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Arwin Birdfoot, Johnny Rafin, Esq., & Erasmus Veen in Ada
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In Kalugano Van Veen fights a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge. The names of the two seconds are Arwin Birdfoot and Johnny Rafin, Esq.:
He was about to enter the music shop when he remembered with a start that he had not left any message for Tapper’s seconds, so he retraced his steps.
He found them sitting in the lounge and requested them to settle matters rapidly — he had more important business than that. ‘Ne grubit’ sekundantam’ (never be rude to seconds), said Demon’s voice in his mind. Arwin Birdfoot, a lieutenant in the Guards, was blond and flabby, with moist pink lips and a foot-long cigarette holder. Johnny Rafin, Esq., was small, dark and dapper and wore blue suede shoes with a dreadful tan suit. Birdfoot soon disappeared, leaving Van to work out details with Johnny, who, though loyally eager to assist Van, could not conceal that his heart belonged to Van’s adversary. (1.42)
According to Vivian Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'), Rafin, Esq., is a pun on 'Rafinesque' [Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840), an American zoologist and botanist of Franco-German extraction who was born in Constantinople], after whom a violet was named. "Birdfoot" hints at birdfoot violet (Viola pedata). As to the name Arwin, it only needs a D (the letter that, according to Walter C. Keyway, Esq., Baron Klim Avidov dropped in order to use it as a particule, 1.36) to become Darwin, a name that has dar (gift) in it:
D + Arwin = Darwin = dar + win
Baron Klim Avidov = Vivian Darkbloom = Vladimir Nabokov
Van and Ada are the children of Demon Veen, their half-sister Lucette is the daughter of Demon's first cousin Daniel Veen. The Veen cousins are the grandchildren of Erasmus Veen (1760-1852). The inventor of the clockwork luggage carts (1.19), Erasmus Veen has the same first name as the poet Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), author of The Botanic Garden (1791), grandfather of the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-82). The cousins Demon and Daniel married the twin sisters Durmanov, Aqua and Marina:
On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover's first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.
The 'D' in the name of Aqua's husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina's husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon's twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns. (1.1)
April 23 is VN's birthday. Marina's affair with Demon Veen started on his, her, and Daniel Veen's birthday, January 5, 1868, when she was twenty-four and both Veens thirty. (1.2) January 5 is Vera Nabokov's birthday.
There is "bird" in birdfoot. In VN's novel Pnin (1955) the Head of the Ornithology Department at Waindell, Professor Wynn has a double whom Pnin mentally calls "Twynn:"
It should not be deemed surprising, therefore, that even Pnin, not a very observant man in everyday life, could not help becoming aware (sometime during his ninth year at Waindell) that a lanky, bespectacled old fellow with scholarly strands of steel-grey hair falling over the right side of his small but corrugated brow, and with a deep furrow descending from each side of his sharp nose to each corner of his long upper-lip--a person whom Pnin knew as Professor Thomas Wynn, Head of the Ornithology Department, having once talked to him at some party about gay golden orioles, melancholy cuckoos, and other Russian countryside birds--was not always Professor Wynn. At times he graded, as it were, into somebody else, whom Pnin did not know by name but whom he classified, with a bright foreigner's fondness for puns as 'Twynn' (or, in Pninian, 'Tvin'). (Chapter Six, 5)
Pnin has a Russian accent and would have called Van Veen (a University Professor who teaches Philosophy and Psychiatry) "Professor Vin," as he does call T. W. Thomas (Professor 'Twynn'):
'Good-bye, good-bye, Professor Vin!' sang out Pnin, his cheeks ruddy and round in the lamplight of the porch. (Chapter Six, 11)
T. W. Thomas is a Waindell Professor of Anthropology. In Chekhov's story Chelovek v futlyare ("The Man in a Case," 1898) anthropos is Belikov's favorite word:
-- О, как звучен, как прекрасен греческий язык! -- говорил он со сладким выражением; и, как бы в доказательство своих слов, прищурив глаз и подняв палец, произносил: -- Антропос!
'Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful is the Greek language!' he would say, with a sugary expression; and as though to prove his words he would screw up his eyes and, raising his finger, would pronounce 'Anthropos!'
