Subject
Vivian Vale, Alphonse Cinq, Ruby Black in Ada
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Date
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The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days 'Alphonse Cinq,' believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Recamier room where Vivian Vale's golden veils were on show. (3.3)
"Recamier" is a character in Naden'ka (1920), Sadovskoy's "story in verse" included in Moroznye uzory ("Frost's Paintings," Petrograd, 1922):
Кто, сидя в лифте на скамье,
Многоэтажный дом огромный
В корзине пролетал подъёмной,
Тот видел надпись: «Рекамье».
...В полусвете
Дышала папироской там
Не Рекамье – не бойтесь, дети, –
А просто Тёркина madame,
Одна из моложавых дам
В румянах, буклях и корсете.
Аскетов с Тёркиной дружил.
Покойный муж её служил
И сочинил два-три романа.
Он громкой славы не нажил
И не сумел набить кармана.
Но Тёркиной сдаваться рано:
Она открыла «институт
Для исправленья переносиц»
И скромно поселилась тут
Под кличкой «Рекамье-фон-Косиц».
Так до сих пор её зовут.
Любить неловко без косметик
В наш век. Давно известно нам,
Что дьявол первый был эстетик.
Об этом знал ещё Адам.
Recamier's real name, Mme Tyorkin, hints at the widow of M. I. Shestyorkin (1866-1908), a modernist painter appreciated by Bryusov (btw., in cards shestyorka is "six"). After her husband's death Mme Tyorkin opened the Institute for Correcting the Nose Bridges and changed her name to Recamier-von-Kossitz. (According to the author, in our time it is inconvenient to love without cosmetics. Even Adam knew that the Satan was the first aesthete.)
Boris Sadovskoy (1881-1952) is the author of Dvuglavyi oryol ("The Two-Headed Eagle," 1911) and Bourbon (1913). The hero of the former story is Prince Potyomkin, a favorite of Catherine II. Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, is mentioned in Ada:
Dear Mr 'Vascodagama' received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van's own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose - the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P. O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id. (1.30)
A mixed-up kid is the hero of Sadovskoy's story in verse Krov' ("The Blood," 1920), included in Moroznye uzory under the title Fedya Kosopuz.
In emigration Hodasevich wrote Sadovskoy's obituary, but the rumors of his death proved false. In the last three decades of his life Sadovskoy was paralized (dorsal tabes). In 1918 Sadovskoy published Vasiliy Pushkin's Opasnyi sosed ("The Dangerous Neighbor," 1811) with his Introduction.
'Alphonse Cinq' seems to hint at Alfonsinka, Lambert's girl-friend in Dostoevski's Podrostok ("The Adolescent," 1875). According to Arkadiy Dolgorukiy (Podrostok's hero and narrator whose name brings to mind Malorukino, the country place of Cordula's mother; Kim Beauharnais, the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis, can be the son of Arkadiy Dolgorukiy and Alfonsinka), Alfonsinka is a spy (shpion). On the other hand, Alfonsinka (the French governess Alphonsine Dijon) is a character in Marina Tsvetaev's autobiographical story To, chto bylo ("What Once Was," 1912). The wife of a double agent, Marina Tsvetaev in the late thirties returned to Russia and perished there. Not long before her death she visited Sadovskoy in the Novodevichiy monastery in Moscow and and left him her archives.
'I was told,' she explained, 'that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay - voozavay entendue? - had shaved his beard, in which case he'd look rather like you, right?'
'Logically, no, ma'am,' replied Van. (3.5)
In Pamyati B. A. Sadovskogo ("In Memory of B. A. Sadovskoy," 1925) Hodasevich describes his last meeting with Sadovskoy in the summer of 1917, in Moscow, and mentions Sadovskoy's unexpectedly dark beard (now completely bald, Sadovskoy was once blond):
Совершенно лысый, с большой бородой, неожиданно тёмной (Садовской был белокур), он сидел на кровати, рассказывал, что изучает отцов церкви, а также много переводит с польского и английского.
