In VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) Sebastian's half-brother V. (the narrator and main character) describes his meeting with Sebastian and his girlfriend in Paris on a dull grey afternoon in November or December 1924:
Two years had elapsed after my mother's death before I saw Sebastian again. One picture postcard was all I had had from him during that time, except the cheques he insisted on sending me. On a dull grey afternoon in November or December 1924, as I was walking up the Champs-Élysées towards the Étoile I suddenly caught sight of Sebastian through the glass front of a popular café. I remember my first impulse was to continue on my way, so pained was I by the sudden revelation that having arrived in Paris he had not communicated with me. Then on second thought I entered. I saw the back of Sebastian's glossy dark head and the downcast bespectacled face of the girl sitting opposite him. She was reading a letter which, as I approached, she handed back to him with a faint smile and took off her horn-rimmed glasses.
'Isn't it rich?' asked Sebastian, and at the same moment I laid my hand on his thin shoulder.
'Oh, hullo, V.,' he said, looking up. 'This is my brother, Miss Bishop. Sit down and make yourself comfortable.' She was pretty in a quiet sort of way with a pale faintly freckled complexion, slightly hollowed cheeks, blue-grey near-sighted eyes, a thin mouth. She wore a grey tailor-made with a blue scarf and a small three-cornered hat. I believe her hair was bobbed.
'I was just going to ring you up,' said Sebastian, not very truthfully I am afraid. 'You see I am only here for the day and going back to London tomorrow. What will you have?'
They were drinking coffee. Clare Bishop, her lashes beating, rummaged in her bag, found her handkerchief, and dabbed first one pink nostril and then the other. 'Cold getting worse,' she said and clicked her bag.
'Oh, splendidly,' said Sebastian, in reply to an obvious question. 'As a matter a fact I have just finished writing a novel, and the publisher I've chosen seems to like it, judging by his encouraging letter. He even seems to approve of the title Cock Robin Hits Back, though Clare doesn't.'
'I think it sounds silly,' said Clare, 'and besides, a bird can't hit.'
'It alludes to a well-known nursery-rhyme,' said Sebastian, for my benefit.
'A silly allusion,' said Clare; 'your first title was much better.'
I don't know…. The prism…. The prismatic edge' murmured Sebastian, 'that's not quite what I want…. Pity Cock Robin is so unpopular….'
'A title,' said Clare, 'must convey the colour of the book, not its subject.' (Chapter 8)
A dull grey afternoon on which V. met Sebastian seems to hint at ashes dull and grey in Oscar Wilde's sonnet To Milton (1881):
Milton! I think thy spirit hath passed away
From these white cliffs, and high embattled towers;
This gorgeous fiery-coloured world of ours
Seems fallen into ashes dull and grey,
And the age changed unto a mimic play
Wherein we waste our else too-crowded hours:
For all our pomp and pageantry and powers
We are but fit to delve the common clay,
Seeing this little isle on which we stand,
This England, this sea-lion of the sea,
By ignorant demagogues is held in fee,
Who love her not: Dear God! is this the land
Which bare a triple empire in her hand
When Cromwell spake the word Democracy!
John Milton is the author of Paradise Lost (1667). Sebastian's and his brother's lost paradise is Russia of their childhood and boyhood. In his sonnet The Grave of Keats (1881) Oscar Wilde compares John Keats (1795-1821) to St. Sebastian (c. AD 255 – c. AD 288, an early Christian saint and martyr):
Rid of the world’s injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water—it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
A well-known nursery-rhyme, Who Killed Cock Robin, brings to mind the first line of Byron's poem John Keats (1821):
Who killed John Keats?
‘I,’ says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
”Twas one of my feats.’
Who shot the arrow?
‘The poet-priest Milman
(So ready to kill man),
Or Southey or Barrow.
In the well-known nursery-rhyme the Sparrow says that he killed Cock Robin with his bow and arrow:
Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
Sebastian's girlfriend, Clare Bishop brings to mind Bishop Berkeley mentioned by Byron at the beginning of Canto Eleven of Don Juan:
When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"
And proved it—'twas no matter what he said:
They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,
Too subtle for the airiest human head;
And yet who can believe it! I would shatter
Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,
Or adamant, to find the World a spirit,
And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
Clare Bishop's first name makes one think of Clara Mary Jane Clairmont (1798-1879), or Claire Clairmont as she was commonly known, the stepsister of the writer Mary Shelley and the mother of Lord Byron's daughter Allegra (Clara Allegra Byron, 1817-22). Byron died in Missolonghi (W Greece) on April 19, 1824, a hundred years before V.'s meeting with Sebastian and his girlfriend (who, after Sebastian breaks up with her, marries a certain Mr. Bishop and dies in childbirth).
On the other hand, a dull grey afternoon in TRLSK makes one think of All in the Golden Afternoon, the preface poem in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a book translated into Russian by VN as Anya v strane chudes (1923). Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) begins with a chess problem. A knight and a bishop are chess pieces. Sebastian Knight dies in a hospital in St. Damier (damier is French for "chessboard').
Keats's poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci (translated into Russian by VN) begins with the line "O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms." In TRLSK V. mentions the futurist poet Alexis Pan whose Russian rendering of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is a very miracle of verbal transfusion:
It appears that Sebastian had developed a friendship with the futurist poet Alexis Pan and his wife Larissa, a weird couple who rented a cottage close to our country estate near Luga. He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the 'submental grunt' as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career – one of these at least being a very miracle of verbal transfusion: his Russian rendering of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'. (Chapter 3)
Pan: a Double Villanelle is a poem by Oscar Wilde. The villanelle is a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. In James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915) there is Stephen Daedalus’ Villanelle of the Temptress. V starom Parizhe ("In the Old Paris," 1896) is a villanelle by Valeriy Bryusov (the poet who died in 1924). Bryusov translated into Russian Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).
See also the expanded version of my previous post, "Lake Leman & hoary riddle in Ada."