-----Mensagem Original-----
Enviada em: Terça-feira, 27 de Abril
de 2004 17:51
Assunto: Fw:ADA's Mascodagama and
Dostoevsky's "The Possessed" (Besy)
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 8:47 AM
Subject: Mascodagama
Nabokov once said that he prefers Joyce
to Dostoevsky. But the maniambulation in ADA seems to refer to both
Joyce's Ulysses and Dostoevsky's _Besy_ (The Possessed, or, literally,
"The Demons").
You remember that, at Chose, Van appears on stage as
Mascodagama - a masked giant who walks, or rather runs, and finally
even dances, on his hands (1.30). Now, in Besy , there is a famous scene
of the "literature quadrille" (kadril' literatury) at the charity ball
(Part Three, chapter 2: "End of the festival"). It consists of some six
pairs of masks. One of the masked dancers, who later turns out to be
Lyamshin (a minor character, one of the novel's demons), plays in
that quadrille the allegorical part of a "non-Petersburger but formidable
newspaper" (nepeterburgskoe, no groznoe izdanie - in fact, Katkov's
"Moskovskie vedomosti"), with a heavy club in his hands. In the
quadrille's last figure, under the stare of the bespectacled "upright
Russian thought" (chestnaya Russkaya mysl' - the magazine "Delo"),
Lyamshin turns head over heels and walks on his hands. This should
allegorically mean a permanent topsy-turvical distortion of the common
sense in the non-Petersburger but formidable newspaper. That
hand-walking in front of the governor's wife happens to be the
last drop which overflowes the cup and scandalizes the public at
the ball. Somebody shouts: "Flibustiery!" (freebooters, pirates,
rather than "filibusters").
Now, I wonder if Van's stage name (if not his whole circus
stunt) that puns on the name of the famous Portuguese navigator,
Vasco da Gama, c1460-1524, wasn't somehow (subconsiously) inspired to him
by that hand-walking and the subsequent mad cry in Besy. Van studies in
the Chose University "terrology" - a branch of psychiatry that deals with
the problems of Terra, a mysterious sibling planet of Demonia, aka
Antiterra, the setting of ADA. On Antiterra, its twin, Terra, is usually
believed to exist only in the minds of the insane. Its notion is sometimes
confused there with that of the Otherworld. Its name (Earth in Latin)
seems to hint, quite clearly, at our planet, Earth. But as I prove in
a series of articles (see for instance my notes "Traditions of a Russian
Family in Ada" and "A Window onto Terra" in the forthcoming
spring issue of The Nabokovian), the Terra planet ows its existence at
least as much to Dostoevsky and some French naturalist writers as it does
to Earth.
Returning to the Dostoevsky novel, let me also point out that the
poor governor, who is present at this charity ball that ends in
a Dostoevskian nightmarish scandal, goes mad right here, after that
quadrille. Simultanously, the big fire begins in the town and, on the
morning, the Lebyadkin couple, brother and sister, is found murdered (the
house where they lived doesn't burn down, but they are stabbed by an
escaped convict, Fed'ka katorzhnyi, who thinks that he acts upon
Stavrogin's will). Ignat Lebyadkin is a wretched poet who attempts to
blackmail the demonic Stavrogin, his sister Maria's husband
(Stavrogin's marriage to Maria Lebyadkin is a secret to the public), just
like "Black Miller" blackmails Demon in ADA sending him the examples
of his verse.
There are many other parallels between Demon's marriage to Aqua in
ADA and the "krovopiytsa" (blood-sucker) Stavrogin's marriage to poor
Maria in Besy.
I quite agree with Brian Boyd (who has told me that he
dislikes Dostoevsky) and with Nabokov himself (whose dislike of Dostoevsky
is well-known) that Besy is a very dull novel. But it is worth reading
once as if "through Nabokov's spectacles." Nabokov was a man of total
recall (at least in everything what concerned literature), and I assure
everybody that there are many allusions in ADA to Besy and
other novels and stories of Dostoevsky. And I still think that Van
Veen (in his writings) and F. M. Dostoevsky shared the favors of the same
muse.
I hope I have murdered nobody with my reckless English,
Alexey
Sklyarenko