Marina Durmanova never realized that Armina, the name of her
óôtÅ 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 Krasnyi tsvetok (“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
The
Latin letter L, present in the name of the Antiterran nineteen century disaster,
corresponds to the Russian letter ì. This character is called ÜÌØ in the modern alphabet (in the old one it was
called lyudi,*** “men”). But
ÜÌØ is also Russian 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, absent-mindedly 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
*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
*** The name of the letter
ì 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 “
**** 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. Lucette drinks a ‘Cossack pony’ of
Klass********** vodka – hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff – before jumping from
‘Tobakoff’ into the
******* See also my note “The Truth
about Terra and Antiterra: Dostoevsky and
******** 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 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 killed by his burden). Note
that, while Hugo’s heroine was stolen by Gypsies, Tsyganok, on the contrary, 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. Besides, kisel’ is an anagram of sikel’ (also spelled sekel’ and sekil’), the Russian vulgar word
for “clitoris.” In one of the “Flavita” (Scrabble) games, Luccete’s six letters,
when reshuffled, would form klitor, the word yet unfamiliar to the little
Lucette (2.5).
********** Klass = K + lass (Klass
is presumably the distiller’s name, with some Marxist connotations in it; K
is a letter missing in voda but
present in vodka; “lass” is a synonym
of “girl”).
*********** 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
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 modern Russian alphabet).