At the beginning of VN's story Time and Ebb (1944) the narrator mentions his dear friends Norman and Nura Stone:
In the first floriferous days of convalescence after a severe illness, which nobody, least of all the patient himself, expected a ninety-year-old organism to survive, I was admonished by my dear friends Norman and Nura Stone to prolong the lull in my scientific studies and relax in the midst of some innocent occupation such as brazzle or solitaire.
The first is out of the question, since tracking the name of an Asiatic town or the title of a Spanish novel through a maze of jumbled syllables on the last page of the evening newsbook (a feat which my youngest great-granddaughter performs with the utmost zest) strikes me as far more strenuous than toying with animal tissues. Solitaire, on the other hand, is worthy of consideration, especially if one is sensitive to its mental counterpart; for is not the setting down of one's reminiscences a game of the same order, wherein events and emotions are dealt to oneself in leisurely retrospection? (1)
One of the many diminutives of Anna (a female given name of Hebrew origin meaning 'favor' or 'grace') is Nyura. On the other hand, Nura Stone seems to hint at the nuraghe, or nurhag, the main type of ancient megalithic edifice found in Sardinia, Italy, developed during the Nuragic Age between 1900 and 730 BC. Today it has come to be the symbol of Sardinia and its distinctive culture known as the Nuragic civilization. More than 7,000 nuraghes have been found, though archeologists believe that originally there were more than 10,000. The word nuraghe is perhaps related to the Sardinian place names Nurra, Nurri, Nurru, and to Sardinian nurra 'heap of stones, cavity in earth' (although these senses are difficult to reconcile). In VN's play Izobretenie Val'sa (The Waltz Invention, 1938) Corsica (Napoleon's native island) and Sardinia are mentioned:
ВАЛЬС: Странно, этот географический атлас, именно этот, был у меня когда-то в школе. И та же клякса на Корсике.
ПОЛКОВНИК: Только это не Корсика, а Сардиния.
ВАЛЬС: Значит, надпись неправильна. (Act One)
According to Salvator Waltz (the main character in VN's play), at school he had the same geographical atlas with the same blot on Corsica, as the Colonel has. To the Colonel's retort that it is Sardinia, not Corsica, Waltz replies that the legend is wrong. In VN's play Sobytie (The Event, 1938) the portrait painter Troshcheykin accuses the authorities of encouraging the vendetta and asks: "where are we? in Corsica?":
Трощейкин. Хорош гусь! А? Что такое, господа? Где мы? На Корсике? Поощрение вендетты? (Act One)
The action in The Event takes place on the fiftieth birthday (presumably, August 28, 1938) of Antonina Pavlovna Opayashin, Troshcheykin's mother-in-law, the lady writer. Two days later, on her dead son's fifth birthday, Troshcheykin's wife Lyubov (Love) commits suicide (like Shakespeare's Othello, Lyubov stabs herself). The action in The Waltz Invention seems to take place in a dream that Lyubov dreams in the sleep of death. In his famous speech in Shakespeare's play Hamlet mentions "that sleep of death:"
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life. (3.1)