Describing Kim Beauharnais’s album, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the kimera (chimera, camera):
A formal photograph, on a separate page: Adochka, pretty and impure in her flimsy, and Vanichka in gray-flannel suit, with slant-striped school tie, facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side, at attention, he with the shadow of a forced grin, she, expressionless. Both recalled the time (between the first tiny cross and a whole graveyard of kisses) and the occasion: it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi. (2.7)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): bayronka: from Bayron, Russ., Byron.
Chacun sa chimère ("Every Man His Chimera") is a poem in prose (included in Le Spleen de Paris, 1869, and translated into Russian by Fyodor Sologub) by Charles Baudelaire:
Sous un grand ciel gris, dans une grande plaine poudreuse, sans chemins, sans gazon, sans un chardon, sans une ortie, je rencontrai plusieurs hommes qui marchaient courbés.
Chacun d’eux portait sur son dos une énorme Chimère, aussi lourde qu’un sac de farine ou de charbon, ou le fourniment d’un fantassin romain.
Mais la monstrueuse bête n’était pas un poids inerte ; au contraire, elle enveloppait et opprimait l’homme de ses muscles élastiques et puissants ; elle s’agrafait avec ses deux vastes griffes à la poitrine de sa monture ; et sa tête fabuleuse surmontait le front de l’homme, comme un de ces casques horribles par lesquels les anciens guerriers espéraient ajouter à la terreur de l’ennemi.
Je questionnai l’un de ces hommes, et je lui demandai où ils allaient ainsi. Il me répondit qu’il n’en savait rien, ni lui, ni les autres ; mais qu’évidemment ils allaient quelque part, puisqu’ils étaient poussés par un invincible besoin de marcher.
Chose curieuse à noter : aucun de ces voyageurs n’avait l’air irrité contre la bête féroce suspendue à son cou et collée à son dos ; on eût dit qu’il la considérait comme faisant partie de lui-même. Tous ces visages fatigués et sérieux ne témoignaient d’aucun désespoir ; sous la coupole spleenétique du ciel, les pieds plongés dans la poussière d’un sol aussi désolé que ce ciel, ils cheminaient avec la physionomie résignée de ceux qui sont condamnés à espérer toujours.
Et le cortége passa à côté de moi et s’enfonça dans l’atmosphère de l’horizon, à l’endroit où la surface arrondie de la planète se dérobe à la curiosité du regard humain.
Et pendant quelques instants je m’obstinai à vouloir comprendre ce mystère ; mais bientôt l’irrésistible Indifférence s’abattit sur moi, et j’en fus plus lourdement accablé qu’ils ne l’étaient eux-mêmes par leurs écrasantes Chimères.
Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty plain devoid of grass, and where not even a nettle or a thistle was to be seen, I met several men who walked bowed down to the ground.
Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chimera as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or as the equipment of a Roman foot-soldier.
But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, rather she enveloped and oppressed the men with her powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed with her two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her fabulous head reposed upon the brow of the man like one of those horrible casques by which ancient warriors hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy.
I questioned one of the men, asking him why they went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he nor the others, but that evidently they went somewhere, since they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to walk.
Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be irritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck and cleaving to his back: one had said that he considered it as a part of himself. These grave and weary faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of the heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an earth as desolate as the sky, they journeyed onwards with the resigned faces of men condemned to hope for ever. So the train passed me and faded into the atmosphere of the horizon at the place where the planet unveils herself to the curiosity of the human eye.
During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to comprehend this mystery; but irresistible Indifference soon threw herself upon me, nor was I more heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing Chimeras.
Baudelaire is the author of Le Goût du néant (“The Taste for Nothingness”), a sonnet with a coda. Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van mentions Richard Leonard Churchill’s novel about a certain Crimean Khan, 'A Great Good Man,' in which the author twice mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout):
Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it,’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion.
Marina helped herself to an Albany from a crystal box of Turkish cigarettes tipped with red rose petal and passed the box on to Demon. Ada, somewhat self-consciously, lit up too.
‘You know quite well,’ said Marina, ‘that your father disapproves of your smoking at table.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ murmured Demon.
‘I had Dan in view,’ explained Marina heavily. ‘He’s very prissy on that score.’
‘Well, and I’m not,’ answered Demon.
Ada and Van could not help laughing. All that was banter — not of a high order, but still banter.
