Describing the patio party on the next day after his arrival in “Ardis the Second,” Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions G. A. Vronsky (the movie man who makes a film of Mlle Larivière’s novel Les Enfants Maudits) sipping his vodka-and-tonic:
The shooting script was now ready. Marina, in dorean robe and coolie hat, reclined reading in a long-chair on the patio. Her director, G. A. Vronsky, elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest, was alternately sipping his vodka-and-tonic and feeding Marina typewritten pages from a folder. On her other side, crosslegged on a mat, sat Pedro (surname unknown, stagename forgotten), a repulsively handsome, practically naked young actor, with satyr ears, slanty eyes, and lynx nostrils, whom she had brought from Mexico and was keeping at a hotel in Ladore. (1.32)
Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van mentions Price, a typical, too typical, old retainer whom Marina (and G. A. Vronsky, during their brief romance) had dubbed, for unknown reasons, ‘Grib:’
Another Price, a typical, too typical, old retainer whom Marina (and G.A. Vronsky, during their brief romance) had dubbed, for unknown reasons, ‘Grib,’ placed an onyx ashtray at the head of the table for Demon, who liked to smoke between courses — a puff of Russian ancestry. A side table supported, also in the Russian fashion, a collection of red, black, gray, beige hors-d’oeuvres, with the serviette caviar (salfetochnaya ikra) separated from the pot of Graybead (ikra svezhaya) by the succulent pomp of preserved boletes, ‘white,’ and ‘subbetuline,’ while the pink of smoked salmon vied with the incarnadine of Westphalian ham. The variously flavored vodochki glittered, on a separate tray. The French cuisine had contributed its chaudfroids and foie gras. A window was open, and the crickets were stridulating at an ominous speed in the black motionless foliage. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): grib: Russ., mushroom.
vodochki: Russ., pl. of vodochka, diminutive of vodka.
“A typical, too typical, old retainer” brings to mind nashe tipovoe rastyot (our typical is growing), the words of our poor “ichthyosaurus” Apollon Grigoriev quoted by Konstantin Leontiev in a letter of Feb. 8, 1887, to N. N. Strakhov:
Помните, наш бедный "ихтиозавр" Аполлон Григорьев говорил где-то -- "наше типовое растет". Хотя я нахожу, что самое это слово "типовое"-- неизящно на слух, не знаю, каким лучшим его заменить.
Apollon Grigoriev’s poem-confession Vverkh po Volge (“Up the Volga,” 1862) ends in the words Vodki, chto li? (Shall I have some vodka?):
Однако знобко… Сердца боли
Как будто стихли… Водки, что ли?
However, I’m feverish… My heart’s aches
Seem to have subsided... Shall I have some vodka?
Describing his dinner with Ada and Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) in ‘Ursus’, Van mention Grigoriev and Glinka, the friends of Uncle Ivan (Marina’s and Aqua’s brother, the violinist who died young and famous):
Knowing how fond his sisters were of Russian fare and Russian floor shows, Van took them Saturday night to ‘Ursus,’ the best Franco-Estonian restaurant in Manhattan Major. Both young ladies wore the very short and open evening gowns that Vass ‘miraged’ that season — in the phrase of that season: Ada, a gauzy black, Lucette, a lustrous cantharid green. Their mouths ‘echoed’ in tone (but not tint) each other’s lipstick; their eyes were made up in a ‘surprised bird-of-paradise’ style that was as fashionable in Los as in Lute. Mixed metaphors and double-talk became all three Veens, the children of Venus.
