Vladimir Nabokov

Daniel Veen, Raduga, Nile & other rivers in Ada

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 5 March, 2022

One of the eleven main characters in VN’s novel Ada (1969) is Daniel Veen (the husband of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina):

 

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. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.

The ‘D’ in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon’s twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns.

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.

Poor Dan’s erotic life was neither complicated nor beautiful, but somehow or other (he soon forgot the exact circumstances as one forgets the measurements and price of a fondly made topcoat worn on and off for at least a couple of seasons) he fell comfortably in love with Marina, whose family he had known when they still had their Raduga place (later sold to Mr Eliot, a Jewish businessman). One afternoon in the spring of 1871, he proposed to Marina in the Up elevator of Manhattan’s first ten-floor building, was indignantly rejected at the seventh stop (Toys), came down alone and, to air his feelings, set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe, adopting, like an animated parallel, the same itinerary every time. In November 1871, as he was in the act of making his evening plans with the same smelly but nice cicerone in a café-au-lait suit whom he had hired already twice at the same Genoese hotel, an aerocable from Marina (forwarded with a whole week’s delay via his Manhattan office which had filed it away through a new girl’s oversight in a dove hole marked RE AMOR) arrived on a silver salver telling him she would marry him upon his return to America. (1.1)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Durak: ‘fool’ in Russian.

Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town of Kitezh which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.

Mr Eliot: we shall meet him again, on pages 361 and 396, in company of the author of ‘The Waistline’ and ‘Agonic Lines’.

Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s globetrotter, travelled from West to East.

 

Describing Uncle Dan’s arrival at Ardis, Van mentions an uncompleted rainbow that rain shed over Ardis Hall:

 

Tea was served in the drawing room, and everybody was rather silent and subdued, and presently Uncle Dan retired to his study, pulling a folded newspaper out of an inner pocket, and no sooner had he left the room than a window flew open all by itself, and a powerful shower started to drum upon the liriodendron and imperialis leaves outside, and the conversation became general and loud.

Not long did the rain last — or rather stay: it continued on its presumable way to Raduga or Ladoga or Kaluga or Luga, shedding an uncompleted rainbow over Ardis Hall. (1.11)

 

Raduga (“Rainbow,” 1865) is a poem by Tyutchev:

 

Как неожиданно и ярко,
На влажной неба синеве,
Воздушная воздвиглась арка
В своём минутном торжестве!

 

Один конец в леса вонзила,
Другим за облака ушла —
Она полнеба обхватила
И в высоте изнемогла.

 

О, в этом радужном виденье
Какая нега для очей!
Оно дано нам на мгновенье,
Лови его — лови скорей!

 

Смотри — оно уж побледнело,
Ещё минута, две — и что ж?
Ушло, как то уйдёт всецело,
Чем ты и дышишь и живёшь.

 

Unexpectedly and brightly,

moist across the blueness of the sky,

an airy arc has been erected.

Triumphant, it will soon pass by.

 

One arm has plunged into the forest.

Beyond the clouds the other sweeps.

Half the sky it has encompassed.

It's reached its highest point and sleeps.

 

This iridescent vision

is pure delight for human eyes.

It's given us for just a moment,

so catch it. In your grasp it lies!

 

Look again. It's paling.

One second more its colours glow.

It's gone. It's vanished just as surely

as what you breathe and live by goes.

(transl. F. Jude)

 

In the last line of his poem Russkaya geografiya (“A Russian Geography,” 1848 or 1849) Tyutchev mentions Daniel, a biblical prophet:

 

Москва, и град Петров, и Константинов град –
Вот царства русского заветные столицы...
Но где предел ему? и где его границы –
На север, на восток, на юг и на закат?
Грядущим временам судьбы их обличат...

 

Семь внутренних морей и семь великих рек...
От Нила до Невы, от Эльбы до Китая,
От Волги по Евфрат, от Ганга до Дуная...
Вот царство русское... и не прейдет вовек,
Как то провидел Дух и Даниил предрек.

 

Moscow and Peter’s town, the city of Constantine,

these are the cherished capitals of the Russian monarchy.

But where is their limit? And where are their frontiers

to the north, the east, the south and the setting sun?

The Fates will reveal them to future generations.

               

Seven internal seas and seven great rivers

from the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China,

from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube.

This is the Russian empire and it will never pass away,

just as the Spirit foretold and Daniel prophesied.

