According to Mr. R. (the writer in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972), all he can offer his publisher is not Tralala but the first and dullest tome of his Tralatitions:
He took a long sip of whiskey, and, rinsing his mouth with it in a manner Person had never yet witnessed, very slowly replaced his glass on the low table. Then, à deux with the muzzled stuff, he swallowed it and shifted to his second English style, the grand one of his most memorable characters:
"Insomnia and her sister Nocturia harry me, of course, but otherwise I am as hale as a pane of stamps. I don't think you met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth: like the English breed of black-blotched swine."
"No," said Hugh, "it does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson."
"O.K., son. And how's Phil?"
They discussed briefly R.'s publisher's vigor, charm, and acumen.
"Except that he wants me to write the wrong books. He wants - " assuming a coy throaty voice as he named the titles of a competitor's novels, also published by Phil - "he wants A Boy for Pleasure but would settle for The Slender Slut, and all I can offer him is not Tralala but the first and dullest tome of my Tralatitions."
"I assure you that he is waiting for the manuscript with utmost impatience. By the way - " (Chapter 10)
In G. Ivanov’s unfinished novel Tretiy Rim (“The Third Rome,” 1929-31) Prince Velski says to himself in order to dispel the thoughts of suicide: "Tra la la la... La donna mobile. Tigris and Euphrates. Tigris and Euphrates. Amidst the green waves kissing the Tauris at daybreak I saw the Nereid" (Velski quotes the Duke's song in Verdi's opera Rigoletto and Pushkin's poem The Nereid):
"Если действительно я..." - начало складываться в уме что-то такое, чего Вельский, сделав над собой усилие, не додумал. - "Тра ла ла ла, забарабанил он пальцами по перилам моста, повторяя вслух первое попавшееся, чтобы прогнать, не дать сложиться какому-то невероятному, немыслимому слову. - Тра ла ла ла,- барабанил он,- Ла донна мобиле. Тигр и Евфрат. Тигр и Евфрат. Среди зеленых волн, лобзающих Тавриду, на утренней заре я видел Нереиду"...
Like Mr. Tamworth (Mr. R.’s secretary whose boy typists Mr. R. mentions in his last letter to his publisher), Velski is a pederast. The characters in G. Ivanov’s novel include Adam Adamovich Shteyer (Velski’s secretary). Reading the galleys of Mr. R.’s Tralatitions, Hugh Person ponders the name of an incidental character "Adam von Librikov:"
After a long consultation with Phil it had been decided not to do anything about the risks of defamation involved in the frankness with which R. described his complicated love life. He had "paid for it once in solitude and remorse, and now was ready to pay in hard cash any fool whom his story might hurt" (abridged and simplified citation from his latest letter). In a long chapter of a much more libertine nature (despite the grandiose wording) than the jock talk of the fashionable writers he criticized, R. showed a mother and daughter regaling their young lover with spectacular caresses on a mountain ledge above a scenic chasm and in other less perilous spots. Hugh did not know Mrs. R. intimately enough to assess her resemblance to the matron of the book (loppy breasts, flabby thighs, coon-bear grunts during copulation, and so forth); but the daughter in manner and movement, in breathless speech, in many other features with which he was not consciously familiar but which fitted the picture, was certainly Julia, although the author had made her fair-haired, and played down the Eurasian quality of her beauty. Hugh read with interest and concentration, but through the translucidity of the textual flow he still was correcting proof as some of us try to do - mending a broken letter here, indicating italics there, his eye and his spine (the true reader's main organ) collaborating rather than occluding each other. Sometimes he wondered what the phrase really meant - what exactly did "rimiform" suggest and how did a "balanic plum" look, or should he cap the 'b' and insert a 'k' after 'l'? The dictionary he used at home was less informative than the huge battered one in the office and he was now slumped by such beautiful things as "all the gold of a kew tree" and "a dappled nebris." He queried the middle word in the name of an incidental character "Adam von Librikov" because the German particle seemed to clash with the rest; or was the entire combination a sly scramble? He finally crossed out his query, but on the other hand reinstated the "Reign of Cnut" in another passage: a humbler proofreader before him had supposed that either the letters in the last word should be transposed or that it be corrected to "the Knout" - she was of Russian descent, like Armande.
Our Person, our reader, was not sure he entirely approved of R.'s luxuriant and bastard style; yet, at its best ("the gray rainbow of a fog-dogged moon"), it was diabolically evocative. He also caught himself trying to establish on the strength of fictional data at what age, in what circumstances, the writer had begun to debauch Julia: had it been in her childhood – tickling her in her bath, kissing her wet shoulders, then one day carrying her wrapped in a big towel to his lair, as delectably described in the novel? Or did he flirt with her in her first college year, when he was paid two thousand dollars for reading to an enormous gown-and-town audience some short story of his, published and republished many times before but really wonderful stuff? How good to have that type of talent! (Chapter 19)
An anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, Adam von Librikov also brings to mind “ex libris besa” (the devil’s ex libris), as in his poem Sankt-Peterburg – uzornyi iney (“St. Petersburg – the patterned rime,” 1923) VN calls St. Petersburg:
Санкт-Петербург - узорный иней,
ex libris беса, может быть,
но дивный... Ты уплыл, и ныне
мне не понять и не забыть.
