In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) finds out about his children’s affair thanks to Daniel Veen’s death:
They took a great many precautions — all absolutely useless, for nothing can change the end (written and filed away) of the present chapter. Only Lucette and the agency that forwarded letters to him and to Ada knew Van’s address. Through an amiable lady in waiting at Demon’s bank, Van made sure that his father would not turn up in Manhattan before March 30. They never came out or went in together, arranging a meeting place at the Library or in an emporium whence to start the day’s excursions — and it so happened that the only time they broke that rule (she having got stuck in the lift for a few panicky moments and he having blithely trotted downstairs from their common summit), they issued right into the visual field of old Mrs Arfour who happened to be passing by their front door with her tiny tan-and-gray long-silked Yorkshire terrier. The simultaneous association was immediate and complete: she had known both families for years and was now interested to learn from chattering (rather than chatting) Ada that Van had happened to be in town just when she, Ada, had happened to return from the West; that Marina was fine; that Demon was in Mexico or Oxmice; and that Lenore Colline had a similar adorable pet with a similar adorable parting along the middle of the back. That same day (February 3, 1893) Van rebribed the already gorged janitor to have him answer all questions which any visitor, and especially a dentist’s widow with a caterpillar dog, might ask about any Veens, with a brief assertion of utter ignorance. The only personage they had not reckoned with was the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel.
Van’s father had just left one Santiago to view the results of an earthquake in another, when Ladore Hospital cabled that Dan was dying. He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling. He had not many interests in life.
At the airport of the moonlit white town we call Tent, and Tobakov’s sailors, who built it, called Palatka, in northern Florida, where owing to engine trouble he had to change planes, Demon made a long-distance call and received a full account of Dan’s death from the inordinately circumstantial Dr Nikulin (grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov — we can’t get rid of the lettuce). Daniel Veen’s life had been a mixture of the ready-made and the grotesque; but his death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch.
Next day, February 5, around nine p.m., Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan’s lawyer, Demon noted — just as he was about to cross Alexis Avenue, an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very exotic and potent pill to face the day’s ordeal on top of a sleepless journey), contented himself — quite properly — with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out of the way of Mrs R4. But precisely in regard to such a contingency, Fate had prepared an alternate continuation. As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered) by the Monaco, where he had often lunched, it occurred to him that his son (whom he had been unable to ‘contact’) might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building. He had never been up there — or had he? For a business consultation with Van? On a sun-hazed terrace? And a clouded drink? (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.)
With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute multicolored optical sparks), Demon hastened to enter the lobby and catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two on a wiggle-wheel table and the Manhattan Times among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas. Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon, placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes. Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter.
‘Then we are fellow travelers,’ said Demon inhaling not without gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain. (1.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Mrs R4: ‘rook four’, a chess indication of position (pun on the woman’s name).
