The action in VN's novel Ada (1969) takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. After the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century electricity was banned on Antiterra:
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.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
Elektrichestvo (“Electricity,” 1901) is a poem by Zinaida Hippius:
Две нити вместе свиты,
Концы обнажены.
То "да" и "нет" не слиты,
Не слиты - сплетены.
Их тёмное сплетенье
И тесно и мертво;
Но ждёт их воскресенье,
И ждут они его:
Концы соприкоснутся,
Проснутся "да" и "нет".
И "да", и "нет" сольются,
И смерть их будет свет.
Two wires are wrapped together
The loose ends naked, exposed
A yes and no, not united,
Not united but juxtaposed.
A dark, dark juxtaposition-
So close together, dead.
But resurrection awaits them,
And they await what waits ahead
End will meet end in touching
Yes - no, left and right,
The yes and no awakening.
Inseparably uniting
And their death will be - Light.
In his memoir note Dama s lornetom ("The Lady with a Lorgnette," 1925) Sergey Esenin (1895-1925), the poet who hanged himself in the Angleterre Hotel in Leningrad (by the L disaster Van does not mean "Elevated"), says that in the Paris newspaper L'Eclair Merezhkovski (Hippius's husband) called him kham (a boor) and that Hippius called him alfons (a gigolo):
В газете «Ecler» Мережковский называл меня хамом, называла меня Гиппиус альфонсом, за то, что когда-то я, пришедший из деревни, имел право носить валенки.
— Что это на Вас за гетры? — спросила она, наведя лорнет.
Я ей ответил:
«— Это охотничьи валенки.
— Вы вообще кривляетесь.»
Потом Мережковский писал: «Альфонс, пьяница, большевик!»
А я ему отвечал устно: «Дурак, бездарность!»
L'Eclair (the newspaper's name misspelled "Ecler" by Esenin) is French for "The Lightning." In lornet (lorgnette) there is net (no). In her poem Electricity Hippius repeats three times the words da (yes) and net (no). In one of her letters to Van (written after Van left Ardis forever) Ada uses the word da:
[Los Angeles, 1889]
We are still at the candy-pink and pisang-green albergo where you once stayed with your father. He is awfully nice to me, by the way. I enjoy going places with him. He and I have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town, but you are also there, as well as the legendary river of Old Rus. Da. Oh, write me, one tiny note, I’m trying so hard to please you! Want some more (desperate) little topics? Marina’s new director of artistic conscience defines Infinity as the farthest point from the camera which is still in fair focus. She has been cast as the deaf nun Varvara (who, in some ways, is the most interesting of Chekhov’s Four Sisters). She sticks to Stan’s principle of having lore and role overflow into everyday life, insists on keeping it up at the hotel restaurant, drinks tea v prikusku (‘biting sugar between sips’), and feigns to misunderstand every question in Varvara’s quaint way of feigning stupidity — a double imbroglio, which annoys strangers but which somehow makes me feel I’m her daughter much more distinctly than in the Ardis era. She’s a great hit here, on the whole. They gave her (not quite gratis, I’m afraid) a special bungalow, labeled Marina Durmanova, in Universal City. As for me, I’m only an incidental waitress in a fourth-rate Western, hip-swinging between table-slapping drunks, but I rather enjoy the Houssaie atmosphere, the dutiful art, the winding hill roads, the reconstructions of streets, and the obligatory square, and a mauve shop sign on an ornate wooden façade, and around noon all the extras in period togs queuing before a glass booth, but I have nobody to call.
