Telling Van about Uncle Dan's death, Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) says that Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming:
A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’ (2.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): pleureuses: widow’s weeds.
In the conversation with his son Demon calls Cordula's husband "Backbay Tobakovich:"
‘I beg you, sir,’ said Van, ‘go down, and I’ll join you in the bar as soon as I’m dressed. I’m in a delicate situation.’
‘Come, come,’ retorted Demon, dropping and replacing his monocle. ‘Cordula won’t mind.’
‘It’s another, much more impressionable girl’ — (yet another awful fumble!). ‘Damn Cordula! Cordula is now Mrs Tobak.’
‘Oh, of course!’ cried Demon. ‘How stupid of me! I remember Ada’s fiancé telling me — he and young Tobak worked for a while in the same Phoenix bank. Of course. Splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap. Backbay Tobakovich!’
‘I don’t care,’ said clenched Van, ‘if he looks like a crippled, crucified, albino toad. Please, Dad, I really must —’
‘Funny your saying that. I’ve dropped in only to tell you poor cousin Dan has died an odd Boschean death. He thought a fantastic rodent sort of rode him out of the house. They found him too late, he expired in Nikulin’s clinic, raving about that detail of the picture. I’m having the deuce of a time rounding up the family. The picture is now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art.’ (ibid.)
Tobakovich seems to hint at Sobakevich, one of the landowners in Gogol's Myortvye dushi ("Dead Souls," 1842). In Nikolai Gogol (1944) VN mentions O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931):
A bad play is more apt to be good comedy or good tragedy than the incredibly complicated creations of such men as Shakespeare or Gogol. In this sense Molière’s stuff (for what it is worth) is “comedy” i. e. something as readily assimilated as a hot dog at a football game, something of one dimension and absolutely devoid of the huge, seething, prodigiously poetic background that makes true drama. And in the same sense O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (for what that is worth) is, I suppose, a tragedy. (2.5)
Molière is the author of Tartuffe, ou l'Imposteur (1664). In the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) Ada mentions a soldier who thought that ‘Tartuffe’ was a tart or a stripteaser:
As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break, that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan.
‘Can one see anything, oh, can one see?’ the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. He relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. ‘You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent,’ she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man’s hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.
‘Look, gipsies,’ she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms — two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf — circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candlelit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons as if taking pictures.
‘I stayed home on purpose, because I hoped you would too — it was a contrived coincidence,’ she said, or said later she’d said — while he continued to fondle the flow of her hair, and to massage and rumple her nightdress, not daring yet to go under and up, daring, however, to mold her nates until, with a little hiss, she sat down on his hand and her heels, as the burning castle of cards collapsed. She turned to him and next moment he was kissing her bare shoulder, and pushing against her like that soldier behind in the queue.
First time I hear about him. I thought old Mr Nymphobottomus had been my only predecessor.
Last spring. Trip to town. French theater matinée. Mademoiselle had mislaid the tickets. The poor fellow probably thought ‘Tartuffe’ was a tart or a stripteaser.
Ce qui n’est pas si bête, au fond. Which was not so dumb after all. Okay. In that scene of the Burning Barn —
Yes?
Nothing. Go on. (1.19)
Van never realizes that Ada (who wanted to spend the night with Van) has bribed Kim Beauharnais (the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis) to set the barn on fire. Similarly, he never finds out that his father died in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific, because Ada managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. According to Ada, at Marina’s funeral Demon wore blue mourning:
‘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)
The name Sobakevich comes from sobaka (dog). Ada calls Dack (the dackel at Ardis) nehoroshaya sobaka (a bad dog):
Through an open french door Dack led his pursuers into the garden. There, on the third lawn, Ada overtook him with the flying plunge used in ‘American football,’ a kind of Rugby game cadets played at one time on the wet turfy banks of the Goodson River. Simultaneously, Mlle Larivière rose from the bench where she had been paring Lucette’s fingernails, and pointing her scissors at Blanche who had rushed up with a paper bag, she accused the young slattern of a glaring precedent — namely of having once dropped a hairpin in Lucette’s cot, un machin long comme ça qui faillit blesser l’enfant à la fesse. Marina, however, who had a Russian noblewoman’s morbid fear of ‘offending an inferior,’ declared the incident closed.
