Describing his performance as Mascodagama (Van’s stage name), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the Ladore, Ladoga, Laguna, Lugano and Luga papers:
Mascodagama’s fame reached inevitably the backwoods of America: a photograph of him, masked, it is true, but unable to mislead a fond relative or faithful retainer, was reproduced by the Ladore, Ladoga, Laguna, Lugano and Luga papers in the first week of 1888; but the accompanying reportage was not. The work of a poet, and only a poet (‘especially of the Black Belfry group,’ as some wit said), could have adequately described a certain macabre quiver that marked Van’s extraordinary act. (1.30)
In his poem Prosnuvshisya ne rano… (“Having woken up not early,” 1911) Fyodor Sologub mentions ozero Lugano (Lake Lugano):
Проснувшися не рано,
Я вышел на балкон.
Над озером Лугано
Дымился лёгкий сон.
От горных высей плыли
Туманы к облакам,
Как праздничные были,
Рассказанные снам.
Весь вид здесь был так дивен,
Был так красив весь край,
Что не был мне противен
Грохочущий трамвай.
Хулы, привычно строгой,
В душе заснувшей нет.
Спокоен я дорогой,
Всем странам шлю привет.
Прекрасные, чужие, —
От них в душе туман;
Но ты, моя Россия,
Прекраснее всех стран.
Having woken up not early,
I came out onto the balcony.
A light dream smoked
Above Lake Lugano.
From the mountain heights
The mists swam to the clouds,
Like festive true stories
Told to the dreams.
The whole view was so wondrous,
The whole land was so beautiful
That a thundering streetcar
Wasn’t revolting to me.
There is no criticism, habitually strong,
In my sleeping soul.
I am calm en route,
To all countries I send greetings.
Beautiful, foreign,
They leave a haze in my soul;
But you, my Russia,
Is more beautiful than all countries.
Vsem stranam shlyu privet (To all countries I send greetings) brings to mind I vsem dolinam dagestanskim / ya shlyu zavistlivyi privet (and to all the Daghestan valleys / I send envious greetings), two lines in VN’s poem “To Prince S. M. Kachurin” (1947):
Качурин, твой совет я принял
и вот уж третий день живу
в музейной обстановке, в синей
гостиной с видом на Неву.
Священником американским
твой бедный друг переодет,
и всем долинам дагестанским
я шлю завистливый привет.
От холода, от перебоев
в подложном паспорте, не сплю:
исследователям обоев
лилеи и лианы шлю.
Но спит, на канапе устроясь,
коленки приложив к стене
и завернувшись в плед по пояс,
толмач, приставленный ко мне.
Kachurin, your advice I’ve accepted
and here I am, living for the third day
in a museumist setup: a blue
drawing room with a view on the Neva.
As an American clergyman
your poor friend is disguised,
and to all the Daghestan valleys
I send envious greetings.
Because of the cold, and the palpitations
of a false passport, I cannot sleep.
To wallpaper investigators
lianas and lilies I send.
But he sleeps (curled up on a canapé,
knees snugly pressed to the wall,
in a plaid rug wrapped up to the waist)
-the interpreter I've been assigned.
Describing his last visit to Villa Venus (one hundred floramors, palatial brothels, built all over the world by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, in memory of his grandson Eric, the author of an essay entitled ‘Villa Venus: an Organized Dream’), Van mentions Princess Kachurin, a maidservant:
Van never regretted his last visit to one last Villa Venus. A cauliflowered candle was messily burning in its tin cup on the window ledge next to the guitar-shaped paper-wrapped bunch of long roses for which nobody had troubled to find, or could have found, a vase. On a bed, some way off, lay a pregnant woman, smoking, looking up at the smoke mingling its volutes with the shadows on the ceiling, one knee raised, one hand dreamily scratching her brown groin. Far beyond her, a door standing ajar gave on what appeared to be a moonlit gallery but was really an abandoned, half-demolished, vast reception room with a broken outer wall, zigzag fissures in the floor, and the black ghost of a gaping grand piano, emitting, as if all by itself, spooky glissando twangs in the middle of the night. Through a great rip in the marbleized brick and plaster, the naked sea, not seen but heard as a panting space separated from time, dully boomed, dully withdrew its platter of pebbles, and, with the crumbling sounds, indolent gusts of warm wind reached the unwalled rooms, disturbing the volutes of shadow above the woman, and a bit of dirty fluff that had drifted down onto her pale belly, and even the reflection of the candle in a cracked pane of the bluish casement. Beneath it, on a rump-tickling coarse couch, Van reclined, pouting pensively, pensively caressing the pretty head on his chest, flooded by the black hair of a much younger sister or cousin of the wretched florinda on the tumbled bed. The child’s eyes were closed, and whenever he kissed their moist convex lids the rhythmic motion of her blind breasts changed or stopped altogether, and was presently resumed.