Speaking of calls, I saw a truly marvelous ornithological film the other night with Demon. I had never grasped the fact that the paleotropical sunbirds (look them up!) are ‘mimotypes’ of the New World hummingbirds, and all my thoughts, oh, my darling, are mimotypes of yours. I know, I know! I even know that you stopped reading at ‘grasped’ — as in the old days. (2.1)
At the end of another letter Ada asks Van to send her an aerogram with one Russian word — the end of her name and wit:
[California? 1890]
I love only you, I’m happy only in dreams of you, you are my joy and my world, this is as certain and real as being aware of one’s being alive, but... oh, I don’t accuse you! — but, Van, you are responsible (or Fate through you is responsible, ce qui revient au même) of having let loose something mad in me when we were only children, a physical hankering, an insatiable itch. The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison. I do not accuse you, but this is why I crave and cannot resist the impact of alien flesh; this is why our joint past radiates ripples of boundless betrayals. All this you are free to diagnose as a case of advanced erotomania, but there is more to it, because there exists a simple cure for all my maux and throes and that is an extract of scarlet aril, the flesh of yew, just only yew. Je réalise, as your sweet Cinderella de Torf (now Madame Trofim Fartukov) used to say, that I’m being coy and obscene. But it all leads up to an important, important suggestion! Van, je suis sur la verge (Blanche again) of a revolting amorous adventure. I could be instantly saved by you. Take the fastest flying machine you can rent straight to El Paso, your Ada will be waiting for you there, waving like mad, and we’ll continue, by the New World Express, in a suite I’ll obtain, to the burning tip of Patagonia, Captain Grant’s Horn, a Villa in Verna, my jewel, my agony. Send me an aerogram with one Russian word — the end of my name and wit. (ibid.)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): da: Russ., yes.
ce qui etc.: which amounts to the same thing.
maux: aches.
aril: coating of certain seeds.
Grant etc.: Jules Verne in Captain Grant’s Children has ‘agonie’ (in a discovered message) turn out to be part of ‘Patagonie’.
The Lady with a Lorgnette (the title of Esenin's memoir note) is a play on the title of Chekhov's story (whose heroine charmingly loses her lorgnette in the crowd on the Yalta pier). Dama s sobachkoy ("The Lady with the Lapdog," 1899) is a story by Chekhov. Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive to poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina):
Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth — say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia — as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua’s bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health (‘just a little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black’) in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive... But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (1.3)
In several poems Alexander Blok uses the phrase shchemyashchiy zvuk (a heart rending sound). Molnii iskusstva ("The Lightnings of Art," 1923) is a collection of Blok's essay about his trip to Italy in 1909. At the beginning of his memoir note The Lady with a Lorgnette Esenin mentions his first visit to Blok (who called Hippius nizkoprobnaya dura, "a lowbrow fool") on March 9, 1915, in Petrograd (St. Petersburg's name in 1914-24; after Lenin's death VN's home city was renamed Leningrad):
Когда-то я мальчиком, проезжая Петербург, зашел к Блоку. Мы говорили очень много о стихах, но Блок мне тут же заметил, вероятно, по указаниям Иванова-Разумника: «Не верь ты этой бабе. Ее и Горький считает умной. Но, по-моему, она низкопробная дура».
Chekhov's Lady with a Lapdog brings to mind Mrs. Arfour (the widow of Van's and Ada's family dentist) and her Yorkshire terrier:
They took a great many precautions — all absolutely useless, for nothing can change the end (written and filed away) of the present chapter. Only Lucette and the agency that forwarded letters to him and to Ada knew Van’s address. Through an amiable lady in waiting at Demon’s bank, Van made sure that his father would not turn up in Manhattan before March 30. They never came out or went in together, arranging a meeting place at the Library or in an emporium whence to start the day’s excursions — and it so happened that the only time they broke that rule (she having got stuck in the lift for a few panicky moments and he having blithely trotted downstairs from their common summit), they issued right into the visual field of old Mrs Arfour who happened to be passing by their front door with her tiny tan-and-gray long-silked Yorkshire terrier. The simultaneous association was immediate and complete: she had known both families for years and was now interested to learn from chattering (rather than chatting) Ada that Van had happened to be in town just when she, Ada, had happened to return from the West; that Marina was fine; that Demon was in Mexico or Oxmice; and that Lenore Colline had a similar adorable pet with a similar adorable parting along the middle of the back. That same day (February 3, 1893) Van rebribed the already gorged janitor to have him answer all questions which any visitor, and especially a dentist’s widow with a caterpillar dog, might ask about any Veens, with a brief assertion of utter ignorance. The only personage they had not reckoned with was the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel.
At the airport of the moonlit white town we call Tent, and Tobakov’s sailors, who built it, called Palatka, in northern Florida, where owing to engine trouble he had to change planes, Demon made a long-distance call and received a full account of Dan’s death from the inordinately circumstantial Dr Nikulin (grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov — we can’t get rid of the lettuce). Daniel Veen’s life had been a mixture of the ready-made and the grotesque; but his death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch.
