Subject
horses, hats, Vitry, Sig Leymanski,
Ronald Oranger & Violet Knox in Ada
Ronald Oranger & Violet Knox in Ada
From
Date
Body
Describing Victor Vitry’s film version of his novel Letters from Terra, Van
Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) mentions horses who wore hats
because of the hot weather:
Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940
by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed
certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you
remember that horses wore hats ― yes, hats ― when heat waves swept
Manhattan?) and gave the impression ― which physics-fiction literature had
much exploited ― of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time.
Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the
wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers. (5.5)
Horses wearing hats bring to mind Dekol’tirovannaya loshad’ (“The Horse
in a Décolleté Dress,” 1927), Hodasevich’s essay on Mayakovski. In his
essay Hodasevich mentions vitrina nemetskogo magazina (the shop window of a
German shop in Moscow):
"Маяковский -- поэт рабочего класса". Вздо
р. Был и остался поэтом подонков, бездельн
иков, босяков просто и "босяков духовных".
Был таким перед войной, когда восхищал и "
пужал" подонки интеллигенции и буржуазии,
выкрикивая брань и похабщину с эстрады По
литехнического музея. И когда, в начале во
йны, сочинял подписи к немцеедским лубка
м, вроде знаменитого:
С криком: "Дейчланд юбер аллес!" -
Немцы с поля убирались.
И когда, бия себя в грудь, патриотически о
раторствовал у памятника Скобелеву, пере
д генерал-губернаторским домом, там, где т
еперь памятник Октябрю и московский совд
еп! И когда читал кровожадные стихи:
О панталоны венских кокоток
Вытрем наши штыки! --
эту позорную нечаянную пародию на Лермон
това:
Не смеют, что ли, командиры
Чужие изорвать мундиры
О русские штыки?
И певцом погромщиков был он, когда водил о
рду хулиганов героическим приступом брат
ь немецкие магазины. И остался им, когда, п
осле Октября, писал знаменитый марш: "Лево
й, левой!" (музыка А. Лурье).
Пафос погрома и мордобоя -- вот истинный п
афос Маяковского. А на что обрушивается п
огром, ему было и есть всё равно: венская л
и кокотка, витрина ли немецкого магазина
в Москве, схваченный ли за горло буржуй --
только бы тот, кого надо громить.
According to Hodasevich, Mayakovski’s blood-thirsty verses “Let’s wipe
our bayonets on the knickers of Viennese cocottes” is a shameful parody of
the lines in Lermontov’s Borodino: “Daren't the commanders rip foreign
uniforms on Russian bayonets?" In Borodino Lermontov mentions koni, lyudi
(horses, men):
Земля тряслась - как наши груди,
Смешались в кучу кони, люди
As did our chests \xa8C earth's hollows trembled;
The steeds, the men all disassembled.
In the old Russian alphabet the letter L (Lermontov’s initial) was called
lyudi. In his poem Yubileynoe (“The Anniversary Poem,” 1924) Mayakovski
points out that his name begins with an M, says that after his death he and
Pushkin will stand almost beside each other and mentions Nadson and Nekrasov
(the poets who in the alphabet are between Mayakovski and Pushkin):
После смерти
нам
стоять почти что рядом:
вы на Пе,
а я
на эМ.
Кто меж нами?
с кем велите знаться?!
Чересчур
страна моя
поэтами нища.
Между нами
- вот беда -
позатесался Надсон
Мы попросим,
чтоб его
куда-нибудь
на Ща!
А Некрасов
Коля,
сын покойного Алёши,-
он и в карты,
он и в стих,
и так
неплох на вид.
Знаете его?
вот он
мужик хороший.
Этот
нам компания -
пускай стоит.