He was thirsty, but the champagne he had bought, with the softly rustling roses, remained sealed and he had not the heart to remove the silky dear head from his breast so as to begin working on the explosive bottle. He had fondled and fouled her many times in the course of the last ten days, but was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained — she, and the other girl, and a third one (a maidservant, Princess Kachurin), who seemed to have been born in the faded bathing suit she never changed and would die in, no doubt, before reaching majority or the first really cold winter on the beach mattress which she was moaning on now in her drugged daze. And if the child really was called Adora, then what was she? — not Rumanian, not Dalmatian, not Sicilian, not Irish, though an echo of brogue could be discerned in her broken but not too foreign English. Was she eleven or fourteen, almost fifteen perhaps? Was it really her birthday — this twenty-first of July, nineteen-four or eight or even several years later, on a rocky Mediterranean peninsula?
A very distant church clock, never audible except at night, clanged twice and added a quarter.
‘Smorchiama la secandela,’ mumbled the bawd on the bed in the local dialect that Van understood better than Italian. The child in his arms stirred and he pulled his opera cloak over her. In the grease-reeking darkness a faint pattern of moonlight established itself on the stone floor, near his forever discarded half-mask lying there and his pump-shod foot. It was not Ardis, it was not the library, it was not even a human room, but merely the squalid recess where the bouncer had slept before going back to his Rugby-coaching job at a public school somewhere in England. The grand piano in the otherwise bare hall seemed to be playing all by itself but actually was being rippled by rats in quest of the succulent refuse placed there by the maid who fancied a bit of music when her cancered womb roused her before dawn with its first familiar stab. The ruinous Villa no longer bore any resemblance to Eric’s’ organized dream,’ but the soft little creature in Van’s desperate grasp was Ada. (2.3)
According to Van, the servant-girls in Villa Venus not seldom descended from emblazoned princely heights:
According to Eric’s plan, Councils of Elderly Noblemen were responsible for mustering the girls. Delicately fashioned phalanges, good teeth, a flawless epiderm, undyed hair, impeccable buttocks and breasts, and the unfeigned vim of avid venery were the absolute prerequisites demanded by the Elders as they had been by Eric. Intactas were tolerated only if very young. On the other hand, no woman who had ever borne a child (even in her own childhood) could be accepted, no matter how free she was of mammilary blemishes.
Their social rank had been left unspecified but the Committees were inclined, initially and theoretically, to recruit girls of more or less gentle birth. Daughters of artists were preferred, on the whole, to those of artisans. Quite an unexpected number turned out to be the children of peeved peers in cold castles or of ruined baronesses in shabby hotels. In a list of about two thousand females working in all the floramors on January 1, 1890 (the greatest year in the annals of Villa Venus), I counted as many as twenty-two directly connected with the royal families of Europe, but at least one-quarter of all the girls belonged to plebeian groups. Owing to some nice vstryaska (shake-up) in the genetic kaleidoscope, or mere poker luck, or no reason at all, the daughters of peasants and peddlers and plumbers were not seldom more stylish than their middle-middle-class or upper-upper-class companions, a curious point that will please my non-gentle readers no less than the fact that the servant-girls ‘below’ the Oriental Charmers (who assisted in various rituals of silver basins, embroidered towels and dead-end smiles the client and his clickies) not seldom descended from emblazoned princely heights. (ibid.)
Vstryaska (“Shake-up,” 1898) is a story by Gorki about a servant boy who enjoyed the performance of a clown at the circus and attempts to imitate his tricks and mannerisms at home. His audience (the icon-painters) applauds him, but then he gets punished for a small blunder. One of the icon-painters grubs him by the hair and sends him flying (causing the boy to make a salto mortale). This cruel punishment is called vstryaska (a shake-up).
The genetic kaleidoscope brings to mind Verlaine’s poem Kaléidoscope:
Dans une rue, au coeur d'une ville de rêve
Ce sera comme quand on a déjà vécu :
Un instant à la fois très vague et très aigu...
Ô ce soleil parmi la brume qui se lève !
Ô ce cri sur la mer, cette voix dans les bois !
Ce sera comme quand on ignore des causes ;
Un lent réveil après bien des métempsycoses :
Les choses seront plus les mêmes qu'autrefois
Dans cette rue, au coeur de la ville magique
Où des orgues moudront des gigues dans les soirs,
Où les cafés auront des chats sur les dressoirs
Et que traverseront des bandes de musique.
