Describing the deathbed delirium of Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937), mentions otkrytie nebesnoy Ameriki (the discovery of a heavenly America):
Нельзя ли как-нибудь понять проще, духовно удовлетворительнее, без помощи сего изящного афея, как и без помощи популярных верований? Ибо в религии кроется какая-то подозрительная общедоступность, уничтожающая ценность ее откровений. Если в небесное царство входят нищие духом, представляю себе, как там весело. Достаточно я их перевидал на земле. Кто еще составляет небесное население? Тьма кликуш, грязных монахов, много розовых близоруких душ протестантского, что-ли производства, - какая смертная скука! У меня высокая температура четвертый день, и я уже не могу читать. Странно, мне раньше казалось, что Яша всегда около меня, что я научился общению с призраками, а теперь, когда я может быть умираю, эта вера в призраки мне кажется чем-то земным, связанным с самыми низкими земными ощущениями, а вовсе не открытием небесной Америки.
Is it not possible to understand more simply, in a way more satisfying to the spirit without the aid of this elegant atheist and equally without the aid of popular faiths? For religion subsumes a suspicious facility of general access that destroys the value of its revelations. If the poor in spirit enter the heavenly kingdom I can imagine how gay it is there. I have seen enough of them on earth. Who else makes up the population of heaven? Swarms of screaming revivalists, grubby monks, lots of rosy, shortsighted souls of more or less Protestant manufacture—what deathly boredom! I am running a high temperature for the fourth day now, and can no longer read. Strange—I used to think before that Yasha was always near me, that I had learned to communicate with ghosts, but now, when I am perhaps dying, this belief in ghosts seems to me something earthly, linked with the very lowest earthly sensations and not at all the discovery of a heavenly America. (Chapter Five)
Poor Alexander Yakovlevich had died not long before Fyodor’s book Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”) appeared. According to Lilya Brik, Chernyshevski’s Chto delat’? (“What to Do?”) was the favorite book of Mayakovski, VN’s “late namesake” who was rereading “What to Do?” on the eve of his suicide. Mayakovski is the author of Moyo otkrytie Ameriki (“My Discovery of America,” 1925-26). Mayakovski’s poem Nebesnyi cherdak (“Celestial Attic,” 1928) brings to mind nebesnaya America (a heavenly America) and cherdak (the attic) mentioned by Fyodor in “The Life of Chernyshevski:”
Юношей он записал в дневнике: "Политическая литература - высшая литература". Впоследствии пространно рассуждая о Белинском (Виссарионе, конечно), о котором распространяться, собственно, не полагалось, он ему следовал, говоря, что "Литература не может не быть служительницей того или иного направления идей", и что писатели "неспособные искренне одушевляться участием к тому, что совершается силою исторического движения вокруг нас... великого ничего не произведут ни в каком случае", ибо "история не знает произведений искусства, которые были бы созданы исключительно идеей прекрасного". Тому же Белинскому, полагавшему, что "Жорж Занд безусловно может входить в реестр имен европейских поэтов, тогда как помещение рядом имен Гоголя, Гомера и Шекспира оскорбляет и приличие и здравый смысл", и что "не только Сервантес, Вальтер Скотт, Купер, как художники по преимуществу, но и Свифт, Стерн, Вольтер, Руссо имеют несравненно, неизмеримо высшее значение во всей исторической литературе, чем Гоголь", Чернышевский вторил, тридцать лет спустя (когда, правда, Жорж Занд поднялась уже на чердак, а Купер спустился в детскую), говоря, что "Гоголь фигура очень мелкая, сравнительно, например, с Диккенсом или Фильдом, или Стерном".