A moment later, however, Van remarked: ‘I think I’ll take an Alibi — I mean an Albany — myself.’
‘Please note, everybody,’ said Ada, ‘how voulu that slip was! I like a smoke when I go mushrooming, but when I’m back, this horrid tease insists I smell of some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the woods.’
‘Well,’ said Demon, ‘Van’s quite right to look after your morals.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
voulu: intentional.
An Alibi mentioned by Van brings to mind a vivisectional alibi provided by the dead boy. On the picture in Marina's bedroom Ivan Durmanov (Marina's and Aqua's elder brother who died young and famous) is clad in bayronka (an open short). At the dinner on the eve of his execution Cincinnatus, the main character in VN's novel Priglashenie na kazn' (Invitation to a Beheading, 1935), and M’sieur Pierre (the executioner) are identically clad in gamletovki (Elsinore jackets):
Но вот хозяин, смуглый старик с эспаньолкой, хлопнул в ладоши, распахнулись двери, и все перешли в столовую. М-сье Пьер и Цинциннат были посажены рядом во главе ослепительного стола, - и, сперва сдержанно, не нарушая приличия, с доброжелательным любопытством, переходившим у некоторых в скрытое умиление, все поглядывали на одинаково, в гамлетовки, одетую чету; затем, по мере того как на губах м-сье Пьер разгоралась улыбка и он начинал говорить, взгляды гостей устремлялись все откровеннее на него и на Цинцинната, который неторопливо, усердно и сосредоточенно, - как будто ища разрешения задачи, - балансировал рыбный нож разными способами, то на солонке, то на сгибе вилки, то прислонял его к хрустальной вазочке с белой розой, отличительно от других украшавший его прибор.
Just then, however, the host, a swarthy old man with a goatee, clapped his hands. The doors were flung open, and everyone moved into the dining room. M’sieur Pierre and Cincinnatus were seated side by side at the head of a dazzling table, and everyone began to glance, with restraint at first, then with benevolent curiosity — which in some began to turn into surreptitious tenderness — at the pair, identically clad in Elsinore jackets; then, as a lambent smile gradually appeared on M’sieur Pierre’s lips and he began to talk, the eyes of the guests turned more and more openly toward him and Cincinnatus who was unhurriedly, diligently and intently — as if seeking the solution to a problem — balancing his fish knife in various ways, now on the salt shaker, now on the incurvation of the fork, now leaning it against t the slender crystal vase with a white rose that distinctly adorned his place. (Chapter XVII)
In a letter of Feb. 18, 1889, to Leontiev-Shcheglov (a fellow writer who nicknamed Chekhov Potyomkin) Chekhov says that he is not Potyomkin, but Cincinnatus:
Голова моя занята мыслями о лете и даче. Денно и нощно мечтаю о хуторе. Я не Потёмкин, а Цинцинат. Лежанье на сене и пойманный на удочку окунь удовлетворяют моё чувство гораздо осязательнее, чем рецензии и аплодирующая галерея. Я, очевидно, урод и плебей.
At the end of his poem O pravitelyakh (“On Rulers,” 1944) VN says that, if his late namesake (V. V. Mayakovski, 1893-1930) were still alive, he would be now finding taut rhymes such as monumentalen and pereperchil:
Покойный мой тёзка,
писавший стихи и в полоску,
и в клетку, на самом восходе
всесоюзно-мещанского класса,
кабы дожил до полдня,
нынче бы рифмы натягивал
на "монументален",
на "переперчил"
и так далее.
If my late namesake,
who used to write verse, in rank
and in file, at the very dawn
of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order,
had lived till its noon
he would be now finding taut rhymes
such as “praline”
or “air chill,”
and others of the same kind.
VN’s footnote: Lines 58–59/“praline” … “air chill.” In the original, monumentalen, meaning “[he is] monumental” rhymes pretty closely with Stalin; and pereperchil, meaning “[he] put in too much pepper,” offers an ingenuous correspondence with the name of the British politician in a slovenly Russian pronunciation (“chair-chill”).
Pereperchil brings to mind Chekhov’s story Peresolil (“Overdoing it,” 1885; literally peresolil means “[he] put in too much salt”). Lev Shestov's essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), has for the epigraph and ends in a line from Baudelaire’s Le Goût du néant:
Résigne-toi, mon cœur; dors ton sommeil de brute
(Resign yourself, my heart; sleep your brutish sleep).