It belatedly occurs to me that the Kur river in Bend Sinister may also hint at Antoniy Pogorelski's fairy tale Chyornaya kuritsa, ili Podzemnye zhiteli ("The Little Black Hen, or the Underground People," 1829). It influenced Vladimir Odoevski (it was Odoevski who wrote Pushkin's obituary that begins with the words "The sun of the Russian poetry has gone down"), the author of Gorodok v tabakerke ("The Little Town in the Snuffbox," 1834). This fairy-tale's title makes one think of Maxim Gorki's Gorodok Okurov. The characters in Bend Sinister include the Maximovs (Krug's friends, an innocent couple, who are arrested). The river that flows in Okurov, Putanitsa (Confusion), dividing it into two equal parts, Shikhan and Zarechye, brings to mind the confusion when Krug tries to cross the Kur:
He yielded, with what pleasure there was in the act, to the soft warm pressure of tears. The sense of relief did not last, for as soon as he let them flow they became atrociously hot and abundant so as to interfere with his eyesight and respiration. He walked through a spasmodic fog down the cobbled Omigod Lane towards the embankment. Tried clearing his throat but it merely led to another gasping sob. He was sorry now he had yielded to that temptation for he could not stop yielding and the throbbing man in him was soaked. As usual he discriminated between the throbbing one and the one that looked on: looked on with concern, with sympathy, with a sigh, or with bland surprise.
This was the last stronghold of the dualism he abhorred. The square root of I is I. Footnotes, forget-me-nots. The stranger quietly watching the torrents of local grief from an abstract bank. A familiar figure, albeit anonymous and aloof. He saw me crying when I was ten and led me to a looking glass in an unused room (with an empty parrot cage in the corner) so that I might study my dissolving face. He has listened to me with raised eyebrows when I said things which I had no business to say. In every mask I tried on, there were slits for his eyes. Even at the very moment when I was rocked by the convulsion men value most. My saviour. My witness. And now Krug reached for his handkerchief which was a dim white blob somewhere in the depths of his private night. Having at last crept out of a labyrinth of pockets, he mopped and wiped the dark sky and amorphous houses; then he saw he was nearing the bridge.
On other nights it used to be a line of lights with a certain lilt, a metrical incandescence with every foot rescanned and prolonged by reflections in the black snaky water. This night there was only a diffused glow where a Neptune of granite loomed upon his square rock which rock continued as a parapet which parapet was lost in the mist. As Krug, trudging steadily, approached, two Ekwilist soldiers barred his way. More were lurking around, and when a lantern moved, knight-wise, to check him, he noticed a little man dressed as a meshchaniner [petty bourgeois] standing with folded arms and smiling a sickly smile. The two soldiers (both, oddly enough, had pock-marked faces) were asking, Krug understood, for his (Krug's) papers. While he was fumbling for the pass they bade him hurry and mentioned a brief love affair they had had, or would have, or invited him to have with his mother.
'I doubt,' said Krug as he went through his pockets, 'whether these fancies which have bred maggot-like from ancient taboos could be really transformed into acts — and this for various reasons. Here it is' (it almost wandered away while I was talking to the orphan — I mean, the nurse).
They grabbed it as if it had been a hundred krun note. While they were subjecting the pass to an intense examination, he blew his nose and slowly put back his handkerchief into the left-hand pocket of his overcoat; but on second thought transferred it to his right-hand trouser pocket.
'What's this?' asked the fatter of the two, marking a word with the nail of the thumb he was pressing against the paper. Krug, holding his reading spectacles to his eyes, peered over the man's hand. 'University,' he said. 'Place where things are taught — nothing very important. '
'No, this,' said the soldier.
'Oh, "philosophy. " You know. When you try to imagine a mirok [small pink potato] without the least reference to any you have eaten or will eat.' He gestured vaguely with his glasses and then slipped them into their lecture-hall nook (vest pocket).
'What is your business? Why are you loafing near the bridge?' asked the fat soldier while his companion tried to decipher the permit in his turn.
'Everything can be explained,' said Krug. 'For the last ten days or so I have been going to the Prinzin Hospital every morning. A private matter. Yesterday my friends got me this document because they foresaw that the bridge would be guarded after dark. My home is on the south side. I am returning much later than usual.
'Patient or doctor?' asked the thinner soldier.
'Let me read you what this little paper is meant to convey,' said Krug, stretching out a helpful hand.
'Read on while I hold it,' said the thin one, holding it upside down.
'Inversion,' said Krug, 'does not trouble me, but I need my glasses. ' He went through the familiar nightmare of overcoat — coat — trouser pockets, and found an empty spectacle case. He was about to resume his search.
'Hands up,' said the fatter soldier with hysterical suddenness.
Krug obeyed, holding the case heavenward.