Мой Пушкин бледной ночью, летом,
сей отблеск объяснял своей
Олениной, а в пенье этом
сквозная тень грядущих дней.
И ныне: лепет любопытных,
прах, нагота, крысиный шурк
в книгохранилищах гранитных;
и ты уплыл, Санкт-Петербург.
И долетая сквозь туманы
с воздушных площадей твоих,
меня печалит музы пьяной
скуластый и осипший стих.
The Third Rome in G. Ivanov’s novel is St. Petersburg (the action in the novel takes place in Petrograd in 1916). In his novel Ivanov mentions nechistaya sila (evil spirits):
Иван Нестерович, новый его друг и покровитель, объехавший, по слухам, весь свет, говоривший на языках, игравший в тысячную игру с первейшими банкирами и даже с генералитетом, при первом же знакомстве произвел очень сильное впечатление на Назара Назаровича. Внешностью он, без преувеличения, был орел, голос — труба, манеры, работал же так, что даже уму непостижимо. Глядя на игру Ивана Нестеровича, Назар Назарович в первую минуту подумал, уж не нечистая ли тут сила (мало ли что бывает — он даже тихонько перекрестился под столом),— такая это была работа. (III)
Ivan Nesterovich (a virtuoso cardsharp whom his younger colleague, Nazar Nazarovich Solovey, believes to be a devil) quotes the lines from Chapter Eight of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, "the aged Derzhavin noticed us and blessed us while descending to his grave:"
Умиление заливало сердце Назара Назаровича, ему было необыкновенно хорошо. Снег скрипел, голова кружилась, нежно, как зефир, отрыгалось севрюжье бляманже. «Я сразу заметил, как ты дергаешь,— говорил ему Иван Нестерович, прижимая его к себе и дыша на него,—этому не научишься, это от Бога. Старик Державин нас заметил и, в гроб сходя, благословил,— басом, на всю улицу, продекламировал он.— Знаешь, про кого это сказано? То-то и оно-то, ничего ты не знаешь—серость твоя тебя губит, неинтеллигентность твоя. В наш век пара и электричества хороший исполнитель все должен знать: и кто такой Державин, и что такое альтернатива. Ну, это потом наверстаешь, а пока чтобы выучил назубок американку, слышишь, чтобы назубок к следующему разу, а не то морду разобью—у меня это просто. Обними меня, друг сердечный»,— неожиданно прибавил Иван Нестерович, размякнув на морозе, и они крепко расцеловались. (III)
Ex libris is a bookplate inscribed to show the name of the book's owner. VN's novel is one of the odd volumes from the library of devils mentioned by Pushkin in Chapter Four (XXX: 1-2) of EO. The spectral narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils.
Btw., rimiform means “having a long furrow” and the medical definition of balanic (cf. a “balanic plum” queried by Hugh Person) is “of or relating to the glans of the penis or of the clitoris.” In his poem Love and Poetry A. D. Hope (the author of Imperial Adam) mentions “the tralatition of cunts:”
It pleased young Pushkin in Odessa once
To have a light of love, not quite a whore,
Who had shared Byron’s bed some years before.
Succession by the tralatition of cunts
Is, like Elijah’s mantle, rare enough;
Poets like Byron, Pushkin, rarer still;
Rarest of all, she had a name to fill
An exile’s heart even in Kishinëv:
Calypso Polychroni! When she sang
Some Turkish song, he heard from classic ground
Odysseus with his axe while her woods rang
And made his Bessarabian wastes resound;
What time his hero sailed for Greece, and there
Let fall Don Juan’s mantle unaware.
In a New York theater Hugh Person and Julia Moore (Mr. R.'s step-daughter) see Cunning Stunts, an "avant garde" play:
Julia liked tall men with strong hands and sad eyes. Hugh had met her first at a party in a New York house. A couple of days later he ran into her at Phil's place and she asked if he cared to see Cunning Stunts, an "avant garde" hit, she had two tickets for herself and her mother, but the latter had had to leave for Washington on legal business (related to the divorce proceedings as Hugh correctly surmised): would he care to escort her? In matters of art, "avant garde" means little more than conforming to some daring philistine fashion, so, when the curtain opened, Hugh was not surprised to be regaled with the sight of a naked hermit sitting on a cracked toilet in the middle of an empty stage. Julia giggled, preparing for a delectable evening. Hugh was moved to enfold in his shy paw the childish hand that had accidentally touched his kneecap. She was wonderfully pleasing to the sexual eye with her doll's face, her slanting eyes and topaz-teared earlobes, her slight form in an orange blouse and black skirt, her slender-jointed limbs, her exotically sleek hair squarely cut on the forehead. No less pleasing was the conjecture that in his Swiss retreat, Mr. R., who had bragged to an interviewer of being blessed with a goodish amount of telepathic power, was bound to experience a twinge of jealousy at the present moment of spacetime. (Chapter 11)
Cunning Stunts = Stunning Cunts