Baron Klim Avidov,[1] who gave Marina’s children the set of Flavita (the Antiterran version of Scrabble), is said to have once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist, a certain Walter C. Keyway, Esq., into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa (1.36).

         The letter D that Keyway believes Avidov has dropped[2] corresponds to the Cyrillic letter Д. Its name in the old Russian alphabet, dobro (“good”), reminds me of the famous first line of Stanislav Kunyaev’s 1959 poem “Dobro dolzhno byt’ s kulakami…” (“Good should have fists…” See below the full Russian text of the poem that, I suspect, made an appearance in Pravda or some other Soviet newspaper[3]). The maxim expressed in this line clashes with Christ’s words to his disciples: “But I tell you not to oppose an evil person. If someone slaps you on your right cheek, turn your other cheek to him as well” (Matthew 5:39). Interestingly, Christ was believed to be king David’s descendant and was even addressed “Son of David:” “And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, [thou] Son of David;[4] my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil” (Matthew 22:15). In the canonical Russian translation of the New Testament “Son of David” is rendered Syn Davidov. SYN DAVIDOV + DE (the particule) = DENIS DAVYDOV (Russian poet and general, 1784-1839, a hero of the war against Napoleon, a friend of Vyazemsky, Baratynsky and Pushkin) = AVIDOV + DED (grandfather) + SNY (dreams).

         I feel the presence of a fundamental ethical problem here that I can not formulate, let alone solve. The name “Walter C. Keyway, Esq.” must be an anagram, but I fail to reshuffle the letters in a way that would make sense. “Keyway” reminds me of an episode in Ilf and Petrov’s novel “The Twelve Chairs.” In “Sorbonne,” a cheap hotel in Stargorod, Ostap Bender asks the priest Fyodor Vostrikov through the keyhole of a locked door: “Pochyom opium dlya naroda?” (“How much is opium for the people [i. e. religion] nowadays?”). In reply, father Fyodor attempts to thrust the offender with a pencil pushed through the keyhole, but Ostap manages to snatch the pencil away. He scratches on its facet an insulting word and, through the same keyhole, returns the object to its owner.[5] GRITZ = G + RITZ, but also hints at Madam Gritsatsuev, “a sultry woman, a poet’s dream,” whom Bender marries in Stargorod in order to search one of her chairs for the diamonds it could hide in its upholstery. Venezia has venets (a crown; cf. brachnyi venets, “wedding crown,” and idti pod venets, “to marry”) and ai (Ay is the town in France famous for its champagne; Van, Ada and Lucette drink Aï [sic] in ‘Ursus:’ 2.8; cf. Blok’s often quoted lines from his poem “In the Restaurant,” 1910: Ya poslal tebe chyornuyu rozu v bokale / Zolotogo, kak nebo, ai: “I sent you a black rose in a goblet / Of the golden, like the sky, Ay”) in it. In Eugene Onegin (Chapter Four, XLVI), Pushkin compares Ay to a volatile mistress and Bordeaux (red wine made in the region of the city of that name), to a friend. If Bordeaux is a friend (note that Bordeaux in the Russian spelling, BORDO = DOBRO = BORODINO + V – VINO; Borodino is a village West of Moscow near which the greatest battle in the 1812 war took place; the title of Lermontov’s 1837 poem; vino is Russian for “wine”), Ay (or Aï) must be an enemy. Russian for “enemy,” VRAG = GAVR = GRAV = OVRAG – O (Gavr is the Russian name of Havre; Le Havre-de-Grâce is the port from which the liner Tobakoff, with Lucette onboard it, sails to America: 3.5; Grav is Graves, French white and red wines from the same Bordeaux region, in the Russian spelling; “a bottle of the friendly Graves” is mentioned in Nabokov’s “The University Poem,” 1927; ovrag is Russian for “ravine;” cf. Chekhov’s story V ovrage, “In the ravine,” 1900, in which evil triumphs over good, because good is weak and has no fists to protect itself). ROSSA = SSORA (ssora is Russian for “quarrel;” in the Preface to “The Golden Calf,” the authors mention krupnaya ssora, a serious quarrel, that arose between them over the following cause: should they kill the hero of “The Twelve Chairs” in the novel’s ending or let him live? Finally, lots were drawn and Ostap Bender’s fate was decided). Besides, Venezia Rossa (“Red Venice”) seems to hint at St. Petersburg (“Leningrad” at the time when Ada was written), the city often called “the northern Venice.”

