Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) mentions Gavronsky (as Ada calls G. A. Vronsky, the movie man who made a film of Mlle Larivière’s novel Les Enfants Maudits):
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.) (1.3)
In his collection of essays Ogon' i dym ("Fire and Smoke," 1922) Mark Aldanov describes his meeting with H. G. Wells (the author of Russia in the Shadows, 1921) in London and mentions Yakov Gavronsky:
Помню, незадолго до разговора с Уэлльсом, мы с тем же А.А. Титовым и Я.О. Гавронским были в гостях у одного английского политического деятеля, — левого направления и весьма энергичного темперамента. Этот человек занимается политикой лет сорок, по рождению принадлежит к правящим группам Англии и знает всех её политических деятелей, можно сказать, наизусть. Нисколько не стесняясь в выражениях, несмотря на присутствие иностранцев, он дал такую сочную характеристику Ллойд-Джорджа, что её, пожалуй, в печати огласить было бы неудобно; заодно коснулся и ближайших сотрудников премьера. (“Russia in the Shadows”)
The title of H. G. Wells’s book (written after the author’s visit to Russia and meeting with Lenin in the fall of 1920) brings to mind the Shadows, in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) a regicidal organization which commissioned Jakob Gradus to assassinate the self-banished king of Zembla. In Canto Three of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel) calls 1958 "a year of Tempests" and mentions Mars:
It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane
Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.
Mars glowed. Shahs married. Gloomy Russians spied.
Lang made your portrait. And one night I died. (ll. 679-82)
In H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1897) England is invaded by Martians. Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (Marina's twin sister), Van mentions her War of the Worlds:
Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth — say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia — as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua’s bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health (‘just a little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black’) in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive… But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (1.3)
Faragod (Darkbloom: “apparently, the god of electricity”) hints at Faraday, a scientist who appears as a character in Aldanov’s Povest’ o smerti (“A Tale of Death," 1952):
Учёная карьера Араго прошла с редким блеском. Он работал в областях астрономии, математики, физики. Двадцати трёх лет от роду он стал членом Академии Наук, позднее её постоянным секретарем. Стоял во главе Парижской обсерватории, считавшейся тогда первой в мире, был почётным доктором многих иностранных университетов, членом главных европейских академий и учёных обществ, знал решительно всё, считался едва ли не первым ученым своего
времени. Быть может, только Фарадей превосходил его славой. Они были друзьями, оба не знали зависти, оба, каждый по своему, были светские святые. Тем не менее Фарадей был некоторой загадкой для Араго: он просто не мог понять, каким образом этот самоучка, бывший переплётчик, ни в каких школах не учившийся, ничего кроме своей науки не знавший, не знавший даже высшей математики, мог сделать столько поразительных открытий. Разговаривать с ним о чем бы то ни было, кроме физики и химии, едва ли стоило. Фарадей, добрейший и бескорыстнейший из людей, принадлежал к какой-то маленькой простонародной секте, верил каждому слову её учения, говорил преимущественно о ней, о погоде, о королеве Виктории, которую, по-видимому, считал небесным явлением, хотя по скромности упорно отказывался от предлагавшихся ему наград и титулов. (Part Two, chapter III)
The main character in Aldanov’s “Tale of Death” is Balzac. In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Mona Dahl (Lolita’s friend at Beardsley) asks Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) to tell her about Ball Zack:
I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my memory all over the keyboard of that shcool year. In the meeting my attempts to find out what kind of boys Lo knew, Miss Dahl was elegantly evasive. Lo who had gone to play tennis at Linda’s country club had telephoned she might be a full half hour late, and so, would I enteretain Mona who was coming to practice with her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the modulations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of and staring at me with perhaps - could I be mistaken? - a faint gleam of crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: “Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a crush on the Reverend Rigger.” (This was a joke - I have already mentioned that gloomy giant of a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to near murder with his impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents that I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.)
