In VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Other Books by the Narrator include The Red Top Hat (1934):
Since 1925 I had written and published four novels; by the beginning of 1934 I was on the point of completing my fifth, Krasnyy Tsilindr (The Red Top Hat), the story of a beheading. None of those books exceeded ninety thousand words but my method of choosing and blending them could hardly be called a timesaving expedient. (2.2)
The title of Vadim Vadimovich’s fifth Russian novel hints at the euphemism in VN’s seventh novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935):
Обрывки этих речей, в которых, как пузыри воды, стремились и лопались слова "прозрачность" и "непроницаемость", теперь звучали у Цинцинната в ушах, и шум крови превращался в рукоплескания, а медальонное лицо Марфиньки всё оставалось в поле его зрения и потухло только тогда, когда судья, - приблизившись вплотную, так что можно было различить на его круглом смуглом носу расширенные поры, одна из которых, на самой дуле, выпустила одинокий, но длинный волос, - произнёс сырым шёпотом: "с любезного разрешения публики, вам наденут красный цилиндр", - выработанная законом подставная фраза, истинное значение коей знал всякий школьник.
Fragments of these speeches, in which the words ‘translucence’ and ‘opacity’ rose and burst like bubbles, now sounded in Cincinnatus’s ears, and the rush of blood became applause, and Marthe’s locket-like face remained in his field of vision and faded only when the judge — who had moved so close that on his large swarthy nose he could see the enlarged pores, one of which, on the very extremity, had sprouted a lone but long hair — pronounced in a moist undertone, ‘with the gracious consent of the audience, you will be made to don the red top hat’ — a token phrase that the courts had evolved, whose true meaning was known to every schoolboy. (Chapter One)
The characters of Yuri Olesha’s fairy tale Tri tolstyaka (“The Three Fat Men,” 1927) include tolstyi kucher v golubom tsilindre s bantikom (a fat coachman in a light-blue top hat with a ribbon on it):
На углу, где горел трёхрукий фонарь, вдоль тротуара стояли экипажи. Цветочницы продавали розы. Кучера переговаривались с цветочницами.
- Его протащили в петле через весь город. Бедняжка!
- Теперь его посадили в железную клетку. Клетка стоит во Дворце Трёх Толстяков, - сказал толстый кучер в голубом цилиндре с бантиком.
There was a street lamp on the corner and carriages were lined up along the sidewalk. Flower girls were selling roses, and coachmen were talking to them.
“He was dragged through the town with a rope round his neck. Poor man!”
“They’ve put him in an iron cage. And the cage is in the Palace of the Three Fat Men,” said a fat coachman in a light-blue top hat with a ribbon on it. (Chapter II “Ten Scaffolds”)
In Priglashenie na kazn’ Cincinnatus mentally calls the jailer Rodion, the director Rodrig Ivanovich and the lawyer Roman Vissarionovich (all of whom turn out to be one and the same man) kukla, kucher, krashenaya svoloch’ (rag doll, coachman, painted swine):
- Позвольте вас от души поздравить, - маслянистым басом сказал директор, входя на другое утро в камеру к Цинциннату.
Родриг Иванович казался ещё наряднее, чем обычно: спина парадного сюртука была, как у кучеров, упитана ватой, широкая, плоско-жирная, парик лоснился, как новый, сдобное тесто подбородка было напудрено, точно калач, а в петлице розовел восковой цветок с крапчатой пастью. Из-за статной его фигуры, - он торжественно остановился на пороге, - выглядывали с любопытством, тоже праздничные, тоже припомаженные, служащие тюрьмы. Родион надел даже какой-то орденок.
- Я готов. Я сейчас оденусь. Я знал, что сегодня.
- Поздравляю, - повторил директор, не обращая внимания на суетливые движения Цинцинната. - Честь имею доложить, что у вас есть отныне сосед, - да, да, только что въехал. Заждались небось? Ничего, - теперь, с наперсником, с товарищем по играм и занятиям, вам не будет так скучно. Кроме того, - но это, конечно, должно остаться строго между нами, могу сообщить, что пришло вам разрешение на свидание с супругой: demain matin.