In one of his last letters to Hodasevich (who quotes it in his obituary essay) Sadovskoy calls Bryusov "a demon," Andrey Bely, "an angel," and Hodasevich and Gershenzon, "human beings:"
Писал, что ему нет дела до брюсовского большевизма: на то Брюсов — демон; нет дела до Белого: на то Белый — ангел, а вот как не стыдно нам с Гершензоном, людям?
It was probably this letter that inspired Hodasevich to write his poem Gostyu ("To a Guest," 1921) included in Heavy Lyre:
Входя ко мне, неси мечту,
Иль дьявольскую красоту,
Иль Бога, если сам ты Божий.
А маленькую доброту,
Как шляпу, оставляй в прихожей.
Здесь, на горошине земли,
Будь или ангел, или демон.
А человек — иль не затем он,
Чтобы забыть его могли?
As you enter my place, bring a dream,
or a devilish beauty,
or God, if you are God's yourself.
And, as to a small kindness,
leave it, like a hat, in the lobby.
Here, on the pea of Earth,
Be either an angel, or a demon.
And a human being - or is not his lot
to be forgotten after all?
(alas, I can not translate the closing lines and resort to a paraphrase)
Vivian Vale's golden veils hint at the Golden Veil that on Antiterra separates Tartary from the Western countries:
In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies...
In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. (5.5)
In Mat' i muzyka ("Mother and Music," 1935) Marina Tsvetaev mentions "the immortal epic of Sigrid Undset:"
Этот магический удар по мне Дивного Терема — те же острые верхи тоски! — я потом узнала в Нибелунгах и, целую жизнь спустя, в бессмертном эпосе Зигрид Ундсет. Это была моя первая встреча с Скандинавским Севером. (Elsewhere Marina Tsvetaev says that Tolstoy's Anna Karinin is but an episode compared to Undset's trilogy Der Kranz — Die Frau — Das Kreuz,* the best what was ever written about a woman's lot.)
Divnyi terem ("Wondrous Chamber") mentioned by the memoirist is Glinka's romance Severnaya zvezda ("Northern Star," 1839) composed on a poem by Eudokia Rostopchin for the wedding of Maria Nikolaevna, the eldest daughter of Nicholas I, and Maximilian Beauharnais. A friend of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's uncle Ivan, Glinka appears in Ada (2.8) and, in the company of Wiegel and Lermontov, in Sadovskoy's "The Blood:"
Являлся Вигель с табакеркой,
И Глинка за вином кричал,
И Лермонтов в углу скучал,
Красуясь пурпурной венгеркой.
Wiegel came with his snuff-box,
and Glinka was noisy at wine,
and Lermontov moped in the corner,
flaunting his purple dolman.
In Sadovskoy's Naden'ka Mme Tyorkin (whose face is rouged and hair is in ringlets) wears a corset. In Ada Lucette mentions a box of corsets and chrestomathies left behind by Mlle Lariviere (Lucette's governess):
'...we were just ordinary sisters, exchanging routine nothings, having little in common, she collecting cactuses or running through her lines for the next audition in Sterva, and I reading a lot, or copying beautiful erotic pictures from an album of Forbidden Masterpieces that we found, apropos, in a box of korsetov i khrestomatiy (corsets and chrestomathies) which Belle had left behind, and I can assure you, they were far more realistic than the scroll-painting by Mong Mong, very active in 888, a millennium before Ada said it illustrated Oriental calisthenics when I found it by chance in the corner of one of my ambuscades.' (2.5)
In her essay "My Pushkin" (1937) Marina Tsvetaev mentions her half-brother Andrey's chrestomathy full of Bagrov grandson and Bagrov grandfather:
Андрюшина хрестоматия была несомненно-толстая, её распирало Багровым-внуком и Багровым-дедом, и лихорадящей матерью, дышащей прямо в грудь ребёнку, и всей безумной любовью этого ребёнка, и вёдрами рыбы, ловимой дурашливым молодым отцом, и - "Ты опять не спишь?" - Николенькой, и
всеми теми гончими и борзыми, и всеми лирическими поэтами России.