There is a town in Florida called Palatka. In Russian, palatka means “tent, marquee.” In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his visit to a dentist in Berlin, in 1910, and says that he still remembers the dentist’s address, “In den Zelten achtzehn A:”
In August 1910, my brother and I were in Bad Kissingen with our parents and tutor (Lenski); after that my father and mother traveled to Munich and Paris, and back to St. Petersburg, and then to Berlin where we boys, with Lenski, were spending the autumn and the beginning of the winter, having our teeth fixed. An American dentist—Lowell or Lowen, I do not remember his name exactly—ripped some of our teeth out and trussed up others with twine before disfiguring us with braces. Even more hellish than the action of the rubber pear pumping hot pain into a cavity were the cotton pads—I could not endure their dry contact and squeak—which used to be thrust between gum and tongue for the operator’s convenience; and there would be, in the windowpane before one’s helpless eyes, a transparency, some dismal seascape or gray grapes, shuddering with the dull reverberations of distant trams under dull skies. “In den Zelten achtzehn A”— the address comes back to me dancing trochaically, immediately followed by the whispery motion of the cream-colored electric taxi that took us there. We expected every possible compensation in atonement for those dreadful mornings. My brother loved the museum of wax figures in the Arcade off the Unter den Linden—Friedrich’s grenadiers, Bonaparte communing with a mummy, young Liszt, who composed a rhapsody in his sleep, and Marat, who died in a shoe; and for me (who did not know yet that Marat had been an ardent lepidopterist) there was, at the corner of that Arcade, Gruber’s famous butterfly shop, a camphoraceous paradise at the top of a steep, narrow staircase which I climbed every other day to inquire if Chapman’s new Hairstreak or Mann’s recently rediscovered White had been obtained for me at last. We tried tennis on a public court; but a wintry gale kept chasing dead leaves across it, and, besides, Lenski could not really play, although insisting on joining us, without removing his overcoat, in a lopsided threesome. Subsequently, most of our afternoons were spent at a roller-skating rink in the Kurfürstendamm. I remember Lenski rolling inexorably toward a pillar which he attempted to embrace while collapsing with a dreadful clatter; and after persevering awhile he would content himself with sitting in one of the loges that flanked the plush parapet and consuming there wedges of slightly salty mokka torte with whipped cream, while I kept self-sufficiently overtaking poor gamely stumbling Sergey, one of those galling little pictures that revolve on and on in one’s mind. A military band (Germany, at the time, was the land of music), manned by an uncommonly jerky conductor, came to life every ten minutes or so but could hardly drown the ceaseless, sweeping rumble of wheels. (Chapter Ten, 3)
Zelt is German for “tent.” In Chapter Four (XXVI: 9-14) of Pushkin’s EO Lenski plays chess with Olga and with a pawn takes in abstraction his own rook:
Уединясь от всех далёко,
Они над шахматной доской,
На стол облокотясь, порой
Сидят, задумавшись глубоко,
И Ленской пешкою ладью
Берёт в рассеяньи свою.
Secluded far from everybody,
over the chessboard they,
their elbows on the table, sometimes
sit deep in thought,
and Lenski with a pawn
takes in abstraction his own rook.
Pushkin’s Lenski (who is eighteen, achtzehn) was a Göttingen student and brought from misty Germany the fruits of learning:
В свою деревню в ту же пору
Помещик новый прискакал
И столь же строгому разбору
В соседстве повод подавал:
По имени Владимир Ленской,
С душою прямо геттингенской
Красавец, в полном цвете лет,
Поклонник Канта и поэт.
Он из Германии туманной
Привез учености плоды:
Вольнолюбивые мечты,
Дух пылкий и довольно странный,
Всегда восторженную речь
И кудри черные до плеч.
At that same time a new landowner
had driven down to his estate
and in the neighborhood was giving cause
for just as strict a scrutiny.
By name Vladimir Lenski,
with a soul really Göttingenian,
a handsome chap, in the full bloom of years,
Kant's votary, and a poet.
From misty Germany
he'd brought the fruits of learning:
liberty-loving dreams, a spirit
impetuous and rather queer,
a speech always enthusiastic,
and shoulder-length black curls. (Two: VI)
Under the sky of Schiller and of Goethe, with their poetic fire Lenski’s soul had kindled:
Негодованье, сожаленье,
Ко благу чистая любовь
И славы сладкое мученье
В нем рано волновали кровь.
Он с лирой странствовал на свете;
Под небом Шиллера и Гете
Их поэтическим огнем
Душа воспламенилась в нем;
И муз возвышенных искусства,
Счастливец, он не постыдил:
Он в песнях гордо сохранил
Всегда возвышенные чувства,
Порывы девственной мечты
И прелесть важной простоты.
Indignation, compassion,
pure love of Good,
and fame's delicious torment
early had stirred his blood.
He wandered with a lyre on earth.
Under the sky of Schiller and of Goethe,
with their poetic fire
his soul had kindled;
and the exalted Muses of the art
he, happy one, did not disgrace:
he proudly in his songs retained
always exalted sentiments,
the surgings of a virgin fancy, and the charm
of grave simplicity. (Two: IX)
The sky of Schiller and of Goethe brings to mind Demon’s simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there is but one sky. In March, 1905, Demon Veen 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 destroy his machine in midair.
