In VN’s novel Transparent Things (1972) Mr. R. lives at Diablonnet, near Versex:
Madame Charles Chamar, née Anastasia Petrovna Potapov (a perfectly respectable name that her late husband garbled as "Patapouf"), was the daughter of a wealthy cattle dealer who had emigrated with his family to England from Ryazan via Kharbin and Ceylon soon after the Bolshevist revolution. She had long grown accustomed to entertaining this or that young man whom capricious Armande had stood up; but the new beau was dressed like a salesman, and had something about him (your genius, Person! ) that puzzled and annoyed Madame Chamar. She liked people to fit. The Swiss boy, with whom Armande was skiing at the moment on the permanent snows high above Witt, fitted. So did the Blake twins. So did the old guide's son, golden-haired Jacques, a bobsled champion. But my gangly and gloomy Hugh Person, with his awful tie, vulgarly fastened to his cheap white shirt, and impossible chestnut suit, did not belong to her accepted world. When told that Armande was enjoying herself elsewhere and might not be back for tea, he did not bother to conceal his surprise and displeasure. He stood scratching his cheek. The inside of his Tyrolean hat was dark with sweat. Had Armande got his letter?
Madame Chamar answered in the noncommittal negative - though she might have consulted the telltale book marker, but out of a mother's instinctive prudence refrained from doing so. Instead she popped the paperback into her garden bag. Automatically, Hugh mentioned that he had recently visited its author.
"He lives somewhere in Switzerland, I think?"
"Yes, at Diablonnet, near Versex."
"Diablonnet always reminds me of the Russian for 'apple trees': yabloni. He has a nice house?"
"Well, we met in Versex, in a hotel, not at his home. I'm told it's a very large and a very old-fashioned place. We discussed business matters. Of course the house is always full of his rather, well, frivolous guests. I shall wait for a little while and then go." (Chapter 12)
Yabloni bring to mind Vsyo proydyot kak s belykh yablon' dym ("everything will pass, like haze off white apple-trees), the second line of Esenin’s poem "Ne zhaleyu, ne zovu, ne plachu..." ("I do not regret, I do not call back, I do not shed tears," 1922). Dym (“Smoke,” 1866) is a novel by Turgenev. The action in “Smoke” begins on August 10 (Sunday), 1862, and takes place in Baden-Baden. In the 19th century (when the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars was twelve days) August 10 in Europe was July 29 in Russia. It seems that Hugh Person first meets Armande on Thursday, July 29, 1965:
He made Armande's acquaintance in a Swiss railway carriage one dazzling afternoon between Thur and Versex on the eve of his meeting with Mr. R. He had boarded a slow train by mistake; she had chosen one that would stop at the small station from which a bus line went up to Witt, where her mother owned a chalet. Armande and Hugh had simultaneously settled in two window seats facing each other on the lake side of the coach. An American family occupied the corresponding four-seat side across the aisle. Hugh unfolded the Journal de Genève.
Oh, she was pretty and would have been exquisitely so had her lips been fuller. She had dark eyes, fair hair, a honey-hued skin. Twin dimples of the crescentic type came down her tanned cheeks on the sides of her mournful mouth. She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse. A book lay in her lap under her black-gloved hands. He thought, he recognized that flame-and-soot paperback. The mechanism of their first acquaintance was ideally banal.
They exchanged a glance of urbane disapproval as the three American kids began pulling sweaters and pants out of a suitcase in savage search for something stupidly left behind (a heap of comics - by now taken care of, with the used towels, by a brisk hotel maid). One of the two adults, catching Armande's cold eye, responded with a look of good-natured helplessness. The conductor came for the tickets.
Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he had been right: it was indeed the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden Window.
"One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.
She considered the book in her lap as if seeking in it some explanation of his remark. Her skirt was very short.
"I mean," he said, "I work for that particular publisher. For the American publisher of the hard-cover edition. Do you like it?"
She answered in fluent but artificial English that she detested surrealistic novels of the poetic sort. She demanded hard realistic stuff reflecting our age. She liked books about Violence and Oriental Wisdom. Did it get better farther on?
"Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa, when the little girl, the narrator's daughter - "
"June."
"Yes. June sets her new dollhouse on fire and the whole villa burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it is all rather symbolic, in the grand manner, and, well, curiously tender at the same time, as the blurb says, or at least said, in our first edition. That cover is by the famous Paul Plam."
