In a conversation with Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) mentions tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except Van’s image:
‘I enjoy — oh, loads of things,’ she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. ‘I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts — but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness. I’m like Dolores — when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air."’
‘Never could finish that novel — much too pretentious.’
‘Pretentious but true. It’s exactly my sense of existing — a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can’t we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?’
‘It’s safer and faster by plane,’ said Van. ‘And for Log’s sake, speak Russian.’ (3.3)
In Tolstoy’s novel Voyna i mir (“War and Peace,” 1869) Natasha Rostov is ochen’ tonen’kaya, stranno-tonen’kaya (a very slim, strangely slim) black-eyed girl when Prince Andrey Bolkonski sees her for the first time:
Князь Андрей, невеселый и озабоченный соображениями о том, что и что ему нужно о делах спросить у предводителя, подъезжал по аллее сада к отрадненскому дому Ростовых. Вправо из за деревьев он услыхал женский, веселый крик, и увидал бегущую на перерез его коляски толпу девушек. Впереди других ближе, подбегала к коляске черноволосая, очень тоненькая, странно-тоненькая, черноглазая девушка в желтом ситцевом платье, повязанная белым носовым платком, из под которого выбивались пряди расчесавшихся волос. Девушка что-то кричала, но узнав чужого, не взглянув на него, со смехом побежала назад.
Князю Андрею вдруг стало от чего-то больно. День был так хорош, солнце так ярко, кругом всё так весело; а эта тоненькая и хорошенькая девушка не знала и не хотела знать про его существование и была довольна, и счастлива какой-то своей отдельной, — верно глупой — но веселой и счастливой жизнию. «Чему она так рада? о чем она думает! Не об уставе военном, не об устройстве рязанских оброчных. О чем она думает? И чем она счастлива?» невольно с любопытством спрашивал себя князь Андрей.
Prince Andrew, depressed and preoccupied with the business about which he had to speak to the Marshal, was driving up the avenue in the grounds of the Rostovs' house at Otradnoe. He heard merry girlish cries behind some trees on the right and saw group of girls running to cross the path of his calèche. Ahead of the rest and nearer to him ran a dark-haired, remarkably slim, pretty girl in a yellow chintz dress, with a white handkerchief on her head from under which loose locks of hair escaped. The girl was shouting something but, seeing that he was a stranger, ran back laughing without looking at him.
Suddenly, he did not know why, he felt a pang. The day was so beautiful, the sun so bright, everything around so gay, but that slim pretty girl did not know, or wish to know, of his existence and was contented and cheerful in her own separate - probably foolish - but bright and happy life. "What is she so glad about? What is she thinking of? Not of the military regulations or of the arrangement of the Ryazan serfs' quitrents. Of what is she thinking? Why is she so happy?" Prince Andrew asked himself with instinctive curiosity. (Book 6)
Describing Don Juan’s Last Fling, a movie that he and Lucette watch in the Tobakoff cinema hall, Van mentions that slip of a girl qui n’en porte pas (as Van had jested once to annoy Mlle Larivière by a fictitious Frenchman’s mistranslation):
The main picture had now started. The three leading parts — cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna — were played by solid stars, whose images passed by in ‘semi-stills,’ or as some say ‘translucencies,’ in a brief introduction. Contrary to expectations, the picture turned out to be quite good.
On the way to the remote castle where the difficult lady, widowed by his sword, has finally promised him a long night of love in her chaste and chilly chamber, the aging libertine nurses his potency by spurning the advances of a succession of robust belles. A gitana predicts to the gloomy cavalier that before reaching the castle he will have succumbed to the wiles of her sister, Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg’s novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit). She also predicted something to Van, for even before Dolores came out of the circus tent to water Juan’s horse, Van knew who she would be.
In the magic rays of the camera, in the controlled delirium of ballerina grace, ten years of her life had glanced off and she was again that slip of a girl qui n’en porte pas (as he had jested once to annoy her governess by a fictitious Frenchman’s mistranslation): a remembered triviality that intruded upon the chill of his present emotion with the jarring stupidity of an innocent stranger’s asking an absorbed voyeur for directions in a labyrinth of mean lanes.
Lucette recognized Ada three or four seconds later, but then clutched his wrist:
‘Oh, how awful! It was bound to happen. That’s she! Let’s go, please, let’s go. You must not see her debasing herself. She’s terribly made up, every gesture is childish and wrong —’
‘Just another minute,’ said Van.
Terrible? Wrong? She was absolutely perfect, and strange, and poignantly familiar. By some stroke of art, by some enchantment of chance, the few brief scenes she was given formed a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892 looks.
The gitanilla bends her head over the live table of Leporello’s servile back to trace on a scrap of parchment a rough map of the way to the castle. Her neck shows white through her long black hair separated by the motion of her shoulder. It is no longer another man’s Dolores, but a little girl twisting an aquarelle brush in the paint of Van’s blood, and Donna Anna’s castle is now a bog flower. (3.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): slip: Fr., panties.
Describing the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday, Van mentions Osberg’s novel The Gitanilla and points out that the omission of panties was ignored by Mlle Larivière (Lucette’s governess):
For the big picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday and Ida’s forty-second jour de fête, the child was permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg’s novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish ‘t,’ not a thick English one), a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt, with red poppies or peonies, ‘deficient in botanical reality,’ as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream.
(Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.)