According to Ada, her husband, Andrey Vinelander, called Demon (the son of Dedalus Veen) Dementiy Labirintovich:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles? (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.
chiens etc.: dogs not allowed.
In a poem composed in September, 1835, after the meter and rhyme scheme of the EO stanza, Pushkin mentions a labyrinth:
В мои осенние досуги,
В те дни, как любо мне писать,
Вы мне советуете, други,
Рассказ забытый продолжать.
Вы говорите справедливо,
Что странно, даже неучтиво
Роман не конча перервать,
Отдав уже его в печать,
Что должно своего героя
Как бы то ни было женить,
По крайней мере уморить,
И лица прочие пристроя,
Отдав им дружеский поклон,
Из лабиринта вывесть вон.
Вы говорите: "Слава богу,
Покамест твой Онегин жив,
Роман не кончен - понемногу
Иди вперёд; не будь ленив.
Со славы, вняв её призванью,
Сбирай оброк хвалой и бранью -
Рисуй и франтов городских
И милых барышень своих,
Войну и бал, дворец и хату,
И келью. . . . и харем
И с нашей публики меж тем
Бери умеренную плату,
За книжку по пяти рублей -
Налог не тягостный, ей-ей."
During my days of autumn leisure -
those days when I so love to write -
you, friends, advise me to go on
with my forgotten tale.
You say - and you are right -
that it is odd, and even impolite,
to interrupt an uncompleted novel
and have it published as it is;
that one must marry off one's hero in any case,
or kill him off at least, and, after having
disposed of the remaining characters
and made to them a friendly bow,
expel them from a labyrinth.
You say: thank God,
while your Onegin is still alive,
the novel is not finished; forward go
little by little, don’t be lazy.
While heeding her appeal, from Fame
Collect a tax in praise and blame.
<Depict the dandies of the town,
your amiable misses,
warfare and ball, palace and hut,
cell…………… and harem, meantime>
take from our public
a reasonable payment –
five rubles for each published part;
really, ’tis not a heavy tax. (EO Commentary, vol. III, p. 377)
In Zueignung (Dedication) to Faust (1808) translated into Russian by VN J. W. Goethe uses the word labyrinthisch (labyrinthine):
Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,
Die früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt.
Versuch' ich wohl, euch diesmal festzuhalten?
Fühl' ich mein Herz noch jenem Wahn geneigt?
Ihr drängt euch zu! nun gut, so mögt ihr walten,
Wie ihr aus Dunst und Nebel um mich steigt;
Mein Busen fühlt sich jugendlich erschüttert
Vom Zauberhauch, der euren Zug umwittert.
Ihr bringt mit euch die Bilder froher Tage,
Und manche liebe Schatten steigen auf;
Gleich einer alten, halbverklungnen Sage
Kommt erste Lieb' und Freundschaft mit herauf;
Der Schmerz wird neu, es wiederholt die Klage
Des Lebens labyrinthisch irren Lauf,
Und nennt die Guten, die, um schöne Stunden
Vom Glück getäuscht, vor mir hinweggeschwunden.
Sie hören nicht die folgenden Gesänge,
Die Seelen, denen ich die ersten sang;
Zerstoben ist das freundliche Gedränge,
Verklungen, ach! der erste Widerklang.
Mein Lied ertönt der unbekannten Menge,
Ihr Beifall selbst macht meinem Herzen bang,
Und was sich sonst an meinem Lied erfreuet,
Wenn es noch lebt, irrt in der Welt zerstreuet.
Und mich ergreift ein längst entwöhntes Sehnen
Nach jenem stillen, ernsten Geisterreich,
Es schwebet nun in unbestimmten Tönen
Mein lispelnd Lied, der Äolsharfe gleich,
Ein Schauer faßt mich, Träne folgt den Tränen,
Das strenge Herz, es fühlt sich mild und weich;
Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten,
Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten.
