In VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Other Books by the Narrator include Vadim’s novel The Dare (1950):
The reader must have noticed that I speak only in a very general way about my Russian fictions of the Nineteen-Twenties and Thirties, for I assume that he is familiar with them or can easily obtain them in their English versions. At this point, however, I must say a few words about The Dare (Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as "a gift to the fatherland"). When in 1934 I started to dictate its beginning to Annette, I knew it would be my longest novel. I did not foresee however that it would be almost as long as General Pudov's vile and fatuous "historical" romance about the way the Zion Wisers usurped St. Rus. It took me about four years in all to write its four hundred pages, many of which Annette typed at least twice. Most of it had been serialized in émigré magazines by May, 1939, when she and I, still childless, left for America; but in book form, the Russian original appeared only in 1950 Turgenev Publishing House, New York), followed another decade later by an English translation, whose title neatly refers not only to the well-known device used to bewilder noddies but also to the daredevil nature of Victor, the hero and part-time narrator.
The novel begins with a nostalgic account of a Russian childhood (much happier, though not less opulent than mine). After that comes adolescence in England (not unlike my own Cambridge years); then life in émigré Paris, the writing of a first novel (Memoirs of a Parrot Fancier) and the tying of amusing knots in various literary intrigues. Inset in the middle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote "on a dare": this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski, whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ's conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age. The next chapter deals with the rage and bewilderment of émigré reviewers, all of them priests of the Dostoyevskian persuasion; and in the last pages my young hero accepts a flirt's challenge and accomplishes a final gratuitous feat by walking through a perilous forest into Soviet territory and as casually strolling back.
I am giving this summary to exemplify what even the poorest reader of my Dare must surely retain, unless electrolysis destroys some essential cells soon after he closes the book. Now part of Annette's frail charm lay in her forgetfulness which veiled everything toward the evening of everything, like the kind of pastel haze that obliterates mountains, clouds, and even its own self as the summer day swoons. I know I have seen her many times, a copy of Patria in her languid lap, follow the printed lines with the pendulum swing of eyes suggestive of reading, and actually reach the "To be continued" at the end of the current installment of The Dare. I also know that she had typed every word of it and most of its commas. Yet the fact remains that she retained nothing--perhaps in result of her having decided once for all that my prose was not merely "difficult" but hermetic ("nastily hermetic," to repeat the compliment Basilevski paid me the moment he realized--a moment which came in due time--that his manner and mind were being ridiculed in Chapter Three by my gloriously happy Victor. I must say I forgave her readily her attitude to my work. At public readings, I admired her public smile, the "archaic" smile of Greek statues. When her rather dreadful parents asked to see my books (as a suspicious physician might ask for a sample of semen), she gave them to read by mistake another man's novel because of a silly similarity of titles. The only real shock I experienced was when I overheard her informing some idiot woman friend that my Dare included biographies of "Chernolyubov and Dobroshevski"! She actually started to argue when I retorted that only a lunatic would have chosen a pair of third-rate publicists to write about--spoonerizing their names in addition! (2.5)
Vadim’s Dare corresponds to VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937). In Chapter Four of “The Gift,” Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”), Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character in “The Gift”) mentions venzel’naya svyaz’ (a monogrammatic union) in which friendship joined Chernyshevski and Dobrolyubov:
Их первую встречу (летом 56 года) Чернышевский спустя чуть ли не тридцать лет (когда писал и о Некрасове) вспоминал со знакомой нам уже детальностью - в сущности болезненной и бессильной, но долженствующей оттенить безупречность мысли в сделках со временем. Дружба соединила этих двух людей вензельной связью, которую сто веков неспособны распутать (напротив: она лишь укрепляется в сознании потомков). Тут не место распространяться о литературной деятельности младшего. Скажем только, что он был топорно груб и топорно наивен; что в "Свистке" он вышучивал Пирогова, пародируя Лермонтова (вообще пользование канвой лермонтовских стихов для шуток было так в ходу, что, в конце концов, становилось карикатурой на самое искусство пародии); скажем еще, что, по выражению Страннолюбского, "от толчка, данного Добролюбовым, литература покатилась по наклонной плоскости с тем неизбежным окончанием, когда, докатившись до нуля, она берется в кавычки: студент привез "литературу". Что ещё сказать? Юмор Добролюбова? О, благословенные времена, когда "комар" был сам по себе смешон, комар, севший на нос, смешнее вдвое, а комар, влетевший в присутственное место и укусивший столоначальника, заставлял слушателей стонать и корчиться от смеха!