Nekrasov is the author of Korobeyniki (“The Peddlers,” 1861). The
characters in Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stulyev (“The Twelve
Chairs,” 1928) include Varfolomey Korobeynikov, the compiler of the Mirror
of Life Index. Alfavit \xa8C zerkalo zhizni (the Mirror of Life Index) brings
to mind Flavita, as the Russian Scrabble is called on Antiterra (aka
Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set). Describing Flavita, Van
mentions ‘Madhatters:’
That was why she [Ada] admitted ‘Flavita.’ The name came from alfavit, an
old Russian game of chance and skill, based on the scrambling and
unscrambling of alphabetic letters. It was fashionable throughout Estoty and
Canady around 1790, was revived by the ‘Madhatters’ (as the inhabitants of
New Amsterdam were once called) in the beginning of the nineteenth century,
made a great comeback, after a brief slump, around 1860, and now a century
later seems to be again in vogue, so I am told, under the name of
‘Scrabble,’ invented by some genius quite independently from its original
form or forms. (1.36)
Alfavit is Russian for “alphabet.” Zerkalo (mirror) brings to mind Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872). The
characters in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
include the Hatter who is sometimes called “the Mad Hatter.” At a Mad
Tea-Party the Dormouse (a character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
tells a story about three little sisters who lived at the bottom of a well
and drew everything that begins with an M:
'They were learning to draw,' the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its
eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; 'and they drew all manner of things ―
everything that begins with an M ― '
'Why with an M?' said Alice.
'Why not?' said the March Hare.
Alice was silent.
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a
doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little
shriek, and went on: ' ― that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and
the moon, and memory, and muchness ― you know you say things are "much of a
muchness" ― did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?
In VN’s Russian version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anya v strane
chudes (1923), the sisters drew not memory (in Russian, pamyat’), but mysli
(thoughts):
- Они учились черпать и чертить, - продолжа
л он, зевая и протирая глаза (ему начинало
хотеться спать), - черпали и чертили всяки
е вещи, всё, что начинается с буквы М.
- Отчего именно с М.? - спросила Аня.
- Отчего бы нет? - сказал Мартовский Заяц.
Меж тем Соня закрыл глаза и незаметно зад
ремал; когда же Шляпник его хорошенько ущ
ипнул, он проснулся с тоненьким визгом и с
короговоркой продолжал:
- ...с буквы М., как, например, мышеловки, мес
яц, и мысли, и маловатости... видели ли вы к
огда-нибудь чертёж маловатости?
In a letter of Oct. 4-6, 1888, to Suvorin Chekhov says that he is cross with
Russkaya mysl’ (“Russian Thought,” a literary magazine, 1880-1918) and
with the entire Moscow literature:
Что же касается ?Русской мысли?, то там сид
ят не литераторы, а копчёные сиги, которые
столько же понимают в литературе, как сви
нья в апельсинах. К тому же библиографиче
ский отдел ведёт там дама. Если дикая утк
а, которая летит в поднебесье, может прези
рать свойскую, которая копается в навозе
и в лужах и думает, что это хорошо, то так д
олжны презирать художники и поэты мудрос
ть копчёных сигов... Сердит я на ?Русскую м
ысль? и на всю московскую литературу!
According to Chekhov, the editors of Russkaya mysl’ are kopchyonye sigi
(the smoked whitefish) who have as much taste for literature as a pig has
for oranges. Sigi is plural of sig (whitefish). Sig Leymanski is the main
character in Van’s novel Letters from Terra:
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.) (2.2)
The characters in Dostoevski’s novel Bednye lyudi (“Poor Folk,” 1846),
written in an epistolary form, include Theresa, an old servant woman who
brings Makar Devushkin’s letters to Varenka Dobrosyolov and Varenka’s
letters to Makar. 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 Jan. 3, 1850, in our world. Dostoevski is the author of
Brat’ya Karamazovy (“Brothers Karamazov,” 1880). In Ilf and Petrov’s
novel Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931) Koreyko (a secret Soviet
millionaire) receives a telegram from brothers Karamazov: Gruzite apel’siny
bochkakh (“Load oranges barrels”).
Apel’siny (oranges) in Chekhov’s letter to Suvorin and in the telegram
received by Koreyko bring to mind Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary). In
his letter to Suvorin Chekhov says that artists and poets should despise the
wisdom of smoked whitefish, just as a wild duck that flies high in the sky
despises a domesticated one that rummages in manure and thinks that it is
good. “The Wild Duck” (1884) is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik
Ibsen. According to Theresa (in Vitry’s film version of Van’s novel), on
Terra Norway is an outstanding country:
In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened
herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of
separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive é
motion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian
troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the
Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the
Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while
she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time
earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset,
and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet
another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933,
Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler ― from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came
to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than
the 1914\xa8C1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries
and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having
covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the
prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement,
and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one). (2.