The uha, the shashlik, the Ai were facile and familiar successes; but the old songs had a peculiar poignancy owing to the participation of a Lyaskan contralto and a Banff bass, renowned performers of Russian ‘romances,’ with a touch of heart-wringing tsiganshchina vibrating through Grigoriev and Glinka. And there was Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian? Romany? Ramseyan?) whose ravishing services Van had availed himself of several times in the fall of that year. As a ‘man of the world,’ Van glanced with bland (perhaps too bland) unconcern at her talented charms, but they certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred and placed in the colored blaze of the feast before him; and that thrill was somehow augmented by his awareness (carefully profiled, diaphanely blinkered) of the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference. Presently, the long sobs of the violins began to affect and almost choke Van and Ada: a juvenile conditioning of romantic appeal, which at one moment forced tearful Ada to go and ‘powder her nose’ while Van stood up with a spasmodic sob, which he cursed but could not control. He went back to whatever he was eating, and cruelly stroked Lucette’s apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian ‘I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, please, don’t let me swill (hlestat’) champagne any more, not only because I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you, and not only because of the physical red thing — your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen’ka (‘darling,’ more than ‘darling’), it looked to me at least eight inches long —’
‘Seven and a half,’ murmured modest Van, whose hearing the music impaired.
‘— but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life, Van, Van, Van.’
Here Van stood up again, as Ada, black fan in elegant motion, came back followed by a thousand eyes, while the opening bars of a romance (on Fet’s glorious Siyala noch’) started to run over the keys (and the bass coughed à la russe into his fist before starting).
A radiant night, a moon-filled garden. Beams
Lay at our feet. The drawing room, unlit;
Wide open, the grand piano; and our hearts
Throbbed to your song, as throbbed the strings in it...
Then Banoffsky launched into Glinka’s great amphibrachs (Mihail Ivanovich had been a summer guest at Ardis when their uncle was still alive — a green bench existed where the composer was said to have sat under the pseudoacacias especially often, mopping his ample brow):
Subside, agitation of passion!
Then other singers took over with sadder and sadder ballads — ‘The tender kisses are forgotten,’ and ‘The time was early in the spring, the grass was barely sprouting,’ and ‘Many songs have I heard in the land of my birth: Some in sorrow were sung, some in gladness,’ and the spuriously populist
There’s a crag on the Ross, overgrown with wild moss
On all sides, from the lowest to highest...
and a series of viatic plaints such as the more modestly anapestic:
In a monotone tinkles the yoke-bell,
And the roadway is dusting a bit...
And that obscurely corrupted soldier dit of singular genius
Nadezhda, I shall then be back
When the true batch outboys the riot...
and Turgenev’s only memorable lyrical poem beginning
Morning so nebulous, morning gray-drowning,
Reaped fields so sorrowful under snow coverings
and naturally the celebrated pseudo-gipsy guitar piece by Apollon Grigoriev (another friend of Uncle Ivan’s)
O you, at least, do talk to me,
My seven-stringed companion,
Such yearning ache invades my soul,
Such moonlight fills the canyon!
‘I declare we are satiated with moonlight and strawberry soufflé — the latter, I fear, has not quite "risen" to the occasion,’ remarked Ada in her archest, Austen-maidenish manner. ‘Let’s all go to bed. You have seen our huge bed, pet? Look, our cavalier is yawning "fit to declansh his masher"’ (vulgar Ladore cant).
‘How (ascension of Mt Yawn) true,’ uttered Van, ceasing to palpate the velvet cheek of his Cupidon peach, which he had bruised but not sampled.
The captain, the vinocherpiy, the shashlikman, and a crew of waiters had been utterly entranced by the amount of zernistaya ikra and Ai consumed by the vaporous-looking Veens and were now keeping a multiple eye on the tray that had flown back to Van with a load of gold change and bank notes.
‘Why,’ asked Lucette, kissing Ada’s cheek as they both rose (making swimming gestures behind their backs in search of the furs locked up in the vault or somewhere), ‘why did the first song, Uzh gasli v komnatah ogni, and the "redolent roses," upset you more than your favorite Fet and the other, about the bugler’s sharp elbow?’