(transl. F. Jude)

 

According to Tyutchev, tsarstvo russkoe (the Russian kingdom) occupies the territory from the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China, from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube. Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when he and Ada make love for the first time), Van mentions the Nile:

 

He caressed and parted with his fleshy folds, parties très charnues, in the case of our passionate siblings, her lank loose, nearly lumbus-length (when she threw back her head as now) black silks as he tried to get at her bed-warm splenius. (It is not necessary, here or elsewhere, there was another similar passage, to blotch a reasonably pure style with vague anatomical terms that a psychiatrist remembers from his student days. In Ada’s later hand.)

‘I wannask,’ she repeated as he greedily reached his hot pale goal.

‘I want to ask you,’ she said quite distinctly, but also quite beside herself because his ramping palm had now worked its way through at the armpit, and his thumb on a nipplet made her palate tingle: ringing for the maid in Georgian novels — inconceivable without the presence of elettricità —

(I protest. You cannot. It is banned even in Lithuanian and Latin. Ada’s note.)

‘— to ask you...’

‘Ask,’ cried Van, ‘but don’t spoil everything’ (such as feeding upon you, writhing against you).

‘Well, why,’ she asked (demanded, challenged, one flame crepitated, one cushion was on the floor), ‘why do you get so fat and hard there when you —’

‘Get where? When I what?’

In order to explain, tactfully, tactually, she belly-danced against him, still more or less kneeling, her long hair getting in the way, one eye staring into his ear (their reciprocal positions had become rather muddled by then).

‘Repeat!’ he cried as if she were far away, a reflection in a dark window.

‘You will show me at once,’ said Ada firmly.

He discarded his makeshift kilt, and her tone of voice changed immediately.

‘Oh, dear,’ she said as one child to another. ‘It’s all skinned and raw. Does it hurt? Does it hurt horribly?’

‘Touch it quick,’ he implored.

‘Van, poor Van,’ she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies, ‘yes, I’m sure it smarts, would it help if I’d touch, are you sure?’

‘You bet,’ said Van, ‘on n’est pas bête à ce point’ (‘there are limits to stupidity,’ colloquial and rude).

‘Relief map,’ said the primrose prig, ‘the rivers of Africa.’ Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. ‘Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact’ (positively chattering), ‘I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom.’

‘God, we all are,’ said Van.

‘Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!’

‘Squeeze, you goose, can’t you see I’m dying.’

But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly — and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.

She looked down in dismay.

‘Not what you think,’ remarked Van calmly. ‘This is not number one. Actually it’s as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Speke.’ (1.19)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Nile is settled: a famous telegram sent by an African explorer.

 

On his first night in “Ardis the Second” Van whispers a riddle in Ada’s ear: what begins with a ‘de’ and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant:

 

Now, at fifteen, she was an irritating and hopeless beauty; a rather unkempt one, too; only twelve hours ago, in the dim toolroom he had whispered a riddle in her ear: what begins with a ‘de’ and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant? She was eccentric in habits and clothing. She cared nothing for sunbathing, and not a tinge of the tan that had californized Lucette could be traced on the shameless white of Ada’s long limbs and scrawny shoulder blades. (1.32)

 

A Silesian river in Van’s riddle, the Oder brings to mind the Elbe, a river mentioned by Tyutchev in his poem “A Russian Geography.” According to Tyutchev, the Russian kingdom spreads from the Volga to the Euphrates. Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van mentions the Tigris-Euphrates valley:

 

Demon popped into his mouth a last morsel of black bread with elastic samlet, gulped down a last pony of vodka and took his place at the table with Marina facing him across its oblong length, beyond the great bronze bowl with carved-looking Calville apples and elongated Persty grapes. The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina’s pretentious ciel-étoilé hairdress and tried to realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a fact by forcing it into the sensuous center, that here was a woman whom he had intolerably loved, who had loved him hysterically and skittishly, who insisted they make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor (‘as respectable people do in the Tigris-Euphrates valley’), who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a bobsleigh a fortnight after parturition, or arrive by the Orient Express with five trunks, Dack’s grandsire, and a maid, to Dr Stella Ospenko’s ospedale where he was recovering from a scratch received in a sword duel (and still visible as a white weal under his eighth rib after a lapse of nearly seventeen years). How strange that when one met afte r a long separation a chum or fat aunt whom one had been fond of as a child the unimpaired human warmth of the friendship was rediscovered at once, but with an old mistress this never happened — the human part of one’s affection seemed to be swept away with the dust of the inhuman passion, in a wholesale operation of demolishment. He looked at her and acknowledged the perfection of the potage, but she, this rather thick-set woman, goodhearted, no doubt, but restive and sour-faced, glazed over, nose, forehead and all, with a sort of brownish oil that she considered to be more ‘juvenizing’ than powder, was more of a stranger to him than Bouteillan who had once carried her in his arms, in a feigned faint, out of a Ladore villa and into a cab, after a final, quite final row, on the eve of her wedding. (ibid.)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Persty: Evidently Pushkin’s vinograd:
as elongated and transparent
as are the fingers of a girl.
(devï molodoy, jeune fille)

ciel-étoilé: starry sky.

