According to Vera Nabokov, the Russian title of VN's novel Transparent Things (1972) should have been Skvoznyak is proshlogo ("A Draft from the Past"). In his poem Nerodivshemusya chitatelyu ("To an Unborn Reader," 1930) VN addresses svetlyi zhitel' budushchikh vekov (a lucid inhabitant of the future centuries), mentions his own blurred photograph in an oval crowning the sixteen lines in an old anthology of undeservedly but thoroughly forgotten verses and, in the poem's closing lines, compares the feeling experienced by the reader to "a draft from the past:"
Ты, светлый житель будущих веков,
ты, старины любитель, в день урочный
откроешь антологию стихов,
забытых незаслуженно, но прочно.
И будешь ты, как шут, одет на вкус
моей эпохи фрачной и сюртучной.
Облокотись. Прислушайся. Как звучно
былое время -- раковина муз.
Шестнадцать строк, увенчанных овалом
с неясной фотографией... Посмей
побрезговать их слогом обветшалым,
опрятностью и бедностью моей.
Я здесь с тобой. Укрыться ты не волен.
К тебе на грудь я прянул через мрак.
Вот холодок ты чувствуешь: сквозняк
из прошлого... Прощай же. Я доволен.
At the beginning of Transparent Things the invisible narrator says that the future does not exist:
Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me.
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.
Hullo, person! What's the matter, don't pull me. I'm not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person . . . (last time, in a very small voice).
When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment. (chapter 1)
Nevertheless, the action in Transparent Things seems to take place in the future (in the summer of 1974). At the end of the novel Hugh Person dies (chokes to death) in a hotel fire. In Jubilate Agno, a religious poem written between 1759 and 1763, during the author's confinement in St. Luke's Asylum (a mental hospital in London), and first published in 1939, Christopher Smart (an English poet, 1722-71) says:
For the Devil can set a house on fire, when the inhabitants find combustibles. (Fragment B, Part 3)
The invisible narrators in Transparent Things seem to be the devils. In his last letter to his publisher Mr. R. says that, if his poor soul is assigned to Hell, it will be misprinted by devils:
Dear Phil,
This, no doubt, is my last letter to you. I am leaving you. I am leaving you for another even greater Publisher. In that House I shall be proofread by cherubim - or misprinted by devils, depending on the department my poor soul is assigned to. So adieu, dear friend, and may your heir auction this off most profitably. (chapter 21)
Judging by the gross mistake in the novel's last sentence ("Easy, you know, does it, son."), after his death Hugh Person (a professional proofreader) goes to Hell where he is misprinted by devils.