In his youth he noted in his diary: “Political literature is the highest literature.” In the fifties when discussing at length Belinski (Vissarion, of course), something the government disapproved of, he followed him in saying that “literature cannot fail to be the handmaiden of one or another ideological trend,” and that writers “incapable of being animated by sympathy toward what is being accomplished around us by the force of historical movement… will never in any circumstances produce anything great,” for “history does not know of any works of art that were created exclusively from the idea of beauty.” In the forties Belinski maintained that “George Sand can unconditionally be included in the roll of European poets (in the German sense of Dichter) , while the juxtaposition of Gogol’s name with those of Homer and Shakespeare offends both decency and common sense” and that “not only Cervantes, Walter Scott and Cooper, as artists pre-eminently, but also Swift, Sterne, Voltaire and Rousseau have an incomparably and immeasurably greater significance in the whole history of literature than Gogol.” Belinksi was seconded three decades later by Chernyshevski (when, it is true, George Sand had already ascended to the attic, and Cooper had descended to the nursery), who said that “Gogol is a very minor figure in comparison, for example, with Dickens or Fielding or Sterne.” (Chapter Four)
In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van and Ada discover that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina’s old herbarium that they found in the attic of Ardis Hall:
The two kids’ best find, however, came from another carton in a lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex, a mountain resort, not far from Brig, Switzerland, where she had sojourned before her marriage, mostly in a rented chalet. The first twenty pages were adorned with a number of little plants collected at random, in August, 1869, on the grassy slopes above the chalet, or in the park of the Hotel Florey, or in the garden of the sanatorium neat: it (‘my nusshaus,’ as poor Aqua dubbed it, or ‘the Home,’ as Marina more demurely identified it in her locality notes). Those introductory pages did not present much botanical or psychological interest; and the fifty last pages or so remained blank; but the middle part, with a conspicuous decrease in number of specimens, proved to be a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers. The specimens were on one side of the folio, with Marina Dourmanoff (sic)’s notes en regard.
Ancolie Bleue des Alpes, Ex en Valais, i.IX.69. From Englishman in hotel. ‘Alpine Columbine, color of your eyes.’
Epervière auricule. 25.X.69, Ex, ex Dr Lapiner’s walled alpine garden.
Golden [ginkgo] leaf: fallen out of a book’ The Truth about Terra’ which Aqua gave me before going back to her Home. 14.XII.69.
Artificial edelweiss brought by my new nurse with a note from Aqua saying it came from a ‘mizernoe and bizarre’ Christmas Tree at the Home. 25.XII.69.
Petal of orchid, one of 99 orchids, if you please, mailed to me yesterday, Special Delivery, c’est bien le cas de le dire, from Villa Armina, Alpes Maritimes. Have laid aside ten for Aqua to be taken to her at her Home. Ex en Valais, Switzerland. ‘Snowing in Fate’s crystal ball,’ as he used to say. (Date erased.)
Gentiane de Koch, rare, brought by lapochka [darling] Lapiner from his ‘mute gentiarium’ 5.I.1870.
[blue-ink blot shaped accidentally like a flower, or improved felt-pen deletion] (Compliquaria compliquata var. aquamarina. Ex, 15.I.70.
Fancy flower of paper, found in Aqua’s purse. Ex, 16.II.1870, made by a fellow patient, at the Home, which is no longer hers.
Gentiana verna (printanière). Ex, 28.III.1870, on the lawn of my nurse’s cottage. Last day here. (1.1)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) the phenomenon of Terra appeared after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality. (1.3)
“Bric-à-Braques” blends George Braques (a Cubist painter, 1882-1963) with brikabrak, as in his story Smert' Ivana Ilyicha (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 1886) Tolstoy calls an antique shop; but it also brings to mind Lilya Brik (Mayakovski’s mistress). At first Tolstoy wanted to entitle his novel Voyna i mir ("War and Peace,” 1869) Vsyo horosho, chto horosho konchaetsya (“All's Well that Ends Well”). Horosho! ("Good!" 1927) is a poem by Mayakovski written for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. In "Ardis the First" Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) uses the word horosho in the sense "all right:"
On the following day Ada informed her mother that Lucette badly needed a bath and that she would give it to her, whether her governess liked it or not. 'Horosho,' said Marina (while getting ready to receive a neighbor and his protégé, a young actor, in her best Dame Marina style), 'but the temperature should be kept at exactly twenty-eight (as it had been since the eighteenth century) and don't let her stay in it longer than ten or twelve minutes.'
‘Beautiful idea,’ said Van as he helped Ada to heat the tank, fill the old battered bath and warm a couple of towels.
Despite her being only in her ninth year and rather underdeveloped, Lucette had not escaped the delusive pubescence of red-haired little girls. Her armpits showed a slight stipple of bright floss and her chub was dusted with copper.