 

Describing his novel Letters from Terra, Van mentions the Volga region and similar watersheds:

 

On Terra, Theresa had been a Roving Reporter for an American magazine, thus giving Van the opportunity to describe the sibling planet’s political aspect. This aspect gave him the least trouble, presenting as it did a mosaic of painstakingly collated notes from his own reports on the ‘transcendental delirium’ of his patients. Its acoustics were poor, proper names often came out garbled, a chaotic calendar messed up the order of events but, on the whole, the colored dots did form a geomantic picture of sorts. As earlier experimentators had conjectured, our annals lagged by about half a century behind Terra’s along the bridges of time, but overtook some of its underwater currents. At the moment of our sorry story, the king of Terra’s England, yet another George (there had been, apparently, at least half-a-dozen bearing that name before him) ruled, or had just ceased to rule, over an empire that was somewhat patchier (with alien blanks and blots between the British Islands and South Africa) than the solidly conglomerated one on our Antiterra. Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)

 

In one of her letters to Van (written after Van left Ardis forever), 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)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): da: Russ., yes.

 

The legendary river of Old Rus is the Neva. Neva means in Finnish what Veen means in Dutch: “peat bog.” Brother and sister (and life-long lovers), Van and Ada are the children of of Demon Veen and Marina Durmanov. But, officially, Ada is a daughter of Daniel Veen. When Van meets Greg Erminin in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set), Greg calls Ada "Adelaida Danilovna:"

 

‘I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony — no, a black Silentium. Bozhe moy!’

‘Yes — Bozhe moy, you can well say that. Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!’

‘You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long —’

‘Neither did she. I was terribly —’

‘How long are you staying —’

‘— terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.’

Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors. The noble reticence of our bed makers.

‘How long will you be staying in Lute? No, Greg, I ordered it. You pay for the next bottle. Tell me —’

‘So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can’t understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius — dead, dead, all dead!’

‘I really know very little about music but it was a great pleasure to make your chum howl. I have an appointment in a few minutes, alas. Za tvoyo zdorovie, Grigoriy Akimovich.’

‘Arkadievich,’ said Greg, who had let it pass once but now mechanically corrected Van.

‘Ach yes! Stupid slip of the slovenly tongue. How is Arkadiy Grigorievich?’

‘He died. He died just before your aunt. I thought the papers paid a very handsome tribute to her talent. And where is Adelaida Danilovna? Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?’

‘In California or Arizona. Andrey’s the name, I gather. Perhaps I’m mistaken. In fact, I never knew my cousin very welclass="underline" I visited Ardis only twice, after all, for a few weeks each time, years ago.’

‘Somebody told me she’s a movie actress.’

‘I’ve no idea, I’ve never seen her on the screen.’

‘Oh, that would be terrible, I declare — to switch on the dorotelly, and suddenly see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund. She must have been terribly affected by her mother’s terrible death.’

Likes the word ‘terrible,’ I declare. A terrible suit of clothes, a terrible tumor. Why must I stand it? Revolting — and yet fascinating in a weird way: my babbling shadow, my burlesque double.

Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform’ my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.

‘Aha,’ said Van, ‘I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.’

‘Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me — yes, Tobak! — that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good health?’ (Van bowed,) ‘And how is the guvernantka belletristka?’

‘Her last novel is called L‘ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.’

They parted laughing. (3.2)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): za tvoyo etc.: Russ., your health.

guvernantka etc.: Russ., governess-novelist.

 

Greg's black Silentium (a motorcycle on which Greg arrives at the picnic site on Ada's sixteenth birthday) brings to mind Tyutchev's poem Silentium (1836). According to Van, the fabulous ancestor of Ada's husband (Andrey Vinelander) "discovered our country:"

 

The rest of Van’s story turns frankly and colorfully upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country. After her husband’s death our lovers are reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere. (5.6)

 

Erik the Red (Erik Thorvaldsson, c. 950 –1003, a Norse explorer, described in medieval and Icelandic saga sources as having founded the first settlement in Greenland) brings to mind Eric Veen (the young author of an essay entitled "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream," 2.3) and Red Veen (as Daniel Veen is also known in society).