Ce sera si fatal qu'on en croira mourir :
Des larmes ruisselant douces le long des joues,
Des rires sanglotés dans le fracas des roues,
Des invocations à la mort de venir,
Des mots anciens comme un bouquet de fleurs fanées !
Les bruits aigres des bals publics arriveront,
Et des veuves avec du cuivre après leur front,
Paysannes, fendront la foule des traînées
Qui flânent là, causant avec d'affreux moutards
Et des vieux sans sourcils que la dartre enfarine,
Cependant qu'à deux pas, dans des senteurs d'urine,
Quelque fête publique enverra des pétards.
Ce sera comme quand on rêve et qu'on s'éveille,
Et que l'on se rendort et que l'on rêve encor
De la même féerie et du même décor,
L'été, dans l'herbe, au bruit moiré d'un vol d'abeille.
Like Kaléidoscope, Verlaine’s poem Sur l’Herbe (“On the Grass”) was translated into Russian by Fyodor Sologub:
– L’abbé divague. – Et toi, marquis,
Tu mets de travers ta perruque.
– Ce vieux vin de Chypre est exquis
Moins, Camargo, que votre nuque.
– Ma flamme … – Do, mi, sol, la, si.
L’abbé, ta noirceur se dévoile !
– Que je meure, mesdames, si
Je ne vous décroche une étoile !
– Je voudrais être petit chien !
– Embrassons nos bergères, l’une
Après l’autre. – Messieurs, eh bien ?
– Do, mi, sol. – Hé ! bonsoir la Lune !
In Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (One: III: 9) Monsieur L'Abbé is the name of Onegin's tutor. He brings to mind Mlle Larivière, Lucette's governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse (the leaving out of the 't' makes it mote intime). In his Foreword to "Paul Verlaine. Poems Selected and Translated by F. Sologub" (1908) Maximilian Voloshin says that he can hear the sounds intimnyi golos (the intimate voice) in Lermontov's poetry, but does not hear them in Pushkin:
Я слышу, например, звуки интимного голоса у Лермонтова, но не слышу их у Пушкина.
The title of Mlle Larivière's novel Les Enfants Maudits blends enfant terrible with Les Poètes Maudits (initially, the title of a book by Verlaine).
Herbe is the favorite painter of Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister). Just before her suicide Lucette recalls Herbe’s diary that she was reading on the eve:
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)
Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge (Van's adversary in a pistol duel in Kalugano), is a member of the Do-Re-La country club (cf. Do, mi, sol in Verlaine’s poem Sur l’Herbe):
The Captain was a first-rate shot, Johnny said, and member of the Do-Re-La country club. Bloodthirsty brutishness did not come with his Britishness, but his military and academic standing demanded he defend his honor. He was an expert on maps, horses, horticulture. He was a wealthy landlord. The merest adumbration of an apology on Baron Veen’s part would clinch the matter with a token of gracious finality.
‘If,’ said Van, ‘the good Captain expects that, he can go and stick his pistol up his gracious anality.’
‘That is not a nice way of speaking,’ said Johnny, wincing. ‘My friend would not approve of it. We must remember he is a very refined person.’
Was Johnny Van’s second, or the Captain’s?
‘I’m yours,’ said Johnny with a languid look. (1.42)
Kachurin + Lugano = Kalugano + urchin = Kaluga + runo/uron + inch = kruchina + Luga + no/on
Describing Uncle Dan’s microfilm, Van mentions pissing urchins:
Besides that old illustrated section of the still existing but rather gaga Kaluga Gazette, our frolicsome Pimpernel and Nicolette found in the same attic a reel box containing what turned out to be (according to Kim, the kitchen boy, as will be understood later) a tremendous stretch of microfilm taken by the globetrotter, with many of its quaint bazaars, painted cherubs and pissing urchins reappearing three times at different points, in different shades of heliocolor. Naturally, at a time one was starting to build a family one could not display very well certain intérieurs (such as the group scenes in Damascus starring him and the steadily-smoking archeologist from Arkansas with the fascinating scar on his liver side, and the three fat whores, and old Archie’s premature squitteroo, as the third male member of the party, a real British brick, drolly called it); yet most of the film, accompanied by purely factual notes, not always easy to locate — because of the elusive or misleading bookmarks in the several guidebooks scattered around — was run by Dan many times for his bride during their instructive honeymoon in Manhattan. (1.1)
Pissing urchins seem to hint at Manneken-Pis, a statue of of a small boy urinating into a fountain's basin in Brussels. Verlaine's poem Bruxelles was also translated into Russian by Sologub.
Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van mentions Lago di Luga:
At one time Aqua believed that a stillborn male infant half a year old, a surprised little fetus, a fish of rubber that she had produced in her bath, in a lieu de naissance plainly marked X in her dreams, after skiing at full pulver into a larch stump, had somehow been saved and brought to her at the Nusshaus, with her sister’s compliments, wrapped up in blood-soaked cotton wool, but perfectly alive and healthy, to be registered as her son Ivan Veen. At other moments she felt convinced that the child was her sister’s, born out of wedlock, during an exhausting, yet highly romantic blizzard, in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge, where a Dr Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover, sat providentially waiting near a rude red stove for his boots to dry. Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 — her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband’s unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: ‘Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld’) she took advantage of his being massaged in the solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom — and experienced a delicious shock: her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along — ever since Shakespeare’s birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G.A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. Marina had spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with him at Kitezh but when she smugly divulged her intentions (just before Aqua’s arrival) he threw her out of the house. Still later, on the last short lap of a useless existence, Aqua scrapped all those ambiguous recollections and found herself reading and rereading busily, blissfully, her son’s letters in a luxurious ‘sanastoria’ at Centaur, Arizona. He invariably wrote in French calling her petite maman and describing the amusing school he would be living at after his thirteenth birthday. She heard his voice through the nightly tinnitus of her new, planful, last, last insomnias and it consoled her. He called her usually mummy, or mama, accenting the last syllable in English, the first, in Russian; somebody had said that triplets and heraldic dracunculi often occurred in trilingual families; but there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever now (except, perhaps, in hateful long-dead Marina’s hell-dwelling mind) that Van was her, her, Aqua’s, beloved son. (1.3)
In the third poem of Sologub's cycle Kipridiny rozy ("The Roses of Cyprida") the girl prays to Khristosik (little Christ):
Как ранняя птичка, проснувшись с зарёю,
Молилася девушка Богу:
«Мой милый Христосик, Тебе я открою
Мою заревую тревогу.
"The Roses of Cyprida" bring to mind the Hairy Alpine Rose mentioned by Aqua:
But that phase elapsed too. Other excruciations replaced her namesake’s loquacious quells so completely that when, during a lucid interval, she happened to open with her weak little hand a lavabo cock for a drink of water, the tepid lymph replied in its own lingo, without a trace of trickery or mimicry: Finito! It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death. Man-made objects lost their significance or grew monstrous connotations; clothes hangers were really the shoulders of decapitated Tellurians, the folds of a blanket she had kicked off her bed looked back at her mournfully with a stye on one drooping eyelid and dreary reproof in the limp twist of a livid lip. The effort to comprehend the information conveyed somehow to people of genius by the hands of a timepiece, or piece of time, became as hopeless as trying to make out the sign language of a secret society or the Chinese chant of that young student with a non-Chinese guitar whom she had known at the time she or her sister had given birth to a mauve baby. But her madness, the majesty of her madness, still retained a mad queen’s pathetic coquetry: ‘You know, Doctor, I think I’ll need glasses soon, I don’t know’ (lofty laugh), ‘I just can’t make out what my wrist watch says... For heaven’s sake, tell me what it says! Ah! Half-past for — for what? Never mind, never mind, "never" and "mind" are twins, I have a twin sister and a twin son. I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten years ago’ (showing her ten fingers gleefully, proudly, ten is ten!). (ibid.)
"Her album" is Marina's herbarium that Van and Ada discover in the attic of Ardis Hall and that helps them to find out that they are brother and sister.
Verlaine's sonnet Nevermore begins: Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu? (Memory, memory, what do you want of me?). Descrbing the deterioration of Villa Venus, Van mentions Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa:
In 1905 a glancing blow was dealt Villa Venus from another quarter. The personage we have called Ritcov or Vrotic had been induced by the ailings of age to withdraw his patronage. However, one night he suddenly arrived, looking again as ruddy as the proverbial fiddle; but after the entire staff of his favorite floramor near Bath had worked in vain on him till an ironic Hesperus rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky, the wretched sovereign of one-half of the globe called for the Shell Pink Book, wrote in it a line that Seneca had once composed:
subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt,
— and departed, weeping. About the same time a respectable Lesbian who conducted a Villa Venus at Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa, throttled with her own hands (she had been a Russian weightlifter) two of her most beautiful and valuable charges. It was all rather sad. (2.3)
runo – fleece
uron – damage, losses
kruchina - sorrow, woe
Btw., like Lermontov’s poem Son (“The Dream,” 1841) and VN’s poem “To Prince S. M. Kachurin,” Ada is a triple dream (a dream within a dream within a dream).