The liquid prison was now ready and an alarm clock given a full quarter of an hour to live.
‘Let her soak first, you’ll soap her afterwards,’ said Van feverishly.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ cried Ada.
‘I’m Van,’ said Lucette, standing in the tub with the mulberry soap between her legs and protruding her shiny tummy.
‘You’ll turn into a boy if you do that,’ said Ada sternly, ‘and that won’t be very amusing.’
Warily, the little girl started to sink her buttocks in the water.
‘Too hot,’ she said, ‘much too horribly hot!’
‘It’ll cool,’ said Ada, ‘plop down and relax. Here’s your doll.’
‘Come on, Ada, for goodness’ sake, let her soak,’ repeated Van.
‘And remember,’ said Ada, ‘don’t you dare get out of this nice warm water until the bell rings or you’ll die, because that’s what Krolik said. I’ll be back to lather you, but don’t call me; we have to count the linen and sort out Van’s hankies.’
The two elder children, having locked the door of the L-shaped bathroom from the inside, now retired to the seclusion of its lateral part, in a corner between a chest of drawers and an old unused mangle, which the sea-green eye of the bathroom looking-glass could not reach; but barely had they finished their violent and uncomfortable exertions in that hidden nook, with an empty medicine bottle idiotically beating time on a shelf, when Lucette was already calling resonantly from the tub and the maid knocking on the door: Mlle Larivière wanted some hot water too. (1.23)
The Mayakovski pastiche in VN's story Istreblenie tiranov ("Tyrants Destroyed," 1936) begins with the word horosho-s (now then):
Хорошо-с,-- а помните, граждане,
Как хирел наш край без отца?
Так без хмеля сильнейшая жажда
Не создаст ни пивца, ни певца.
Now then, citizens,
You remember how long
Our land wilted without a Father?...
Thus, without hops, no matter how strong
One’s thirst, it is rather
Difficult, isn’t it,
To make both the beer and the drinking song!
(chapter 16)
Horosho-s seems to hint not only at Mayakovski's Horosho, but also at ot gospoda boga-s (from God, the Lord), a phrase used by Mayakovski in his poem Pyatyi Internatsional ("The Fifth International," 1922):
Мистики пишут: «Логос,
Это всемогущество. От господа бога-с».
The mystics write: "Logos
is omnipotence. From God, the Lord."
The Supreme Being on Antiterra, Log seems to hint at Logos (the rational principle that governs and develops the universe). In Ward Five of the Kalugano hospital (where Van recovers from a wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper and where he visits Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie) male nurse Dorofey is reading the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos):
After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin's coachman, said priehali ('we have arrived') and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos). (1.42)
In his poem Vo ves' golos ("At the Top of my Voice," 1930) Mayakovski calls himself "a poet of the boiled and an enemy of unboiled water:"
И, возможно, скажет
ваш учёный,
кроя эрудицией
вопросов рой,
что жил-де такой
певец кипячёной
И ярый враг воды сырой.
Alexander Blok's poem Golos iz khora ("Voice from Choir", 1914) ends in the lines:
Будьте ж довольны жизнью своей,
Тише воды, ниже травы!
О, если б знали, дети, вы,
Холод и мрак грядущих дней!
Quieter than water, lower than grass,
Be glad now with your life!
Oh, if you could foresee, children,
The cold and dark of days to come!
The proverbial phrase tishe vody, nizhe travy ("quieter than water, lower than grass") was used by Dostoevski in his first novel Bednye lyudi ("Poor Folk," 1846):
Маменька его очень любила. Но старик ненавидел Анну Фёдоровну, хотя был пред нею тише воды, ниже травы.
Mama was very fond of him. But the old man hated Anna Fyodorovna, though he was as quiet as a mouse and humbler than dust in her presence.