She would finish it, of course, no matter how boring, because every task in life should be brought to an end like completing that road above Witt, where they had a house, a chalet de luxe, but had to trudge up to the Drakonita cableway until that new road had been finished. The Burning Window or whatever it was called had been given her only the day before, on her twenty-third birthday, by the author's stepdaughter whom he probably -
"Julia."
Yes. Julia and she had both taught in the winter at a school for foreign young ladies in the Tessin. Julia's stepfather had just divorced her mother whom he had treated in an abominable fashion. What had they taught? Oh, posture, rhythmics - things like that.
Hugh and the new, irresistible person had by now switched to French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English. Asked to guess her nationality he suggested Danish or Dutch. No, her father's family came from Belgium, he was an architect who got killed last summer while supervising the demolition of a famous hotel in a defunct spa; and her mother was born in Russia, in a very noble milieu, but of course completely ruined by the revolution. Did he like his job? Would he mind pulling that dark blind down a little? The low sun's funeral. Was that a proverb, she queried? No, he had just made it up. (Chapter 9)
The previous day, August 28, 1965, was Armande’s twenty-third birthday. Armande was born on July 28, 1942. Figures in a Golden Window (a book that Julia gave Armande as a birthday present) brings to mind Joyce's poem Golden Hair ("Lean out of the window, Goldenhair") and an open window in VN's novel Lolita (1955):
Should I enter my old house? As in a Turgenev story, a torrent of Italian music came from an open window—that of the living room: what romantic soul was playing the piano where no piano had plunged and plashed on that bewitched Sunday with the sun on her beloved legs? (2.33)
A Turgenev story mentioned by Humbert Humbert is Tri vstrechi (“Three Meetings,” 1852). In VN's novel Humbert meets Lolita and falls in love with her because on the eve McCoo's house burnt down to the ground. Like Humbert, Mr. R. has an affair with his step-daughter (Julia Moore).
Hugh Person asks Armande’s permission to call on her, say Wednesday, the fourth:
“Would you permit me to call on you, say Wednesday, the fourth? Because I shall be by then at the Ascot Hotel in your Witt, where I am told there is some excellent skiing even in summer. The main object of my stay here, on the other hand, is to find out when the old rascal's current book will be finished. It is queer to recall how keenly only the day before yesterday I had looked forward to seeing the great man at last in the flesh.” (Chapter 10)
In 1965 (the year of Hugh Person’s second visit to Switzerland) August 4 was Wednesday. In 1965, when he visits Switzerland for the second time, Hugh Person is thirty-two:
This was his fourth visit to Switzerland. The first one had been eighteen years before when he had stayed for a few days at Trux with his father. Ten years later, at thirty-two, he had revisited that old lakeside town and had successfully courted a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by going to see their hotel. (Chapter 4)
Hugh Person was born in 1933 (the year when Hitler came to power in Germany). For the first time Hugh Person visits Switzerland in 1955 with his father who dies during this visit (Hugh Person's mother died a year before). Hugh Person's parents outlived Stalin (who died on March 5, 1953.) On the day of his father's death Hugh Person moves to much finer lodgings in Geneva, has homard a l'americaine for dinner, and goes to find his first whore in a lane right behind his hotel:
She [the prostitute] took him to one of the better beds in a hideous old roominghouse - to the precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two, nearly ninety-three years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on his way to Italy. The bed - a different one, with brass knobs - was made, unmade, covered with a frock coat, made again; upon it stood a half-open green-checkered grip, and the frock coat was thrown over the shoulders of the night-shirted, bare-necked, dark-tousled traveler whom we catch in the act of deciding what to take out of the valise (which he will send by mail coach ahead) and transfer to the knapsack (which he will carry himself across the mountains to the Italian frontier). He expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter, to join him here any moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that romantics would undertake even during a drizzly spell in August; it rained even more in those uncomfortable times; his boots are still wet from a ten-mile ramble to the nearest casino. They stand outside the door in the attitude of expulsion, and he has wrapped his feet in several layers of German-language newspaper, a language which incidentally he finds easier to read than French. The main problem now is whether to confide to his knapsack or mail in his grip his manuscripts: rough drafts of letters, an unfinished short story in a Russian copybook bound in black cloth, parts of a philosophical essay in a blue cahier acquired in Geneva, and the loose sheets of a rudimentary novel under the provisional title of Faust in Moscow. As he sits at that deal table, the very same upon which our Person's whore has plunked her voluminous handbag, there shows through that bag, as it were, the first page of the Faust affair with energetic erasures and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green ink. The sight of his handwriting fascinates him; the chaos on the page is to him order, the blots are pictures, the marginal jottings are wings. Instead of sorting his papers, he uncorks his portable ink and moves nearer to the table, pen in hand. But at that minute there comes a joyful banging on the door. The door flies open and closes again. (Chapter 6)
1955 – 93 = 1862. In 1862 Turgenev's novel Ottsy i deti ("Fathers and Sons") appeared. The characters in “Fathers and Sons” include Princess R. (Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov’s late mistress). Turgenev is the author of Faust, a story in nine letters (1856), and Pozhar na more (“A Fire in the Sea,” 1883), an autobiographical story. In Turgenev's correspondence there is a strange gap in August, 1856. On July 21/August 2, 1856, Turgenev left St. Petersburg on a steamer sailing to Stettin, completed his Faust abroad and on August 18/30 sent the manuscript to the editors of The Contemporary.