How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A panic. Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh, not a frightful lot, just as much as she could stand. What did she, languorous Mona, think of Lo? Sir? Did she think Lo was doing well at school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a kid. But her general behavior was -? Oh, she was a swell kid. But still? “Oh, she’s a doll,” concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a book that happened to lie at hand, and with a change of expression, falsely furrowing her brow, inquired: “Do tell me about Ball Zack, sir. Is he really that good?” She moved up so close to my chair that I made out through lotions and creams her uninteresting skin scent. A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the wrong substitute. Avoiding Mona’s cool gaze, I talked literature for a minute. Then Dolly arrived - and slit her pale eyes at us. I left the two friends to their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position - a knight’s move from the top - always strangely disturbed me. (2.9)
The girls call Rev. Rigger (a teacher at Beardsley College) Rigor Mortis (“stiffening of the body after death, postmortem rigidity”):
Except for the Rev. Rigor Mortis (as the girls called him), and an old gentleman who taught non-obligatory German and Latin, there were no regular male teachers at Beardsley School. But on two occasions an art instructor on the Beardsley College faculty had come over to show the schoolgirls magic lantern pictures of French castles and nineteenth-century paintings. I had wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly, as was her wont, had asked me not to, period. I also remembered that Gaston had referred to that particular lecturer as a brilliant garçon; but that was all; memory refused to supply me with the name of the chateau-lover. (2.24)
All the main characters in Lolita die in 1952. 1952 was a leap year. The first essay in Aldanov's "Fire and Smoke" is entitled Varfolomeevskiy god ("The Year of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day). 1572 (the year of the massacre) was also a leap year. In VN’s novel Pnin (1957) St Bartholomew's is Victor’s preparatory school near Boston:
Pnin put on his new brown suit (paid for by the Cremona lecture) and, after a hurried lunch at The Egg and We, walked through the snow-patched park to the Waindell bus station, arriving there almost an hour too early. He did not bother to puzzle out why exactly Liza had felt the urgent need to see him on her way back from visiting St Bartholomew's, the preparatory school near Boston that her son would go to next fall: all he knew was that a flood of happiness foamed and rose behind the invisible barrier that was to burst open any moment now. He met five buses, and in each of them clearly made out Liza waving to him through a window as she and the other passengers started to file out, and then one bus after another was drained and she had not turned up. Suddenly he heard her sonorous voice ('Timofey, zdrastvuy!') behind him, and, wheeling around, saw her emerge from the only Greyhound he had decided would not bring her. What change could our friend discern in her? What change could there be, good God! There she was. She always felt hot and buoyant, no matter the cold, and now her sealskin coat was wide open on her frilled blouse as she hugged Pnin's head and he felt the grapefruit fragrance of her neck, and kept muttering: 'Nu, nu, vot i horosho, nu vot'--mere verbal heart props--and she cried out: 'Oh, he has splendid new teeth!' He helped her into a taxi, her bright diaphanous scarf caught on something, and Pnin slipped on the pavement, and the taximan said 'Easy,' and took her bag from him, and everything had happened before, in this exact sequence. (Chapter Two, 6)
The son of Eric Wind and Liza Bogolepov (Pnin's former wife), Victor dreams that his father is the King:
The King, his father, wearing a very white sports shirt open at the throat and a very black blazer, sat at a spacious desk whose highly polished surface twinned his upper half in reverse, making of him a kind of court card. Ancestral portraits darkened the walls of the vast panelled room. Otherwise, it was not unlike the headmaster's study at St Bart's School, on the Atlantic seaboard, some three thousand miles west of the imagined Palace. A copious spring shower kept lashing at the french windows, beyond which young greenery, all eyes, shivered and streamed. Nothing but this sheet of rain seemed to separate and protect the Palace from the revolution that for several days had been rocking the city.... Actually, Victor's father was a cranky refugee doctor, whom the lad had never much liked and had not seen now for almost two years. (Chapter Four, 1)
Eric Wind (Victor's father) brings to mind Eric Veen, in Ada the young author of an essay entitled "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream:"
In the spring of 1869, David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction (in no way related to the Veens of our rambling romance), escaped uninjured when the motorcar he was driving from Cannes to Calais blew a front tire on a frost-blazed road and tore into a parked furniture van; his daughter sitting beside him was instantly killed by a suitcase sailing into her from behind and breaking her neck. In his London studio her husband, an unbalanced, unsuccessful painter (ten years older than his father-in-law whom he envied and despised) shot himself upon receiving the news by cablegram from a village in Normandy called, dreadfully, Deuil.
The momentum of disaster lost none of its speed, for neither did Eric, a boy of fifteen, despite all the care and adoration which his grandfather surrounded him with, escape a freakish fate: a fate strangely similar to his mother’s.