Their first meeting (summer 1856) was recalled almost thirty years later by Chernyshevski (when he also wrote about Nekrasov) with his familiar wealth of detail, essentially sickly and impotent, but supposed to set off the irreproachability of thought in its transactions with time. Friendship joined these two men in a monogrammatic union which a hundred centuries are incompetent to untie (on the contrary: it becomes even faster in the consciousness of posterity). This is not the place to enlarge upon the literary activities of the younger man. Let us merely say that he was uncouthly crude and uncouthly naïve; that in the satirical review The Whistle he poked fun at the distinguished Dr. Pirogov while parodying Lermontov (the use of some of Lermontov’s lyrical poems as a canvas for journalistic jokes about people and events was in general so widespread that in the long run it turned into a caricature of the very art of parody); let us say also, in Strannolyubski’s words, that “from the push given it by Dobrolyubov, literature rolled down an inclined plane, with the inevitable result, once it had rolled to zero, that it was put into inverted commas: the student brought some literature’ ” (meaning propaganda leaflets). What else can one add? Dobrolyubov’s humor? Oh, those blessed times when “mosquito” was in itself funny, a mosquito settling on someone’s nose twice as funny, and a mosquito flying into a governmental office and biting a civil servant caused the listeners to groan and double up with laughter!
According to Vadim, his wives and his books are interlaced in LATH monogrammatically like some sort of watermark or ex libris design:
In this memoir my wives and my books are interlaced monogrammatically like some sort of watermark or ex libris design; and in writing this oblique autobiography—oblique, because dealing mainly not with pedestrian history but with the mirages of romantic and literary matters—I consistently try to dwell as lightly as inhumanly possible on the evolution of my mental illness. Yet Dementia is one of the characters in my story. (2.3)
Venzel’naya svyaz’ (a monogrammatic union) mentioned by Fyodor in “The Gift” brings to mind zavetnyi venzel’ (the cherished monogram) that in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Three: XXXVII: 14) Tatiana writes with her charming finger on the bemisted glass of the windowpane:
Смеркалось; на столе, блистая,
Шипел вечерний самовар,
Китайский чайник нагревая;
Под ним клубился легкий пар.
Разлитый Ольгиной рукою,
По чашкам темною струею
Уже душистый чай бежал,
И сливки мальчик подавал;
Татьяна пред окном стояла,
На стекла хладные дыша,
Задумавшись, моя душа,
Прелестным пальчиком писала
На отуманенном стекле
Заветный вензель О да Е.
'Twas darkling; on the table, shining,
the evening samovar
hissed as it warmed the Chinese teapot;
light vapor undulated under it.
Poured out by Olga's hand,
into the cups, in a dark stream,
the fragrant tea already
ran, and a footboy served the cream;
Tatiana stood before the window;
breathing on the cold panes,
lost in thought, the dear soul
wrote with her charming finger
on the bemisted glass
the cherished monogram: an O and E.
In his EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 403) VN points out that this cherished monogram also appeared in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (“Elective Affinities,” 1809), Part I, chapter 9, where a drinking glass is described, on which one could see “die Buchstaben E und O in sehr zierlicher Verschlingung eingeschnitten: es war eins der Gläser, die für Eduarden in seiner Jugend verfertigt worden.”
In Chapter Eight (XXV: 6) of EO Pushkin uses the word venzel’ in the sense “badge:”
Тут был на эпиграммы падкий,
На всё сердитый господин:
На чай хозяйский слишком сладкий,
На плоскость дам, на тон мужчин,
На толки про роман туманный,
На вензель, двум сестрицам данный,
На ложь журналов, на войну,
На снег и на свою жену.
Here was, to epigrams addicted
a gentleman cross with everything:
with the too-sweet tea of the hostess,
the ladies' platitudes, the ton of men,
the comments on a foggy novel,
the badge two sisters had been granted,
the falsehoods in reviews, the war,
the snow, and his own wife.
In his EO Commentary (vol. III, p. 196) VN writes:
badge / venzel’: from the Polish węzeł, “knot.” The two orphaned (sirotkam, dat. pl.) young ladies had been made ladies in waiting of the empress and as such received a venzel’ or shifr (Fr. chiffre), a court decoration with royal initials. In another, more usual sense, venzel’ means simply “monogram,” and is so employed in Three: XXXVII: 14.