Next day, February 5, around nine p.m., Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan’s lawyer, Demon noted — just as he was about to cross Alexis Avenue, an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very exotic and potent pill to face the day’s ordeal on top of a sleepless journey), contented himself — quite properly — with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out of the way of Mrs R4. But precisely in regard to such a contingency, Fate had prepared an alternate continuation. As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered) by the Monaco, where he had often lunched, it occurred to him that his son (whom he had been unable to ‘contact’) might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building. He had never been up there — or had he? For a business consultation with Van? On a sun-hazed terrace? And a clouded drink? (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.)
With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute multicolored optical sparks), Demon hastened to enter the lobby and catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two on a wiggle-wheel table and the Manhattan Times among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas. Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon, placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes. Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter.
‘Then we are fellow travelers,’ said Demon inhaling not without gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain. (2.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): R4: ‘rook four’, a chess indication of position (pun on the woman’s name).
A Hollywood actress who resembles Ada, Lenore Colline is the girlfriend of Alph (the son of Alphonse the First of Portugal):
Mr Sween, lunching with a young fellow who sported a bullfighter’s sideburns and other charms, bowed gravely in the direction of their table; then a naval officer in the azure uniform of the Gulfstream Guards passed by in the wake of a dark, ivory-pale lady and said: ‘Hullo Lucette, hullo, Van.’
‘Hullo, Alph,’ said Van, whilst Lucette acknowledged the greeting with an absent smile: over her propped-up entwined hands she was following with mocking eyes the receding lady. Van cleared his throat as he gloomily glanced at his half-sister.
‘Must be at least thirty-five,’ murmured Lucette, ‘yet still hopes to become his queen.’
(His father, Alphonse the First of Portugal, a puppet potentate manipulated by Uncle Victor, had recently abdicated upon Gamaliel’s suggestion in favor of a republican regime, but Lucette spoke of fragile beauty, not fickle politics.)
‘That was Lenore Colline. What’s the matter, Van?’
‘Cats don’t stare at stars, it’s not done. The resemblance is much less close than it used to be — though, of course, I’ve not kept up with counterpart changes. A propos, how’s the career been progressing?’
‘If you mean Ada’s career, I hope it’s also a flop, the same as her marriage. So my getting you will be all Demon gains. I don’t go often to movies, and I refused to speak to Dora and her when we met at the funeral and haven’t the remotest idea of what her stage or screen exploits may have been lately.’
‘Did that woman tell her brother about your innocent frolics?’
‘Of course not! She drozhit (trembles) over his bliss. But I’m sure it was she who forced Ada to write me that I "must never try again to wreck a successful marriage" — and this I forgive Daryushka, a born blackmailer, but not Adochka. I don’t care for your cabochon. I mean it’s all right on your dear hairy hand, but Papa wore one like that on his hateful pink paw. He belonged to the silent-explorer type. Once he took me to a girls’ hockey match and I had to warn him I’d yell for help if he didn’t call off the search.’
‘Das auch noch,’ sighed Van, and pocketed the heavy dark-sapphire ring. He would have put it into the ashtray had it not been Marina’s last present.
‘Look, Van,’ she said (finishing her fourth flute). ‘Why not risk it? Everything is quite simple. You marry me. You get my Ardis. We live there, you write there. I keep melting into the back ground, never bothering you. We invite Ada — alone, of course — to stay for a while on her estate, for I had always expected mother to leave Ardis to her. While she’s there, I go to Aspen or Gstaad, or Schittau, and you live with her in solid crystal with snow falling as if forever all around pendant que je shee in Aspenis. Then I come back like a shot, but she can stay on, she’s welcome, I’ll hang around in case you two want me. And then she goes back to her husband for a couple of dreary months, see?’
‘Yes, magnificent plan,’ said Van. ‘The only trouble is: she will never come. It’s now three o’clock, I have to see a man who is to renovate Villa Armina which I inherited and which will house one of my harems. Slapping a person’s wrist that way is not your prettiest mannerism on the Irish side. I shall now escort you to your apartment. You are plainly in need of some rest.’
‘I have an important, important telephone call to make, but I don’t want you to listen,’ said Lucette searching for the key in her little black handbag. (3.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): das auch noch: Germ., and that too.
pendant que je etc.: while I am skiing.