         The apostrophe in the name d’Avidov conjured up by unfortunate Keyway’s imagination seems to correspond to the inverted comma in the rebus composed by old Sinitsky in Ilf and Petrov’s “The Golden Calf.” (We know of this rebus that it also comprises a goose holding the letter G in its beak, and its solution is the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s old motto: “you will earn your right by fighting for it.”[6]) On the other hand, this apostrophe reminds me of Pushkin’s very specific use of typographical marks in his epigram on Boileau (“Comparison,” 1813-17: U Depreo byla lish’ zapyataya, / A u menya dve tochki s zapyatoi: “Desprèaux had only , / And I have : with ,” hinting at Boileau’s physical flaw).[7] Finally, it brings to mind the word zapyataya (comma) used idiomatically in the following passage in Chekhov’s side-splitting “A Letter to a Learned Neighbor” (1880): “You have invented [in your writings] that man descends from apian tribes marmosets, orangutans etc. Pardon me, the little old man as I am, but I do not agree with you about this important issue and can raise an objection (mogu Vam zapyatuyu postavit’, literally: “I can insert you a comma”)… If apes were our ancestors, we would have been taken [for a walk] through the cities by Gypsies, paying money for being shown to each other, dancing at a Gypsy’s command or sitting behind bars in a zoo… Would we love and not despise a woman, if she smelt just a tiny bit like a monkey, which we can see each Monday at the marshal of the nobility’s?[8] …my great-great-grandfather Amvrosiy, who lived in the old days in the kingdom of Poland, was buried not like a monkey, but beside the catholic abot [sic] Ioakim Shostak, whose Notes about the moderate climate and immoderate consumption of strong drinks are still kept by my brother Ivan (the major). ‘Abot’[9] means a Roman Catholic priest.”

         There are two Roman Catholic priests, Moroshek and Kushakovsky, who try to convert to their faith their compatriot Adam Kozlevich, the driver of the Antelope Gnu car, in Ilf and Petrov’s “The Golden Calf.” Chekhov, too, loved to portray ministers of religion in his stories, but he did it with more sympathy and not always satirically. In “The Duel” (1891) there is the inquisitive and easily amused deacon Pobedov (whose surname comes from pobeda, Russian for ‘victory’). The patronymic of another character, Dr. Samoylenko, is Davidych. But the tale’s two main figures are Layevsky and his antagonist, the zoologist von Koren, who calls (in their absence) Layevsky and his mistress macaques and thinks that the society should use violence in order to get rid of people like them. He is particularly angry about Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s words: “I don’t understand how one can be seriously occupied with small insects (bukashkami i kozyavkami) at the time, when the people suffer.”

         Like von Koren, Nabokov all his life was seriously occupied with small insects, and, like Layevsky’s mistress, he was aware of his nation’s sufferings. I doubt that he would have taken sides with either von Koren or his opponent. Neither does Chekhov, the writer whom Nabokov admired, and the man, with whom he deeply sympathized. When Chekhov only began his career as a writer, a radical critic had predicted him that he will die drunk beneath a fence. Chekhov died in his bed in a hotel room, not beneath a fence, having drunk his last glass of champagne. The writer’s last words were: “It’s been a long time since I last drank champagne.” Some twelve years earlier, in a letter to Suvorin, Chekhov complained that there was no alcohol in the contemporary literature that would intoxicate and enthrall the reader. “Lift up the hem of our Muse’s skirt and you will see the flat spot.[10] Remember that writers whom we call everlasting or simply good and who intoxicate us all have one very important feature in common: they go somewhere and invite you to follow them and you feel not with your mind but with your whole heart that they have some goal, like the Ghost of Hamlet’s father who came and stirred the imagination. Some of them, depending on the caliber, have immediate goals: the [abolition of] serfdom, liberation of the motherland, politics, beauty, or, like Denis Davydov, simply vodka; others have distant ones: God, afterlife, the happiness of mankind etc. The best of them are realists and portray life as it is, but because every line is saturated, as with a juice, with the awareness of the goal, you feel, besides the life that exists, the life that should be and this fascinates you.”