2)
A Norwegian novelist, Siegrid Undset was a favorite writer of Marina
Tsvetaev (“the wife of a double agent and poet of genius,” as VN calls her
in his autobiography Speak, Memory, 1951). In Chapter Fourteen of SM VN
describes his years in Berlin (1922-37) and in Paris (1937-40) and, among
other writers whom he met in exile, mentions Hodasevich:
Vladislav Hodasevich used to complain, in the twenties and thirties, that
young émigré poets had borrowed their art form from him while following
the leading cliques in modish angoisse and soul-reshaping. I developed a
great liking for this bitter man, wrought of irony and metallic-like genius,
whose poetry was as complex a marvel as that of Tyutchev or Blok. He was,
physically, of a sickly aspect, with contemptuous nostrils and beetling
brows, and when I conjure him up in my mind he never rises from the hard
chair on which he sits, his thin legs crossed, his eyes glittering with
malevolence and wit, his long fingers screwing into a holder the half of a
Caporal Vert cigarette. There are few things in modern world poetry
comparable to the poems of his Heavy Lyre, but unfortunately for his fame
the perfect frankness he indulged in when voicing his dislikes made him some
terrible enemies among the most powerful critical coteries. Not all the
mystagogues were Dostoevskian Alyoshas; there were also a few Smerdyakovs in
the group, and Hodasevich’s poetry was played down with the thoroughness of
a revengeful racket. (2)
In his poem Silentium! (1830) Tyutchev says: mysl’ izrechyonnaya est’
lozh’ (a thought once uttered is untrue). In Ada Silentium is Greg
Erminin’s motorcycle. At the family dinner Van tells Demon that he vainly
tried to find a Silentium with a side car:
The roast hazel-hen (or rather its New World representative, locally called
‘mountain grouse’) was accompanied by preserved lingonberries (locally
called ‘mountain cranberries’). An especially succulent morsel of one of
those brown little fowls yielded a globule of birdshot between Demon’s red
tongue and strong canine: ‘La fève de Diane,’ he remarked, placing it
carefully on the edge of his plate. ‘How is the car situation, Van?’
‘Vague. I ordered a Roseley like yours but it won’t be delivered before
Christmas. I tried to find a Silentium with a side car and could not,
because of the war, though what connection exists between wars and
motorcycles is a mystery. But we manage, Ada and I, we manage, we ride, we
bike, we even jikker.’ (1.38)
Alexander Blok is the author of Neznakomka (“Incognita,” 1906), a poem
directly alluded to in Ada (3.3), Dvenadtsat’ (“The Twelve,” 1918) and
Nochnaya Fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906), a poem subtitled “a Dream.”
Nox being Latin for “night,” Blok’s “Night Violet” brings to mind
Violet Knox, Van’s typist who marries Ronald Oranger:
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with
us in 1957. She was (and still is ― ten years later) an enchanting English
blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump
[.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has
been responsible for typing out this memoir ― the solace of what are, no
doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better
sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother’s
children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her
[generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed
silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her
‘Fialochka’ and allowed herself the luxury of admiring ‘little Violet’
‘s cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner,
lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover
of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her
flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated
had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4).
Alyosha Karamazov and Smerdyakov (mentioned by VN in Speak, Memory) are
characters in “Brothers Karamazov.” The Golden Horde that again subjugated
Rus (on Terra as imagined by Vitry) brings to mind the lines in VN’s poem O
pravitelyakh (“On Rulers,” 1944):
Умирает со скуки историк:
за Мамаем всё тот же Мамай.
В самом деле, нельзя же нам с горя
поступить, как чиновный Китай,
кучу лишних веков присчитавший
к истории скромной своей,
от этого, впрочем, не ставшей
ни лучше, ни веселей.
The historian dies of sheer boredom:
On the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
Does our plight really force us to do
what did bureaucratic Cathay
that with heaps of superfluous centuries
augmented her limited history
(which, however, hardly became
either better or merrier)?
VN’s footnotes:
Line 29/Mamay. A particularly evil Tartar prince of the fourteenth century.
Line 35. One recalls Stalin’s hilarious pronouncement: “Life has grown
better, life has grown merrier!”
At the end of “On Rulers” VN mentions his late namesake:
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 footnotes:
Line 52/my late namesake. An allusion to the Christian name and patronymic
of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski (1893\xa8C1930), minor Soviet poet,
endowed with a certain brilliance and bite, but fatally corrupted by the
regime he faithfully served.