Hippius called Esenin alfons (a gigolo), because the poet's second wife, Isadora Duncan (an American-born dancer and choreographer, 1877-1927), was much older than her husband. Alph eventually marries Lenore Colline (and recovers his father's throne):
He showered and changed, and finished the flask of brandy in his dressing case, and called the Geneva airport and was told that the last plane from America had just arrived. He went for a stroll — and saw that the famous ‘mûrier,’ that spread its great limbs over a humble lavatory on a raised terrace at the top of a cobbled lane, was now in sumptuous purple-blue bloom. He had a beer at the café opposite the railway station, and then, automatically, entered the flower shop next door. He must be gaga to have forgotten what she said the last time about her strange anthophobia (somehow stemming from that debauche à trois thirty years ago). Roses she never liked anyway. He stared and was easily outstared by small Carols from Belgium, long-stemmed Pink Sensations, vermilion Superstars. There were also zinnias, and chrysanthemums, and potted aphelandras, and two graceful fringetails in an inset aquarium. Not wishing to disappoint the courteous old florist, he bought seventeen odorless Baccara roses, asked for the directory, opened it at Ad-Au, Mont Roux, lit upon ‘Addor, Yolande, Mlle secrét., rue des Délices, 6,’ and with American presence of mind had his bouquet sent there.
People were already hurrying home from work. Mademoiselle Addor, in a sweat-stained frock, was climbing the stairs. The streets had been considerably quieter in the sourdine Past. The old Morris pillar, upon which the present Queen of Portugal figured once as an actress, no longer stood at the corner of Chemin de Mustrux (old corruption of the town’s name). Must Trucks roar through Must Rux? (Part Four)
In the Hollywood film version of Four Sistsrs (as Chekhov's play The Three Sisters, 1901, is known on Antiterra) Lenore Colline played Irina (the youngest sister):
The beginning of Ada’s limelife in 1891 happened to coincide with the end of her mother’s twenty-five-year-long career. What is more, both appeared in Chekhov’s Four Sisters. Ada played Irina on the modest stage of the Yakima Academy of Drama in a somewhat abridged version which, for example, kept only the references to Sister Varvara, the garrulous originalka (‘odd female’ — as Marsha calls her) but eliminated her actual scenes, so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters, as indeed it appeared in the wittier of the local notices. It was the (somewhat expanded) part of the nun that Marina acted in an elaborate film version of the play; and the picture and she received a goodly amount of undeserved praise.
‘Ever since I planned to go on the stage,’ said Ada (we are using her notes), ‘I was haunted by Marina’s mediocrity, au dire de la critique, which either ignored her or lumped her in the common grave with other "adequate sustainers"; or, if the role had sufficient magnitude, the gamut went from "wooden " to "sensitive" (the highest compliment her accomplishments had ever received). And here she was, at the most delicate moment of my career, multiplying and sending out to friends and foes such exasperating comments as "Durmanova is superb as the neurotic nun, having transferred an essentially static and episodical part into et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
‘Of course, the cinema has no language problems,’ continued Ada (while Van swallowed, rather than stifled, a yawn). ‘Marina and three of the men did not need the excellent dubbing which the other members of the cast, who lacked the lingo, were provided with; but our wretched Yakima production could rely on only two Russians, Stan’s protégé Altshuler in the role of Baron Nikolay Lvovich Tuzenbach-Krone-Altschauer, and myself as Irina, la pauvre et noble enfant, who is a telegraph operator in one act, a town-council employee in another, and a schoolteacher in the end. All the rest had a macedoine of accents — English, French, Italian — by the way what’s the Italian for "window"?’
‘Finestra, sestra,’ said Van, mimicking a mad prompter.
‘Irina (sobbing): "Where, where has it all gone? Oh, dear, oh, dear! All is forgotten, forgotten, muddled up in my head — I don’t remember the Italian for ‘ceiling’ or, say, ‘window.’"’
‘No, "window" comes first in that speech,’ said Van, ‘because she looks around, and then up; in the natural movement of thought.’
