In VN’s novel Ada (1969) poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina) imagines that she can understand the language of her namesake, water:
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.
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!). (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.’
In Knyazhna Mery (Princess Mary), the fourth novella of Lermontov's novel Geroy nashego vremeni ("A Hero of Our Time," 1840), Pechorin kills Grushnitski in a pistol duel and tells Dr Werner (who is Russian, despite his German name): "Finita la commedia!":
- Грушницкий! - сказал я, - еще есть время; откажись от своей клеветы, и я тебе прощу все. Тебе не удалось меня подурачить, и мое самолюбие удовлетворено; - вспомни - мы были когда-то друзьями...
Лицо у него вспыхнуло, глаза засверкали.
- Стреляйте! - отвечал он, - я себя презираю, а вас ненавижу. Если вы меня не убьете, я вас зарежу ночью из-за угла. Нам на земле вдвоем нет места...
Я выстрелил...
Когда дым рассеялся, Грушницкого на площадке не было. Только прах легким столбом еще вился на краю обрыва.
Все в один голос вскрикнули.
- Finita la comedia! - сказал я доктору.
Он не отвечал и с ужасом отвернулся.
Я пожал плечами и раскланялся с секундантами Грушницкого.
“Grushnitski!” I said. “There is still time: recant your slander, and I will forgive you everything. You have not succeeded in making a fool of me; my self-esteem is satisfied. Remember—we were once friends”...
His face flamed, his eyes flashed.
“Fire!” he answered. “I despise myself and I hate you. If you do not kill me I will lie in wait for you some night and cut your throat. There is not room on the earth for both of us”...
I fired.
When the smoke had cleared away, Grushnitski was not to be seen on the ledge. Only a slender column of dust was still eddying at the edge of the precipice.
There was a simultaneous cry from the rest.
“Finita la commedia!” I said to the doctor.
He made no answer, and turned away with horror.
I shrugged my shoulders and bowed to Grushnitski’s seconds.
Describing poor Aqua's torments, Van mentions Palermontovia (a country that blends Palermo, the city in and capital of Sicily, with Lermontov):
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)
An independent inferno (as Van calls Tartary, a country that occupies on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra, the territory of Soviet Russia) makes of think of the Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy. The title of Dante's comedy brings to mind all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world:
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.
Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): entendons-nous: let’s have it clear (Fr.).
Aqua believed that, after her death, she would fly to Terra on libellula long wings. Libellula is a genus of dragonflies, called chasers (in English) or skimmers (in American), in the family Libellulidae. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) published his early short stories in Strekoza ("The Dragonfly," a satirical and humorous weekly magazine) under the penname Antosha Chekhonte. In his essay O Chekhove ("On Chekhov," 1929) Hodasevich contrasts Chekhov (the writer who admired Lermontov and dreamt of writing a second Taman') with Derzhavin and says that Chekhov, apparently, does not believe in the immortality of soul:
Хворый Чехов не любит "необычайного"; он весь обычаен, он совсем не хочет парить, а, напротив, любовно и прочно привязан к земле, ко всему простейшему, самому будничному; и в бессмертие души он, по-видимому, не верит. Чеховская чайка не стремится ввысь, как державинский лебедь; она стелется над водой и льнет к берегу.
In Chekhov’s play Dyadya Vanya (“Uncle Vanya,” 1898) Astrov, as he parts with Elena Andreevna, says “Finita la comedia” and then repeats “Finita:”
Елена Андреевна. Какой вы смешной… Я сердита на вас, но все же… буду вспоминать о вас с удовольствием. Вы интересный, оригинальный человек. Больше мы с вами уже никогда не увидимся, а потому — зачем скрывать? Я даже увлеклась вами немножко. Ну, давайте пожмем друг другу руки и разойдемся друзьями. Не поминайте лихом.
Астров (пожал руку). Да, уезжайте… (В раздумье.) Как будто бы вы и хороший, душевный человек, но как будто бы и что-то странное во всем вашем существе. Вот вы приехали сюда с мужем, и все, которые здесь работали, копошились, создавали что-то, должны были побросать свои дела и все лето заниматься только подагрой вашего мужа и вами. Оба — он и вы — заразили всех нас вашею праздностью. Я увлекся, целый месяц ничего не делал, а в это время люди болели, в лесах моих, лесных порослях, мужики пасли свой скот… Итак, куда бы ни ступили вы и ваш муж, всюду вы вносите разрушение… Я шучу, конечно, но все же… странно, и я убежден, что если бы вы остались, то опустошение произошло бы громадное. И я бы погиб, да и вам бы… не сдобровать. Ну, уезжайте. Finita la comedia!
