Vladimir Nabokov

elmo & stone-heavy-dead St Zeus in Ada

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 24 February, 2022

Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade:

 

She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether.

But that phase elapsed too. Other excruciations replaced her namesake’s loquacious quells so completely that when, during a lucid interval, she happened to open with her weak little hand a lavabo cock for a drink of water, the tepid lymph replied in its own lingo, without a trace of trickery or mimicry: Finito! It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death. Man-made objects lost their significance or grew monstrous connotations; clothes hangers were really the shoulders of decapitated Tellurians, the folds of a blanket she had kicked off her bed looked back at her mournfully with a stye on one drooping eyelid and dreary reproof in the limp twist of a livid lip. The effort to comprehend the information conveyed somehow to people of genius by the hands of a timepiece, or piece of time, became as hopeless as trying to make out the sign language of a secret society or the Chinese chant of that young student with a non-Chinese guitar whom she had known at the time she or her sister had given birth to a mauve baby. But her madness, the majesty of her madness, still retained a mad queen’s pathetic coquetry: ‘You know, Doctor, I think I’ll need glasses soon, I don’t know’ (lofty laugh), ‘I just can’t make out what my wrist watch says... For heaven’s sake, tell me what it says! Ah! Half-past for — for what? Never mind, never mind, "never" and "mind" are twins, I have a twin sister and a twin son. I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten years ago’ (showing her ten fingers gleefully, proudly, ten is ten!). (1.3)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.

my lad, my pretty, etc: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.

ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255–1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’

 

Elmo is Italian for “helmet.” In his poem Leoni Aquila Alas (“To a Lion the Wings of an Eagle,” 1911) included in his collection Cor Ardens (“The Ardent Heart”) Vyacheslav Ivanov mentions shlem kosmatyi (a shaggy helmet):

 

Мы препоясаны мечом
И клятвой связаны отныне;
Одной обречены святыне,
Пронизаны одним лучом.

 

Да будет мир в ограде лат,
Да шлем косматый будет схима,
И тот, кто видел Серафима,
В обличье Льва — шестикрылат.

 

One of Vyacheslav Ivanov's poems begins:

 

Есть Зевс над твердью — и в Эребе.

There is Zeus over the firmament — and in Erebus.

 

In the next poem, Kamennyi dub ("The Stone Oak"), Vyacheslav Ivanov says that even a stone oak wants to break into leaf in May:

 

Хмурый молчальник, опять бормочу втихомолку стихами:
Хочет и каменный дуб майской листвой прозвенеть.
Дремлет в чеканной броне под бореями бурными зиму:
Зеленью свежей весна в пологах темных сквозит.
Черную ветвь разгляди: под металлом скорченных листьев
Ржавой смеется тюрьме нежный и детский побег.

 

Aqua’s “pudendron” seems to blend pudenda (external genital organs, especially of a woman) with rhododendron (the Hairy Alpine Rose in Marina’s album is the plant Rhododendron hirsutum). In his memoir essay Vyacheslav Ivanov included in his book Vospominaniya o Rossii (“Reminiscences of Russia,” 1959) Leonid Sabaneyev (a music critic and composer, 1881-1968) says that Vyacheslav Ivanov compared all those recommendations that would allow him to leave the Soviet Russia and go to Italy to a kind of “pudenda:”

 

Наконец препятствия были преодолены. Разрешение на выезд было дано. Даны были и чрезвычайно высокие рекомендации от разных почтенных советских учреждений.

Но Иванов был все же в тревоге; он решил получить рекомендательные письма от университета, потому что ехал в Западную Европу и рекомендации советских инстанций там могли иметь разве отрицательные воздействия, особенно в те годы.

С этой целью он решил повидать тогдашнего (одного из последних «выборных») ректора Московского университета, моего коллегу П. Н. Сакулина. Об этом свидании мне рассказывал сам Сакулин, и этот рассказ чрезвычайно характерен и для практической неловкости нашего поэта, и для того, чтобы понять, как человек «слишком мудрый» и слишком ученый может наделать глупостей.

Сакулин мне рассказывал, что «Вячеслав начал с того, что заявил, что он находится в обладании массы рекомендаций, но только от советских учреждений, и что это его удручает. «Все эти рекомендации для меня суть как своего рода "pudenda"» (выразился он, как привык, по-латыни), и что он хочет иметь рекомендации от Московского университета как от учреждения, сохранившего (тогда это было еще так) дозу независимости от властей.

– Я бы мог быть вам и университету полезен, – пояснил Иванов. – Я бы мог для примера рассказать, как героически ведет университет борьбу с властью за свою независимость…

Тут он заметил, что лицо Сакулина не выразило не только никакого восторга, но, напротив, явные признаки беспокойства. Надо помнить, что то были годы решительной и последней схватки университета с властью и что положение самого ректора Сакулина было более нежели неустойчивое (он был «выборный ректор», сторонник автономии и член партии народных социалистов, большевиками ненавидимой).

Заметив это, Вяч. Иванов продолжал совершенно спокойно:

– Ну, если вам это не подходит, я могу сделать там доклад о том, как университет успешно и плодотворно сотрудничает с новой властью…

Тут уже его прервал Сакулин:

– Вячеслав Иванович! Университет не есть фиговый листок для прикрывания ваших «pudenda»!