‘Yes, of course: still wrestling with "window," she looks up and is confronted by the equally enigmatic "ceiling." In fact, I’m sure I played it your psychological way, but what does it matter, what did it matter? — the performance was perfectly odious, my baron kept fluffing every other line — but Marina, Marina was marvelous in her world of shadows! "Ten years and one have gone by-abye since I left Moscow"’ — (Ada, now playing Varvara, copied the nun’s ‘singsongy devotional tone’ (pevuchiy ton bogomolki, as indicated by Chekhov and as rendered so irritatingly well by Marina). ‘"Nowadays, Old Basmannaya Street, where you (turning to Irina) were born a score of yearkins (godkov) ago, is Busman Road, lined on both sides with workshops and garages (Irina tries to control her tears). Why, then, should you want to go back, Arinushka? (Irina sobs in reply)." Naturally, as would-every fine player, mother improvised quite a bit, bless her soul. And moreover her voice — in young tuneful Russian! — is substituted for Lenore’s corny brogue.’
Van had seen the picture and had liked it. An Irish girl, the infinitely graceful and melancholy Lenore Colline —
Oh! qui me rendra ma colline
Et le grand chêne and my colleen!
— harrowingly resembled Ada Ardis as photographed with her mother in Belladonna, a movie magazine which Greg Erminin had sent him, thinking it would delight him to see aunt and cousin, together, on a California patio just before the film was released. Varvara, the late General Sergey Prozorov’s eldest daughter, comes in Act One from her remote nunnery, Tsitsikar Convent, to Perm (also called Permwail), in the backwoods of Akimsk Bay, North Canady, to have tea with Olga, Marsha, and Irina on the latter’s name day. Much to the nun’s dismay, her three sisters dream only of one thing — leaving cool, damp, mosquito-infested but otherwise nice and peaceful ‘Permanent’ as Irina mockingly dubs it, for high life in remote and sinful Moscow, Id., the former capital of Estotiland. In the first edition of his play, which never quite manages to heave the soft sigh of a masterpiece, Tchechoff (as he spelled his name when living that year at the execrable Pension Russe, 9, rue Gounod, Nice) crammed into the two pages of a ludicrous expository scene all the information he wished to get rid of, great lumps of recollections and calendar dates — an impossible burden to place on the fragile shoulders of three unhappy Estotiwomen. Later he redistributed that information through a considerably longer scene in which the arrival of the monashka Varvara provides all the speeches needed to satisfy the restless curiosity of the audience. This was a neat stroke of stagecraft, but unfortunately (as so often occurs in the case of characters brought in for disingenuous purposes) the nun stayed on, and not until the third, penultimate, act was the author able to bundle her off, back to her convent.
‘I assume,’ said Van (knowing his girl), ‘that you did not want any tips from Marina for your Irina?’
‘It would have only resulted in a row. I always resented her suggestions because they were made in a sarcastic, insulting manner. I’ve heard mother birds going into neurotic paroxysms of fury and mockery when their poor little tailless ones (bezkhvostïe bednyachkí) were slow in learning to fly. I’ve had enough of that. By the way, here’s the program of my flop.’
Van glanced through the list of players and D.P.’s and noticed two amusing details: the role of Fedotik, an artillery officer (whose comedy organ consists of a constantly clicking camera)’, had been assigned to a ‘Kim (short for Yakim) Eskimossoff’ and somebody called ‘John Starling’ had been cast as Skvortsov (a sekundant in the rather amateurish duel of the last act) whose name comes from skvorets, starling. When he communicated the latter observation to Ada, she blushed as was her Old World wont.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he was quite a lovely lad and I sort of flirted with him, but the strain and the split were too much for him — he had been, since pubescence, the puerulus of a fat ballet master, Dangleleaf, and he finally committed suicide. You see ("the blush now replaced by a matovaya pallor") I’m not hiding one stain of what rhymes with Perm.’
‘I see. And Yakim —’
‘Oh, he was nothing.’
‘No, I mean, Yakim, at least, did not, as his rhymesake did, take a picture of your brother embracing his girl. Played by Dawn de Laire.’
‘I’m not sure. I seem to recall that our director did not mind some comic relief.’
‘Dawn en robe rose et verte, at the end of Act One.’
‘I think there was a click in the wings and some healthy mirth in the house. All poor Starling had to do in the play was to hollo off stage from a rowboat on the Kama River to give the signal for my fiancé to come to the dueling ground.’
But let us shift to the didactic metaphorism of Chekhov’s friend, Count Tolstoy.