         Lolita and Pale Fire are set in an invented country that only resembles the real United States and Ada’s setting is an invented word, Earth’s twin planet. Nevertheless, no one can say that Nabokov doesn’t portray life as it is. Humbert, Kinbote and Van Veen never really existed, but in the fictional worlds created by the artist’s imagination they not only could, but should have lived. In that sense, Nabokov, like Chekhov or Tolstoy, is a realist. At the same time, we feel in his novels not only the life that exists, but also the life that should be – for the very reason that his every line is saturated with the awareness of the goal. Nabokov’s goals are most distant; however, he doesn’t scorn the immediate ones, such as the liberation of his country. He summons us to fight and convinces us of the actuality of the old SR Party’s motto: “you will earn your right by fighting for it.” He gives us the example that, despite the saying, sometimes odin v pole voin (“one man is a man;” literally: the sole man in the field is a fighter).

         I odin v pole voin is a novel (1886) by G. A. Machtet (1852-1901), the writer whom Chekhov mentions several times in his letters. On the other hand, this phrase reminds one of an episode in the ending of Pushkin’s long poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila,” 1820, when Ruslan single-handedly wins the battle of the Kievans against the pechenegs,[11] thanks to the magic sword he was given by Golova (the Head), the still alive organ of Chernomor’s decapitated brother. VOIN (warrior, fighter) = VINO = OVIN (barn) = GOLOVIN – LOG (Golovin is an old Russian aristocratic family name that comes from golova; there was a writer Ivan Golovin, 1816-90, an émigré and memoirist, whose pen-name – in fact, one of whose many pen-names – was Nivolog; cf. Ivan Il’ych Golovin, the hero of Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Il’ych,” 1886; Log is an Antiterran Supreme Being, short of “Logos”). Chernomor, the name of the dwarf and evil sorcerer in “Ruslan and Lyudmila” and of the marine tutor (morskoy dyad’ka) of the thirty three knights who live in the sea in Pushkin’s “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” (1831), evokes both Chernomordik, the rather improbable but funny name (that comes from chyornaya morda, “black muzzle”) of the chemist in Chekhov’s story “A Chemist’s Wife” (1886), and Chernomorsk, a (fictional) city on the Black Sea (Chyornoe more in Russian), the setting of Ilf and Petrov’s “The Golden Calf.” Vino is mentioned in both Chekhov’s story and Ilf and Petrov’s novel. While in the former a character means by it vinum gallicum rubrum (“vinum plochissimum,” very bad wine, Russo-Lat.) that one could buy at the chemist’s, in the latter vino turns out to be vodka (khlebnoe vino, alcohol made of corn). The yardman Nikita Pryakhin, one of the inhabitants of the ill-starred Voron’ya Slobodka (“Raven’s nest”), perishes, attempting to save from the burning house tsel’nyi gus’, chetvert’ khlebnogo vina (a full bottle containing some six pints of vodka; note gus’, “the goose”). It was the only heroic deed he ever committed and his last words were: kak pozhelaem, tak I sdelaem (“We shall act as we want”).

         In Chekhov’s story Bab’ye tsarstvo (“Women’s Realm,” 1894) there is a character, the lawyer Lysevich, an ardent admirer of Maupassant (the only other writer whom Lysevich reads sometimes is Jules Verne). Recommending Maupassant to the heroine and telling her about his latest piece, he says that it has exhausted him, has made him drunk. “But I fear that you will remain indifferent toward it. In order to get carried away by it, you have to savor it, slowly wring out the juice from every line, drink… You have to drink it.” On the other hand, young Chekhov has a charming miniature “Woman from the Point of View of a Drunkard” (1885) signed “My brother’s brother.”[12] Depending on age and marital status, women (“the intoxicating product”) are compared to this or that beverage. Women under sixteen are distilled water (Humbert Humbert would have disagreed with this); from 23 to 26, champagne; 28 years old, cognac with a slice of lemon; from 29 to 32, liqueurs; from 40 to 100, fusel oil; old spinster, a slice of lemon without cognac, etc.

         It seems to me that a similar classification can be made as applied to the works of different writers. In this classification, Maupassant (whom Lysevich advises Anna Akimovna to drink; note that Maupassant doesn’t exist on Antiterra and the authorship of some of his stories is ascribed to Mlle Larivière, Lucette’s governess) is at best a claret, Chekhov’s friend Gorky, a bad Zhigulyovskiy beer, while Shakespeare’s dramas, Pushkin’s poems and novel in verse “Eugene Onegin” (despite the author’s confession that he admixed a lot of water unto his poetic goblet[13]), many of Chekhov’s stories and Nabokov’s novels belong to the strongest literary concoctions. I would compare Ada or ardor to the so-called izvin’, pure alcohol, that, thanks to the skill of the experienced distiller, one drinks smoothly, as if it were champagne.

