Vadim's daughter Bel elopes with Charlie Everett who
subsequently changes his name to "Karl Ivanovich Vetrov":
In the summer of 1960, Christine Dupraz,
who ran the summer camp for disabled children between cliff and highway, just
east of Larive, informed me that Charlie Everett, one of her assistants, had
eloped with my Bel after burning--in a grotesque ceremony that she visualized
more clearly than I--his passport and a little American flag (bought at a
souvenir stall especially for that purpose) "right in the middle of the Soviet
Consul's back garden"; whereupon the new "Karl Ivanovich Vetrov" and the
eighteen-year-old Isabella, a ci-devant's daughter, had gone through
some form of mock marriage in Berne and incontinently headed for Russia.
(LATH, 5.1)
The surname Vetrov comes from veter (wind). In his
Introduction to Bend Sinister VN points out that in Chapter Six "a
slight shift in the spectrum of meaning replaces the title Gone with the
Wind (filched* from Dowson's Cynara) with that of Flung
Roses (filched** from the same poem)." Rustic Roses is
the place where Annette Blagovo (Bel's mother)
moves to after leaving her husband. In her farewell letter
to Vadim Annette (or, maybe, her friend Ninel Langley) speaks of
America as a "sinister" country:
Had I really loved you I would not
have left you; but I never loved you really, and maybe your escapade--which no
doubt is not your first since our arrival in this sinister
(zloveshchuyu) "free" country--is for me a
mere pretext for leaving you. (3.4)
Seven years later Annette and Ninel die in a tornado at
Rosedale Lake:
The mad scholar in Esmeralda and Her
Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera
end as Ophelia with all her flowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga
Repnin remarks that tornadoes and floods are really sensational only in
North America. On May 17, 1953, several papers printed a photograph of a family,
complete with birdcage, phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it
out on the roof of their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers
carried the picture of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid
tree with a man, a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the
driver's seat, stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the
Weather Bureau was accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteen
schoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animals donated
by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor's widow, to the Rosedale Museum, were safe in
the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twister struck. But the
prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drowned bodies of its two
occupants were never retrieved. (4.2)
Oleg Orlov, a poet whom Vadim had met in Paris in the 1920s
and who, unrecognized by Vadim, accompanies him in his trip to Leningrad and
back to Paris, wrote "poems in prose": Oleg wrote "poems in
prose" (long after Turgenev), absolutely worthless stuff, which his father, a
half-demented widower, would try to "place," pestering with his son's worthless
wares the dozen or so periodicals of the emigration. (5.3)
One of Turgenev's best-known poems in prose is Kak
khoroshi, kak svezhi byli rosy! ("How beautiful, how fresh were the
roses!")*** This line was also quoted by Igor Severyanin in his poem "The
Classical Roses" (1925):
КЛАССИЧЕСКИЕ РОЗЫ
Как
хороши, как свежи были розы
В моём саду! Как взор прельщали мой!
Как я
молил весенние морозы
Не трогать их холодною рукой!
Мятлев, 1843
г.
В те времена, когда роились грёзы
В сердцах
людей, прозрачны и ясны,
Как хороши, как свежи были розы
Моей любви, и
славы, и весны!
Прошли лета, и всюду льются слёзы...
Нет ни страны, ни
тех, кто жил в стране...
Как хороши, как свежи ныне розы
Воспоминаний о
минувшем дне!
Но дни идут - уже стихают грозы.
Вернуться в дом Россия
ищет троп...
Как хороши, как свежи будут розы,
Моей страной мне брошенные
в гроб!
"...How beautiful, how fresh will be the roses
that my country will throw into my coffin!"
In another (much earlier) poem Severyanin, addressing a young
woman, mentions "vash muzh, posol Arlekinii" (your
husband, the Ambassador of Harlequinia). Vadim's benefactor (and father?),
Nikifor Nikodimovich Starov, is an old diplomat.
*by Margaret Mitchell
**by VN
***filched from a poem by Myatlev (a minor poet, friend of
Pushkin and Lermontov), see the epigraph to Severyanin's poem; btw., the rhyme
morozy - rozy (frosts - roses/of a rose) had already
been mocked by Pushkin in Eugene Onegin (Chapter
Four)
Alexey Sklyarenko