After she happened to glimpse Pnin (the title character of a novel, 1957, by VN) basking in the unearthly lilac light of his sun lamp, wearing nothing but shorts, dark glasses, and a dazzling Greek-Catholic cross on his broad chest, Desdemona (the old coloured charwoman, who came on Fridays) insisted that Pnin was a saint:
It should be said for both Laurence and Joan that rather soon they began to appreciate Pnin at his unique Pninian worth, and this despite the fact that he was more of a poltergeist than a lodger. He did something fatal to his new heater and gloomily said never mind, it would soon be spring now. He had an irritating way of standing on the landing and assiduously brushing his clothes there, the brush clinking against the buttons, for at least five minutes every blessed morning. He had a passionate intrigue with Joan's washing machine. Although forbidden to come near it, he would be caught trespassing again and again. Casting aside all decorum and caution, he would feed it anything that happened to be at hand, his handkerchief, kitchen towels, a heap of shorts and shirts smuggled down from his room, just for the joy of watching through that porthole what looked like an endless tumble of dolphins with the staggers. One Sunday, after checking the solitude, he could not resist, out of sheer scientific curiosity, giving the mighty machine a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes stained with clay and chlorophyll to play with; the shoes tramped away with a dreadful arhythmic sound, like an army going over a bridge, and came back without their soles, and Joan appeared from her little sitting-room behind the pantry and said in sadness, 'Again, Timofey?' But she forgave him, and liked to sit with him at the kitchen table, both cracking nuts or drinking tea. Desdemona, the old coloured charwoman, who came on Fridays and with whom at one time God had gossiped daily ('"Desdemona," the Lord would say to me, "that man George is no good."), happened to glimpse Pnin basking in the unearthly lilac light of his sun lamp, wearing nothing but shorts, dark glasses, and a dazzling Greek-Catholic cross on his broad chest, and insisted thereafter that he was a saint. Laurence, on going up to his study one day, a secret and sacred lair cunningly carved out of the attic, was incensed to find the mellow lights on and fat-naped Pnin braced on his thin legs serenely browsing in a corner: 'Excuse me, I only am grazing,' as the gentle intruder (whose English was growing richer at a surprising pace) remarked, glancing over the higher of his two shoulders; but somehow that very afternoon a chance reference to a rare author, a passing allusion tacitly recognized in the middle distance of an idea, an adventurous sail descried on the horizon, led insensibly to a tender mental concord between the two men, both of whom were really at ease only in their warm world of natural scholarship. There are human solids and there are human surds, and Clements and Pnin belonged to the latter variety. (Chapter Two, 4)
In Chekhov's story V ovrage ("In the Ravine," 1900) Lipa asks the old man and his companion if they are svyatye (holy men):
Но прошла минута, и опять были видны и подводы, и старик, и длинный Вавила. Телеги скрипели, выезжая на дорогу.
— Вы святые? — спросила Липа у старика.
— Нет. Мы из Фирсанова.
— Ты давеча взглянул на меня, а сердце мое помягчило. И парень тихий. Я и подумала: это, должно, святые.
— Тебе далече ли?
— В Уклеево.
— Садись, подвезем до Кузьменок. Тебе там прямо, нам влево.
Вавила сел на подводу с бочкой, старик и Липа сели на другую. Поехали шагом, Вавила впереди.
— Мой сыночек весь день мучился, — сказала Липа. — Глядит своими глазочками и молчит, и хочет сказать и не может. Господи батюшка, царица небесная! Я с горя так всё и падала на пол. Стою и упаду возле кровати. И скажи мне, дедушка, зачем маленькому перед смертью мучиться? Когда мучается большой человек, мужик или женщина, то грехи прощаются, а зачем маленькому, когда у него нет грехов? Зачем?
— А кто ж его знает! — ответил старик.
Проехали с полчаса молча.