According to Van's second, Captain Tapper (a member of the Do-Re-La country club whose name brings to mind Chekhov's stroy Tapyor, "The Ballroom Pianist," 1885) is an expert on maps, horses, horticulture. In Chekhov's story Loshadinaya familiya ("A Horsey Name," 1885) the name forgotten by the steward turns out to be Ovsov ("Hayes"). The characters of VN's novel Podvig (Glory, 1930) include Darwin (Martin Edelweiss' best friend at Cambridge). According to Sonya Zilanov (the girl with whom Martin and Darwin are in love), Darwin is a "simian" name.
In Chekhov's story The Duel (1891) von Koren does not kill Laevski in a pistol duel, because he is hampered by the deacon's cry. The moment Tapper discharges his pistol, Van notices a boy in a sailorsuit who looks like Dr Platonov's grandson:
They found a convenient clearing, and the principals, pistol in hand, faced each other at a distance of some thirty paces, in the kind of single combat described by most Russian novelists and by practically all Russian novelists of gentle birth. As Arwin clapped his hands, informally signaling the permission to fire at will, Van noticed a speckled movement on his right: two little spectators - a fat girl and a boy in a sailorsuit, wearing glasses, with a basket of mushrooms between them. It was not the chocolate-muncher in Cordula's compartment, but a boy very much like him, and as this flashed through Van's mind he felt the jolt of the bullet ripping off, or so it felt, the entire left side of his torso. He swayed, but regained his balance, and with nice dignity discharged his pistol in the sun-hazy air. (1.42)
Platonov is the main character in Chekhov's Pyesa bez nazvaniya ("Play without a Title," 1881). The passengers of Cordula's compartment (in a train that brings Van to Kalugano) include Dr Platonov (the grandfather of the chocolate-muncher):
As he was pushing his unsteady way through one corridor after another, cursing under his breath the window-gazers who did not draw in their bottoms to let him pass, and hopelessly seeking a comfortable nook in one of the first-class cars consisting of four-seat compartments, he saw Cordula and her mother facing each other on the window side. The two other places were occupied by a stout, elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned brown wig with a middle parting, and a bespectacled boy in a sailor suit sitting next to Cordula, who was in the act of offering him one half of her chocolate bar. Van entered, moved by a sudden very bright thought, but Cordula's mother did not recognize him at once, and the flurry of reintroductions combined with a lurch of the train caused Van to step on the prunella-shod foot of the elderly passenger, who uttered a sharp cry and said, indistinctly but not impolitely: 'Spare my gout (or 'take care' or 'look out'), young man!'
'I do not like being addressed as "young man,"' Van told the invalid in a completely uncalled-for, brutal burst of voice.
'Has he hurt you, Grandpa?' inquired the little boy.
'He has,' said Grandpa, 'but I did not mean to offend anybody by my cry of anguish.'
'Even anguish should be civil,' continued Van (while the better Van in him tugged at his sleeve, aghast and ashamed).
'Cordula,' said the old actress (with the same apropos with which she once picked up and fondled a fireman's cat that had strayed into Fast Colors in the middle of her best speech), 'why don't you go with this angry young demon to the tea-car? I think I'll take my thirty-nine winks now.'
'What's wrong?' asked Cordula as they settled down in the very roomy and rococo 'crumpeter,' as Kalugano College students used to call it in the 'Eighties and 'Nineties.
'Everything,' replied Van, 'but what makes you ask?'
'Well, we know Dr Platonov slightly, and there was absolutely no reason for you to be so abominably rude to the dear old man.'
'I apologize,' said Van. 'Let us order the traditional tea.' (ibid.)
According to Van, the father of the Erminin twins Greg and Grace was a Chekhovian colonel:
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform' my lord' that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saigon and was summoning him to appear.
'Aha,' said Van, 'I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.' (3.2).
The third pair of twins in Ada are the brothers Jean and Jacques with whom Van and Dick C. play a game of poker at Chose (Van's English University, 1.28). Their names seem to hint at Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), an enthusiastic student of botany. A French writer of an earlier century who might have called the little room in which Demon for the first time possessed Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) a "cabinet recule" (1.2) is Roussseau.
