Compare
with:
1. Father's
Butterflies
"a silent, subtle, charmingly sly conspiracy between nature
and the one who alone can understand, who alone has at last achieved this
comprehension — a spiritual alliance concluded above and beyond all the
seething, the stirring, the darkness of roaming reveilles, behind the back of
all the world’s organic life.";
2.
"That in Aleppo
Once...", page 558
"something of which he was a mere symbol, something monstrous
and impalpable, a timeless and faceless mass of
immemorial horror that still keeps coming
at me from behind even here, in the green
vacuum of Central Park.";
In his
other short-stories VN doesn't take into account "Herman Brink's”
diagnostic about “ Referential mania" - but we also
find other instances of delusion, auditory hallucination together
with ciphered "signs and symbols" which now enhance
the "correspondences", as those outlined by Baudelaire, for instance,
to describe the achievements of a poet and the dimension he sees
in "art".
Sounds,
page 14
"And when I
withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that - homogeneous,
congruent, bound by lawsw of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that
instant all became vertical chords on
musical staves. I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of
identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the
water, you... All was unified, equivalent, divine [...] It was as if my soul had
extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving
simultaneously Nigara Falls thundering far beyond the ocean and the long golden
drops...I...felt that, in place of arms, I possessed inclined branches covered
with little wet leaves and, instead of legs, a thousand slender roots[...] I
wanted to transfuse myself thus into all nature, to experience what it was like
to be an old boletus mushroom...or a dragonfly; or the solar sphere."
Beneficence,
page 77
"Here I
became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that
surrounded me, the blissful bond between
me and all of creation, and I realized
that the joy I had sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed
around me everywhere, in the speeding
street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted
skirt... I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a
predaceous sequence of chance events, but
shimmering bliss..."
La Veneziana, page 97
"He sensed
the onset of an auditory hallucination that had afflicted him since childhood.
When in a meadow, or, as now, in a quiet, already duskening wood, he would
involuntarily begin to wonder if, through this silence, he might perhaps hear
the entire, enormous world traversing space with a melodious whistle, a bustle
of distant cities, the pounding of sea waves..."
Cloud, Castle, Lake, page
431
"the
inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence
it had, my love!, my obedient one! - was something so unique, and so
familiar, and so
long-promised..."
Lik, page
461
"go to live
in that castle, and, moreover, find himself in a world of ineffable tenderness -
a bluish, delicate world where fabulous adventures of the senses occur, and
unheard-of metamorphoses of the mind...
Here these
sense-perceptions clearly emerge now as pathological lapses or
promptings into a delusional state:
1.A Nursery Tale, page
164:
"Nothing," said Frau Monde. "Your feeling, your desire,
are a command in themselves. However, in
order that you may be sure that the deal stands, I shall have a sign given to
you every time - a smile, not necessarily
addressed to you, a chance word in the
crowd, a sudden patch of color - that sort of thing. Don't worry, you'll
know."
2.Terror, page
176
"I stepped out
into the center of an incidental city,
and saw houses, trees, automobiles, people, my mind abruptly refused to accept
them as "houses," "trees," and so forth - as something connected with ordinary
human life. My line of communication with the world had snapped, I was on
my own and the world was on its own, and that world was devoid of sense. I saw
the actual essence of all things... I was no longer a man, but a naked eye, an
aimless glance moving in an absurd world."
..........................................................................
Anthony Stadlen:
Quoting: "can anyone explain the pattern of names: Mrs. Sol (the next door
neighbor?) and Dr. Solov (family’s doctor) surrounding, in the story line,
Soloveichik"
Jansy
Mello: V.E.Alexandrov mentioned various poets in connection to
Nabokov and one of the names was Vladimir Soloviev.
Could the family doctor's name and the Soloveichicks indicate a particular work
by Soloviev?