 

In his essay Sergey Prokofiev included in "Reminiscences of Russia" Sabaneyev says that Prokofiev came kak Pallada iz golovy Zevsa (like Pallas Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, from the head of Zeus):

 

Очень трудно установить «генеалогию» музыки Прокофьева. Он явился, как «Паллада из головы Зевса», — как будто без предков, без влияний — с одними резко выраженными «отталкиваниями». Но при ближайшем рассмотрении выясняется, что два композитора были наиболее близки ему. Это Бетховен и Мусоргский. С ними его сближает и известная лапидарность стиля, и неизменное чувство музыкального юмора, и какая-то «нутряная», стихийная сила фантазии, так что всегда остается впечатление, что только часть вдохновения поместилась в произведение и что еще остается огромный неиспользованный запас его, — чувство неиссякаемости творческой силы. И никогда — головной, рассудочной работы: всё создано, а не выдумано.

 

Sabaneyev mentions Prokofiev’s abiding sense of music humor. In his essay on Tolstoy in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers” Ayhenvald compares Tolstoy’s humor to that of Zeus and says that nature itself would joke like that:

 

Строгий рабочий духа, он даже в минуты своего юмора - редкие, но ценные - не обменивается улыбкой со своими слушателями; даже и тогда остаётся он как-то одинок, и в самой шутке его есть глубина и сосредоточенность. Так шутила бы сама природа; это - юмор Зевса.

 

The author of Romeo i Dzhulyetta (1935), a ballet based on Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev (who returned to Russia from emigration in 1934) used Karl Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach ("Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it") for his Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, Op. 74 (1937). Describing the method of his work, Van mentions Marx père, the popular author of 'historical' plays:

 

Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada] liked to change his abode at the end of a section or chapter or even paragraph, and he had almost finished a difficult bit dealing with the divorce between time and the contents of time (such as action on matter, in space, and the nature of space itself) and was contemplating moving to Manhattan (that kind of switch being a reflection of mental rubrication rather than a concession to some farcical 'influence of environment' endorsed by Marx père, the popular author of 'historical' plays), when he received an unexpected dorophone call which for a moment affected violently his entire pulmonary and systemic circulation. (2.5)

 

At the beginning of Tolstoy’s story Posle bala (“After the Ball,” 1903) the narrator mentions sreda (environment) and sluchay (chance):

 

― Вот вы говорите, что человек не может сам по себе понять, что хорошо, что дурно, что всё дело в среде, что среда заедает. А я думаю, что всё дело в случае. Я вот про себя скажу.

 

‘And you say that a man cannot, of himself, understand what is good and evil; that it is all environment, that the environment swamps the man. But I believe it is all chance. Take my own case . . . ”

 

In VN’s story Soglyadatay (“The Eye,” 1930) the narrator says that “everything is vacillating, everything is due to chance and in vain have been the efforts of that ramshackle and grumbling bourgeois in Victorian check trousers, who wrote the obscure work called 'Capital' ― a fruit of insomnia and megrim:”

 

Глупо искать закона, ещё глупее его найти. Надумает нищий духом, что весь путь человечества можно объяснить каверзной игрою планет или борьбой пустого с тугонабитым желудком, пригласит к богине Клио аккуратного секретарчика из мещан, откроет оптовую торговлю эпохами, народными массами, и тогда несдобровать отдельному индивидууму, с его двумя бедными "у", безнадежно аукающимися в чащобе экономических причин. К счастью, закона никакого нет, -- зубная боль проигрывает битву, дождливый денёк отменяет намеченный мятеж, -- всё зыбко, всё от случая, и напрасно старался тот расхлябанный и брюзгливый буржуа в клетчатых штанах времён Виктории, написавший тёмный труд "Капитал" -- плод бессонницы и мигрени.

 

It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio’s clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u’s, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine.

 

The popular author of 'historical' plays, “Marx père” also seems to hint at Shaxpere (as Shakespeare’s name is sometimes spelled), the author of history plays whom Tolstoy disliked. Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) married Aqua (afflicted with her usual vernal migraine) on Shakespeare’s birthday:

 

On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. (1.1)

 

Demon was a great fisherman in his youth:

 

Daniel Veen’s mother was a Trumbell, and he was prone to explain at great length — unless sidetracked by a bore-baiter — how in the course of American history an English ‘bull’ had become a New England ‘bell.’ Somehow or other he had ‘gone into business’ in his twenties and had rather rankly grown into a Manhattan art dealer. He did not have — initially at least — any particular liking for paintings, had no aptitude for any kind of salesmanship, and no need whatever to jolt with the ups and downs of a ‘job’ the solid fortune inherited from a series of far more proficient and venturesome Veens. Confessing that he did not much care for the countryside, he spent only a few carefully shaded summer weekends at Ardis, his magnificent manor near Ladore. He had revisited only a few times since his boyhood another estate he had, up north on Lake Kitezh, near Luga, comprising, and practically consisting of, that large, oddly rectangular though quite natural body of water which a perch he had once clocked took half an hour to cross diagonally and which he owned jointly with his cousin, a great fisherman in his youth. (ibid.)

 

Leonid Sabaneyev (the music critic and memoirist) was a son of zoologist Leonid Sabaneyev (1844-98), the author of a popular book on fishing.