— Всего знать нельзя, зачем да как, — сказал старик. — Птице положено не четыре крыла, а два, потому что и на двух лететь способно; так и человеку положено знать не всё, а только половину или четверть. Сколько надо ему знать, чтоб прожить, столько и знает.
But a minute passed, and again she could see the two carts and the old man and lanky Vavila. The carts creaked as they went out on the road.
“Are you holy men?” Lipa asked the old man.
“No. We are from Firsanovo.”
“You looked at me just now and my heart was softened. And the young man is so gentle. I thought you must be holy men.”
“Are you going far?”
“To Ukleevo.”
“Get in, we will give you a lift as far as Kuzmenki, then you go straight on and we turn off to the left.”
Vavila got into the cart with the barrel and the old man and Lipa got into the other. They moved at a walking pace, Vavila in front.
“My baby was in torment all day,” said Lipa. “He looked at me with his little eyes and said nothing; he wanted to speak and could not. Holy Father, Queen of Heaven! In my grief I kept falling down on the floor. I stood up and fell down by the bedside. And tell me, grandfather, why a little thing should be tormented before his death? When a grown-up person, a man or woman, are in torment their sins are forgiven, but why a little thing, when he has no sins? Why?”
“Who can tell?” answered the old man.
They drove on for half an hour in silence.
“We can’t know everything, how and wherefore,” said the old man. “It is ordained for the bird to have not four wings but two because it is able to fly with two; and so it is ordained for man not to know everything but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know so as to live, so much he knows.” (Chapter 8)
A writer whom Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) lists among Russian humorists, Chekhov is the author of Deputat, ili povest' o tom, kak u Dezdemonova 25 rubley propalo (“The Deputy, or the Tale of How Desdemonov Lost 25 Rubles,” 1883), Razgovor cheloveka s sobakoy ("A Man's Talk with a Dog," 1885) and Dama s sobachkoy ("The Lady with the Lapdog," 1899). At the end of Pnin the hero leaves Waindell, taking a stray dog with him. Dog is God in reverse. Hazel Shade (the poet's daughter) liked to read words backwards. In Canto Two of his poem Shade speaks of his dead daughter and mentions the school pantomime in which she appeared as Mother Time, a bent charwoman with slop pail and broom:
It was no use, no use. The prizes won
In French and history, no doubt, were fun;
At Christmas parties games were rough, no doubt,
And one shy little guest might be left out;
But let's be fair: while children of her age
Were cast as elves and fairies on the stage
That she'd helped paint for the school pantomime,
My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time,
A bent charwoman with slop pail and broom,
And like a fool I sobbed in the men's room. (ll. 305-314)
According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), in a conversation with him Shade compared Shakespeare to a Great Dane and himself, to a grateful mongrel:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov."
Talking of the vulgarity of a certain burly acquaintance of ours: "The man is as corny as a cook-out chef apron." Kinbote (laughing): "Wonderful!"
The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane." (note to Line 172)
A Great Dane brings to mind "the bedside Dane" (as the narrator of Pnin calls H. C. Andersen):
Both Eric and Liza Wind were morbidly concerned with heredity, and instead of delighting in Victor's artistic genius, they used to worry gloomily about its genetic cause. Art and science had been represented rather vividly in the ancestral past. Should one trace Victor's passion for pigments back to Hans Andersen (no relation to the bedside Dane), who had been a stained-glass artist in Lübeck before losing his mind (and believing himself to be a cathedral) soon after his beloved daughter married a grey-haired Hamburg jeweller, author of a monograph on sapphires, and Eric's maternal grandfather? Or was Victor's almost pathological precision of pencil and pen a by-product of Bogolepov's science? For Victor's mother's great-grandfather, the seventh son of a country pope, had been no other than that singular genius, Feofilakt Bogolepov, whose only rival for the title of greatest Russian mathematician was Nikolay Lobachevski. One wonders. (Chapter Four, 3)
In Bogolepov there is Bog (God in Russian). A monograph on sapphires brings to mind Gerald Emerald, a young instructor at Wordsmith University who gives Gradus (Shade's murderer, son of a Protestant minister in Riga) a lift to Kinbote's rented house in New Wye. Describing a conversation at the Faculty Club, Kinbote compares Gerald Emerald to a disciple in Leonardo's Last Supper. In his poem about painters Victor Wind mentions Mona Lisa and her nun-pale lips:
To the latest issue of the school magazine Victor had contributed a poem about painters, over the nom de guerre Moinet, and under the motto 'Bad reds should all be avoided; even if carefully manufactured, they are still bad' (quoted from an old book on the technique of painting but smacking of a political aphorism). The poem began:
Leonardo! Strange diseases
strike at madders mixed with lead:
nun-pale now are Mona Lisa's
lips that you had made so red. (Chapter Four, 5)
Victor’s nom de guerre Moinet blends moine (French for “monk”) with the names of two French impressionist painters: Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Édouard Manet (1832-83). Chyornyi monakh ("The Black Monk," 1893) is a story by Chekhov. In Chapter Five (VI: 9) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions a black monk:
Татьяна верила преданьям
Простонародной старины,
И снам, и карточным гаданьям,
И предсказаниям луны.