After being removed from Note to a small private school in Vaud Canton and then spending a consumptive summer in the Maritime Alps, he was sent to Ex-en-Valais, whose crystal air was supposed at the time to strengthen young lungs; instead of which its worst hurricane hurled a roof tile at him, fatally fracturing his skull, Among the boy’s belongings David van Veen found a number of poems and the draft of an essay entitled 'Villa Venus: an Organized Dream.’
To put it bluntly, the boy had sought to solace his first sexual torments by imagining and detailing a project (derived from reading too many erotic works found in a furnished house his grandfather had bought near Vence from Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole): namely, a chain of palatial brothels that his inheritance would allow him to establish all over ‘both hemispheres of our callipygian globe.’ The little chap saw it as a kind of fashionable club, with branches, or, in his poetical phrase, ‘Floramors,’ in the vicinity of cities and spas. Membership was to be restricted to noblemen, ‘handsome and healthy,’ with an age limit of fifty (which must be praised as very broadminded on the poor kid’s part), paying a yearly fee of 3650 guineas not counting the cost of bouquets, jewels and other gallant donations. Resident female physicians, good-looking and young (‘of the American secretarial or dentist-assistant type’), would be there to check the intimate physical condition of ‘the caresser and the caressed’ (another felicitous formula) as well as their own if ‘the need arose,’ One clause in the Rules of the Club seemed to indicate that Eric, though frenziedly heterosexual, had enjoyed some tender ersatz fumblings with schoolmates at Note (a notorious preparatory school in that respect): at least two of the maximum number of fifty inmates in the major floramors might be pretty boys, wearing frontlets and short smocks, not older than fourteen if fair, and not more than twelve if dark. However, in order to exclude a regular flow of ‘inveterate pederasts,’ boy love could be dabbled in by the jaded guest only between two sequences of three girls each, all possessed in the course of the same week — a somewhat comical, but not unshrewd, stipulation. (2.3)
One of the guests of Eric Veen's floramors is King Victor:
Demon’s father (and very soon Demon himself), and Lord Erminin, and a Mr Ritcov, and Count Peter de Prey, and Mire de Mire, Esq., and Baron Azzuroscudo were all members of the first Venus Club Council; but it was bashful, obese, big-nosed Mr Ritcov’s visits that really thrilled the girls and filled the vicinity with detectives who dutifully impersonated hedge-cutters, grooms, horses, tall milkmaids, new statues, old drunks and so forth, while His Majesty dallied, in a special chair built for his weight and whims, with this or that sweet subject of the realm, white, black or brown. (ibid.)
Like Bunin and Sirin (VN's Russian nom de plume), Aldanov is mentioned in Pnin:
This was the first time Pnin was coming to The Pines but I had been there before. Émigré Russians--liberals and intellectuals who had left Russia around 1920--could be found swarming all over the place. You would find them in every patch of speckled shade, sitting on rustic benches and discussing émigré writers--Bunin, Aldanov, Sirin; lying suspended in hammocks, with the Sunday issue of a Russian-language newspaper over their faces in traditional defence against flies; sipping tea with jam on the veranda; walking in the woods and wondering about the edibility of local toadstools. (Chapter Five, 2)
At the end of Pnin the narrator mentions the great Lang (apparently, the artist who made a portrait of Sybil Shade):
Brilliant Cockerell also told of the strange feud between Pnin and his compatriot Komarov--the mediocre muralist who had kept adding fresco portraits of faculty members in the college dining hall to those already depicted there by the great Lang. Although Komarov belonged to another political faction than Pnin, the patriotic artist had seen in Pnin's dismissal an anti-Russian gesture and had started to delete a. sulky Napoleon that stood between young, plumpish (now gaunt) Blorenge and young, moustached (now shaven) Hagen, in order to paint in Pnin; and there was the scene between Pnin and President Poore at lunch--an enraged, spluttering Pnin losing all control over what English he had, pointing a shaking forefinger at the preliminary outlines of a ghostly muzhik on the wall, and shouting that he would sue the college if his face appeared above that blouse; and there was his audience, imperturbable Poore, trapped in the dark of his total blindness, waiting for Pnin to peter out and then asking at large: 'Is that foreign gentleman on our staff?' (Chapter Seven, 6)
The main purpose of this brief note is to draw your attention to the updated version of my recent post “342 in Lolita; 221 in Ada” (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35682).