In his fair copy Pushkin has dvum sirotkam (two orphaned young ladies) instead of dvum sestritsam (two sisters). At the beginning of LATH Vadim tells Ivor Black (whose sister Vadim soon marries) that they are “unpopular orphans:”
I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy conspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim of the plot.
Some time during the Easter Term of my last Cambridge year (1922) I happened to be consulted, "as a Russian," on certain niceties of make-up in an English version of Gogol's Inspector which the Glowworm Group, directed by Ivor Black, a fine amateur actor, intended to stage. He and I had the same tutor at Trinity, and he drove me to distraction with his tedious miming of the old man's mincing ways--a performance he kept up throughout most of our lunch at the Pitt. The brief business part turned out to be even less pleasant. Ivor Black wanted Gogol's Town Mayor to wear a dressing gown because "wasn't it merely the old rascal's nightmare and didn't Revizor, its Russian title, actually come from the French for ‘dream,’ rêve?" I said I thought it a ghastly idea.
If there were any rehearsals, they took place without me. In fact, it occurs to me now that I do not really know if his project ever saw the footlights.
Shortly after that, I met Ivor Black a second time--at some party or other, in the course of which he invited me and five other men to spend the summer at a Côte d'Azur villa he had just inherited, he said, from an old aunt. He was very drunk at the moment and seemed surprised when a week or so later on the eve of his departure I reminded him of his exuberant invitation, which, it so happened, I alone had accepted. We both were unpopular orphans, and should, I remarked, band together. (1.1)
Vadim and his first three wives (Iris Black, Annette Blagovo and Louise Adamson) seem to be the children of Count Starov. Vadim’s first three wives are thus his half-sisters.
In Pushkin’s fair copy the name of a gentleman cross with everything is Brodin. As pointed out by commentators, it hints at Borozdin, a name that comes from borozda (furrow) and brings to mind the saying staryi kon’ borozdy ne isportit (an old ox makes a straight furrow).
On the other hand, Brodin reminds one of a Mr Brod or Bred whom Dorothy Vinelander (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Ada’s sister-in-law) eventually marries (3.8). VN’s Ada corresponds to Vadim’s novel Ardis (1970). According to Vadim, his daughter Bel resembles Ada Bredow, Vadim’s first cousin whose portrait by Serov Vadim saw in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad:
I am reduced--a sad confession!--to something I have also used before, and even in this book--the well-known method of degrading one species of art by appealing to another. I am thinking of Serov's Five-petaled Lilac, oil, which depicts a tawny-haired girl of twelve or so sitting at a sun-flecked table and manipulating a raceme of lilac in search of that lucky token. The girl is no other than Ada Bredow, a first cousin of mine whom I flirted with disgracefully that very summer, the sun of which ocellates the garden table and her bare arms. What hack reviewers of fiction call "human interest" will now overwhelm my reader, the gentle tourist, when he visits the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, where I have seen with my own rheumy eyes, on a visit to Sovietland a few years ago, that picture which belonged to Ada's grandmother before being handed over to the People by a dedicated purloiner. I believe that this enchanting little girl was the model of my partner in a recurrent dream of mine with a stretch of parquetry between two beds in a makeshift demonic guest room. Bel's resemblance to her--same cheekbones, same chin, same knobby wrists, same tender flower—can be only alluded to, not actually listed. But enough of this. I have been trying to do something very difficult and I will tear it up if you say I have succeeded too well, because I do not want, and never wanted, to succeed, in this dismal business of Isabel Lee--though at the same time I was intolerably happy. (4.3)
It was Ada’s grandmother, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, who summoned Vadim to look at the harlequins:
I saw my parents infrequently. They divorced and remarried and redivorced at such a rapid rate that had the custodians of my fortune been less alert, I might have been auctioned out finally to a pair of strangers of Swedish or Scottish descent, with sad bags under hungry eyes. An extraordinary grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, amply replaced closer blood. As a child of seven or eight, already harboring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) unduly sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in a most outrageous fashion.
"Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!
"What harlequins? Where?"
"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes, images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"
I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my grand-aunt in honor of my first daydreams, and now, down the marble steps of memory's front porch, here she slowly comes, sideways, sideways, the poor lame lady, touching each step edge with the rubber tip of her black cane. (1.2)
Vadim Vadimovich’s surname (that he forgets after a stroke) seems to be Yablonski. His zavetnyi venzel’ (cherished monogram) would be then Я да B (“an Ya and V”). But one can easily imagine scoffers who would call Vadim “Prince Yeblonski.”