The action in Ada takes place on Demonia or Antiterra, Earth's twin planet. The phenomenon of Terra (one is liable to identify it with Earth) appeared on Demonia after the so-called L disaster:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans - and not to grave men or gravemen. (1.3)
The Antiterran L disaster in the middle of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski (the author of The Double, 1846) and the Petrashevskians on January 3, 1850 (NS). January 3, 1876, is Lucette's birthday (1.1). The characters in Dostoevski's Dnevnik pisatelya ("Writer's Diary") include the Parodoksalist. Paradox is Johnny's car in which Van arrives at the site of the duel in the Kalugano forest:
He shaved, disposed of two blood-stained safety blades by leaving them in a massive bronze ashtray, had a structurally perfect stool, took a quick bath, briskly dressed, left his bag with the concierge, paid his bill and at six punctually squeezed himself next to blue-chinned and malodorous Johnny into the latter's Paradox, a cheap 'semi-racer.' For two or three miles they skirted the dismal bank of the lake - coal piles, shacks, boathouses, a long strip of black pebbly mud and, in the distance, over the curving bank of autumnally misted water, the tawny fumes of tremendous factories.
'Where are we now, Johnny dear?' asked Van as they swung out of the lake's orbit and sped along a suburban avenue with clapboard cottages among laundry-lined pines.
'Dorofey Road,' cried the driver above the din of the motor. 'It abuts at the forest.'
It abutted. Van felt a faint twinge in his knee where he had hit it against a stone when attacked from behind a week ago, in another wood. At the moment his foot touched the pine-needle strewn earth of the forest road, a transparent white butterfly floated past, and with utter certainty Van knew that he had only a few minutes to live. (1.42)
In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Shchyogolev mentions Petrashevski (confusing him with Chernyshevski, the hero of Fyodor's book):
"Ну что ж, -- последний наш вечерок! -- сказат Борис Иванович, вдоволь нахохотавшись. -- За ваше преуспевание, синьор. Кто-то мне на-днях говорил, что вы накатали презлой реферат о Петрашевском. Похвально. Слушай, мама, там стоит ещё бутылочка, незачем везти, отдашь Касаткиным".
'Well - our last evening!' said Boris Ivanovich, having laughed to his heart's content. 'May you prosper, signor. Someone told me the other day that you dashed off a rather nasty paper on Petrashevski. Very laudable. Listen, Mama, there's another bottle there, no point in taking it with us, give it to the Kasatkins.' (Chapter Five)
In the same chapter of the novel Koncheev (in a conversation imagined by Fyodor) says that nature was seeing double when she created us:
Если к этому добавить, что у природы двоилось в глазах, когда она создавала нас (о, эта проклятая парность, от которой некуда деваться: лошадь-корова, кошка-собака, крыса-мышь, блоха-клоп), что симметричность в строении живых тел есть следствие мирового вращения (достаточно долго пущенный волчок начнет, быть может, жить, расти, размножаться), а что в порыве к ассиметрии, к неравенству, слышится мне вопль по настоящей свободе, желание вырваться из кольца, -- --
And if one adds to this that nature was seeing double when she created us (oh, this accursed pairing which is impossible to escape: horse-cow, cat-dog, rat-mouse, flea-bug), that symmetry in the structure of live bodies is a consequence of the rotation of worlds (a top that spinsfor sufficiently long will begin, perhaps, to live, grow and multiply), and that in our straining toward asymmetry, toward inequality, I can detect a howl for genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle... (ibid.)
As he speaks of certain aspects of the Antiterran geography, Van mentions the Arctic no longer vicious Circle:
Ved' ('it is, isn't it') sidesplitting to imagine that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! (1.3)
Dar (The Gift) has the following epigraph:
Дуб -- дерево. Роза -- цветок. Олень -- животное. Воробей -- птица. Россия -- наше отечество. Смерть неизбежна.
П. Смирновский.
Учебник русской грамматики.
An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.
P. Smirnovsky,
A Textbook of Russian Grammar.
A rare oak (Quercus ruslan Chat., also known as Baldy) grows in Ardis (2.7).
Van wonders if the name of his first platonic love (Mrs. Tapirov's daughter) was Rose (1.42). According to Ada, she loathes roses (the flowers given her by Percy de Prey at the picnic on her sixteenth birthday, 1.39).