Ее тревожили приметы;
Таинственно ей все предметы
Провозглашали что-нибудь,
Предчувствия теснили грудь.
Жеманный кот, на печке сидя,
Мурлыча, лапкой рыльце мыл:
То несомненный знак ей был,
Что едут гости. Вдруг увидя
Младой двурогий лик луны
На небе с левой стороны,
Она дрожала и бледнела.
Когда ж падучая звезда
По небу темному летела
И рассыпалася, — тогда
В смятенье Таня торопилась,
Пока звезда еще катилась,
Желанье сердца ей шепнуть.
Когда случалось где-нибудь
Ей встретить черного монаха
Иль быстрый заяц меж полей
Перебегал дорогу ей,
Не зная, что начать со страха,
Предчувствий горестных полна,
Ждала несчастья уж она.
Tatiana credited the lore
of plain-folk ancientry,
dreams, cartomancy,
prognostications by the moon.
Portents disturbed her:
mysteriously all objects
foretold her something,
presentiments constrained her breast.
The mannered tomcat sitting on the stove,
purring, would wash his muzzlet with his paw:
to her 'twas an indubitable sign
that guests were coming. Seeing all at once
the young two-horned moon's visage
in the sky on her left,
she trembled and grew pale.
Or when a falling star
along the dark sky flew
and dissipated, then
in agitation Tanya hastened
to whisper, while the star still rolled,
her heart's desire to it.
When anywhere she happened
a black monk to encounter,
or a swift hare amid the fields
would run across her path,
so scared she knew not what to undertake,
full of grievous forebodings,
already she expected some mishap.
In her latest poem that she recites lying supine on Pnin's bed Liza Bogolepov says that she is more modest than monashenka (a nun):
'Listen to my latest poem,' she said, her hands now along her sides as she lay perfectly straight on her back, and she sang out rhythmically, in long-drawn, deep-voiced tones:
'Ya nadela tyomnoe plat'e,
I monashenki ya skromney;
Iz slonovoy kosti raspyat'e
Nad holodnoy postel'yu moey.
No ogni nebyvalyh orgiy
Prozhigayut moyo zabytyo
I shepchu ya imya Georgiy--
Zolotoe imya tvoyo!
(I have put on a dark dress
And am more modest than a nun;
An ivory crucifix
Is over my cold bed.
But the lights of fabulous orgies
Burn through my oblivion,
And I whisper the name George--
Your golden name!)'
'He is a very interesting man,' she went on, without any interval. 'Practically English, in fact. He flew a bomber in the war and now he is with a firm of brokers who have no sympathy with him and do not understand him. He comes from an ancient family. His father was a dreamer, had a floating casino, you know, and all that, but was ruined by some Jewish gangsters in Florida and voluntarily went to prison for another man; it is a family of heroes.' (Chapter Two, 6)