Lines 58\xa8C59/“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”).
Describing the family dinner in Ardis the Second, Van mentions Richard
Leonard Churchill’s novel about a certain Crimean Khan, “A Great Good
Man:”
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. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Great good man: a phrase that Winston
Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
Churchill definitely peresolil (“put in too much salt,” as we say of a
person who grossly exaggerated something). Peresolil (“Overdoing it,”
1885) is a story by Chekhov. As to pereperchil (put in too much pepper), it
brings to mind “Pig and Pepper,” a chapter in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. “A Clever Piggy” is an article in the Russian-language
newspaper Golos (Logos) that the male nurse Dorofey reads during Van’s
visit to Rack (who is dying in Ward Five of the Kalugano hospital):
Van drew in his useless weapon. Controlling himself, he thumped it against
the footboard of his wheelchair. Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then
went back to the article that engrossed him ― 'A Clever Piggy (from the
memoirs of an animal trainer),' or else 'The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas
Help Chinese Troops.' A diminutive nurse simultaneously stepped out from
behind the farther screen and disappeared again. (1.42)
Actually, golos means “voice.” A concierge at Van’s hotel compares
Dorothy Vinelander’s voice to a brass trumpet:
Lucien, something of a wit, soon learned to recognize Dorothy’s contralto:
‘La voix cuivrée a téléphoné,’ ‘La Trompette n’était pas contente
ce matin,’ et cetera. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): la voix etc.: the brassy voice telephoned…
the trumpet did not sound pleased this morning.
In “The Twelve Chairs” Ilf and Petrov compare the voice of Vorobyaninov’s
mother-in-law, Mme Petukhov, to that of Richard the Lionheart:
Голос у неё был такой силы и густоты, что е
му позавидовал бы Ричард Львиное Сердце,
от крика которого, как известно, приседал
и кони.
Her voice was so strong and fruity that it might well have been envied by
Richard the Lionheart, at whose shout, as is well known, horses used to
kneel. (chapter I “Bezenchuk and The Nymphs”)
Richard Leonard Churchill (the author of a novel about a certain Crimean
Khan) blends Richard the Lionheart with Winston Churchill.
Dorothy Vinelander reads to her ill brother (Ada’s husband) old issues of
the Golos Feniksa:
Much to Van’s amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress
neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of
the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never
being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in
readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and
suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel
doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his
sister was not allowed to Visit him ‘because of the constant necessity of
routine tests’ ― or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront
disaster in manly solitude.
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Russ., The Phoenix Voice, Russian language
newspaper in Arizona.
Phoenix in Russian spelling, Feniks brings to mind VN’s Russian nom de
plume, Sirin (Phoenix and Sirin are fairy tale birds; in her memoirs Italics
are Mine Nina Berberova compares VN to Phoenix). In Chapter Fourteen of
Speak, Memory VN says that the author that interested him most was Sirin:
But the author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to
my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the
loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first
novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as
strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid
interest on the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties
in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic
structure of society, so the mystagogues of émigré letters deplored his
lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him
was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of
decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when
in the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge
with both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin’s admirers made
much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision,
functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been
raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called
the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirrorlike angles of his
clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of
his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to
“windows giving upon a contiguous world … a rolling corollary, the shadow
of a train of thought.” Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use
a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared,
leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness. (2)
In his review of Van’s Letters from Terra the poet Max Mispel discerned the
influence of Ben Sirine, an obscene ancient Arab:
The only other compliment was paid to poor Voltemand in a little Manhattan
magazine (The Village Eyebrow) by the poet Max Mispel (another botanical
name ― ‘medlar’ in English), member of the German Department at Goluba
University. Herr Mispel, who liked to air his authors, discerned in Letters
from Terra the influence of Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy
tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift
thesialists) as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of
anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, thus transliterated by Captain de Roux,
according to Burton in his adaptation of Nefzawi’s treatise on the best
method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females (The Perfumed Garden,
Panther edition, p. 187, a copy given to ninety-three-year-old Baron Van
Veen by his ribald physician Professor Lagosse). His critique ended as
follows: ‘If Mr Voltemand (or Voltimand or Mandalatov) is a psychiatrist,
as I think he might be, then I pity his patients, while admiring his
talent.’ (2.2)
The names Max Mispel and Mandalatov begin with an M.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) mentions horses who wore hats
because of the hot weather:
Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940
by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed
certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you
remember that horses wore hats ― yes, hats ― when heat waves swept
Manhattan?) and gave the impression ― which physics-fiction literature had
much exploited ― of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time.
Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the
wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers. (5.5)
Horses wearing hats bring to mind Dekol’tirovannaya loshad’ (“The Horse
in a Décolleté Dress,” 1927), Hodasevich’s essay on Mayakovski. In his
essay Hodasevich mentions vitrina nemetskogo magazina (the shop window of a
German shop in Moscow):
"Маяковский -- поэт рабочего класса". Вздо
р. Был и остался поэтом подонков, бездельн
иков, босяков просто и "босяков духовных".
Был таким перед войной, когда восхищал и "
пужал" подонки интеллигенции и буржуазии,
выкрикивая брань и похабщину с эстрады По
литехнического музея. И когда, в начале во
йны, сочинял подписи к немцеедским лубка
м, вроде знаменитого:
С криком: "Дейчланд юбер аллес!" -
Немцы с поля убирались.
И когда, бия себя в грудь, патриотически о
раторствовал у памятника Скобелеву, пере
д генерал-губернаторским домом, там, где т
еперь памятник Октябрю и московский совд
еп! И когда читал кровожадные стихи:
О панталоны венских кокоток
Вытрем наши штыки! --
эту позорную нечаянную пародию на Лермон
това:
Не смеют, что ли, командиры
Чужие изорвать мундиры
О русские штыки?
И певцом погромщиков был он, когда водил о
рду хулиганов героическим приступом брат
ь немецкие магазины. И остался им, когда, п
осле Октября, писал знаменитый марш: "Лево
й, левой!" (музыка А. Лурье).
Пафос погрома и мордобоя -- вот истинный п
афос Маяковского. А на что обрушивается п
огром, ему было и есть всё равно: венская л
и кокотка, витрина ли немецкого магазина
в Москве, схваченный ли за горло буржуй --
только бы тот, кого надо громить.
According to Hodasevich, Mayakovski’s blood-thirsty verses “Let’s wipe
our bayonets on the knickers of Viennese cocottes” is a shameful parody of
the lines in Lermontov’s Borodino: “Daren't the commanders rip foreign
uniforms on Russian bayonets?" In Borodino Lermontov mentions koni, lyudi
(horses, men):
Земля тряслась - как наши груди,
Смешались в кучу кони, люди
As did our chests \xa8C earth's hollows trembled;
The steeds, the men all disassembled.
In the old Russian alphabet the letter L (Lermontov’s initial) was called
lyudi. In his poem Yubileynoe (“The Anniversary Poem,” 1924) Mayakovski
points out that his name begins with an M, says that after his death he and
Pushkin will stand almost beside each other and mentions Nadson and Nekrasov
(the poets who in the alphabet are between Mayakovski and Pushkin):
После смерти
нам
стоять почти что рядом:
вы на Пе,
а я
на эМ.
Кто меж нами?
с кем велите знаться?!
Чересчур
страна моя
поэтами нища.
Между нами
- вот беда -
позатесался Надсон
Мы попросим,
чтоб его
куда-нибудь
на Ща!
А Некрасов
Коля,
сын покойного Алёши,-
он и в карты,
он и в стих,
и так
неплох на вид.
Знаете его?
вот он
мужик хороший.
Этот
нам компания -
пускай стоит.
Nekrasov is the author of Korobeyniki (“The Peddlers,” 1861). The
characters in Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stulyev (“The Twelve
Chairs,” 1928) include Varfolomey Korobeynikov, the compiler of the Mirror
of Life Index. Alfavit \xa8C zerkalo zhizni (the Mirror of Life Index) brings
to mind Flavita, as the Russian Scrabble is called on Antiterra (aka
Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set). Describing Flavita, Van
mentions ‘Madhatters:’
That was why she [Ada] admitted ‘Flavita.’ The name came from alfavit, an
old Russian game of chance and skill, based on the scrambling and
unscrambling of alphabetic letters. It was fashionable throughout Estoty and
Canady around 1790, was revived by the ‘Madhatters’ (as the inhabitants of
New Amsterdam were once called) in the beginning of the nineteenth century,
made a great comeback, after a brief slump, around 1860, and now a century
later seems to be again in vogue, so I am told, under the name of
‘Scrabble,’ invented by some genius quite independently from its original
form or forms. (1.36)
Alfavit is Russian for “alphabet.” Zerkalo (mirror) brings to mind Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872). The
characters in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
include the Hatter who is sometimes called “the Mad Hatter.” At a Mad
Tea-Party the Dormouse (a character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
tells a story about three little sisters who lived at the bottom of a well
and drew everything that begins with an M:
'They were learning to draw,' the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its
eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; 'and they drew all manner of things ―
everything that begins with an M ― '
'Why with an M?' said Alice.