In Ada's last sentence Van and Ada (who are on their death-bed and hasten to complete the book before it is too late) mention a doe at gaze:
Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more. (5.6)
When Van first sees Blanche (a French handmaid at Ardis), she is feeding a sparrow:
She wore what his father termed with a semi-assumed leer 'soubret black and frissonet frill'; a tortoiseshell comb in her chestnut hair caught the amber light; the French window was open, and she was holding one hand, starred with a tiny aquamarine, rather high on the jamb as she looked at a sparrow that was hopping up the paved path toward the bit of baby-toed biscuit she had thrown to him. (1.7)
The Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature is mentioned in the same paragraph as Blanche:
Van, who knew that Ada was a little 'snoopy,' discovered Blanche in his room feigning to make the made bed, with the unlocked diary lying on the stool beside it. He slapped her lightly on the behind and removed the shagreen-bound book to a safer place. Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature. It might have been a neat little sequel to the Shattal Tree incident. Instead, both resumed their separate ways - and Blanche, I suppose, went to weep in her bower. (1.15)
On Antiterra Russia is a part of Abraham Milton's Amerussia (1.3). In the epilogue Van compares the 'Ardis' part of Ada to Tolstoy's Detstvo (Childood, 1852) and Otrochestvo (Boyhood, 1854):
Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy's reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the 'Ardis' part of the book. (5.6)
Otechestvo being Russian for 'fatherland," on Antiterra the title Detstvo i otrochestvo was mistranslated as Childhood and Fatherland:
'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858). (1.1)
Captain Tapper, Arwin Birdfoot and Johnny Rafin, Esq., are gay ("pansy"). The characters of Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1875-77) include a homosexual couple (the two officers serving in Vronski's regiment).
I thank Victor Fet (Marshall Univrsity) for drawing my attention to the fact that Darvin (Darwin in Russian spelling) consists of dar (gift) and Vin (Veen in Russian spelling) or vin (gen. pl. of vino, "wine"). As far as we both know, the pun was first published in Fet's poem Pushkin, Darvin i bogi ("Pushkin, Darwin and Gods," Literaturnyi evropeets, Frankfurt, 1999, 19).
Alexey Sklyarenko
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He was about to enter the music shop when he remembered with a start that he had not left any message for Tapper’s seconds, so he retraced his steps.
He found them sitting in the lounge and requested them to settle matters rapidly — he had more important business than that. ‘Ne grubit’ sekundantam’ (never be rude to seconds), said Demon’s voice in his mind. Arwin Birdfoot, a lieutenant in the Guards, was blond and flabby, with moist pink lips and a foot-long cigarette holder. Johnny Rafin, Esq., was small, dark and dapper and wore blue suede shoes with a dreadful tan suit. Birdfoot soon disappeared, leaving Van to work out details with Johnny, who, though loyally eager to assist Van, could not conceal that his heart belonged to Van’s adversary. (1.42)
According to Vivian Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'), Rafin, Esq., is a pun on 'Rafinesque' [Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840), an American zoologist and botanist of Franco-German extraction who was born in Constantinople], after whom a violet was named. "Birdfoot" hints at birdfoot violet (Viola pedata). As to the name Arwin, it only needs a D (the letter that, according to Walter C. Keyway, Esq., Baron Klim Avidov dropped in order to use it as a particule, 1.36) to become Darwin, a name that has dar (gift) in it:
D + Arwin = Darwin = dar + win
Baron Klim Avidov = Vivian Darkbloom = Vladimir Nabokov
Van and Ada are the children of Demon Veen, their half-sister Lucette is the daughter of Demon's first cousin Daniel Veen. The Veen cousins are the grandchildren of Erasmus Veen (1760-1852). The inventor of the clockwork luggage carts (1.19), Erasmus Veen has the same first name as the poet Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), author of The Botanic Garden (1791), grandfather of the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-82). The cousins Demon and Daniel married the twin sisters Durmanov, Aqua and Marina:
On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover's first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.
The 'D' in the name of Aqua's husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina's husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon's twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns. (1.1)
April 23 is VN's birthday. Marina's affair with Demon Veen started on his, her, and Daniel Veen's birthday, January 5, 1868, when she was twenty-four and both Veens thirty. (1.2) January 5 is Vera Nabokov's birthday.
