ADA’S SPIRITS: A GALLON OF GALLOWS ALE

         Marina Durmanov never realized that Armina, the name of her Сôtе d’Azure villa (which belonged to Demon Veen before he gave it to his former mistress: 3.1), was an anagram of marina, the feminine form of the Latin adjective marinus, “of the sea,” rather than of her first name (1.27). But Armina is also an anagram of Ariman (Russian for Ahriman, the Greek name of Angra Mainyu, the evil spirit in the Iranian religion Zoroastrianism).

         An interesting mention of Ariman can be found in Garshin’s story “The Red Flower” (1883). “In his [the mad protagonist’s] eyes, the flower [a poppy] personified the entire evil; it has absorbed all innocently spilled blood (that’s why it was so red), all the tears and all the bile of humanity. It was a mysterious, terrible creature, God’s opposite, Ariman, that adopted a humble and innocent disguise.”

         Garshin’s hero is an insane person, a patient of a mental hospital (who manages to free himself from a strait-jacket, leave the ward in the night, pluck the flower in the hospital garden and return unheeded to his bed, before he dies of exhaustion in the morning, still clutching the flower in his hand). Like his hero, Vsevolod Garshin (1855-1888) suffered from a mental illness.* In a sudden fit he committed a suicide by jumping in the stair-well. It seems to me that Garshin’s presence in Ada is marked by the name of a character, Mr. Arshin, an acrophobe (a height-fearing person) “who couldn’t step down from a footstool” (2.6). GARSHIN = G + ARSHIN (arshin, accented on the second syllable, is an old Russian measure of length, equivalent to 28 inches, and a carpenter’s instrument, rule one arshin in length; this word occurs in several interesting proverbs, as well as in Tyutchev’s famous poem on Russia). The Latin letter G corresponds to the Cyrillic letter Γ. The latter character was called glagol’, “gallows,” in the old (“Church”) Russian alphabet.** On the other hand, it looks like the Latin character L turned upside down.

         The Latin L, present in the name of the Antiterran nineteen century disaster, corresponds to the Russian Л. The latter is called эль in the modern alphabet (in the old one it was called lyudi,*** “men”), which is also the Russian word for ale, a malt liquor containing alcohol. Now, “the Gallows Ale” is the drink served for the discussion held by Van and his colleagues about the problems of space fear and time-terror (2.6). It occurs in the paragraph immediately following the one in which Mr. Arshin is mentioned:

         Van had cold cuts brought up for them, and a gallon of Gallows Ale – but his mind was elsewhere and he didn’t shine in the discussion which forever remained in his mind as a grisaille of inconclusive tedium.

         It remains to be said that, initially, Garshin fell ill in 1880, when he was desperately trying to save from the gallows a revolutionary terrorist (things were made worse, for everybody concerned, by the fact that, before going to a high official, Garshin, who hardly ever touched alcohol, absentmindedly drank a full glass of a hard liquor**** as if it were plain water; see “The Death of V. M. Garshin” by Gleb Uspensky, the writer who was to go mad, too).

         I won’t touch here, for the lack of time, space and language abilities, on the flowers in Marina’s herbarium that Demon sent her from Villa Armina and Aqua, Marina’s twin sister and Demon’s wife, from her alpine “Nusshaus” (1.1). Please trace all these connections, as well as the links to Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal,” Dumas fils’s “La dame aux camélias,” Blok’s “The Night Violet” and other flora in literature, including Ada’s floramors, by yourselves, or, even better, read my 285-page-long article “The Truth is in Wine: the Solution of a Charadoid Imbedded in Nabokov’s Ada” soon to appear in Russian in Zembla (or, may be, some other Web site).

*Despite his illness, Garshin is always lucid in his writings (unlike, say, Dostoevsky).

** In the sense “gallows” the word glagol’ is used, for example, by Pushkin in his poem “Alfons saditsya na konya…” (“Alphonse is mounting a horse…” 1836). Like Pushkin’s play “The Stone Guest,” this poem is set in Spain.

*** The name of the letter Л in the old Russian alphabet, lyudi, evokes the title of Dostoevsky’s first novel, Bednye lyudi, (“Poor Folks,” 1846), written in an epistolary form, and that of the second part of Gorky’s***** autobiographic trilogy, V lyudyakh (“Away from home,” 1915-16). The former book’s hero, Makar Devushkin, gives his correspondent (a young woman, Makar’s distant relative,****** whom he saved from a procuress and for whom he rented a room in the house to which he, too, moved, taking for himself much less comfortable lodgings; her window is opposite his, giving on the narrow courtyard that separates the correspondents) a pot geranium, blooming with pretty red flowers (punsovym krestikom, “formed as a tiny crimson cross,” as Varen’ka Dobrosyolov puts it). The name of the woman (a woman servant in Makar’s abject chambres garnies) who brings Makar’s letters to Varen’ka and hers to him, Tereza, is matched by the name (Theresa) of the heroine of Van Veen’s first novel “Letters from Terra,” the girl who sends messages to an Antiterran professor from Terra, Demonia’s twin planet, before flying over to him (2.2).******* Please find yourselves the parallels between Varen’ka’s krestik and Lucette’s use of this diminutive noun in Ada (2.5). Consider the fact that “Devushkin” comes from devushka, which is Russian for “girl.” Note that the name Makar (which comes from the Greek word meaning “happy”) has some interesting anagrams. Also, note the English pun and the Russian sovy, “owls,” in punsovyi (this adjective is spelled differently in the modern Russian: puntsovyi).