In Ada Andrey Andreevich Aksakov (AAA) is Van's angelic Russian tutor, Bagrov grandson is little Van's playmate, and Grandpa Bagrov, a neighbor of Daniel Veen:
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... 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... 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. (1.24)
In her autobiographical story Chyort ("The Devil," 1935) Marina Tsvetaev describes the likeable devil of her childhood as dog (Russ., a Great Dane), i. e. sobachiy bog (the dogs' God):
Догом тебя вижу, голубчик, то есть собачьим богом.
At the beginning of her story Marina Tsvetaev says that the devil lived in the room of her half-sister Valeria:
Чёрт жил в комнате у сестры Валерии, — наверху, прямо с лестницы — красной, атласно-муарово-штофной, с вечными сильным косым столбом солнца, где непрерывно и почти неподвижно крутилась пыль.
The story has an epigraph: svyazalsya chyort s mladentsem ("the devil got involved with a baby," a saying often used with regard to cradle-snatchers). This saying ideally describes the relationships of Valeriy Bryusov and Nadya Lvov, Demon Veen and his wife Aqua (and, after Aqua's suicide, Demon's mistresses who grow younger and younger so that "soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber," as Van puts it, 3.8), Demon's son Van and Lucette. Like Bryusov's mistress and Demon's wife, poor Lucette commits suicide. Nadya Lvov shots herself dead, Aqua takes poison, Lucette drowns herself (3.5).
After her first battle with insanity at Ex en Valais she [Aqua] returned to America, and suffered a bad defeat, in the days when Van was still being suckled by a very young wet nurse, almost a child, Ruby Black, born Black, who was to go mad too: for no sooner did all the fond, all the frail, come into close contact with him (as later Lucette did, to give another example) than they were bound to know anguish and calamity, unless strengthened by a strain of his father's demon blood. (1.3)
Ruby Black is a Negro girl. In 1880, at ten, Van scraps with a Negro lad in Louisiana:
AAA explained, he remembered, to a Negro lad with whom Van had scrapped, that Pushkin and Dumas had African blood, upon which the lad showed AAA his tongue, a new interesting trick which Van emulated at the earliest occasion and was slapped by the younger of the Misses Fortune, put it back in your face, sir, she said. (1.24)
In "My Pushkin" Marina Tsvetaev says that she prefers black people to the white:
От памятника Пушкина у меня и моя безумная любовь к чёрным, пронесённая через всю жизнь, по сей день польщённость всего существа, когда случайно, в вагоне трамвая или ином, окажусь с чёрным - рядом. Мое белое убожество бок о бок с чёрным божеством. В каждом негре я люблю Пушкина и узнаю Пушкина чёрный памятник Пушкина моего дограмотного младенчества и всея России.
As a little girl, Marina Tsvetaev saw Pushkin's son Alexander who visited her parents:
Позвонили, и залой прошёл господин. Из гостиной, куда он прошёл, сразу вышла мать, и мне, тихо: - Муся! Ты видела этого господина? - Да. - Так это - сын Пушкина. Ты ведь знаешь памятник Пушкина? Так это его сын. Почётный опекун. Не уходи и не шуми, а когда пройдёт обратно - гляди. Он очень похож на отца. Ты ведь знаешь его отца? (ibid.)
"Miss Condor" who says that Van resembles her friend Vivian Vale, "the cootooriay," is a mulatto girl. Lucette calls her pava ("a peahen," 3.5). In Skazka o tsare Saltane ("The Fairy Tale about Tsar Saltan," 1831) Pushkin compares Tsarevna Lebed' (the Swan Princess) to pava:
Mesyats pod kosoy blestit,
A vo lbu zvezda gorit;
A sama-to velichava,
Vystupaet, budto pava;
A kak rech'-to govorit,
Slovno rechen'ka zhurchit.
The moon shines under her plait,
And the star blazes on her brow;
Stately herself,
She walks like a peahen;
And when she is speaking,
It is like murmur of a rivulet.
In reply to Van's question at the door of the Tobakoff grill bar, Lucette tenderly shakes her jeweled head (3.5). Lucette's demure speech and her walk conscious of Van's gaze, her "struthious" dress also bring to mind Pushkin's Tsarevna Lebed'. In Pushkin's fairy tale Prince Gvidon saves her from an evil sorcerer in a kite's disguise:
Ты не лебедь ведь избавил,
Девицу в живых оставил;
Ты не коршуна убил,
Чародея подстрелил.
