As a schoolboy at Riverlane (Van’s prep-school), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) is platonically in love with Mrs Tapirov's daughter:
He had just turned thirteen. He had never before left the comforts of the paternal roof. He had never before realized that such ‘comforts’ might not be taken for granted, only occurring in some introductory ready-made metaphor in a book about a boy and a school. A few blocks from the schoolgrounds, a widow, Mrs Tapirov, who was French but spoke English with a Russian accent, had a shop of objets d’art and more or less antique furniture. He visited it on a bright winter day. Crystal vases with crimson roses and golden-brown asters were set here and there in the fore part of the shop — on a gilt-wood console, on a lacquered chest, on the shelf of a cabinet, or simply along the carpeted steps leading to the next floor where great wardrobes and flashy dressers semi-encircled a singular company of harps. He satisfied himself that those flowers were artificial and thought it puzzling that such imitations always pander so exclusively to the eye instead of also copying the damp fat feel of live petal and leaf. When he called next day for the object (unremembered now, eighty years later) that he wanted repaired or duplicated, it was not ready or had not been obtained. In passing, he touched a half-opened rose and was cheated of the sterile texture his fingertips had expected when cool life kissed them with pouting lips. ‘My daughter,’ said Mrs Tapirov, who saw his surprise, ‘always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.’ As he was leaving she came in, a schoolgirl in a gray coat with brown shoulder-length ringlets and a pretty face. On another occasion (for a certain part of the thing — a frame, perhaps — took an infinite time to heal or else the entire article proved to be unobtainable after all) he saw her curled up with her schoolbooks in an armchair — a domestic item among those for sale. He never spoke to her. He loved her madly. It must have lasted at least one term. (1.4)
Mrs Tapirov brings to mind Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, Van’s adversary in a pistol duel in Kalugano. On the day preceding the duel Van recalls his first love:
When Van arrived in front of the music shop, he found it locked. He stared for a moment at the harps and the guitars and the flowers in silver vases on consoles receding in the dusk of looking-glasses, and recalled the schoolgirl whom he had longed for so keenly half a dozen years ago - Rose? Roza? Was that her name? Would he have been happier with her than with his pale fatal sister? (1.42)
In one of her letters to Van (written after Van left Ardis forever) Ada mentions Van’s duel in K.:
[Los Angeles, mid-September, 1888]
This is a second howl iz ada (out of Hades). Strangely, I learned on the same day, from three different sources, of your duel in K.; of P’s death; and of your recuperating at his cousin’s (congs as she and I used to say). I rang her up, but she said that you had left for Paris and that R. had also died — not through your intervention, as I had thought for a moment, but through that of his wife. Neither he nor P. was technically my lover, but both are on Terra now, so it does not matter. (2.1)
In her next letter Ada mentions the legendary river of Old Rus:
[Los Angeles, 1889]
We are still at the candy-pink and pisang-green albergo where you once stayed with your father. He is awfully nice to me, by the way. I enjoy going places with him. He and I have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town, but you are also there, as well as the legendary river of Old Rus. Da. Oh, write me, one tiny note, I’m trying so hard to please you! Want some more (desperate) little topics? Marina’s new director of artistic conscience defines Infinity as the farthest point from the camera which is still in fair focus. She has been cast as the deaf nun Varvara (who, in some ways, is the most interesting of Chekhov’s Four Sisters). She sticks to Stan’s principle of having lore and role overflow into everyday life, insists on keeping it up at the hotel restaurant, drinks tea v prikusku (‘biting sugar between sips’), and feigns to misunderstand every question in Varvara’s quaint way of feigning stupidity — a double imbroglio, which annoys strangers but which somehow makes me feel I’m her daughter much more distinctly than in the Ardis era. She’s a great hit here, on the whole. They gave her (not quite gratis, I’m afraid) a special bungalow, labeled Marina Durmanova, in Universal City. As for me, I’m only an incidental waitress in a fourth-rate Western, hip-swinging between table-slapping drunks, but I rather enjoy the Houssaie atmosphere, the dutiful art, the winding hill roads, the reconstructions of streets, and the obligatory square, and a mauve shop sign on an ornate wooden façade, and around noon all the extras in period togs queuing before a glass booth, but I have nobody to call.