There is "bird" in birdfoot. In VN's novel Pnin (1955) the Head of the Ornithology Department at Waindell, Professor Wynn has a double whom Pnin mentally calls "Twynn:"
It should not be deemed surprising, therefore, that even Pnin, not a very observant man in everyday life, could not help becoming aware (sometime during his ninth year at Waindell) that a lanky, bespectacled old fellow with scholarly strands of steel-grey hair falling over the right side of his small but corrugated brow, and with a deep furrow descending from each side of his sharp nose to each corner of his long upper-lip--a person whom Pnin knew as Professor Thomas Wynn, Head of the Ornithology Department, having once talked to him at some party about gay golden orioles, melancholy cuckoos, and other Russian countryside birds--was not always Professor Wynn. At times he graded, as it were, into somebody else, whom Pnin did not know by name but whom he classified, with a bright foreigner's fondness for puns as 'Twynn' (or, in Pninian, 'Tvin'). (Chapter Six, 5)
Pnin has a Russian accent and would have called Van Veen (a University Professor who teaches Philosophy and Psychiatry) "Professor Vin," as he does call T. W. Thomas (Professor 'Twynn'):
'Good-bye, good-bye, Professor Vin!' sang out Pnin, his cheeks ruddy and round in the lamplight of the porch. (Chapter Six, 11)
T. W. Thomas is a Waindell Professor of Anthropology. In Chekhov's story Chelovek v futlyare ("The Man in a Case," 1898) anthropos is Belikov's favorite word:
-- О, как звучен, как прекрасен греческий язык! -- говорил он со сладким выражением; и, как бы в доказательство своих слов, прищурив глаз и подняв палец, произносил: -- Антропос!
'Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful is the Greek language!' he would say, with a sugary expression; and as though to prove his words he would screw up his eyes and, raising his finger, would pronounce 'Anthropos!'
According to Van's second, Captain Tapper (a member of the Do-Re-La country club whose name brings to mind Chekhov's stroy Tapyor, "The Ballroom Pianist," 1885) is an expert on maps, horses, horticulture. In Chekhov's story Loshadinaya familiya ("A Horsey Name," 1885) the name forgotten by the steward turns out to be Ovsov ("Hayes"). The characters of VN's novel Podvig (Glory, 1930) include Darwin (Martin Edelweiss' best friend at Cambridge). According to Sonya Zilanov (the girl with whom Martin and Darwin are in love), Darwin is a "simian" name.
In Chekhov's story The Duel (1891) von Koren does not kill Laevski in a pistol duel, because he is hampered by the deacon's cry. The moment Tapper discharges his pistol, Van notices a boy in a sailorsuit who looks like Dr Platonov's grandson:
They found a convenient clearing, and the principals, pistol in hand, faced each other at a distance of some thirty paces, in the kind of single combat described by most Russian novelists and by practically all Russian novelists of gentle birth. As Arwin clapped his hands, informally signaling the permission to fire at will, Van noticed a speckled movement on his right: two little spectators - a fat girl and a boy in a sailorsuit, wearing glasses, with a basket of mushrooms between them. It was not the chocolate-muncher in Cordula's compartment, but a boy very much like him, and as this flashed through Van's mind he felt the jolt of the bullet ripping off, or so it felt, the entire left side of his torso. He swayed, but regained his balance, and with nice dignity discharged his pistol in the sun-hazy air. (1.42)
Platonov is the main character in Chekhov's Pyesa bez nazvaniya ("Play without a Title," 1881). The passengers of Cordula's compartment (in a train that brings Van to Kalugano) include Dr Platonov (the grandfather of the chocolate-muncher):
As he was pushing his unsteady way through one corridor after another, cursing under his breath the window-gazers who did not draw in their bottoms to let him pass, and hopelessly seeking a comfortable nook in one of the first-class cars consisting of four-seat compartments, he saw Cordula and her mother facing each other on the window side. The two other places were occupied by a stout, elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned brown wig with a middle parting, and a bespectacled boy in a sailor suit sitting next to Cordula, who was in the act of offering him one half of her chocolate bar. Van entered, moved by a sudden very bright thought, but Cordula's mother did not recognize him at once, and the flurry of reintroductions combined with a lurch of the train caused Van to step on the prunella-shod foot of the elderly passenger, who uttered a sharp cry and said, indistinctly but not impolitely: 'Spare my gout (or 'take care' or 'look out'), young man!'