Again you show yourselves, you wavering Forms,
Revealed, as you once were, to clouded vision.
Shall I attempt to hold you fast once more?
Heart’s willing still to suffer that illusion?
You crowd so near! Well then, you shall endure,
And rouse me, from your mist and cloud’s confusion:
My spirit feels so young again: it’s shaken
By magic breezes that your breathings waken.
You bring with you the sight of joyful days,
And many a loved shade rises to the eye:
And like some other half-forgotten phrase,
First Love returns, and Friendship too is nigh:
Pain is renewed, and sorrow: all the ways,
Life wanders in its labyrinthine flight,
Naming the good, those that Fate has robbed
Of lovely hours, those slipped from me and lost.
They can no longer hear this latest song,
Spirits, to whom I gave my early singing:
That kindly crowd itself is now long gone,
Alas, it dies away, that first loud ringing!
I bring my verses to the unknown throng,
My heart’s made anxious even by their clapping,
And those besides delighted by my verse,
If they still live, are scattered through the Earth.
I feel a long and unresolved desire
For that serene and solemn land of ghosts,
It quivers now, like an Aeolian lyre,
My stuttering verse, with its uncertain notes,
A shudder takes me: tear on tear, entire,
The firm heart feels weakened and remote:
What I possess seems far away from me,
And what is gone becomes reality.
At the end of Pushkin's "Scene from Faust" (1825) Faust tells Mephistopheles to sink the Spanish ship about to dock in Holland:
Фayст.
Что там белеет? говори.
Мефистофель
Корабль испанский трёхмачтовый,
Пристать в Голландию готовый:
На нём мерзавцев сотни три,
Две обезьяны, бочки злата,
Да груз богатый шоколата,
Да модная болезнь: она
Недавно вам подарена.
Фауст
Всё утопить.
Мефистофель
Сейчас.
(Исчезает.)
Faust
What's that white spot on the water?
Mephistopheles
A Spanish three-master, clearing the sound,
Fully laden, Holland-bound;
Three hundred sordid souls aboard her,
Two monkeys, chests of gold, a lot
Of fine expensive chocolate,
And a fashionable malady
Bestowed on your kind recently.
Faust
Sink it.
Mephistopheles
Right away.
(Vanishes)
(transl. A. Shaw)
In her postscript to Van's apologetic note to Lucette (written after the dinner in 'Ursus' and debauch á trois in Van's Manhattan flat) Ada mentions Italy and Holland:
After a while he adored [sic! Ed.] the pancakes. No Lucette, however, turned up, and when Ada, still wearing her diamonds (in sign of at least one more caro Van and a Camel before her morning bath) looked into the guest room, she found the white valise and blue furs gone. A note scrawled in Arlen Eyelid Green was pinned to the pillow.
Would go mad if remained one more night shall ski at Verma with other poor woolly worms for three weeks or so miserable
Pour Elle
Van walked over to a monastic lectern that he had acquired for writing in the vertical position of vertebrate thought and wrote what follows:
Poor L.
We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. Pilots of tremendous airships and even coarse, smelly coachmen are known to have been driven insane by a pair of green eyes and a copper curl. We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene. These are times of emotional stress and reconditioning. Destroy and forget.
Tenderly yours A & V.
(in alphabetic order).
‘I call this pompous, puritanical rot,’ said Ada upon scanning Van’s letter. ‘Why should we apollo for her having experienced a delicious spazmochka? I love her and would never allow you to harm her. It’s curious — you know, something in the tone of your note makes me really jealous for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for "life." Ed.] Van, Van, somewhere, some day, after a sunbath or dance, you will sleep with her, Van!’
‘Unless you run out of love potions. Do you allow me to send her these lines?’
‘I do, but want to add a few words.’
Her P.S. read:
The above declaration is Van’s composition which I sign reluctantly. It is pompous and puritanical. I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly. When you’re sick of Queen, why not fly over to Holland or Italy?
A. (2.8)