Speaking of calls, I saw a truly marvelous ornithological film the other night with Demon. I had never grasped the fact that the paleotropical sunbirds (look them up!) are ‘mimotypes’ of the New World hummingbirds, and all my thoughts, oh, my darling, are mimotypes of yours. I know, I know! I even know that you stopped reading at ‘grasped’ — as in the old days. (2.1)
The surname Veen, of almost all main characters in Ada, means in Dutch what Neva (the name of the river that flows through St. Petersburg, VN’s home city renamed Leningrad in 1924) means in Finnish: “peat bog.” In Fyodor Sologub’s satire on the leaders of the Comintern, Nedorazumenie s Nevoyu (“A Confusion with the Neva,” 1926), the Neva says that it is tired of its name and wants to be renamed Rosa or Clara (presumably, after Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin) and indeed is renamed Rosa:
Перетерпев судеб удары,
Мы в удареньях знатоки.
Никто не скажет, что мадьяры,
Хотя и храбры, но жидки,
И также знаем мы, что все напитки
Бывают жидки,
Какой ни примешай к ним густоты,
И если говорим мы про хвосты,
Так мы не говорим: прохвосты,
Все эти истины, конечно, просты,
И ведомы, бесспорно, всем.
Я речь о них завел затем,
Чтоб присказка была, потом же будет сказка,
И в ней завязка и развязка.
Нева не хочет быть Невой,
Уж каламбур наскучил ей избитый,
И плещется она волной сердитой,
Когда ей пушки говорят: не вой!
Шумит, ревет, взывает в злости ярой:
– Хочу быть Розой или Кларой! —
Склонилась наконец к ее моленью власть,
Ей дали имя Роза,
Но что же за напасть!
Бунтует Роза, нет зимой мороза.
Кондукторша стояла у окна
Чрез Розу проходящего вагона,
И объяснила так она
Причину бунта, рева, стона:
– Вишь, на подъем она легка,
Наделает немало злого.
Да что с воды спросить? Жидка,
Спросить бы надобно иного.
Нелегкие деньки
К нам в Ленинград приходят:
Волна вслед за волной повсюду колобродят,
Жидки.
Услышал эти речи
Внимательный и верный комсомол
И, взяв кондукторшу за плечи,
В милицию отвел.
Что жидко здесь, и что здесь густо,
Все объяснили ей. Идет домой,
Кричит: – Чтоб всем вам было пусто!
Всех, Роза, довела домой! —
Вы слышите здесь недоразуменье,
Поставлено неверно ударенье.
Всем надо знать, что воды у реки,
Так точно, как и все напитки,
Бывают жидки,
А не жидки,
И говоря неверно,
Вождей заденешь Коминтерна.
Konduktorsha (the conductress) in Sologub's poem brings to mind the words of poor mad Aqua (Marina's twin sister who married Demon Veen) to a train conductor:
At one time Aqua believed that a stillborn male infant half a year old, a surprised little fetus, a fish of rubber that she had produced in her bath, in a lieu de naissance plainly marked X in her dreams, after skiing at full pulver into a larch stump, had somehow been saved and brought to her at the Nusshaus, with her sister’s compliments, wrapped up in blood-soaked cotton wool, but perfectly alive and healthy, to be registered as her son Ivan Veen. At other moments she felt convinced that the child was her sister’s, born out of wedlock, during an exhausting, yet highly romantic blizzard, in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge, where a Dr Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover, sat providentially waiting near a rude red stove for his boots to dry. Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 — her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband’s unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: ‘Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld’) she took advantage of his being massaged in the solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom — and experienced a delicious shock: her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along — ever since Shakespeare’s birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G.A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. Marina had spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with him at Kitezh but when she smugly divulged her intentions (just before Aqua’s arrival) he threw her out of the house. Still later, on the last short lap of a useless existence, Aqua scrapped all those ambiguous recollections and found herself reading and rereading busily, blissfully, her son’s letters in a luxurious ‘sanastoria’ at Centaur, Arizona. He invariably wrote in French calling her petite maman and describing the amusing school he would be living at after his thirteenth birthday. She heard his voice through the nightly tinnitus of her new, planful, last, last insomnias and it consoled her. He called her usually mummy, or mama, accenting the last syllable in English, the first, in Russian; somebody had said that triplets and heraldic dracunculi often occurred in trilingual families; but there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever now (except, perhaps, in hateful long-dead Marina’s hell-dwelling mind) that Van was her, her, Aqua’s, beloved son. (1.3)
In 1921 Sologub's wife Anastasiya Chebotarevski drowned herself in the Neva. In 1901 Van’s and Ada’s half-sister Lucette commits suicide by jumping into the Atlantic from Admiral Tobakoff (3.5). In March, 1905, Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7). Van does not realize that his father died because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destory his machine in midair. Describing his conversation with Demon (who asks Van to stop his affair with Ada), Van mentions the Nuremberg Old Maid’s iron sting:
The first thing Demon said was:
‘I insist that you face me when I’m speaking to you.’
Van realized that the fateful conversation must have already started in his father’s brain, for the admonishment had the ring of a self-interruption, and with a slight bow he took a seat.