Цинциннат опять опустился на койку и сказал:
- Да, это хорошо. Благодарю вас, кукла, кучер, крашенная сволочь... Простите, я немножко...
“Please accept my sincerest congratulations” said the director in his unctuous bass as he entered Cincinnatus’s cell next morning.
Rodrig Ivanovich seemed even more spruce than usual: the dorsal part of his best frock coat was stuffed with cotton padding like a Russian coachman’s, making his back look broad, smooth, and fat; his wig was glossy as new; the rich dough of his chin seemed to be powdered with flour, while in his buttonhole there was a pink waxy flower with a speckled mouth. From behind his stately figure — he had stopped on the threshold — the prison employees peeked curiously, also decked out in their Sunday best, also with their hair slicked down; Rodion had even put on some little medal.
“I am ready. I shall get dressed at once. I knew it would be today.”
'Congratulations,” repeated the director, paying no attention to Cincinnatus’s jerky agitation. “I have the honour to inform you that henceforth you have a neighbour — yes, yes, he has just moved in. You have grown tired of waiting, I bet? Well, don't worry — now, with a confidant, with a pal, to play and work with, you won’t find it so dull. And, what is more — but this, of course, must remain strictly between ourselves — I can inform you that permission has come for you to have an interview with your spouse, demain matin?
Cincinnatus lay back down on the cot and said, ‘Yes, that’s fine. I thank you, rag doll, coachman, painted swine. . . Excuse me, I am a little… (Chapter Five)
Among rag dolls made by Cincinnatus for schoolgirls is old little Tolstoy with his fat nose, in a peasant's smock:
Работая в мастерской, он долго бился над затейливыми пустяками, занимался изготовлением мягких кукол для школьниц, - тут был и маленький волосатый Пушкин в бекеше, и похожий на крысу Гоголь в цветистом жилете, и старичок Толстой, толстоносенький, в зипуне, и множество других, например: застегнутый на все пуговки Добролюбов в очках без стекол. Искусственно пристрастясь к этому мифическому девятнадцатому веку, Цинциннат уже готов был совсем углубиться в туманы древности и в них найти подложный приют, но другое отвлекло его внимание.
In the shop he struggled for a long time with intricate trifles and worked on rag dolls for schoolgirls; here there was little hairy Pushkin in a fur carrick, and ratlike Gogol in a flamboyant waistcoat, and old little Tolstoy with his fat nose, in a peasant's smock, and many others, as for example Dobrolyubov, in spectacles without lenses and all buttoned up. Having artificially developed a fondness for this mythical Nineteenth Century, Cincinnatus was ready to become completely engrossed in the mists of that antiquity and find therein a false shelter, but something else distracted him. (Chapter Two)
M’sieur Pierre (the executioner in “Invitation to a Beheading”) is a namesake of Pierre Bezukhov, a character in Tolstoy’s novel Voyna i mir (“War and Peace,” 1869). In the battle of Borodino Pierre Bezukhov wears a white hat and a green tail coat:
25-го утром Пьер выезжал из Можайска. На спуске с огромной крутой и кривой горы, ведущей из города, мимо стоящего на горе направо собора, в котором шла служба и благовестили, Пьер вылез из экипажа и пошёл пешком. За ним спускался на горе какой-то конный полк с песельниками впереди. Навстречу ему поднимался поезд телег с раненными во вчерашнем деле. Возчики-мужики, крича на лошадей и хлеща их кнутами, перебегали с одной стороны на другую.
Телеги, на которых лежали и сидели по три и по четыре солдата раненых, прыгали по набросанным в виде мостовой камням на крутом подъеме. Раненые, обвязанные тряпками, бледные, с поджатыми губами и нахмуренными бровями,
держась за грядки, прыгали и толкались в телегах. Все почти с наивным детским любопытством смотрели на белую шляпу и зелёный фрак Пьера.