'Why not?' said the March Hare.
Alice was silent.
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a
doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little
shriek, and went on: ' ― that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and
the moon, and memory, and muchness ― you know you say things are "much of a
muchness" ― did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?
In VN’s Russian version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anya v strane
chudes (1923), the sisters drew not memory (in Russian, pamyat’), but mysli
(thoughts):
- Они учились черпать и чертить, - продолжа
л он, зевая и протирая глаза (ему начинало
хотеться спать), - черпали и чертили всяки
е вещи, всё, что начинается с буквы М.
- Отчего именно с М.? - спросила Аня.
- Отчего бы нет? - сказал Мартовский Заяц.
Меж тем Соня закрыл глаза и незаметно зад
ремал; когда же Шляпник его хорошенько ущ
ипнул, он проснулся с тоненьким визгом и с
короговоркой продолжал:
- ...с буквы М., как, например, мышеловки, мес
яц, и мысли, и маловатости... видели ли вы к
огда-нибудь чертёж маловатости?
In a letter of Oct. 4-6, 1888, to Suvorin Chekhov says that he is cross with
Russkaya mysl’ (“Russian Thought,” a literary magazine, 1880-1918) and
with the entire Moscow literature:
Что же касается ?Русской мысли?, то там сид
ят не литераторы, а копчёные сиги, которые
столько же понимают в литературе, как сви
нья в апельсинах. К тому же библиографиче
ский отдел ведёт там дама. Если дикая утк
а, которая летит в поднебесье, может прези
рать свойскую, которая копается в навозе
и в лужах и думает, что это хорошо, то так д
олжны презирать художники и поэты мудрос
ть копчёных сигов... Сердит я на ?Русскую м
ысль? и на всю московскую литературу!
According to Chekhov, the editors of Russkaya mysl’ are kopchyonye sigi
(the smoked whitefish) who have as much taste for literature as a pig has
for oranges. Sigi is plural of sig (whitefish). Sig Leymanski is the main
character in Van’s novel Letters from Terra:
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.) (2.2)
The characters in Dostoevski’s novel Bednye lyudi (“Poor Folk,” 1846),
written in an epistolary form, include Theresa, an old servant woman who
brings Makar Devushkin’s letters to Varenka Dobrosyolov and Varenka’s
letters to Makar. 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 Jan. 3, 1850, in our world. Dostoevski is the author of
Brat’ya Karamazovy (“Brothers Karamazov,” 1880). In Ilf and Petrov’s
novel Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931) Koreyko (a secret Soviet
millionaire) receives a telegram from brothers Karamazov: Gruzite apel’siny
bochkakh (“Load oranges barrels”).
Apel’siny (oranges) in Chekhov’s letter to Suvorin and in the telegram
received by Koreyko bring to mind Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary). In
his letter to Suvorin Chekhov says that artists and poets should despise the
wisdom of smoked whitefish, just as a wild duck that flies high in the sky
despises a domesticated one that rummages in manure and thinks that it is
good. “The Wild Duck” (1884) is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik
Ibsen. According to Theresa (in Vitry’s film version of Van’s novel), on
Terra Norway is an outstanding country:
In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened
herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of
separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive é
motion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian
troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the
Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the
Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while
she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time
earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset,
and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet
another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933,
Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler ― from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came
to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than
the 1914\xa8C1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries
and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having
covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the
prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement,
and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one). (2.
