At the beginning of VN's novel Transparent Things (1972) the narrators mention the exact level of the moment:
Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me.
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.
Hullo, person! What's the matter, don't pull me. I'm not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person . . . (last time, in a very small voice).
When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment. (Chapter 1)
In his Don Juan Byron rhymes 'level' with 'devil' and 'revel:'
But Time, which brings all beings to their level,
And sharp Adversity, will teach at last
Man, -- and, as we would hope, -- perhaps the devil,
That neither of their intellects are vast:
While youth's hot wishes in our red veins revel,
We know not this -- the blood flows on too fast;
But as the torrent widens towards the ocean,
We ponder deeply on each past emotion. (Canto the Fourth, II)
In one of the next stanzas Byron mentions a moment merry, a novel word in his vocabulary:
Some have accused me of a strange design
Against the creed and morals of the land,
And trace it in this poem every line:
I don't pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing plann'd,
Unless it were to be a moment merry,
A novel word in my vocabulary. (Canto the Fourth, V)
The spectral narrators in VN's novel seem to be the devils. This is a novel word, figuratively speaking, not only in VN's work, but also in the world literature. The last sentence of the novel's first chapter, "More in a moment" seems to be a play on memento mori (an artistic symbol or trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death). The epigraph to VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) ends with the sentence Smert' neizbezhna (Death is inevitable):
Дуб – дерево. Роза – цветок. Олень – животное. Воробей – птица. Россия – наше отечество. Смерть неизбежна.
П. Смирновский. Учебник русской грамматики
An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.
P. SMIRNOVSKI, A Textbook of Russian Grammar.
The characters in Dar include engineer Kern who closely knew the late Alexander Blok. Pushkin's famous poem K*** ("To***," 1825) that begins with the line Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnoven'ye (I remember a wondrous moment") is addressed to Anna Kern. The poet put a leaf with its hand-written text in a copy of the just published Chapter Two of Eugene Onegin that he gave to Anna Kern when she visited him in Mikhaylovskoe. In Chapter Four (XXX: 1-2) of EO Pushkin mentions razroznennye tomy iz biblioteki chertey (odd volumes out of the devils' library):
Но вы, разрозненные томы
Из библиотеки чертей,
Великолепные альбомы,
Мученье модных рифмачей,
Вы, украшенные проворно
Толстого кистью чудотворной
Иль Баратынского пером,
Пускай сожжёт вас божий гром!
Когда блистательная дама
Мне свой in-quarto подаёт,
И дрожь и злость меня берёт,
И шевелится эпиграмма
Во глубине моей души,
А мадригалы им пиши!
But you, odd volumes
out of the devils' library,
the gorgeous albums,
the rack of fashionable rhymesters;
you, nimbly ornamented
by Tolstoy's wonder-working brush,
or Baratïnski's pen,
let the Lord's levin burn you!
Whenever her in-quarto a resplendent lady
proffers to me,
a tremor and a waspishness possess me,
and at the bottom of my soul
there stirs an epigram —
but madrigals you have to write for them!
Transparent Things seems to be an odd volume out of the devils' library. The name of engineer Kern's friend in The Gift, Goryainov, is related to goryachiy (hot) and goret' (to burn). Youth's hot wishes revel in our red veins (in Byron's Don Juan). Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov is a character in Dostoevski's Zapiski iz myortvogo doma ("Notes from the House of the Dead," 1862). He was sent to a prison colony in Siberia for killing his wife. After murdering (strangling in his sleep) his wife Armande Hugh Person spends eight years in prison and mental asylums. In the seventh poem of Blok's cycle Zhizn’ moego priyatelya ("The Life of my Pal," 1915), Greshi, poka tebya volnuyut ("Do sin, while your innocent sins agitate you"), the devils speak:
Сверкнут ли дерзостные очи -
Ты их сверканий не отринь,
Грехам, вину и страстной ночи
Шепча заветное «аминь».
...И станешь падать — но толпою
Мы все, как ангелы, чисты,
Тебя подхватим, чтоб пятою
О камень не преткнулся ты...
Should the daring eyes sparkle at you,
do not reject their sparkling,
whispering "amen"
to sins, wine and the amorous night.
...And you'll begin to fall, but in a crowd
we all, pure as angels,
shall pick you up in order to prevent
you to stumble on the stone...
At the end of Transparent Things Hugh Person dies in a hotel fire. The reader expects Hugh to fall from the window of the burning house, but instead he chokes to death in his hotel room.