‘Van, too, was upset,’ replied Ada cryptically and grazed with freshly rouged lips tipsy Lucette’s fanciest freckle. (2.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): romances, tsiganshchina: Russ., pseudo-Tsigan ballads.
vinocherpiy: Russ., the ‘wine-pourer’.
zernistaya ikra: ‘large-grained’ caviar (Russ.).
uzh gasli etc.: Russ., the lights were already going out in the rooms.
Before jumping to her death into the Atlantic, Lucette drinks three Cossack ponies of Klass vodka in the Admiral Tobakoff promenade-deck bar:
Having cradled the nacred receiver she changed into black slacks and a lemon shirt (planned for tomorrow morning); looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or crest; ripped out the flyleaf of Herb’s Journal, and tried to think up something amusing, harmless, and scintillating to say in a suicide note. But she had planned everything except that note, so she tore her blank life in two and disposed of the pieces in the W. C.; she poured herself a glass of dead water from a moored decanter, gulped down one by one four green pills, and, sucking the fifth, walked to the lift which took her one click up from her three-room suite straight to the red-carpeted promenade-deck bar. There, two sluglike young men were in the act of sliding off their red toadstools, and the older one said to the other as they turned to leave: ‘You may fool his lordship, my dear, but not me, oh, no.’
She drank a ‘Cossack pony’ of Klass vodka — hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff; had another; and was hardly able to down a third because her head had started to swim like hell. Swim like hell from sharks, Tobakovich!
She had no purse with her. She almost fell from her convex ridiculous seat as she fumbled in her shirt pocket for a stray bank note.
‘Beddydee,’ said Toby the barman with a fatherly smile, which she mistook for a leer. ‘Bedtime, miss,’ he repeated and patted her ungloved hand.
Lucette recoiled and forced herself to retort distinctly and haughtily:
‘Mr Veen, my cousin, will pay you tomorrow and bash your false teeth in.’
Six, seven — no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne, after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off. These steps are something.
While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Dimanche etc.: Sunday. Lunch on the grass. Everybody stinks. My mother-in-law swallows her dentures. Her little bitch, etc. After which, etc. (see p.375, a painter’s diary Lucette has been reading).
Kazaki (“The Cossacks,” 1863) is a novella by Tolstoy. A pony of vodka brings to mind vsyo, chto ya ponimayu, ya ponimayu tol’ko potomu, chto lyublyu (everything that I understand, I understand only because I love), a thought of dying Prince Andrey Bolkonski in Tolstoy’s novel Voyna i mir (“War and Peace,” 1869):
Любовь? Что такое любовь? — думал он. — Любовь мешает смерти. Любовь есть жизнь. Все, все, что я понимаю, я понимаю только потому, что люблю. Все есть, все существует только потому, что я люблю. Все связано одною ею. Любовь есть Бог, и умереть — значит мне, частице любви, вернуться к общему и вечному источнику». Мысли эти показались ему утешительны. Но это были только мысли. Чего-то недоставало в них, что-то было односторонне личное, умственное — не было очевидности. И было то же беспокойство и неясность. Он заснул.
""Love? What is love?" he thought. "Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep. (Book Twelve. Chapter XVI)
Lyublyu (I love) makes one think of "yellow-blue Vass frocks" mentioned by Van when he describes his arrival in "Ardis the Second:"
Van revisited Ardis Hall in 1888. He arrived on a cloudy June afternoon, unexpected, unbidden, unneeded; with a diamond necklace coiled loose in his pocket. As he approached from a side lawn, he saw a scene out of some new life being rehearsed for an unknown picture, without him, not for him. A big party seemed to be breaking up. Three young ladies in yellow-blue Vass frocks with fashionable rainbow sashes surrounded a stoutish, foppish, baldish young man who stood, a flute of champagne in his hand, glancing down from the drawing-room terrace at a girl in black with bare arms: an old runabout, shivering at every jerk, was being cranked up by a hoary chauffeur in front of the porch, and those bare arms, stretched wide, were holding outspread the white cape of Baroness von Skull, a grand-aunt of hers. Against the white cape Ada’s new long figure was profiled in black — the black of her smart silk dress with no sleeves, no ornaments, no memories. The slow old Baroness stood groping for something under one armpit, under the other — for what? a crutch? the dangling end of tangled bangles? — and as she half-turned to accept the cloak (now taken from her grandniece by a belated new footman) Ada also half-turned, and her yet ungemmed neck showed white as she ran up the porch steps. (1.31)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Yellow-blue Vass: the phrase is consonant with ya lyublyu vas, (‘I love you’ in Russian).