On the morning of the twenty-fifth Pierre was leaving Mozhaysk. At the descent of the high steep hill, down which a winding road led out of the town past the cathedral on the right, where a service was being held and the bells were ringing, Pierre got out of his vehicle and proceeded on foot. Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down the hill preceded by its singers. Coming up toward him was a train of carts carrying men who had been wounded in the engagement the day before. The peasant drivers, shouting and lashing their horses, kept crossing from side to side. The carts, in each of which three or four wounded soldiers were lying or sitting, jolted over the stones that had been thrown on the steep incline to make it something like a road. The wounded, bandaged with rags, with pale cheeks, compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to the sides of the carts as they were jolted against one another. Almost all of them stared with naive, childlike curiosity at Pierre’s white hat and green tail coat.
Pierre’s coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep to one side of the road. (Book Three, Part Two, chapter XX)
Borodino (1837) is a poem by Lermontov, the author of Demon ("The Demon," 1829-40). According to Vadim Vadimovich, the society nickname of his father was Demon:
My father was a gambler and a rake. His society nickname was Demon. Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, his black hair. What remained on the palette has been used by me, Vadim, son of Vadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the best of my English romaunts, Ardis (1970). (2.5)
It was Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, who first 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)
Lermontov’s poem Tamara (1841) and Tamara in Lermontov’s “Demon” bring to mind Tamariny sady (the Tamara Gardens) in “Invitations to a Beheading:”
Там-то, на той маленькой фабрике, работала Марфинька, - полуоткрыв влажные губы, целилась ниткой в игольное ушко: "Здравствуй, Цинциннатик!" - и вот начались те упоительные блуждания в очень, очень просторных (так что даже случалось - холмы в отдалении были дымчаты от блаженства своего отдаления) Тамариных Садах, где в три ручья плачут без причины ивы, и тремя каскадами, с небольшой радугой над каждым, ручьи свергаются в озеро, по которому плывет лебедь рука об руку со своим отражением. Ровные поляны, рододендрон, дубовые рощи, весёлые садовники в зелёных сапогах, день-деньской играющие в прятки; какой-нибудь грот, какая-нибудь идиллическая скамейка, на которой три шутника оставили три аккуратных кучки (уловка - подделка из коричневой крашеной жести), - какой-нибудь оленёнок, выскочивший в аллею и тут же у вас на глазах превратившийся в дрожащие пятна солнца, - вот они были каковы, эти сады! Там, там - лепет Марфиньки, её ноги в белых чулках и бархатных туфельках, холодная грудь и розовые поцелуи со вкусом лесной земляники. Вот бы увидеть отсюда - хотя бы древесные макушки, хотя бы гряду отдаленных холмов...
There, in that little factory, worked Marthe; her moist lips half open, aiming a thread at the eye of a needle. ‘Hi, Cincinnatik!’ And so began those rapturous wanderings in the very, very spacious (so much so that even the hills in the distance would be hazy from the ecstasy of their remoteness) Tamara Gardens, where, for no reason, the willows weep into three brooks, and the brooks, in three cascades, each with its own small rainbow, tumble into the lake, where a swan floats arm in arm with its reflection. The level lawns, the rhododendrons, the oak groves, the merry gardeners in their green jackboots playing hide-and-seek the whole day through; some grotto, some idyllic bench, on which three jokers had left three neat little heaps (it’s a trick — they are imitations made of brown painted tin), some baby deer, bounding into the avenue and before your very eyes turning into trembling mottles of sunlight — that is what those gardens were like! There, there is Marthe’s lisping prattle, her white stockings and velvet slippers, her cool breast and her rosy kisses tasting of wild strawberries. If only one could see from here — at least the treetops, at least the distant range of hills… (Chapter Two)
Tamara (1925) is Vadim's first novel. Showing to Vadim a lending library in the house that he rents for his business, Oks (Osip Lvovich Oksman) mentions Vadim’s Tamara:
He led me to a distant corner and triumphantly trained his flashlight on the gaps in my shelf of books.
"Look," he cried, "how many copies are out. All of Princess Mary is out, I mean Mary--damn it, I mean Tamara. I love Tamara, I mean your Tamara, not
Lermontov's or Rubinstein's. Forgive me. One gets so confused among so many damned masterpieces." (2.4)
See also the updated version of my previous post “M’sieur Pierre & his spring in Invitation to a Beheading.”