. Look nearer: I possess large yellowish teeth; his are whiter and set more closely together, but is that really important? On my forehead a vein stands out like a capital M imperfectly drawn, but when I sleep my brow is as smooth as that of my double. And those ears ... the convolutions of his are but very slightly altered in comparison with mine: here more compressed, there smoothed out. We have eyes of the same shape, narrowly slit with sparse lashes, but his iris is paler than mine.
This was about all in the way of distinctive markings that I discerned at that first meeting. During the following night my rational memory did not cease examining such minute flaws, whereas with the irrational memory of my senses I kept seeing, despite everything, myself, my own self, in the sorry disguise of a tramp, his face motionless, with chin and cheeks bristle-shaded, as happens to a dead man overnight.
Why did I tarry in Prague? I had finished my business. I was free to return to Berlin. Why did I go back to those slopes next morning, to that road? I had no trouble in finding the exact spot where he had sprawled the day before. I discovered there a golden cigarette-end, a dead violet, a scrap of Czech newspaper, and--that pathetically impersonal trace which the unsophisticated wanderer is wont to leave under a bush: one large, straight, manly piece and a thinner one coiled over it. Several emerald flies completed the picture. Whither had he gone? Where had he passed the night? Empty riddles. Somehow I felt horribly uncomfortable in a vague heavy way, as if the whole experience had been an evil deed.
I returned to the hotel for my suitcase and hurried to the station. There, at the entrance to the platform, were two rows of nice low benches with backs carved and curved in perfect accordance with the human spine. Some people were sitting there; a few were dozing. It occurred to me that I should suddenly see him there, fast asleep, hands open and one last violet still in his buttonhole. People would notice us together; jump up, surround us, drag us to the police station... why? Why do I write this? Just the usual rush of my pen? Or is it indeed a crime in itself for two people to be as alike as two drops of blood? (Chapter I)
Kapli krovi ("Drops of Blood," 1905) is the first novel of Fyodor Sologub's trilogy Tvorimaya legenda ("The Created Legend," 1905-14). Its other title is Nav'yi chary ("A Ghost's Spell"). The trilogy's second novel, Koroleva Ortruda ("Queen Ortruda"), brings to mind Gertrude (in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet's mother, Queen of Denmark) and Queen Blenda, in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) the mother of Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla. The main character of Sologub's novel Melkiy Bes ("The Petty Demon," 1907), Ardalion Borisovich Peredonov brings to mind Ardalion (a cousin of Hermann's wife Lydia) and his friend Perebrodov:
"Это идея, – сказал Ардалион. – Я и сам там стрельну. Пьёт он, между прочим, как зверь, Васька Перебродов. Спросите мою тетушку, ту, которая вышла за французского фермера, – я вам рассказывал, – очень живая особа, но несосветимо скупа. У неё около Феодосии было имение, мы там с Васькой весь погреб выпили в двадцатом году".
“That’s an idea,” said Ardalion, “I’ll have a shot there myself. By the bye, he drinks like a fish, good old Perebrodov. Ask that aunt of mine, who married a French farmer—I told you about her—a very lively lady, but dashed close-fisted. She had some land in the Crimea and during the fighting there in 1920 Perebrodov and I drank up her cellar.” (Chapter Six)
Dve kapli krovi (two drops of blood) is a play on the saying "to be as alike as dve kapli vody (two drops of water). In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN quotes the last words of his grand aunt, Praskovia Nikolaevna Tarnovski (the author of works on psychiatry, anthropology and social welfare, 1848-1910), "vsyo—voda (everything is water):"
One of my mother’s happier girlhood recollections was having traveled one summer with her aunt Praskovia to the Crimea, where her paternal grandfather had an estate near Feodosia. Her aunt and she went for a walk with him and another old gentleman, the well-known seascape painter Ayvazovski. She remembered the painter saying (as he had said no doubt many times) that in 1836, at an exhibition of pictures in St. Petersburg, he had seen Pushkin, “an ugly little fellow with a tall handsome wife.” That was more than half a century before, when Ayvazovski was an art student, and less than a year before Pushkin’s death. She also remembered the touch nature added from its own palette—the white mark a bird left on the painter’s gray top hat. The aunt Praskovia, walking beside her, was her mother’s sister, who had married the celebrated syphilologist V. M. Tarnovski (1839–1906) and who herself was a doctor, the author of works on psychiatry, anthropology and social welfare. One evening at Ayvazovski’s villa near Feodosia, Aunt Praskovia met at dinner the twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Anton Chekhov whom she somehow offended in the course of a medical conversation. She was a very learned, very kind, very elegant lady, and it is hard to imagine how exactly she could have provoked the incredibly coarse outburst Chekhov permits himself in a published letter of August 3, 1888, to his sister. Aunt Praskovia, or Aunt Pasha, as we called her, often visited us at Vyra. She had an enchanting way of greeting us, as she swept into the nursery with a sonorous “Bonjour, les enfants!” She died in 1910. My mother was at her bedside, and Aunt Pasha’s last words were: “That’s interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo—voda.” (Chapter Three, 3)
Dr. Tarnovski brings to mind Tarnitz, a town where Hermann dines with Felix (a tramp whom Hermann believes to be his perfect double) in a tavern and where they spend the night in a hotel.
Btw., while Hermann Karlovich makes one think of Hermann, the main character of Pushkin's story Pikovaya dama ("The Queen of Spades," 1833), Felix brings to mind Derzhavin's poem Felitsa (1782) addressed to Empress Catherine II. Orlovius (the purblind insurance agent in Despair) reminds one of brothers Orlov who dispatched Catherine's husband Peter III and helped Catherine to ascend the throne.