In his essay O romanakh gr. L. N. Tolstogo (“On the Novels of Count L. N. Tolstoy,” 1890) Konstantin Leontiev speaks of the psychology of suicide (pointing out, for instance, that young people decide to kill themselves much more often than the old) and mentions grib (a mushroom) that in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenin (1875-77) makes Sergey Ivanovich Koznyshev change his mind and prevents him from proposing to Varenka:
Всякому известно, что люди, привычные к обидам и скорбям, не так легко посягают на свою жизнь, как не привычные, не притерпевшиеся. Молодые, например (в наше, по крайней мере, время), чаще старых решаются на самоубийство. И в газетных известиях нередко случается встречать основательно выраженное удивление тому, что «самоубийца и без того был стар».
Эта психологическая особого рода подготовка Вронского к попытке самоубийства до того изумительно верна и в то же время оригинальна; она представляет собою такой правильный tour de force таланта, что за ней, пожалуй, можно признать чисто научное достоинство.
Могу привести здесь и другой, равносильный этому, но вовсе не однородный пример. Это по поводу гриба, который помешал Сергею Ивановичу Кознышеву посвататься за Вареньку. Только что он готов был признаться, что она ему очень нравится, она нашла большой гриб и перебила ему не столько мысли, сколько чувства. Некстати прибежали и дети. Именно чувства ему перебили, ибо мысли-то у человека, привыкшего к публичной диалектике, подобный вздор не мог бы перебить. Но для того, чтобы охладить недавнее и не сильное рассудительное увлечение человека солидного, кабинетного, давно «осевшего» в прекрасном общественном положении, достаточно было этого гриба и детского крика. Застыла мгновенно капля горячего чувства, готовая излиться из сосуда души его, переполненного поэзией сельской жизни и этой милой встречей с «подходящей» ему девушкой. Она застыла, эта капля, и тотчас же опытный рассудок сказал себе: «На что это?» – Все это, конечно, привлекательно, но… не вернее ли холостым дожить жизнь?»
И – ни слова более.
Эта черта анализа психического стоит подготовки Вронского к пистолетному выстрелу в грудь! – Черта тоже своеобразная, но вполне индивидуальная и точная. Ни Вронского, страстного и решительного при всей его видимой сдержанности, ни князя Облонского, легкомысленного и влюбчивого эпикурейца, ни Левина, колеблющегося, правда, но в то же время и весьма стремительного – этот гриб не удержал бы. Левину он (этот гриб) мысли как раз, пожалуй, перебил бы на целый день, но чувства на веки веков он ни за что бы ему не порвал. (VI)
Leontiev points out that this grib would not have kept Vronski, or Oblonski, or Lyovin from a decision they had taken. In his essay Dva grafa: Aleksey Vronski i Lev Tolstoy (“The Two Counts: Alexey Vronski and Leo Tolstoy,” 1888) Leontiev argues that Russia needs Vronski more than she needs Tolstoy:
О Вронском-то я и хочу поговорить подробнее и, между прочим, о том, почему нам Вронский гораздо нужнее и дороже самого Льва Толстого.
Без этих Толстых (то есть без великих писателей) можно и великому народу долго жить, а без Вронских мы не проживём и полувека. Без них и писателей национальных не станет; ибо не будет и самобытной нации.