The left part of the moon was so strongly shaded as to be almost invisible in the pool of clear but dark ether across which it seemed to be swiftly floating, an illusion due to the moonward movement of some small chinchilla clouds; its right part, however, a somewhat porous but thoroughly talc-powdered edge or cheek, was vividly illumined by the artificial-looking blaze of an invisible sun. The whole effect was remarkable.
The soldiers searched him. They found an empty flask which quite recently had contained a pint of brandy. Although a burly man, Krug was ticklish and he uttered little grunts and squirmed slightly as they rudely investigated his ribs. Something jumped and dropped with a grasshopper's click. They had located the glasses.
'All right,' said the fat soldier. 'Pick them up, you old fool. '
Krug stooped, groped, side-stepped — and there was a horrible scrunch under the toe of his heavy shoe.
'Dear, dear, this is a singular position,' he said. 'For now there is not much to choose between my physical illiteracy and your mental one. '
'We are going to arrest you,' said the fat soldier. 'It will put an end to your clowning, you old drunkard. And when we get fed up with guarding you, we'll chuck you into the water and shoot at you while you drown. '
Another soldier came up idly juggling with a flashlight and again Krug had a glimpse of a pale-faced little man standing apart and smiling.
'I want some fun too,' the third soldier said.
'Well, well,' said Krug. 'Fancy seeing you here. How is your cousin, the gardener?'
The newcomer, an ugly, ruddy-cheeked country lad, looked at Krug blankly and then pointed to the fat soldier.
'It is his cousin, not mine. '
'Yes, of course,' said Krug quickly. 'Exactly what I meant. How is he, that gentle gardener? Has he recovered the use of his left leg?'
'We have not seen each other for some time,' answered the fat soldier moodily. 'He lives in Bervok. '
'A fine fellow,' said Krug. 'We were all so sorry when he fell into that gravel pit. Tell him, since he exists, that Professor Krug often recalls the talks we had over a jug of cider. Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past. Grand apples in Bervok. '
'This is his permit,' said the fat moody one to the rustic ruddy one, who took the paper gingerly and at once handed it back.
'You had better call that ved'min syn [son of a witch] there,' he said.
It was then that the little man was brought forward. He seemed to labour under the impression that Krug was some sort of superior in relation to the soldiers for he started to complain in a thin almost feminine voice, saying that he and his brother owned a grocery store on the other side and that both had venerated the Ruler since the blessed seventeenth of that month. The rebels were crushed, thank God, and he wished to join his brother so that a Victorious People might obtain the delicate foods he and his deaf brother sold.
'Cut it out,' said the fat soldier, 'and read this. '
The pale grocer complied.
Professor Krug had been given full liberty by the Committee of Public Welfare to circulate after dusk. To cross from the south town to the north one. And back. The reader desired to know why he could not accompany the professor across the bridge. He was briskly kicked back into the darkness. Krug proceeded to cross the black river. (Chapter 2)
A diminutive of mir (world; peace), mirok brings to mind Mir iskusstva ('The World of Art'), an art movement and art magazine. One of the leaders of the World of Art group was Dmitri Filosofov (filosof is Russian for "philosopher"). In 1903 Diaghilev (Filosofov's cousin and lover) offered to Chekhov to become the editor-in-chief the "World of Art" magazine. At the beginning of Chekhov's story Zhena ("The Wife," 1892) the narrator uses the word mirok (little world):
Обеспокоенный анонимным письмом и тем, что каждое утро какие-то мужики приходили в людскую кухню и становились там на колени, и тем, что ночью из амбара вытащили двадцать кулей ржи, сломав предварительно стену, и общим тяжелым настроением, которое поддерживалось разговорами, газетами и дурною погодой, — обеспокоенный всем этим, я работал вяло и неуспешно. Я писал «Историю железных дорог»; нужно было прочесть множество русских и иностранных книг, брошюр, журнальных статей, нужно было щёлкать на счетах, перелистывать логарифмы, думать и писать, потом опять читать, щёлкать и думать; но едва я брался за книгу или начинал думать, как мысли мои путались, глаза жмурились, я со вздохом вставал из-за стола и начинал ходить по большим комнатам своего пустынного деревенского дома. Когда надоедало ходить, я останавливался в кабинете у окна и, глядя через свой широкий двор, через пруд и голый молодой березняк, и через большое поле, покрытое недавно выпавшим, тающим снегом, я видел на горизонте на холме кучу бурых изб, от которых по белому полю спускалась вниз неправильной полосой черная грязная дорога. Это было Пестрово, то самое, о котором писал мне анонимный автор. Если бы не вороны, которые, предвещая дождь или снежную погоду, с криком носились над прудом и полем, и если бы не стук в плотницком сарае, то этот мирок, о котором теперь так много шумят, казался бы похожим на Мертвое озеро — так всё здесь тихо, неподвижно, безжизненно, скучно!
Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants came every morning to the servants’ kitchen and went down on their knees there, and that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen at night out of the barn, the wall having first been broken in, and by the general depression which was fostered by conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather—worried by all this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing “A History of Railways”; I had to read a great number of Russian and foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then again to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a book or began to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes began blinking, I would get up from the table with a sigh and begin walking about the big rooms of my deserted country-house. When I was tired of walking about I would stand still at my study window, and, looking across the wide courtyard, over the pond and the bare young birch-trees and the great fields covered with recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the horizon a group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road ran down in an irregular streak through the white field. That was Pestrovo, concerning which my anonymous correspondent had written to me. If it had not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated cawing over the pond and the fields, and the tapping in the carpenter’s shed, this bit of the world about which such a fuss was being made would have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all so still, motionless, lifeless, and dreary! (I)
In Chekhov's story Ivan Ivanych Bragin says Smert' ne kartoshka ("Death is not a potato"):
— Да... — забормотал Иван Иваныч некстати. — У купца Бурова тысяч четыреста есть, а может, и больше. Я ему и говорю: «Отвали-ка, тезка, голодающим тысяч сто или двести. Все равно помирать будешь, на тот свет с собой не возьмешь». Обиделся. А помирать-то ведь надо. Смерть не картошка.
“Yes...” Ivan Ivanych muttered inappropriately. “Burov, the merchant, must have four hundred thousand at least. I said to him: ‘My namesake, hand over one or two thousand to the famine. You can’t take it with you when you die, anyway.’ He was offended. But we all have to die, you know. Death is not a potato.” (II)
Describing IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) in Canto Three of his poem, John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) mentions Rabelais and his grand potato (le grand peut-être).
In the hospital where his wife just died Krug says that Dr. Krug who has a car is no relative of his (in Chekov's story "The Wife" the merchant Burov is Ivan Ivanych's namesake):
KRUG HALTED in the doorway and looked down at her upturned face. The movement (pulsation, radiation) of its features (crumpled ripples) was due to her speaking, and he realized that this movement had been going on for some time. Possibly all the way down the hospital stairs. With her faded blue eyes and long wrinkled upper lip she resembled someone he had known for years but could not recall—funny. A side line of indifferent cognition led him to place her as the head nurse. The continuation of her voice came into being as if a needle had found its groove. Its groove in the disc of his mind. Of his mind that had started to revolve as he halted in the doorway and looked down at her upturned face. The movement of its features was now audible.
She pronounced the word that meant “fighting” with a north-western accent: “fakhtung” instead of “fahtung.” The person (male?) whom she resembled peered out of the mist and was gone before he could identify her—or him.
“They are still fighting,” she said. “… dark and dangerous. The town is dark, the streets are dangerous. Really, you had better spend the night here.… In a hospital bed” (gospitalisha kruvka—again that marshland accent and he felt like a heavy crow—kruv—flapping against the sunset). “Please! Or you could wait at least for Dr. Krug who has a car.”
'No relative of mine,' he said. 'Pure coincidence. '
'I know,' she said, 'but still you ought not to not to not to not to' — (the world went on revolving although it had expended its sense).
'I have,' he said, 'a pass. ' And, opening his wallet, he went so far as to unfold the paper in question with trembling fingers. He had thick (let me see) clumsy (there) fingers which always trembled slightly. The inside of his cheeks was methodically sucked in and smacked ever so slightly when he was in the act of unfolding something. Krug — for it was he — showed her the blurred paper. He was a huge tired man with a stoop.
'But it might not help,' she whined, 'a stray bullet might hit you. '
(You see the good woman thought that bullets were still flukhtung about in the night, meteoric remnants of the firing that had long ceased. )
'I am not interested in politics,' he said. 'And I have only the river to cross. A friend of mine will come to fix things tomorrow morning. '
He patted her on the elbow and went on his way. (Chapter 2)
Krug's wife Olga is a namesake of Olga Knipper, Anton Chekhov's wife.
In Gorky's novel Zhizn' Klima Samgina ("The Life of Klim Samgin," 1925-36) Samgin remembers Berdnikov's words mirok-to kakoy kartinnyi ("what a scenic little world"):
Самгин взял книжку Мережковского "Грядущий хам", прилег на диван, но скоро убедился, что автор, предвосхитив некоторые его мысли, придал им дряблую, уродующую форму. Это было досадно. Бросив книгу на стол, он восстановил в памяти яркую картину парада женщин в Булонском лесу.
"Мирок-то какой картинный", -- прозвучала в памяти фраза Бердникова. (Part Four)
Samgin is reading Merezhkovski's new book Gryadushchiy Kham (The Future Ham, 1906) and recalls the "Boschean" parade of women that he and Berdnikov saw in the Bois de Boulogne. Filosofov was a close friend of Merezhkovski and his wife Zinaida Hippius.
Bend Sinister = Bender + insist = bed + inn + sister/resist
Bender - Ostap Bender, the main character in Ilf and Petrov's novels The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931).