Word: vadim
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...artificer has written one of his slyest and funniest books. Admirers who sloped off muttering after a struggle with the intricacies of Ada are urged to reopen their hearts. Look at the Harlequins comes in the form of memoirs by the distinguished Russian-born novelist Vadim Vadimych N., a cranky exquisite who laments piteously the high initial cost and outrageous maintenance expense of owning an artistic soul. This gent, at the time of writing, is a formidable old illusion-monger with a high, rounded forehead and the vanity of a borzoi. He was born a prince. Bounced from home...
...this anyone we know? That question constantly haunts Vadim Vadimych: "I now confess that I was bothered ... by a dream feeling that my life was the nonidentical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man's life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier and crueler than your obedient servant...
...first name and patronymic "Vadim Vadimych" do not exist in Russian, but they could, the memoirist feels uneasily, be blurred rendering of "Vladimir Vladimirovich." As to his own surname, poor Vadim cannot remember it, though he feels fairly sure it begins with "N" -Naborcroft, he wonders? Nablize? (The experienced reader, meanwhile, notices that Vadim's pseudonym "V. Irisin" sounds a lot like "Sirin," the pen name of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, an émigré Russian of illustrious but not aristocratic background who wrote in Berlin, not Paris, after the revolution. This Sirin, Nabokov has been heard to assert...
Forefeel of Fame. "Apart from incipient lunacy," writes Vadim, "I have been in excellent health throughout adulthood." He can be pleased with a literary career, which brought him in youth the heady "forefeel of fame" and later allowed him to strut as "a fat, famous writer in his powerful forties." Lechery has been a constant, though a Humbert-Lolita relationship with his daughter never flowered to the extent that he, in damp imagining, would have liked. Yet to each of four prospective brides, he has had to admit that he is cracked: "I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning...
...Vadim Vadimych's problem, the reader may feel, is excessively rarefied. He can imagine that he is walking up a village street from his house, for instance, to the post office, but he cannot then imagine himself turning around and facing the same street in the opposite direction. Rather than pivot easily on toe and heel, he must with hideous effort swing his entire dream street, post office, taxis, stray dogs and all, 180° around on the axis of his own mad self. Eventually, obsession invades reality. He walks to the end of a real village street, cannot...