Korshun ("The Kite," 1916) is a poem by Blok:
Чертя за кругом плавный круг,
Над сонным лугом коршун кружит
И смотрит на пустынный луг.-
В избушке мать, над сыном тужит:
"На хлеба, на, на грудь, соси,
Расти, покорствуй, крест неси".
Идут века, шумит война,
Встает мятеж, горят деревни,
А ты всё та ж, моя страна,
В красе заплаканной и древней.-
Доколе матери тужить?
Доколе коршуну кружить?
Describing circle after circle,
The wheeling kite looks down upon
A dream-like, empty meadow. A mother
Grieves in the cabin for her son:
“Here, suck this breast, here, take this bread.
Grow up, be humble, trust in God.”
The ages pass, endless war rages,
Revolt flares, villages are burned,
But you are still the same, my homeland,
In beauty ancient and tear-stained.
How long must that poor mother cry,
How long the kite wheel in the sky?
(transl. A. Miller)
Mother feeds her son with her breast. In her last note Aqua (Van's aunt who believed in her delusion that Van was her beloved son) mentions Ruby Black's scanty right breast:
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. (1.3)
Van's young Negro wet-nurse brings to mind Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (1936). But on Antiterra there are Siegrid Mitchel (in Norway) and Margaret Undset (in America). (5.5)
Note that klok rhymes with Blok. Blok's Dvenadtsat' ("The Twelve," 1918) begins:
Chyornyi vecher.
Belyi sneg.
Veter, veter!
Na nogakh ne stoit chelovek.
Veter, veter -
Na vsyom bozh'yem svete!
Black evening.
White snow.
Wind, wind!
Man can not stand on his feet.
Wind, wind -
All over the world!
A namesake of Aqua's twin sister, Marina Tsvetaev is the author of Stikhi k Bloku ("Verses to Blok," 1921). Sadovskoy's Moroznye uzory. Rasskazy v stikhakh ("Frost's Paintings. Stories in verse," 1922) were published by G. P. Blok, the poet's first cousin.
*"The Wreath. The Woman. The Cross."
Alexey Sklyarenko
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"Recamier" is a character in Naden'ka (1920), Sadovskoy's "story in verse" included in Moroznye uzory ("Frost's Paintings," Petrograd, 1922):
Кто, сидя в лифте на скамье,
Многоэтажный дом огромный
В корзине пролетал подъёмной,
Тот видел надпись: «Рекамье».
...В полусвете
Дышала папироской там
Не Рекамье – не бойтесь, дети, –
А просто Тёркина madame,
Одна из моложавых дам
В румянах, буклях и корсете.
Аскетов с Тёркиной дружил.
Покойный муж её служил
И сочинил два-три романа.
Он громкой славы не нажил
И не сумел набить кармана.
Но Тёркиной сдаваться рано:
Она открыла «институт
Для исправленья переносиц»
И скромно поселилась тут
Под кличкой «Рекамье-фон-Косиц».
Так до сих пор её зовут.
Любить неловко без косметик
В наш век. Давно известно нам,
Что дьявол первый был эстетик.
Об этом знал ещё Адам.
Recamier's real name, Mme Tyorkin, hints at the widow of M. I. Shestyorkin (1866-1908), a modernist painter appreciated by Bryusov (btw., in cards shestyorka is "six"). After her husband's death Mme Tyorkin opened the Institute for Correcting the Nose Bridges and changed her name to Recamier-von-Kossitz. (According to the author, in our time it is inconvenient to love without cosmetics. Even Adam knew that the Satan was the first aesthete.)
Boris Sadovskoy (1881-1952) is the author of Dvuglavyi oryol ("The Two-Headed Eagle," 1911) and Bourbon (1913). The hero of the former story is Prince Potyomkin, a favorite of Catherine II. Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, is mentioned in Ada:
Dear Mr 'Vascodagama' received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van's own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose - the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P. O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id. (1.30)
A mixed-up kid is the hero of Sadovskoy's story in verse Krov' ("The Blood," 1920), included in Moroznye uzory under the title Fedya Kosopuz.