‘However, before I advise you of those two facts, I would like to know how long this — how long this has been...’ (‘going on,’ one presumes, or something equally banal, but then all ends are banal — hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid’s iron sting, shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital, mistaking a drop of thirty thousand feet for the airplane’s washroom, being poisoned by one’s wife, expecting a bit of Crimean hospitality, congratulating Mr and Mrs Vinelander —)
‘It will be nine years soon,’ replied Van. ‘I seduced her in the summer of eighteen eighty-four. Except for a single occasion, we did not make love again until the summer of eighteen eighty-eight. After a long separation we spent one winter together. All in all, I suppose I have had her about a thousand times. She is my whole life.’
A longish pause not unlike a fellow actor’s dry-up, came in response to his well-rehearsed speech. (2.11)
The Nuremberg Old Maid's iron sting seems to hint at Sologub's poem Nyurenbergskiy palach ("The Executioner of Nuremberg," 1907):
Кто знает, сколько скуки
В искусстве палача!
Не брать бы вовсе в руки
Тяжелого меча.
И я учился в школе
В стенах монастыря,
От мудрости и боли
Томительно горя.
Но путь науки строгой
Я в юности отверг,
И вольною дорогой
Пришел я в Нюренберг.
На площади казнили:
У чьих-то смуглых плеч
В багряно-мглистой пыли
Сверкнул широкий меч.
Меня прельстила алость
Казнящего меча
И томная усталость
Седого палача.
Пришел к нему, учился
Владеть его мечом,
И в дочь его влюбился,
И стал я палачом.
Народною боязнью
Лишенный вольных встреч,
Один пред каждой казнью
Точу мой темный меч.
Один взойду на помост
Росистым утром я,
Пока спокоен дома
Строгий судия.
Свяжу веревкой руки
У жертвы палача.
О, сколько тусклой скуки
В сверкании меча!
Удар меча обрушу,
И хрустнут позвонки,
И кто-то бросит душу
В размах моей руки.
И хлынет ток багряный,
И, тяжкий труп влача,
Возникнет кто-то рдяный
И темный у меча.
Не опуская взора,
Пойду неспешно прочь
От скучного позора
В мою дневную ночь.
Сурово хмуря брови,
В окошко постучу,
И дома жажда крови
Приникнет к палачу.
Мой сын покорно ляжет
На узкую скамью,
Опять веревка свяжет
Тоску мою.
Стенания и слезы, —
Палач – везде палач.
О, скучный плеск березы!
О, скучный детский плач!
Кто знает, сколько скуки
В искусстве палача!
Не брать бы вовсе в руки
Тяжелого меча!
The first line of the poem’s second stanza, I ya uchilsya v shkole (And I, too, went to school), brings to mind Riverlane, Van’s prep-school. At the dinner in Bellevue with Ada and her family Van tells Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) that he does not attend school any longer:
‘How did you like my brother?’ asked Dorothy. ‘On redchayshiy chelovek (he’s, a most rare human being). I can’t tell you how profoundly affected he was by the terrible death of your father, and, of course, by Lucette’s bizarre end. Even he, the kindest of men, could not help disapproving of her Parisian sans-gêne, but he greatly admired her looks — as I think you also did — no, no, do not negate it! — because, as I have always said, her prettiness seemed to complement Ada’s, the two halves forming together something like perfect beauty, in the Platonic sense’ (that cheerless smile again). ‘Ada is certainly a "perfect beauty," a real muirninochka — even when she winces like that — but she is beautiful only in our little human terms, within the quotes of our social esthetics — right, Professor? — in the way a meal or a marriage or a little French tramp can be called perfect.’
‘Drop her a curtsey,’ gloomily remarked Van to Ada.
‘Oh, my Adochka knows how devoted I am to her’ — (opening her palm in the wake of Ada’s retreating hand). ‘I’ve shared all her troubles. How many podzharïh (tight-crotched) cowboys we’ve had to fire because they delali ey glazki (ogled her)! And how many bereavements we’ve gone through since the new century started! Her mother and my mother; the Archbishop of Ivankover and Dr Swissair of Lumbago (where mother and I reverently visited him in 1888); three distinguished uncles (whom, fortunately, I hardly knew); and your father, who, I’ve always maintained, resembled a Russian aristocrat much more than he did an Irish Baron. Incidentally, in her deathbed delirium — you don’t mind, Ada, if I divulge to him ces potins de famille? — our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other — that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?’
‘I don’t attend school any longer,’ said Van, stifling a yawn; ‘and, furthermore, in my works, I try not to "explain" anything, I merely describe.’
‘Still, you cannot deny that certain insights —’ (3.8)