(TT, 12)
In a conversation with Hugh
Person (who is soon to marry her daughter) Madame Chamar mentions
yabloni: "Diablonnet always reminds me of the Russian for 'apple
trees': yabloni." (Ibid.) According to a Russian
saying (quoted by Turgenev in Punin and Baburin and Virgin
Soil), yabloko ot yabloni nedaleko padaet ("like mother, like
child;" literally: an apple never falls too
far from apple-tree).
Madame Chamar dies in a Belgian hospital, and Armande survives
her mother by barely a month: In the second week
of February, about one month before death separated them, the Persons flew over
to Europe for a few days: Armande, to visit her mother dying in a Belgian
hospital (the dutiful daughter came too late), and Hugh, at his firm's request,
to look up Mr. R. and another American writer, also residing in
Switzerland. (TT, 18)
"Mister R.", as he was called in the office (he had a
long German name, in two installments, with a nobiliary particle between castle
and crag)... (TT, 8) I wonder, if the name Rausch von Traubenberg,
beginning with R. and having that nobiliary particle, was ever mentioned in
connection with "Mister R."? Baron Evgeniy Aleksandrovich Rausch von
Traubenberg (the father of VN's first cousin and childhood friend Yuri) was
the military Governor of Warsaw (Speak, Memory, p. 49). A cousin (?) of
his, Baron Konstantin Konstantinovich Rausch von Traubenberg (1871-1935,
Paris) was a famous sculptor. In 1907 he participated, with Roerich,
Bilibin and the architect Shchusev (the future author of Lenin's Mausoleum),
in the Paris exhibition (reviewed in Vesy by
Gumilyov) of New Russian art.
A Belgian sculptor lives in the penthouse above the Persons's appartment in
New York: After serving them an excellent supper (a little
on the rich side, perhaps, but not overabundant - neither was a big eater) obese
Pauline, the - femme de ménage, whom they shared with a Belgian artist
in the penthouse immediately above them, washed the dishes and" left at her
usual hour (nine fifteen or thereabouts)... As had happened on previous
occasions, around ten o'clock a most jarring succession of bumps and scrapes
suddenly came from above: it was the cretin upstairs dragging a heavy piece of
inscrutable sculpture (catalogued as "Pauline anide") from the center
of his studio to the corner it occupied at night. (TT, 19)
Not long after the death of VN's brother Kirill, his widow
Gilberte perished in a Brussels department-store fire set by an
arsonist. (VN was in the U. S. when, on April 16, 1964, his
brother died of a heart attack in Munich and couldn't arrive in time
for Kirill's funeral. See VN's letter of May 5 to Gilberte Nabokov in
Selected Letters)
Alexey Sklyarenko