We all know those old wardrobes in old hotels in the Old World subalpine zone. At first one opens them with the utmost care, very slowly, in the vain hope of hushing the excruciating creak, the growing groan that the door emits midway. Before long one discovers, however, that if it is opened or closed with celerity, in one resolute sweep, the hellish hinge is taken by surprise, and triumphant silence achieved. Van and Ada, for all the exquisite and powerful bliss that engulfed and repleted them (and we do not mean here the rose sore of Eros alone), knew that certain memories had to be left closed, lest they wrench every nerve of the soul with their monstrous moan. But if the operation is performed swiftly, if indelible evils are mentioned between two quick quips, there is a chance that the anesthetic of life itself may allay unforgettable agony in the process of swinging its door.
Now and then she poked fun at his sexual peccadilloes, though generally she tended to ignore them as if demanding, by tacit implication, a similar kind of leniency in regard to her frailty. He was more inquisitive than she but hardly managed to learn more from her lips than he had from her letters. To her past admirers Ada attributed all the features and faults we have already been informed of: incompetence of performance, inanity and nonentity, and to her own self nothing beyond easy feminine compassion and such considerations of hygiene and sanity as hurt Van more than would a defiant avowal of passionate betrayal. Ada had made up her mind to transcend his and her sensual sins: the adjective being a near synonym of ‘senseless’ and ‘soulless’; therefore not represented in the ineffable hereafter that both our young people mutely and shyly believed in. Van endeavored to follow the same line of logic but could not forget the shame and the agony even while reaching heights of happiness he had not known at his brightest hour before his darkest one in the past. (2.9)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): au dire etc.: according to the reviewers.
finestra, sestra: Ital., window, sister.
Arinushka: Russ., folksy diminutive of ‘Irina’.
oh qui me rendra etc.: Oh, who’ll give me back
my hill and the big oak.
sekundant: Russ., second.
puerulus: Lat., little lad.
matovaya: Russ., dull-toned.
en robe etc.: in a pink and green dress.
At the beginning of Ada Van turns the first sentence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1875-77) inside out:
‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858).
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. ‘Mount Tabor’ and ‘Pontius’ allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.
In his book Tolstoy and Dostoevski (1902) Merezhkovski several times quotes his wife's poem Electricity. The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on January 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. January 3 is Lucette's birthday:
According to the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed), and that had survived with other old papers in the cockloft of Ardis Hall, the Veen-Durmanov wedding took place on St Adelaida’s Day, 1871. Twelve years and some eight months later, two naked children, one dark-haired and tanned, the other dark-haired and milk-white, bending in a shaft of hot sunlight that slanted through the dormer window under which the dusty cartons stood, happened to collate that date (December 16, 1871) with another (August 16, same year) anachronistically scrawled in Marina’s hand across the corner of a professional photograph (in a raspberry-plush frame on her husband’s kneehole library table) identical in every detail — including the commonplace sweep of a bride’s ectoplasmic veil, partly blown by a parvis breeze athwart the groom’s trousers — to the newspaper reproduction. A girl was born on July 21, 1872, at Ardis, her putative father’s seat in Ladore County, and for some obscure mnemonic reason was registered as Adelaida. Another daughter, this time Dan’s very own, followed on January 3, 1876. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Goodnight Kids: their names are borrowed, with distortions, from a comic strip for French-speaking children.
Russian for "dog" is sobaka. Esenin is the author of Sobake Kachalova ("To Kachalov's Dog," 1925). In a conversation with Van in her bedroom Marina mentions Kachalov (the stage name of Vadim Shverubovich, 1875-1948, a leading actor of the Moscow Art Theater):
Naked-faced, dull-haired, wrapped up in her oldest kimono (her Pedro had suddenly left for Rio), Marina reclined on her mahogany bed under a golden-yellow quilt, drinking tea with mare’s milk, one of her fads.
‘Sit down, have a spot of chayku,’ she said. ‘The cow is in the smaller jug, I think. Yes, it is.’ And when Van, having kissed her freckled hand, lowered himself on the ivanilich (a kind of sighing old hassock upholstered in leather): ‘Van, dear, I wish to say something to you, because I know I shall never have to repeat it again. Belle, with her usual flair for the right phrase, has cited to me the cousinage-dangereux-voisinage adage — I mean "adage," I always fluff that word — and complained qu’on s’embrassait dans tous les coins. Is that true?’
Van’s mind flashed in advance of his speech. It was, Marina, a fantastic exaggeration. The crazy governess had observed it once when he carried Ada across a brook and kissed her because she had hurt her toe. I’m the well-known beggar in the saddest of all stories.