‘Nehoroshaya, nehoroshaya sobaka,’ crooned Ada with great aspiratory and sibilatory emphasis as she gathered into her arms the now lootless, but completely unabashed. ‘bad dog.’ (1.11)
In the Night of the Burning Barn all the dogs return well pleased with the night treat:
But the shag of the couch was as tickly as the star-dusted sky. Before anything new happened, Ada went on all fours to rearrange the lap robe and cushions. Native girl imitating rabbit. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy’s sandcastle-molding position; but she turned over, naïvely ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo. She was right. For the first time in their love story, the blessing, the genius of lyrical speech descended upon the rough lad, he murmured and moaned, kissing her face with voluble tenderness, crying out in three languages — the three greatest in all the world — pet words upon which a dictionary of secret diminutives was to be based and go through many revisions till the definitive edition of 1967. When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him as if she had been love-making for years in all our dreams — but impatient young passion (brimming like Van’s overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird uttered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well pleased with the night treat, the cook’s niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas) — and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress, and giving the couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent bedrooms. (1.21)
A French handmaid at Ardis, Blanche (whom Mlle Larivière calls ‘Cendrillon’) is the cook’s niece. In his memoir essay Moyo znakomstvo s Gogolem (“My Acquaintance with Gogol,” 1862) L. I. Arnoldi compares Gogol to Molière who read his comedies, before they were staged, to his kukharka (female cook):
Слушая Гоголя, я невольно вспомнил о кухарке Мольера.
In his offensive article on Sirin's novels and short stories in the Paris émigré review Chisla (Numbers #1, 1930) G. Ivanov called VN kukharkin syn (a cook's son).
In his book on Gogol VN several times mentions the devil. Gogol' i chyort ("Gogol and the Devil," 1906) is a book by Merezhkovski. Describing Demon's speech, Van uses for the third (and last) time the phrase k chertyam sobach’im (to the devil):
‘My gloves! Cloak! Thank you. Can I use your W.C.? No? All right. I’ll find one elsewhere. Come over as soon as you can, and we’ll meet Marina at the airport around four and then whizz to the wake, and —’
And here Ada entered. Not naked — oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio — comfortably combing her hair, sweet and sleepy. She made the mistake of crying out ‘Bozhe moy!’ and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second.
‘Or better — come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.’ He spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now — when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter. (2.11)
After Demon forced him to give up Ada, Van blinds Kim Beauharnais for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada (2.11). But because love is blind (as Van himself remarks, when he and Ada watch Kim Beauharnais’s album), old Van fails to see that Mr. Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary and the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van’s and Ada’s death) are the grandchildren of Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband) and Ada.
Violet Knox (Fialochka) brings to mind Alexander Blok's poem Nochnaya Fialka ("The Night Violet," 1906). In his Foreword to N. V. Gogol. Povesti (NY, Chekhov Publishing House, 1952) VN says that from the modest violet at the bottom of Chichikov's snuff-box it is but one step to Blok's Night Violet:
От скромной фиалки на дне чичиковской табакерки до "Ночной Фиалки" Блока один лишь шаг - по животворной, чмокающей мочежине (с которой, между прочим, немало перешло и в толстовский ягдташ).
Van's conversation at dinner with the three Vinelanders (Ada's husband, her sister-in-law and Ada herself) is a parody of Chekhov's mannerisms. At the beginning of Chekhov's play Chayka ("The Seagull," 1896) Masha says that she is unhappy and therefore always wears traur (mourning):
Медведенко. Отчего вы всегда ходите в черном?
Маша. Это траур по моей жизни. Я несчастна.
Медведенко. Отчего? (В раздумье.) Не понимаю... Вы здоровы, отец у вас хотя и небогатый, но с достатком. Мне живется гораздо тяжелее, чем вам. Я получаю всего 23 рубля в месяц, да еще вычитают с меня в эмеритуру, а все же я не ношу траура. (Садятся.)
Маша. Дело не в деньгах. И бедняк может быть счастлив.
MEDVEDENKO. Why do you always wear mourning?
MASHA. I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.
MEDVEDENKO. Why should you be unhappy? [Thinking it over] I don’t understand it. You are healthy, and though your father is not rich, he has a good competency. My life is far harder than yours. I only have twenty-three roubles a month to live on, but I don’t wear mourning. [They sit down].
MASHA. Happiness does not depend on riches; poor men are often happy. (Act One)
In a conversation with Van Marina says that Van’s costume is, in a sense, traurnyi (funerary):
You see (rummaging for her handkerchief under her pillow), when children are still quite tiny (takie malyutki), we cannot imagine that we can go without them, for even a couple of days, and later we do, and it’s a couple of weeks, and later it’s months, gray years, black decades, and then the opéra bouffe of the Christians’ eternity. I think even the shortest separation is a kind of training for the Elysian Games — who said that? I said that. And your costume, though very becoming, is, in a sense, traurnïy (funerary). (1.37)