In emigration Hodasevich wrote Sadovskoy's obituary, but the rumors of his death proved false. In the last three decades of his life Sadovskoy was paralized (dorsal tabes). In 1918 Sadovskoy published Vasiliy Pushkin's Opasnyi sosed ("The Dangerous Neighbor," 1811) with his Introduction.
'Alphonse Cinq' seems to hint at Alfonsinka, Lambert's girl-friend in Dostoevski's Podrostok ("The Adolescent," 1875). According to Arkadiy Dolgorukiy (Podrostok's hero and narrator whose name brings to mind Malorukino, the country place of Cordula's mother; Kim Beauharnais, the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis, can be the son of Arkadiy Dolgorukiy and Alfonsinka), Alfonsinka is a spy (shpion). On the other hand, Alfonsinka (the French governess Alphonsine Dijon) is a character in Marina Tsvetaev's autobiographical story To, chto bylo ("What Once Was," 1912). The wife of a double agent, Marina Tsvetaev in the late thirties returned to Russia and perished there. Not long before her death she visited Sadovskoy in the Novodevichiy monastery in Moscow and and left him her archives.
'I was told,' she explained, 'that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay - voozavay entendue? - had shaved his beard, in which case he'd look rather like you, right?'
'Logically, no, ma'am,' replied Van. (3.5)
In Pamyati B. A. Sadovskogo ("In Memory of B. A. Sadovskoy," 1925) Hodasevich describes his last meeting with Sadovskoy in the summer of 1917, in Moscow, and mentions Sadovskoy's unexpectedly dark beard (now completely bald, Sadovskoy was once blond):
Совершенно лысый, с большой бородой, неожиданно тёмной (Садовской был белокур), он сидел на кровати, рассказывал, что изучает отцов церкви, а также много переводит с польского и английского.
In one of his last letters to Hodasevich (who quotes it in his obituary essay) Sadovskoy calls Bryusov "a demon," Andrey Bely, "an angel," and Hodasevich and Gershenzon, "human beings:"
Писал, что ему нет дела до брюсовского большевизма: на то Брюсов — демон; нет дела до Белого: на то Белый — ангел, а вот как не стыдно нам с Гершензоном, людям?
It was probably this letter that inspired Hodasevich to write his poem Gostyu ("To a Guest," 1921) included in Heavy Lyre:
Входя ко мне, неси мечту,
Иль дьявольскую красоту,
Иль Бога, если сам ты Божий.
А маленькую доброту,
Как шляпу, оставляй в прихожей.
Здесь, на горошине земли,
Будь или ангел, или демон.
А человек — иль не затем он,
Чтобы забыть его могли?
As you enter my place, bring a dream,
or a devilish beauty,
or God, if you are God's yourself.
And, as to a small kindness,
leave it, like a hat, in the lobby.
Here, on the pea of Earth,
Be either an angel, or a demon.
And a human being - or is not his lot
to be forgotten after all?
(alas, I can not translate the closing lines and resort to a paraphrase)
Vivian Vale's golden veils hint at the Golden Veil that on Antiterra separates Tartary from the Western countries:
In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies...
In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. (5.5)
In Mat' i muzyka ("Mother and Music," 1935) Marina Tsvetaev mentions "the immortal epic of Sigrid Undset:"
Этот магический удар по мне Дивного Терема — те же острые верхи тоски! — я потом узнала в Нибелунгах и, целую жизнь спустя, в бессмертном эпосе Зигрид Ундсет. Это была моя первая встреча с Скандинавским Севером. (Elsewhere Marina Tsvetaev says that Tolstoy's Anna Karinin is but an episode compared to Undset's trilogy Der Kranz — Die Frau — Das Kreuz,* the best what was ever written about a woman's lot.)
Divnyi terem ("Wondrous Chamber") mentioned by the memoirist is Glinka's romance Severnaya zvezda ("Northern Star," 1839) composed on a poem by Eudokia Rostopchin for the wedding of Maria Nikolaevna, the eldest daughter of Nicholas I, and Maximilian Beauharnais. A friend of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's uncle Ivan, Glinka appears in Ada (2.8) and, in the company of Wiegel and Lermontov, in Sadovskoy's "The Blood:"
Являлся Вигель с табакеркой,
И Глинка за вином кричал,
И Лермонтов в углу скучал,
Красуясь пурпурной венгеркой.