The Antiterran L disaster right in the middle of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850, in our world (Dostoevski was arrested for reading in public Belinski’s letter to Gogol). In “The Gift” Fyodor compares Dostoevski to a room in which a lamp burns during the day:
Фёдор Константинович собрался было восвояси, когда его сзади окликнул шепелявый голос: он принадлежал Ширину, автору романа "Седина" (с эпиграфом из книги Иова), очень сочувственно встреченного эмигрантской критикой. ("Господи, отче -- --? По Бродвею, в лихорадочном шорохе долларов, гетеры и дельцы в гетрах, дерясь, падая, задыхаясь, бежали за золотым тельцом, который, шуршащими боками протискиваясь между небоскребами, обращал к электрическому небу изможденный лик свой и выл. В Париже, в низкопробном притоне, старик Лашез, бывший пионер авиации, а ныне дряхлый бродяга, топтал сапогами старуху-проститутку Буль-де-Сюиф. Господи отчего -- --? Из московского подвала вышел палач и, присев у конуры, стал тюлюкать мохнатого щенка: Махонький, приговаривал он, махонький... В Лондоне лорды и лэди танцевали джими и распивали коктейль, изредка посматривая на эстраду, где на исходе восемнадцатого ринга огромный негр кнок-оутом уложил на ковер своего белокурого противника. В арктических снегах, на пустом ящике из-под мыла, сидел путешественник Эриксен и мрачно думал: Полюс или не полюс?.. Иван Червяков бережно обстригал бахрому единственных брюк. Господи, отчего Вы дозволяете все это?"). Сам Ширин был плотный, коренастый человек, с рыжеватым бобриком, всегда плохо выбритый, в больших очках, за которыми, как в двух аквариумах, плавали два маленьких, прозрачных глаза, совершенно равнодушных к зрительным впечатлениям. Он был слеп как Мильтон, глух как Бетховен, и глуп как бетон. Святая ненаблюдательность (а отсюда – полная неосведомленность об окружающем мире -- и полная неспособность что-либо именовать) -- свойство, почему-то довольно часто встречающееся у русского литератора-середняка, словно тут действует некий благотворный рок, отказывающий безталанному в благодати чувственного познания, дабы он зря не изгадил материала. Бывает, конечно, что в таком темном человеке играет какой-то собственный фонарик, -- не говоря о том, что известны случаи, когда по прихоти находчивой природы, любящей неожиданные приспособления и подмены, такой внутренний свет поразительно ярок -- на зависть любому краснощекому таланту. Но даже Достоевский всегда как-то напоминает комнату, в которой днём горит лампа.
Fyodor was about to walk home when a lisping voice called him from behind: it belonged to Shirin, author of the novel The Hoary Abyss (with an Epigraph from the Book of Job) which had been received very sympathetically by the émigré critics. (“Oh Lord, our Father! Down Broadway in a feverish rustle of dollars, hetaeras and businessmen in spats, shoving, falling and out of breath, were running after the golden calf, which pushed its way, rubbing against walls between the skyscrapers, then turned its emaciated face to the electric sky and howled. In Paris, in a low-class dive, the old man Lachaise, who had once been an aviation pioneer but was now a decrepit vagabond, trampled under his boots an ancient prostitute, Boule de Suif. Oh Lord, why—? Out of a Moscow basement a killer came out, squatted by a kennel and began to coax a shaggy pup: little one, he repeated, little one… In London, lords and ladies danced the Jimmie and imbibed cocktails, glancing from time to time at a platform where at the end of the eighteenth ring a huge Negro had laid his fair-haired opponent on the carpet with a knockout. Amid arctic snows the explorer Ericson sat on an empty soapbox and thought gloomily: The pole or not the pole?… Ivan Chervyakov carefully trimmed the fringe of his only pair of pants. Oh Lord, why dost Thou permit all this?”) Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes—which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot. A blissful incapacity for observation (and hence complete uninformedness about the surrounding world—and a complete inability to put a name to anything) is a quality quite frequently met with among the average Russian literati, as if a beneficent fate were at work refusing the blessing of sensory cognition to the untalented so that they will not wantonly mess up the material. It happens, of course, that such a benighted person has some little lamp of his own glimmering inside him—not to speak of those known instances in which, through the caprice of resourceful nature that loves startling adjustments and substitutions, such an inner light is astonishingly bright—enough to make the envy of the ruddiest talent. But even Dostoevski always brings to mind somehow a room in which a lamp burns during the day. (Chapter Five)