         Let me add that, in my article in Russian “Ada as a charade novel” (available in Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sklyarenko5.doc), I argue that the Antiterran L disaster corresponds to the mock execution of the Petrashevskians, with Dostoevsky among them. Not only did this cruel farce take place in the beau milieu of the 19^th century (December 22, 1849, Old Style), but it also coincides with Lucette’s birthday (January 3, New Style). Note that L is also the Roman number 50.

**** The Riga Black Balsam (alcohol content 45%). The name of the liquor brings to mind the pot balsam (Russian: balzamin) blooming next to the geranium on the window-sill in Varvara Dobrosyolova’s room (see previous note), Ostrovsky’s comedy “The Wedding of Balzaminov” (also titled Za chem poidiosh’, to i naidiosh’, “You will find, what you are looking for,” 1861) and the French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850).

***** Note that A. M. Peshkov’s pen-name, Gorky (which means “bitter” in Russian; cf. Van’s words to the barman in a Parisian bar: “Gin and bitter for me:” 3.3; cf. Russian stock phrase gor’kiy p’yanitsa, “inveterate drunkard,” and Pushkin’s use of the adjective in his story “The Shot” (1830), in which the narrator, I. P. Belkin, drops the noun and calls local drunkards simply gor’kie), begins with G, glagol’.******** In the first part of his autobiographic trilogy, Detstvo (“Childhood,” 1913, Chapter Five), Gorky tells how his grandfather Kashirin taught him characters of the alphabet and mentions quite a number of them (including glagol’ and lyudi).

****** Sed’maia voda na kisele (“seventh water on the kissel,*********” as Makar puts it), which is an even more distant connexion than English “kissing cousin.” Note voda, aqua, in this proverb. Note that voda needs only one letter (kako, “how,” of the old Russian alphabet) to become aqua vitae, i. e. vodka.

******* See also my note “The Truth about Terra and Antiterra: Dostoevsky and Ada’s Twin Planets” in The Nabokovian #51.

******** The Latin letter G is part of the following anagram (one of the many anagrams forming what I call the charadoid in Ada): ANTILIA GLEMS + GERALD + A = GITANILLA + ESMERALDA + G. Antilia Glems is a character in Van’s novel “Letters from Terra;” Gerald is Maurice Gerald, the hero of Mayn Reid’s Headless Horseman; la gitanilla is Spanish for “gypsy girl” (and the title of a Cervantes novella**********); Esmeralda is the heroine of Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris,” whose name means “emerald” in Spanish. It is worth noting that Esmeralda is not really a Gypsy. She turns out to be a daughter of a Parisian harlot, who was stolen from her mother and raised by Gypsies. Despite the efforts of Quasimodo to save her from the gallows, she is executed at the end of the novel.

         Interestingly, in Gorky’s Detstvo there is a character nick-named Tsyganok (“a gypsy boy”), the foster son of A. M. Peshkov’s grandparents, one of the very few likeable people in the Kashirin household, who died in a young age due to an accident (he was asked by his elder foster-brothers, Gorky’s uncles, to carry to the cemetery a heavy wooden cross, but fell under its weight and was pressed down by his burden). Note that, while Hugo’s heroine was stolen by Gypsies, Tsyganok, just the opposite, was abandoned by his (presumably) Gypsy parents and raised by the Kashirins who found the baby at the door of their house.

********* Kisel’ is a kind of blancmange. This word occurs in some other proverbs.

********** Pushkin used the text of this novella (the original and a French translation), when he learned Spanish. (The first Russian translation of La Gitanilla appeared in 1842, five years after Pushkin’s death, and was entitled “Khitanochka.”) In Ada, gitanilla is a heroine of Osberg’s Spanish novel (titled, apparently, “Lolita”), whom Ada plays in Yuzlik’s film version (“Don Juan’s Last Fling:” 3.5).

         Let me finish this last note to note with the mention of Rasskaz o semi poveshennykh (“The Story of the Seven Who Were Hanged,” 1908) by Leonid Andreev, Gorky’s younger friend and protégé; of the art critic Sergey Glagol’ (pen-name of S. S. Goloushev, 1855-1920), who wrote, in the co-authorship with Grabar’, a book on Levitan, the painter and a friend of Chekhov; and of Glagolitsa (which comes not from glagol’, but from glagol, in the sense “word”), the old Slavic alphabet that by far surpasses Cyrillitsa (never mastered by Daniel Veen: 1.19) in nightmarishness.

         And the final comment: glagol’ rhymes with alkogol’ (Russian for “alcohol”). As a matter of fact, GLAGOL’ + OKA + VOLYA = ALKOGOL’ + VOLGA + YA (the Oka and the Volga are rivers in the European part of Russia, both of them are mentioned in Ada: 1.10 and 2.2; the Oka flows into the Volga in Nizhniy Novgorod, A. M. Peshkov’s home town, that was renamed, in the writer’s lifetime, Gorky; volya is Russian for “freedom” and “will” and part of the name Narodnaya Volya, “People’s Freedom,” of the Russian nineteen century terrorist organization; ya is Russian for “I” and the last letter of the Russian alphabet).