‘Erunda (nonsense),’ said Van. ‘She once saw me carrying Ada across the brook and misconstrued our stumbling huddle (spotïkayushcheesya sliyanie).’
‘I do not mean Ada, silly,’ said Marina with a slight snort, as she fussed over the teapot. ‘Azov, a Russian humorist, derives erunda from the German hier und da, which is neither here nor there. Ada is a big girl, and big girls, alas, have their own worries. Mlle Larivière meant Lucette, of course. Van, those soft games must stop. Lucette is twelve, and naive, and I know it’s all clean fun, yet (odnako) one can never behave too delikatno in regard to a budding little woman. A propos de coins: in Griboedov’s Gore ot uma, "How stupid to be so clever," a play in verse, written, I think, in Pushkin’s time, the hero reminds Sophie of their childhood games, and says:
How oft we sat together in a corner
And what harm might there be in that?
but in Russian it is a little ambiguous, have another spot, Van?’ (he shook his head, simultaneously lifting his hand, like his father), ‘because, you see, — no, there is none left anyway — the second line, i kazhetsya chto v etom, can be also construed as "And in that one, meseems," pointing with his finger at a corner of the room. Imagine — when I was rehearsing that scene with Kachalov at the Seagull Theater, in Yukonsk, Stanislavski, Konstantin Sergeevich, actually wanted him to make that cosy little gesture (uyutnen’kiy zhest).’
‘How very amusing,’ said Van.
The dog came in, turned up a brimming brown eye Vanward, toddled up to the window, looked at the rain like a little person, and returned to his filthy cushion in the next room.
‘I could never stand that breed,’ remarked Van. ‘Dackelophobia.’
‘But girls — do you like girls, Van, do you have many girls? You are not a pederast, like your poor uncle, are you? We have had some dreadful perverts in our ancestry but — Why do you laugh?’
‘Nothing,’ said Van. ‘I just want to put on record that I adore girls. I had my first one when I was fourteen. Mais qui me rendra mon Hélène? She had raven black hair and a skin like skimmed milk. I had lots of much creamier ones later. I kazhetsya chto v etom?’
‘How strange, how sad! Sad, because I know hardly anything about your life, my darling (moy dushka). The Zemskis were terrible rakes (razvratniki), one of them loved small girls, and another raffolait d’une de ses juments and had her tied up in a special way-don’t ask me how’ (double hand gesture of horrified ignorance ‘— when he dated her in her stall. Kstati (à propos), I could never understand how heredity is transmitted by bachelors, unless genes can jump like chess knights. I almost beat you, last time we played, we must play again, not today, though — I’m too sad today. I would have liked so much to know everything, everything, about you, but now it’s too late. Recollections are always a little "stylized" (stilizovanï), as your father used to say, an irrisistible and hateful man, and now, even if you showed me your old diaries, I could no longer whip up any real emotional reaction to them, though all actresses can shed tears, as I’m doing now. 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). I’m spouting drivel. Forgive me these idiotic tears... Tell me, is there anything I could do for you? Do think up something! Would you like a beautiful, practically new Peruvian scarf, which he left behind, that crazy boy? No? It’s not your style? Now go. And remember — not a word to poor Mlle Larivière, who means well!’ (1.37)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): chayku: Russ., tea (diminutive).
Ivanilich: a pouf plays a marvelous part in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where it sighs deeply under a friend of the widow’s.
cousinage: cousinhood is dangerous neighborhood.
on s’embrassait: kissing went on in every corner.
erunda: Russ., nonsense.
hier und da: Germ., here and there.
raffolait etc.: was crazy about one of his mares.
The phrase k chertyam sobach'im (to the devils) is repeated in Ada three times:
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether. (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.
my lad, my pretty, etc: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.
ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’
Of course, of course, because that was the first time, Ada recalled, she had glimpsed him. In his little white sailor suit and blue sailor cap. (Un régulier angelochek, commented Van in the Raduga jargon.) He was eight, she was six. Uncle Dan had unexpectedly expressed the desire to revisit the old estate. At the last moment Marina had said she’d come too, despite Dan’s protests, and had lifted little Ada, hopla, with her hoop, into the calèche. They took, she imagined, the train from Ladoga to Raduga, for she remembered the way the station man with the whistle around his neck went along the platform, past the coaches of the stopped local, banging shut door after door, all six doors of every carriage, each of which consisted of six one-window carrosses of pumpkin origin, fused together. It was, Van suggested, a ‘tower in the mist’ (as she called any good recollection), and then a conductor walked on the running board of every coach with the train also running and opened doors all over again to give, punch, collect tickets, and lick his thumb, and change money, a hell of a job, but another ‘mauve tower.’ Did they hire a motor landaulet to Radugalet? Ten miles, she guessed. Ten versts, said Van. She stood corrected. He was out, he imagined, na progulke (promenading) in the gloomy firwood with Aksakov, his tutor, and Bagrov’s grandson, a neighbor’s boy, whom he teased and pinched and made horrible fun of, a nice quiet little fellow who quietly massacred moles and anything else with fur on, probably pathological. However, when they arrived, it became instantly clear that Demon had not expected ladies. He was on the terrace drinking goldwine (sweet whisky) with an orphan he had adopted, he said, a lovely Irish wild rose in whom Marina at once recognized an impudent scullery maid who had briefly worked at Ardis Hall, and had been ravished by an unknown gentleman — who was now well-known. In those days Uncle Dan wore a monocle in gay-dog copy of his cousin, and this he screwed in to view Rose, whom perhaps he had also been promised (here Van interrupted his interlocutor telling her to mind her vocabulary). The party was a disaster. The orphan languidly took off her pearl earrings for Marina’s appraisal. Grandpa Bagrov hobbled in from a nap in the boudoir and mistook Marina for a grande cocotte as the enraged lady conjectured later when she had a chance to get at poor Dan. Instead of staying for the night, Marina stalked off and called Ada who, having been told to ‘play in the garden,’ was mumbling and numbering in raw-flesh red the white trunks of a row of young birches with Rose’s purloined lipstick in the preamble to a game she now could not remember — what a pity, said Van — when her mother swept her back straight to Ardis in the same taxi leaving Dan — to his devices and vices, inserted Van — and arriving home at sunrise. But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach’im, to hell’s hounds — and it did remind one of Rose’s terrier that had kept trying to hug Dan’s leg) the charming glimpse was granted her of tiny Van, with another sweet boy, and blond-bearded, white-bloused Aksakov, walking up to the house, and, oh yes, she had forgotten her hoop — no, it was still in the taxi. But, personally, Van had not the slightest recollection of that visit or indeed of that particular summer, because his father’s life, anyway, was a rose garden all the time, and he had been caressed by ungloved lovely hands more than once himself, which did not interest Ada. (1.24)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Bagrov’s grandson: allusion to Childhood Years of Bagrov’s Grandson by the minor writer Sergey Aksakov (A.D. 1791-1859).
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. (2.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Bozhe moy: Russ., good Heavens.
In her memoir essay on Maximilian Voloshin, Zhivoe o zhivom ("A Living Word about a Living Man," 1932), Marina Tsvetaev (1892-1941, a poet who, like Esenin, hanged herself) uses the phrase au beau milieu (right in the middle) as applied to Victor Hugo's poem Napoléon II (1832):
И внезапно au beau milieu Victor Hugo Наполеон уже не вкрадчиво, а срочно: А нельзя ли будет пойти куда-нибудь в другое место? Можно, конечно, вниз тогда, но там семь градусов и больше не бывает.
Sem' gradusov (seven degrees) bring to mind Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962). Shade is the author of "The Nature of Electricity," a poem quoted by Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in his Commentary to Shade's poem:
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
Describing Ada's dramatic career, Van mentions the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly:
Next day, in their little drawing room, with its black divan, yellow cushions, and draftproof bay whose new window seemed to magnify the slow steady straight-falling snowflakes (coincidentally stylized on the cover of the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly which lay on the window ledge), Ada discussed her ‘dramatic career.’ The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor). For him the written word existed only in its abstract purity, in its unrepeatable appeal to an equally ideal mind. It belonged solely to its creator and could not be spoken or enacted by a mime (as Ada insisted) without letting the deadly stab of another’s mind destroy the artist in the very lair of his art. A written play was intrinsically superior to the best performance of it, even if directed by the author himself. Otherwise, Van agreed with Ada that the talking screen was certainly preferable to the live theater for the simple reason that with the former a director could attain, and maintain, his own standards of perfection throughout an unlimited number of performances. (2.9)