2)
A Norwegian novelist, Siegrid Undset was a favorite writer of Marina
Tsvetaev (“the wife of a double agent and poet of genius,” as VN calls her
in his autobiography Speak, Memory, 1951). In Chapter Fourteen of SM VN
describes his years in Berlin (1922-37) and in Paris (1937-40) and, among
other writers whom he met in exile, mentions Hodasevich:
Vladislav Hodasevich used to complain, in the twenties and thirties, that
young émigré poets had borrowed their art form from him while following
the leading cliques in modish angoisse and soul-reshaping. I developed a
great liking for this bitter man, wrought of irony and metallic-like genius,
whose poetry was as complex a marvel as that of Tyutchev or Blok. He was,
physically, of a sickly aspect, with contemptuous nostrils and beetling
brows, and when I conjure him up in my mind he never rises from the hard
chair on which he sits, his thin legs crossed, his eyes glittering with
malevolence and wit, his long fingers screwing into a holder the half of a
Caporal Vert cigarette. There are few things in modern world poetry
comparable to the poems of his Heavy Lyre, but unfortunately for his fame
the perfect frankness he indulged in when voicing his dislikes made him some
terrible enemies among the most powerful critical coteries. Not all the
mystagogues were Dostoevskian Alyoshas; there were also a few Smerdyakovs in
the group, and Hodasevich’s poetry was played down with the thoroughness of
a revengeful racket. (2)
In his poem Silentium! (1830) Tyutchev says: mysl’ izrechyonnaya est’
lozh’ (a thought once uttered is untrue). In Ada Silentium is Greg
Erminin’s motorcycle. At the family dinner Van tells Demon that he vainly
tried to find a Silentium with a side car:
The roast hazel-hen (or rather its New World representative, locally called
‘mountain grouse’) was accompanied by preserved lingonberries (locally
called ‘mountain cranberries’). An especially succulent morsel of one of
those brown little fowls yielded a globule of birdshot between Demon’s red
tongue and strong canine: ‘La fève de Diane,’ he remarked, placing it
carefully on the edge of his plate. ‘How is the car situation, Van?’
‘Vague. I ordered a Roseley like yours but it won’t be delivered before
Christmas. I tried to find a Silentium with a side car and could not,
because of the war, though what connection exists between wars and
motorcycles is a mystery. But we manage, Ada and I, we manage, we ride, we
bike, we even jikker.’ (1.38)
Alexander Blok is the author of Neznakomka (“Incognita,” 1906), a poem
directly alluded to in Ada (3.3), Dvenadtsat’ (“The Twelve,” 1918) and
Nochnaya Fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906), a poem subtitled “a Dream.”
Nox being Latin for “night,” Blok’s “Night Violet” brings to mind
Violet Knox, Van’s typist who marries Ronald Oranger:
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with
us in 1957. She was (and still is ― ten years later) an enchanting English
blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump
[.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has
been responsible for typing out this memoir ― the solace of what are, no
doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better
sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother’s
children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her
[generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed
silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her
‘Fialochka’ and allowed herself the luxury of admiring ‘little Violet’
‘s cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner,
lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover
of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her
flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated
had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4).
Alyosha Karamazov and Smerdyakov (mentioned by VN in Speak, Memory) are
characters in “Brothers Karamazov.” The Golden Horde that again subjugated
Rus (on Terra as imagined by Vitry) brings to mind the lines in VN’s poem O
pravitelyakh (“On Rulers,” 1944):
Умирает со скуки историк:
за Мамаем всё тот же Мамай.
В самом деле, нельзя же нам с горя
поступить, как чиновный Китай,
кучу лишних веков присчитавший
к истории скромной своей,
от этого, впрочем, не ставшей
ни лучше, ни веселей.
The historian dies of sheer boredom:
On the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
Does our plight really force us to do
what did bureaucratic Cathay
that with heaps of superfluous centuries
augmented her limited history
(which, however, hardly became
either better or merrier)?
VN’s footnotes:
Line 29/Mamay. A particularly evil Tartar prince of the fourteenth century.
Line 35. One recalls Stalin’s hilarious pronouncement: “Life has grown
better, life has grown merrier!”
At the end of “On Rulers” VN mentions his late namesake:
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 footnotes:
Line 52/my late namesake. An allusion to the Christian name and patronymic
of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski (1893\xa8C1930), minor Soviet poet,
endowed with a certain brilliance and bite, but fatally corrupted by the
regime he faithfully served.