Hugh Person strangles Armande in his sleep in March, 1966. Armande outlives her mother (who was born in Ryazan before 1917 and who dies in February, 1966) by a month:
In the second week of February, about one month before death separated them, the Persons flew over to Europe for a few days: Armande, to visit her mother dying in a Belgian hospital (the dutiful daughter came too late), and Hugh, at his firm's request, to look up Mr. R. and another American writer, also residing in Switzerland. (Chapter 18)
In Turgenev’s story Chasy (“The Watch,” 1875) the action takes place in Ryazan in 1801. The characters in Turgenev’s story include Nastasey Nastaseich, the narrator’s godfather who gives the boy a silver watch as a name-day present. In his last letter to his publisher Mr. R. says that the entire solar system is but a reflection in the crystal of his (or his publisher’s) wrist watch:
Poor soul is right, you know. My wretched liver is as heavy as a rejected manuscript; they manage to keep the hideous hyena pain at bay by means of frequent injections but somehow or other it remains always present behind the wall of my flesh like the muffled thunder of a permanent avalanche which obliterates there, beyond me, all the structures of my imagination, all the landmarks of my conscious self. It is comic - but I used to believe that dying persons saw the vanity of things, the futility of fame, passion, art, and so forth. I believed that treasured memories in a dying man's mind dwindled to rainbow wisps; but now I feel just the contrary: my most trivial sentiments and those of all men have acquired gigantic proportions. The entire solar system is but a reflection in the crystal of my (or your) wrist watch. The more I shrivel the bigger I grow. I suppose this is an uncommon phenomenon. Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one big book, that book would become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new creed. Fortunately for my self-esteem that book will not be written - not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately. Note added by the recipient:
Received on the day of the writer's death. File under Repos - R. (Chapter 21)
As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted "Peterson" and pronounced "Parson" by some) extricated his angular bulk from the taxi that had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort from Trux, and while his head was still lowered in an opening meant for emerging dwarfs, his eyes went up - not to acknowledge the helpful gesture sketched by the driver who had opened the door for him but to check the aspect of the Ascot Hotel (Ascot!) against an eight-year-old recollection, one fifth of his life, engrained by grief. (Chapter 2)
Hugh Person, aged forty, visits Switzerland again in the summer (in the first days of August) of 1973 and dies in a hotel fire. Transparent Things appeared in 1972 (the year of Mr. R.'s death?). The action in the novel ends after the book was finished and published. Skvoznyak iz proshlogo (the draft from the past) kills the hero! VN planned to entitle the Russian version of his novel Skvoznyak iz proshlago. In his poem Nerodivshemusya chitatelyu ("To an Unborn Reader," 1930) VN addresses a lucid inhabitant of the future centuries, mentions his own blurred photograph in an oval crowning the sixteen lines in an old anthology of thoroughly forgotten verses and, in the poem's closing lines, compares the feeling experienced by the reader to "the draft from the past:"
Ты, светлый житель будущих веков,
ты, старины любитель, в день урочный
откроешь антологию стихов,
забытых незаслуженно, но прочно.
И будешь ты, как шут, одет на вкус
моей эпохи фрачной и сюртучной.
Облокотись. Прислушайся. Как звучно
былое время -- раковина муз.
Шестнадцать строк, увенчанных овалом
с неясной фотографией... Посмей
побрезговать их слогом обветшалым,
опрятностью и бедностью моей.
Я здесь с тобой. Укрыться ты не волен.
К тебе на грудь я прянул через мрак.
Вот холодок ты чувствуешь: сквозняк
из прошлого... Прощай же. Я доволен.