'I do not like being addressed as "young man,"' Van told the invalid in a completely uncalled-for, brutal burst of voice.
'Has he hurt you, Grandpa?' inquired the little boy.
'He has,' said Grandpa, 'but I did not mean to offend anybody by my cry of anguish.'
'Even anguish should be civil,' continued Van (while the better Van in him tugged at his sleeve, aghast and ashamed).
'Cordula,' said the old actress (with the same apropos with which she once picked up and fondled a fireman's cat that had strayed into Fast Colors in the middle of her best speech), 'why don't you go with this angry young demon to the tea-car? I think I'll take my thirty-nine winks now.'
'What's wrong?' asked Cordula as they settled down in the very roomy and rococo 'crumpeter,' as Kalugano College students used to call it in the 'Eighties and 'Nineties.
'Everything,' replied Van, 'but what makes you ask?'
'Well, we know Dr Platonov slightly, and there was absolutely no reason for you to be so abominably rude to the dear old man.'
'I apologize,' said Van. 'Let us order the traditional tea.' (ibid.)
According to Van, the father of the Erminin twins Greg and Grace was a Chekhovian colonel:
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform' my lord' that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saigon and was summoning him to appear.
'Aha,' said Van, 'I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.' (3.2).
The third pair of twins in Ada are the brothers Jean and Jacques with whom Van and Dick C. play a game of poker at Chose (Van's English University, 1.28). Their names seem to hint at Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), an enthusiastic student of botany. A French writer of an earlier century who might have called the little room in which Demon for the first time possessed Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) a "cabinet recule" (1.2) is Roussseau.
The action in Ada takes place on Demonia or Antiterra, Earth's twin planet. The phenomenon of Terra (one is liable to identify it with Earth) appeared on Demonia after the so-called L disaster:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans - and not to grave men or gravemen. (1.3)
The Antiterran L disaster in the middle of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski (the author of The Double, 1846) and the Petrashevskians on January 3, 1850 (NS). January 3, 1876, is Lucette's birthday (1.1). The characters in Dostoevski's Dnevnik pisatelya ("Writer's Diary") include the Parodoksalist. Paradox is Johnny's car in which Van arrives at the site of the duel in the Kalugano forest:
He shaved, disposed of two blood-stained safety blades by leaving them in a massive bronze ashtray, had a structurally perfect stool, took a quick bath, briskly dressed, left his bag with the concierge, paid his bill and at six punctually squeezed himself next to blue-chinned and malodorous Johnny into the latter's Paradox, a cheap 'semi-racer.' For two or three miles they skirted the dismal bank of the lake - coal piles, shacks, boathouses, a long strip of black pebbly mud and, in the distance, over the curving bank of autumnally misted water, the tawny fumes of tremendous factories.
'Where are we now, Johnny dear?' asked Van as they swung out of the lake's orbit and sped along a suburban avenue with clapboard cottages among laundry-lined pines.
'Dorofey Road,' cried the driver above the din of the motor. 'It abuts at the forest.'
It abutted. Van felt a faint twinge in his knee where he had hit it against a stone when attacked from behind a week ago, in another wood. At the moment his foot touched the pine-needle strewn earth of the forest road, a transparent white butterfly floated past, and with utter certainty Van knew that he had only a few minutes to live. (1.42)
In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Shchyogolev mentions Petrashevski (confusing him with Chernyshevski, the hero of Fyodor's book):
"Ну что ж, -- последний наш вечерок! -- сказат Борис Иванович, вдоволь нахохотавшись. -- За ваше преуспевание, синьор. Кто-то мне на-днях говорил, что вы накатали презлой реферат о Петрашевском. Похвально. Слушай, мама, там стоит ещё бутылочка, незачем везти, отдашь Касаткиным".