She had stepped into it, naked, while her legs were still damp and ‘piney’ after a special rubbing with a washcloth (morning baths being unknown under Mlle Larivière’s regime) and pulled it on with a brisk jiggle of the hips which provoked her governess’s familiar rebuke: mais ne te trémousse pas comme ça quand tu mets ta jupe! Une petite fille de bonne maison, etc. Per contra, the omission of panties was ignored by Ida Larivière, a bosomy woman of great and repulsive beauty (in nothing but corset and gartered stockings at the moment) who was not above making secret concessions to the heat of the dog-days herself; but in tender Ada’s case the practice had deprecable effects. The child tried to assuage the rash in the soft arch, with all its accompaniment of sticky, itchy, not altogether unpleasurable sensations, by tightly straddling the cool limb of a Shattal apple tree, much to Van’s disgust as we shall see more than once. Besides the lolita, she wore a short-sleeved white black-striped jersey, a floppy hat (hanging behind her back from an elastic around her throat), a velvet hairband and a pair of old sandals. Neither hygiene, nor sophistication of taste, were, as Van kept observing, typical of the Ardis household. (1.13)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared. Incidentally, that title’s pronunciation has nothing to do with English or Russian (pace an anonymous owl in a recent issue of the TLS).
When she says that she is only a picture painted on air, Lucette compares herself to Dolores, Osberg’s gitanilla. Lucette's (or, rather, Dolores's) words bring to mind the inscription on Keats' grave stone: "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." In his Fragment on Keats Shelley writes:
ON KEATS, WHO DESIRED THAT ON HIS TOMB SHOULD BE INSCRIBED -
'Here lieth One whose name was writ on water.'
But, ere the breath that could erase it blew,
Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter,
Death, the immortalizing winter, flew
Athwart the stream, - and time's printless torrent grew
A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name
Of Adonais!
On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, P. B. Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. In a letter of Dec. 6, 1906, to E. W. Ellis (who thought that Shelley was the greatest English poet) Tolstoy writes:
Dear Sir,
I quite agree with you about Shelley. He has not given all what he could and certainly would have given to the world. He had the highest aspirations and was always bold and true.
I was glad to know that you agree with my opinion of the merit of Shakespeare’s work.
Yours truly,
Leo Tolstoy.
In a letter to Van written after Lucete’s suicide Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) mentions naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton [Chekhov, the author of Tolstyi i tonkiy (“Fat and Thin,” 1883)]:
Son:
I have followed your instructions, anent that letter, to the letter. Your epistolary style is so involute that I should suspect the presence of a code, had I not known you belonged to the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton. I do not give a damn whether you slept or not with Lucette; but I know from Dorothy Vinelander that the child had been in love with you. The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl. A jinx has been cast on our poor girl’s career. Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his ‘fantasy’ on Cervantes’s crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as ‘Quicks.’ Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions. In result it is impossible to purchase a reel of the picture which will vanish like the proverbial smoke once it has fizzled out on provincial screens. Come and have dinner with me on July 10. Evening dress. (3.6)
Lucette drowns herself in the Atlantic. The element that destroys Van's and Ada's father is air:
Furnished Space, l’espace meublé (known to us only as furnished and full even if its contents be ‘absence of substance’ — which seats the mind, too), is mostly watery so far as this globe is concerned. In that form it destroyed Lucette. Another variety, more or less atmospheric, but no less gravitational and loathsome, destroyed Demon.
Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. A list of ‘leading figures’ dead in the explosion comprised the advertising manager of a department store, the acting foreman in the sheet-metal division of a facsimile corporation, a recording firm executive, the senior partner of a law firm, an architect with heavy aviation background (a first misprint here, impossible to straighten out), the vice president of an insurance corporation, another vice president, this time of a board of adjustment whatever that might be —
‘I’m hongree,’ said a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers.
‘Use bell,’ said Van, continuing in a state of odd fascination to go through the compilation of labeled lives:
— the president of a wholesale liquor-distributing firm, the manager of a turbine equipment company, a pencil manufacturer, two professors of philosophy, two newspaper reporters (with nothing more to report), the assistant controller of a wholesome liquor distribution bank (misprinted and misplaced), the assistant controller of a trust company, a president, the secretary of a printing agency —
The names of those big shots, as well as those of some eighty other men, women, and silent children who perished in blue air, were being withheld until all relatives had been reached; but the tabulatory preview of commonplace abstractions had been thought to be too imposing not to be given at once as an appetizer; and only on the following morning did Van learn that a bank president lost in the closing garble was his father. (3.7)
In an apologetic note to Lucette written after the dinner in ‘Ursus’ and the debauch à trois in Van’s Manhattan flat Van mentions pilots of tremendous airships and coarse, smelly coachmen:
Poor L.
We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. Pilots of tremendous airships and even coarse, smelly coachmen are known to have been driven insane by a pair of green eyes and a copper curl. We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene. These are times of emotional stress and reconditioning. Destroy and forget.
Tenderly yours A & V.
(in alphabetic order). (2.8)
By coarse, smelly coachmen Van means Ben Wright, the English coachman in “Ardis the First.” Lucette sits next to him on the box, when he drives the children and Mlle Larivière home from the picnic site:
A slight commotion took place on the box. Lucette turned around and spoke to Ada.
‘I want to sit with you. Mne tut neudobno, i ot nego nehorosho pakhnet (I’m uncomfortable here, and he does not smell good).’
‘We’ll be there in a moment,’ retorted Ada, ‘poterpi (have a little patience).’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mlle Larivière.
‘Nothing, Il pue.’
‘Oh dear! I doubt strongly he ever was in that Rajah’s service.’ (1.13)
What Van does not suspect is that his father died because Ada had managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. According to Ada, with age Demon grew leaner and leaner and looked positively Quixotic when she saw him at Marina’s funeral:
‘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.’ (3.8)