The characters in VN's novel Bend Sinister (1947) include the philosopher Adam Krug and his friend Ember, the Shakespeare scholar and translator. Krug means in Russian "circle;" ember means in Hungarian "human being." This makes one think of the Vitruvian Man (It., L'uomo vitruviano), a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (dated to c. 1490):
The drawing represents Leonardo's conception of ideal body prportions, originally derived from Vitruvius (a Roman architect of the 1st century BC) but influenced by his own measurements, the drawings of his contemporaries, and the De pictura treatise by Leon Battista Alberti. Krug's son David makes one think of David (1501-04), a sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti:
Michelangelo is also the author of The Creation of Adam (Creazione di Adamo), a fresco painting on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. At the end of Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri wonders if the creator of Vatican (Michelangelo) was no murderer after all:
Ты заснёшь
Надолго, Моцарт! но ужель он прав,
И я не гений? Гений и злодейство
Две вещи несовместные. Неправда:
А Бонаротти? или это сказка
Тупой, бессмысленной толпы — и не был
Убийцею создатель Ватикана?
Your sleep
Will be a long one, Mozart. But is he right,
And I’m no genius? Genius and villainy
Are two things incompatible. Not true:
What about Buonarotti? Or is that just
A fable of stupid, senseless crowd,
And the Vatican’s creator was no murderer?* (Scene II)
*Rumors say Michelangelo murdered his model to portray the sufferings of Christ more realistically.
In Ember's playful rendering the beginning of Hamlet's soliloquy Byt' ili ne byt'? ("To be or not to be?" in Russian) becomes Ubit' il' ne ubit'? (To kill or not to kill?):
But enough of this, let us hear Ember's rendering of some famous lines:
Ubit' il' ne ubit'? Vot est' oprosen.
Vto bude edler: v rasume tzerpieren
Ogneprashchi i strely zlovo roka –
(or as a Frenchman might have it:)
L’éorgerai-je ou non? Voici le vrai problème.
Est-il plus noble en soi de supporter quand même
Et les dards et le feu d'un accablant destin –
Yes, I am still jesting. We now come to the real thing.
Tam nad ruch'om rostiot naklonno iva,
V vode iavliaia list'ev sedinu;
Guirliandy fantasticheskie sviv
Iz etikh list'ev – s primes'u romashek,
Krapivy, lutikov –
(over yon brook there grows aslant a willow
Showing in the water the hoariness of its leaves;
Having tressed fantastic garlands
of these leaves, with a sprinkling of daisies,
Nettles, crowflowers – )
You see, I have to choose my commentators.
Or this difficult passage:
Ne dumaete-li Vy, sudar', shto vot eto (the song about the wounded deer), da les per'ev na shliape, da dve kamchatye rozy na proreznykh bashmakakh, mogli by, kol' fortuna zadala by mne turku, zasluzhit' mne uchast'e v teatralnoy arteli; a, sudar'?
Or the beginning of my favourite scene:
As he sits listening to Ember's translation, Krug cannot help marvelling at the strangeness of the day. He imagines himself at some point in the future recalling this particular moment. He, Krug, was sitting beside Ember's bed. Ember, with knees raised under the counterpane, was reading bits of blank verse from scraps of paper. Krug had recently lost his wife. A new political order had stunned the city. Two people he was fond of had been spirited away and perhaps executed. But the room was warm and quiet and Ember was deep in Hamlet. And Krug marvelled at the strangeness of the day. He listened to the rich-toned voice (Ember's father had been a Persian merchant) and tried to simplify the terms of his reaction. Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator's inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combination of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T - the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of sun rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day. From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and material (those headaches, those midnight triumphs that turn out to be disasters in the sober light of morning!) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpiece of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man's genius. Could this suicidal limitation and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactics, by the thousand devices of shadography, by the keen pleasure that the weaver of words and their witness experienced at every new wile in the warp, or was it, taken all in all, but an exaggerated and spiritualized replica of Paduk's writing machine? (chapter 7)
The name of the dictator of Padukgrad, Paduk (Krug's former schoolmate) seems to hint at padunk, Hungarian for "our bench." As a schoolboy, Krug liked to sit on Paduk's face.
Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri make one think of Ferenc Liszt (1811-86), the most famous Hungarian composer (a pupil of Antonio Salieri), a son of Adam List (an amateur musician, 1776-1827). His family name is a homophone of the Russian word for "leaf," list. Plural of list is list'ya. Cf. V vode iavliaia list'ev sedinu, (That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream), a line in Gertrude's willow speech in Ember's rendering. Ya is Russian for "I" (the first-person pronoun). According to Krug, the square root of I is I. In Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man there is not only a circle, but also a square. The river that flows in Padukgrad, the Kur may hint at kör, Hungarian for 'circle.' Tree in Hungarian is fa and son is fiú. Fa is a musical note (in Russian, the notes of the scale are do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do). Father begins with fa. Father in Hungarian is apa (mother is anya). The Italian word for tree, albero, is ony one step away from albergo (inn, hotel). Albertina is a character in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a novel in seven volumes written under a strong influence of Henry Bergson (a French philosopher, 1859-1941). Bergson is the author of Le Rire ("Laughter," 1900). In VN's story Istreblenie tiranov (Tyrants Destroyed, 1938) laughter helps the hero to survive. Krug ("The Circle," 1936) is a story by VN. In VN’s story Vesna v Fial'te (“Spring in Fialta,” 1936) the narrator, as he sees Ferdinand (the Franco-Hungarian writer) in the company of his friends, recalls The Last Supper (a mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan):
Когда мы вошли в кафе, там играл дамский оркестр; я мимоходом заметил, как в одной из гранёных колонн, облицованных зеркалами, отражается страусовая ляжка арфы, а затем тотчас увидел составной стол, за которым, посреди долгой стороны и спиной к плюшу, председательствовал Фердинанд, и на мгновение эта поза его, положение расставленных рук и обращенные к нему лица сотрапезников напомнили мне с кошмарной карикатурностью... что именно напомнили, я сам тогда не понял, а потом, поняв, удивился кощунственности сопоставления, не более кощунственного, впрочем, чем самое искусство его.
An orchestra of women was playing when we entered the café; first I noted the ostrich thigh of a harp reflected in one of the mirror-faced pillars, and then I saw the composite table (small ones drawn together to form a long one) at which, with his back to the plush wall, Ferdinand was presiding; and for a moment his whole attitude, the position of his parted hands, and the faces of his table companions all turned toward him reminded me in a grotesque, nightmarish way of something I did not quite grasp, but when I did so in retrospect, the suggested comparison struck me as hardly less sacrilegious than the nature of his art itself.