Wiegel came with his snuff-box,
and Glinka was noisy at wine,
and Lermontov moped in the corner,
flaunting his purple dolman.
In Sadovskoy's Naden'ka Mme Tyorkin (whose face is rouged and hair is in ringlets) wears a corset. In Ada Lucette mentions a box of corsets and chrestomathies left behind by Mlle Lariviere (Lucette's governess):
'...we were just ordinary sisters, exchanging routine nothings, having little in common, she collecting cactuses or running through her lines for the next audition in Sterva, and I reading a lot, or copying beautiful erotic pictures from an album of Forbidden Masterpieces that we found, apropos, in a box of korsetov i khrestomatiy (corsets and chrestomathies) which Belle had left behind, and I can assure you, they were far more realistic than the scroll-painting by Mong Mong, very active in 888, a millennium before Ada said it illustrated Oriental calisthenics when I found it by chance in the corner of one of my ambuscades.' (2.5)
In her essay "My Pushkin" (1937) Marina Tsvetaev mentions her half-brother Andrey's chrestomathy full of Bagrov grandson and Bagrov grandfather:
Андрюшина хрестоматия была несомненно-толстая, её распирало Багровым-внуком и Багровым-дедом, и лихорадящей матерью, дышащей прямо в грудь ребёнку, и всей безумной любовью этого ребёнка, и вёдрами рыбы, ловимой дурашливым молодым отцом, и - "Ты опять не спишь?" - Николенькой, и
всеми теми гончими и борзыми, и всеми лирическими поэтами России.
In Ada Andrey Andreevich Aksakov (AAA) is Van's angelic Russian tutor, Bagrov grandson is little Van's playmate, and Grandpa Bagrov, a neighbor of Daniel Veen:
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... 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... 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. (1.24)
In her autobiographical story Chyort ("The Devil," 1935) Marina Tsvetaev describes the likeable devil of her childhood as dog (Russ., a Great Dane), i. e. sobachiy bog (the dogs' God):
Догом тебя вижу, голубчик, то есть собачьим богом.
At the beginning of her story Marina Tsvetaev says that the devil lived in the room of her half-sister Valeria:
Чёрт жил в комнате у сестры Валерии, — наверху, прямо с лестницы — красной, атласно-муарово-штофной, с вечными сильным косым столбом солнца, где непрерывно и почти неподвижно крутилась пыль.
The story has an epigraph: svyazalsya chyort s mladentsem ("the devil got involved with a baby," a saying often used with regard to cradle-snatchers). This saying ideally describes the relationships of Valeriy Bryusov and Nadya Lvov, Demon Veen and his wife Aqua (and, after Aqua's suicide, Demon's mistresses who grow younger and younger so that "soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber," as Van puts it, 3.8), Demon's son Van and Lucette. Like Bryusov's mistress and Demon's wife, poor Lucette commits suicide. Nadya Lvov shots herself dead, Aqua takes poison, Lucette drowns herself (3.5).
After her first battle with insanity at Ex en Valais she [Aqua] returned to America, and suffered a bad defeat, in the days when Van was still being suckled by a very young wet nurse, almost a child, Ruby Black, born Black, who was to go mad too: for no sooner did all the fond, all the frail, come into close contact with him (as later Lucette did, to give another example) than they were bound to know anguish and calamity, unless strengthened by a strain of his father's demon blood. (1.3)
Ruby Black is a Negro girl. In 1880, at ten, Van scraps with a Negro lad in Louisiana:
AAA explained, he remembered, to a Negro lad with whom Van had scrapped, that Pushkin and Dumas had African blood, upon which the lad showed AAA his tongue, a new interesting trick which Van emulated at the earliest occasion and was slapped by the younger of the Misses Fortune, put it back in your face, sir, she said. (1.24)
In "My Pushkin" Marina Tsvetaev says that she prefers black people to the white:
От памятника Пушкина у меня и моя безумная любовь к чёрным, пронесённая через всю жизнь, по сей день польщённость всего существа, когда случайно, в вагоне трамвая или ином, окажусь с чёрным - рядом. Мое белое убожество бок о бок с чёрным божеством. В каждом негре я люблю Пушкина и узнаю Пушкина чёрный памятник Пушкина моего дограмотного младенчества и всея России.