'Well - our last evening!' said Boris Ivanovich, having laughed to his heart's content. 'May you prosper, signor. Someone told me the other day that you dashed off a rather nasty paper on Petrashevski. Very laudable. Listen, Mama, there's another bottle there, no point in taking it with us, give it to the Kasatkins.' (Chapter Five)
In the same chapter of the novel Koncheev (in a conversation imagined by Fyodor) says that nature was seeing double when she created us:
Если к этому добавить, что у природы двоилось в глазах, когда она создавала нас (о, эта проклятая парность, от которой некуда деваться: лошадь-корова, кошка-собака, крыса-мышь, блоха-клоп), что симметричность в строении живых тел есть следствие мирового вращения (достаточно долго пущенный волчок начнет, быть может, жить, расти, размножаться), а что в порыве к ассиметрии, к неравенству, слышится мне вопль по настоящей свободе, желание вырваться из кольца, -- --
And if one adds to this that nature was seeing double when she created us (oh, this accursed pairing which is impossible to escape: horse-cow, cat-dog, rat-mouse, flea-bug), that symmetry in the structure of live bodies is a consequence of the rotation of worlds (a top that spinsfor sufficiently long will begin, perhaps, to live, grow and multiply), and that in our straining toward asymmetry, toward inequality, I can detect a howl for genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle... (ibid.)
As he speaks of certain aspects of the Antiterran geography, Van mentions the Arctic no longer vicious Circle:
Ved' ('it is, isn't it') sidesplitting to imagine that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! (1.3)
Dar (The Gift) has the following epigraph:
Дуб -- дерево. Роза -- цветок. Олень -- животное. Воробей -- птица. Россия -- наше отечество. Смерть неизбежна.
П. Смирновский.
Учебник русской грамматики.
An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.
P. Smirnovsky,
A Textbook of Russian Grammar.
A rare oak (Quercus ruslan Chat., also known as Baldy) grows in Ardis (2.7).
Van wonders if the name of his first platonic love (Mrs. Tapirov's daughter) was Rose (1.42). According to Ada, she loathes roses (the flowers given her by Percy de Prey at the picnic on her sixteenth birthday, 1.39).
In Ada's last sentence Van and Ada (who are on their death-bed and hasten to complete the book before it is too late) mention a doe at gaze:
Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more. (5.6)
When Van first sees Blanche (a French handmaid at Ardis), she is feeding a sparrow:
She wore what his father termed with a semi-assumed leer 'soubret black and frissonet frill'; a tortoiseshell comb in her chestnut hair caught the amber light; the French window was open, and she was holding one hand, starred with a tiny aquamarine, rather high on the jamb as she looked at a sparrow that was hopping up the paved path toward the bit of baby-toed biscuit she had thrown to him. (1.7)
The Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature is mentioned in the same paragraph as Blanche:
Van, who knew that Ada was a little 'snoopy,' discovered Blanche in his room feigning to make the made bed, with the unlocked diary lying on the stool beside it. He slapped her lightly on the behind and removed the shagreen-bound book to a safer place. Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel's Evolution in the History of Literature. It might have been a neat little sequel to the Shattal Tree incident. Instead, both resumed their separate ways - and Blanche, I suppose, went to weep in her bower. (1.15)
On Antiterra Russia is a part of Abraham Milton's Amerussia (1.3). In the epilogue Van compares the 'Ardis' part of Ada to Tolstoy's Detstvo (Childood, 1852) and Otrochestvo (Boyhood, 1854):
Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy's reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the 'Ardis' part of the book. (5.6)
Otechestvo being Russian for 'fatherland," on Antiterra the title Detstvo i otrochestvo was mistranslated as Childhood and Fatherland:
'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858). (1.1)
Captain Tapper, Arwin Birdfoot and Johnny Rafin, Esq., are gay ("pansy"). The characters of Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1875-77) include a homosexual couple (the two officers serving in Vronski's regiment).
I thank Victor Fet (Marshall Univrsity) for drawing my attention to the fact that Darvin (Darwin in Russian spelling) consists of dar (gift) and Vin (Veen in Russian spelling) or vin (gen. pl. of vino, "wine"). As far as we both know, the pun was first published in Fet's poem Pushkin, Darvin i bogi ("Pushkin, Darwin and Gods," Literaturnyi evropeets, Frankfurt, 1999, 19).
Alexey Sklyarenko
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