Елена Андреевна (берет с его стола карандаш и быстро прячет). Этот карандаш я беру себе на память.
Астров. Как-то странно… Были знакомы и вдруг почему-то… никогда уже больше не увидимся. Так и всё на свете… Пока здесь никого нет, пока дядя Ваня не вошел с букетом, позвольте мне… поцеловать вас… На прощанье… Да? (Целует ее в щеку.) Ну, вот… и прекрасно.
Елена Андреевна. Желаю вам всего хорошего. (Оглянувшись.) Куда ни шло, раз в жизни! (Обнимает его порывисто, и оба тотчас же быстро отходят друг от друга.) Надо уезжать.
Астров. Уезжайте поскорее. Если лошади поданы, то отправляйтесь.
Елена Андреевна. Сюда идут, кажется.
Оба прислушиваются.
Астров. Finita!
ELENA ANDREEVNA How amusing you are. I am angry with you, but all the same... I’ll remember you with pleasure. You’re an interesting, original man. We’ll never meet each other again, and so – why should I hide it? I was carried away by you a little bit. Well, let’s shake each other’s hands and part friends. Remember the good things.
ASTROV (Shakes her hand.) Yes, you must go... (Thoughtfully.) It’s as if you’re a good, sensitive person, but also as if there’s something strange in your entire being. You came here with your husband and everyone who worked here, beavered away, created something, they all had to throw aside their work and occupy themselves the whole summer with your husband’s gout and you. Both of you, he and you, infected us with your idleness. I was carried away. For a whole month I did nothing, and in the meantime people fell ill, In my woods the peasants set their cattle to graze on the young saplings... It seems as if wherever you and your husband set foot you bring ruin... I am joking of course, but all the same... It’s strange, but I’m convinced that if you stayed here there would be widespread devastation. I myself would perish, and you wouldn’t escape either. Well, you must set off. Finita la comedia.
ELENA ANDREEVNA (Takes a pencil from the table and quickly hides it.) I’ll take this pencil as a keepsake.
ASTROV It’s strange... We got to know each other and suddenly for some reason... we won’t ever meet again. That’s how it is on this earth... While nobody’s here, while Uncle Vanya does not come in with his bouquet, let me... have one kiss... a farewell... Yes? (He kisses her on the cheek.) Well, there you are... Excellent.
ELENA ANDREEVNA I wish you all the best. (She looks round.) Well, whatever. For once in my life! (She quickly embraces and kisses him and the two then rapidly part from each other.) I must be going.
ASTROV Leave quickly. If the horses are ready then set off straight away.
ELENA ANDREEVNA It seems they’re coming this way.
(Bothe of them listen.)
ASTROV Finita!
Chekhov’s story Zhenshchina s tochki zreniya p’yanitsy (“Woman as Seen by a Drunkard,” 1885), in which girls under sixteen are compared to aqua distillatae (distilled water), was signed Brat moego brata (My brother’s brother). Aqua’s last note was signed “My sister’s sister who teper’ iz ada (now is out of hell):”
Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.
[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’
iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): aujourd’hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).
Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.
La Princesse Lointaine (1895) is a play by Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Describing his novel Letters from Terra, Van mentions all that Cyraniana:
Ada’s letters breathed, writhed, lived; Van’s Letters from Terra, ‘a philosophical novel,’ showed no sign of life whatsoever.
(I disagree, it’s a nice, nice little book! Ada’s note.)
He had written it involuntarily, so to speak, not caring a dry fig for literary fame. Neither did pseudonymity tickle him in reverse — as it did when he danced on his hands. Though ‘Van Veen’s vanity’ often cropped up in the drawing-room prattle among fan-wafting ladies, this time his long blue pride feathers remained folded. What, then, moved him to contrive a romance around a subject that had been worried to extinction in all kinds of ‘Star Rats,’ and ‘Space Aces’? We — whoever ‘we’ are — might define the compulsion as a pleasurable urge to express through verbal imagery a compendium of certain inexplicably correlated vagaries observed by him in mental patients, on and off, since his first year at Chose. Van had a passion for the insane as some have for arachnids or orchids.