As a little girl, Marina Tsvetaev saw Pushkin's son Alexander who visited her parents:
Позвонили, и залой прошёл господин. Из гостиной, куда он прошёл, сразу вышла мать, и мне, тихо: - Муся! Ты видела этого господина? - Да. - Так это - сын Пушкина. Ты ведь знаешь памятник Пушкина? Так это его сын. Почётный опекун. Не уходи и не шуми, а когда пройдёт обратно - гляди. Он очень похож на отца. Ты ведь знаешь его отца? (ibid.)
"Miss Condor" who says that Van resembles her friend Vivian Vale, "the cootooriay," is a mulatto girl. Lucette calls her pava ("a peahen," 3.5). In Skazka o tsare Saltane ("The Fairy Tale about Tsar Saltan," 1831) Pushkin compares Tsarevna Lebed' (the Swan Princess) to pava:
Mesyats pod kosoy blestit,
A vo lbu zvezda gorit;
A sama-to velichava,
Vystupaet, budto pava;
A kak rech'-to govorit,
Slovno rechen'ka zhurchit.
The moon shines under her plait,
And the star blazes on her brow;
Stately herself,
She walks like a peahen;
And when she is speaking,
It is like murmur of a rivulet.
In reply to Van's question at the door of the Tobakoff grill bar, Lucette tenderly shakes her jeweled head (3.5). Lucette's demure speech and her walk conscious of Van's gaze, her "struthious" dress also bring to mind Pushkin's Tsarevna Lebed'. In Pushkin's fairy tale Prince Gvidon saves her from an evil sorcerer in a kite's disguise:
Ты не лебедь ведь избавил,
Девицу в живых оставил;
Ты не коршуна убил,
Чародея подстрелил.
Korshun ("The Kite," 1916) is a poem by Blok:
Чертя за кругом плавный круг,
Над сонным лугом коршун кружит
И смотрит на пустынный луг.-
В избушке мать, над сыном тужит:
"На хлеба, на, на грудь, соси,
Расти, покорствуй, крест неси".
Идут века, шумит война,
Встает мятеж, горят деревни,
А ты всё та ж, моя страна,
В красе заплаканной и древней.-
Доколе матери тужить?
Доколе коршуну кружить?
Describing circle after circle,
The wheeling kite looks down upon
A dream-like, empty meadow. A mother
Grieves in the cabin for her son:
“Here, suck this breast, here, take this bread.
Grow up, be humble, trust in God.”
The ages pass, endless war rages,
Revolt flares, villages are burned,
But you are still the same, my homeland,
In beauty ancient and tear-stained.
How long must that poor mother cry,
How long the kite wheel in the sky?
(transl. A. Miller)
Mother feeds her son with her breast. In her last note Aqua (Van's aunt who believed in her delusion that Van was her beloved son) mentions Ruby Black's scanty right breast:
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. (1.3)
Van's young Negro wet-nurse brings to mind Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (1936). But on Antiterra there are Siegrid Mitchel (in Norway) and Margaret Undset (in America). (5.5)
Note that klok rhymes with Blok. Blok's Dvenadtsat' ("The Twelve," 1918) begins:
Chyornyi vecher.
Belyi sneg.
Veter, veter!
Na nogakh ne stoit chelovek.
Veter, veter -
Na vsyom bozh'yem svete!
Black evening.
White snow.
Wind, wind!
Man can not stand on his feet.
Wind, wind -
All over the world!
A namesake of Aqua's twin sister, Marina Tsvetaev is the author of Stikhi k Bloku ("Verses to Blok," 1921). Sadovskoy's Moroznye uzory. Rasskazy v stikhakh ("Frost's Paintings. Stories in verse," 1922) were published by G. P. Blok, the poet's first cousin.
*"The Wreath. The Woman. The Cross."
Alexey Sklyarenko
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