Lines 58\xa8C59/“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”).
Describing the family dinner in Ardis the Second, Van mentions Richard
Leonard Churchill’s novel about a certain Crimean Khan, “A Great Good
Man:”
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. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Great good man: a phrase that Winston
Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
Churchill definitely peresolil (“put in too much salt,” as we say of a
person who grossly exaggerated something). Peresolil (“Overdoing it,”
1885) is a story by Chekhov. As to pereperchil (put in too much pepper), it
brings to mind “Pig and Pepper,” a chapter in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. “A Clever Piggy” is an article in the Russian-language
newspaper Golos (Logos) that the male nurse Dorofey reads during Van’s
visit to Rack (who is dying in Ward Five of the Kalugano hospital):
Van drew in his useless weapon. Controlling himself, he thumped it against
the footboard of his wheelchair. Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then
went back to the article that engrossed him ― 'A Clever Piggy (from the
memoirs of an animal trainer),' or else 'The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas
Help Chinese Troops.' A diminutive nurse simultaneously stepped out from
behind the farther screen and disappeared again. (1.42)
Actually, golos means “voice.” A concierge at Van’s hotel compares
Dorothy Vinelander’s voice to a brass trumpet:
Lucien, something of a wit, soon learned to recognize Dorothy’s contralto:
‘La voix cuivrée a téléphoné,’ ‘La Trompette n’était pas contente
ce matin,’ et cetera. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): la voix etc.: the brassy voice telephoned…
the trumpet did not sound pleased this morning.
In “The Twelve Chairs” Ilf and Petrov compare the voice of Vorobyaninov’s
mother-in-law, Mme Petukhov, to that of Richard the Lionheart:
Голос у неё был такой силы и густоты, что е
му позавидовал бы Ричард Львиное Сердце,
от крика которого, как известно, приседал
и кони.
Her voice was so strong and fruity that it might well have been envied by
Richard the Lionheart, at whose shout, as is well known, horses used to
kneel. (chapter I “Bezenchuk and The Nymphs”)
Richard Leonard Churchill (the author of a novel about a certain Crimean
Khan) blends Richard the Lionheart with Winston Churchill.
Dorothy Vinelander reads to her ill brother (Ada’s husband) old issues of
the Golos Feniksa:
Much to Van’s amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress
neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of
the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never
being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in
readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and
suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel
doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his
sister was not allowed to Visit him ‘because of the constant necessity of
routine tests’ ― or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront
disaster in manly solitude.
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Russ., The Phoenix Voice, Russian language
newspaper in Arizona.
Phoenix in Russian spelling, Feniks brings to mind VN’s Russian nom de
plume, Sirin (Phoenix and Sirin are fairy tale birds; in her memoirs Italics
are Mine Nina Berberova compares VN to Phoenix). In Chapter Fourteen of
Speak, Memory VN says that the author that interested him most was Sirin:
But the author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to
my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the
loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first
novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as
strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid
interest on the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties
in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic
structure of society, so the mystagogues of émigré letters deplored his
lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him
was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of
decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when
in the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge
with both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin’s admirers made
much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision,
functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been
raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called
the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirrorlike angles of his
clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of
his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to
“windows giving upon a contiguous world … a rolling corollary, the shadow
of a train of thought.” Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use
a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared,
leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness. (2)
In his review of Van’s Letters from Terra the poet Max Mispel discerned the
influence of Ben Sirine, an obscene ancient Arab:
The only other compliment was paid to poor Voltemand in a little Manhattan
magazine (The Village Eyebrow) by the poet Max Mispel (another botanical
name ― ‘medlar’ in English), member of the German Department at Goluba
University. Herr Mispel, who liked to air his authors, discerned in Letters
from Terra the influence of Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy
tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift
thesialists) as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of
anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, thus transliterated by Captain de Roux,
according to Burton in his adaptation of Nefzawi’s treatise on the best
method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females (The Perfumed Garden,
Panther edition, p. 187, a copy given to ninety-three-year-old Baron Van
Veen by his ribald physician Professor Lagosse). His critique ended as
follows: ‘If Mr Voltemand (or Voltimand or Mandalatov) is a psychiatrist,
as I think he might be, then I pity his patients, while admiring his
talent.’ (2.2)
The names Max Mispel and Mandalatov begin with an M.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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