There were good reasons to disregard the technological details involved in delineating intercommunication between Terra the Fair and our terrible Antiterra. His knowledge of physics, mechanicalism and that sort of stuff had remained limited to the scratch of a prep-school blackboard. He consoled himself with the thought that no censor in America or Great Britain would pass the slightest reference to ‘magnetic’ gewgaws. Quietly, he borrowed what his greatest forerunners (Counterstone, for example) had imagined in the way of a manned capsule’s propulsion, including the clever idea of an initial speed of a few thousand miles per hour increasing, under the influence of a Counterstonian type of intermediate environment between sibling galaxies, to several trillions of light-years per second, before dwindling harmlessly to a parachute’s indolent descent. Elaborating anew, in irrational fabrications, all that Cyraniana and ‘physics fiction’ would have been not only a bore but an absurdity, for nobody knew how far Terra, or other innumerable planets with cottages and cows, might be situated in outer or inner space: ‘inner,’ because why not assume their microcosmic presence in the golden globules ascending quick-quick in this flute of Moët or in the corpuscles of my, Van Veen’s —
(or my, Ada Veen’s)
— bloodstream, or in the pus of a Mr Nekto’s ripe boil newly lanced in Nektor or Neckton. Moreover, although reference works existed on library shelves in available, and redundant, profusion, no direct access could be obtained to the banned, or burned, books of the three cosmologists, Xertigny, Yates and Zotov (pen names), who had recklessly started the whole business half a century earlier, causing, and endorsing, panic, demency and execrable romanchiks. All three scientists had vanished now: X had committed suicide; Y had been kidnapped by a laundryman and transported to Tartary; and Z, a ruddy, white-whiskered old sport, was driving his Yakima jailers crazy by means of incomprehensible crepitations, ceaseless invention of invisible inks, chameleonizations, nerve signals, spirals of out-going lights and feats of ventriloquism that imitated pistol shots and sirens.
Poor Van! In his struggle to keep the writer of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality. This Theresa maddened with her messages a scientist on our easily maddened planet; his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua’s last doctor. When Leymanski’s obsession turned into love, and one’s sympathy got focused on his enchanting, melancholy, betrayed wife (née Antilia Glems), our author found himself confronted with the distressful task of now stamping out in Antilia, a born brunette, all traces of Ada, thus reducing yet another character to a dummy with bleached hair.
After beaming to Sig a dozen communications from her planet, Theresa flies over to him, and he, in his laboratory, has to place her on a slide under a powerful microscope in order to make out the tiny, though otherwise perfect, shape of his minikin sweetheart, a graceful microorganism extending transparent appendages toward his huge humid eye. Alas, the testibulus (test tube — never to be confused with testiculus, orchid), with Theresa swimming inside like a micromermaid, is ‘accidentally’ thrown away by Professor Leyman’s (he had trimmed his name by that time) assistant, Flora, initially an ivory-pale, dark-haired funest beauty, whom the author transformed just in time into a third bromidic dummy with a dun bun.
(Antilia later regained her husband, and Flora was weeded out. Ada’s addendum.)
On Terra, Theresa had been a Roving Reporter for an American magazine, thus giving Van the opportunity to describe the sibling planet’s political aspect. This aspect gave him the least trouble, presenting as it did a mosaic of painstakingly collated notes from his own reports on the ‘transcendental delirium’ of his patients. Its acoustics were poor, proper names often came out garbled, a chaotic calendar messed up the order of events but, on the whole, the colored dots did form a geomantic picture of sorts. As earlier experimentators had conjectured, our annals lagged by about half a century behind Terra’s along the bridges of time, but overtook some of its underwater currents. At the moment of our sorry story, the king of Terra’s England, yet another George (there had been, apparently, at least half-a-dozen bearing that name before him) ruled, or had just ceased to rule, over an empire that was somewhat patchier (with alien blanks and blots between the British Islands and South Africa) than the solidly conglomerated one on our Antiterra. Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Cyraniana: allusion to Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique des Etats de la Lune.
Nekto: Russ., quidam.
romanchik: Russ., novelette.
Sig Leymanski: anagram of the name of a waggish British novelist keenly interested in physics fiction.
In his essay M. Yu. Lermontov as a Poet of Superhumanity (1911) Merezhkovski says that Pushkin is the diurnal and Lermontov the nocturnal luminary (i.e., the moon) of Russian poetry:
Пушкин -- дневное, Лермонтов -- ночное светило русской поэзии. Вся она между ними колеблется, как между двумя полюсами -- созерцанием и действием.