         It seems to me that the existence in Ada of two identical worlds, as like as two peas (or “two drops of water,” as we say in Russian), Terra and Antiterra, can be regarded as a result of author’s intoxication – not with Pryakhin’s vulgar vodka, but with Chekhov’s exquisite wine of fantasy. No inspiration is possible without this “wine.” Note, by the way, that a “habitually intoxicated laborer” (as a certain Ivan Ivanov of Yukonsk is described; incidentally, “Ivanov” and “Uncle Vanya” are plays by Chekhov) is, according to Ada (1.21), a good definition of the true artist. Also, it seems to me that the name of Ada’s most ‘Chekhovian’ character, Ada’s husband Andrey Vinelander, who dies, like Chekhov, of consumption (3.8), is, in part, a tribute to the author of “The Ward # 6” (in the same letter to Suvorin, Chekhov modestly calls this story “a lemonade”).

         Following in her mother’s footsteps, Ada becomes an actress (who plays Irina in the Antiterran version of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”[14]). Like Ada’s poor husband, Chekhov was married to an actress, Olga Knipper,[15] whom he affectionately called Knipusha in his letters. KNIPUSHA = PUSHKINA = PUSHINKA (Pushkina is Natal’ya Nikolaevna Pushkina, née Goncharova, the poet’s wife who flirted with d’Anthes; pushinka is Russian for “a bit of fluff;” this word is used in one of Mandelstam’s poems where it refers to his wife). This coincidence appears even more striking, when we learn that, before she joined the company of Stanislavsky’s Arts Theater in Moscow, Olga Knipper lived in the Goncharov family estate Polotnyanyi Zavod near Kaluga, a city SW of Moscow.[16] Now, Stanislav Kunyaev was born (in 1932, if I’m not mistaken) in Kaluga! In the summer of 1888 Van and Ada traveled to Kaluga (on Antiterra, a city in the U.S.A.) where they drank the Kaluga Waters[17] and visited the family dentist. (Incidentally, two weeks before Chekhov’s death, his wife went from Badenweiler, a German spa, to Basel, Switzerland, in order to visit a dentist.[18])

         Let us return, at the end of these chaotic notes (I have skipped many important facts that I discuss in my Russian piece where the material is organized in a very different way; perhaps I should have cut down this abridged version, almost a summery, of my 300-page-long Russian article even more radically), to the name Avidov. It differs from Avilov, the name of the woman who was in love with Chekhov,[19] only by one letter. Similarly, the word klok that occurs both in Kunyaev’s poem (chtoby letela sherst’ klokami, “to make tufts of hair fly [from the bodies of those who oppose good]”) and in Aqua’s last note (“otherwise, he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek [man]:” 1.3), differs from the name Blok, of the Russian poet (1880-1921), only by its initial. Blok is the author of Incognita (the poem mentioned in Ada: 3.3) that ends in the lines: “You are right, the drunken beast, / I know: “in wine is truth!” On the other hand, Blok’s “The Twelve” (1918) ends in Christ, in a white little crown of roses, with a blood-red banner in his hands (cf. “Venezia Rossa”), going before the twelve Red Army soldiers (it is unclear, whether they pursue Christ or, on the contrary, he is their leader; their number and the names of some of the soldiers suggest that they might be the apostles; it is strange, though, that they seem to shoot at their God).

         Unlike Christians, Christ is not mentioned in Ada. Note, nevertheless, that Khristosik (little Christ) is G. A. Vronsky’s word for any pretty starlet (1.3; the film director Vronsky is another former lover of Marina Durmanova). Now, this word was invented by Boris Sinani (1889-1910), Osip Mandelstam’s friend, who used to call thus young members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. “The Khristosiks were soft-faced young Russians, the bearers of “the idea of person’s role in history” – and many of them actually resembled Jesus in Nesterov’s paintings.”[20] Sinani was a son of a famous psychiatrist who tried to cure the writer Gleb Uspensky (1843-1902) of his mental illness. Like his namesake or distant relative, Chekhov’ friend Isaak Sinani (who owned a bookstore in Yalta; it was from Sinani that the Yalta resident Chekhov learnt of his father’s death in a Moscow hospital), Boris Sinani père was a Karaite (Crimean Tartar). Van Veen, the protagonist of Ada, is also a psychiatrist, who in his free time performs in variety with a difficult circus stunt. His partner in it is Rita, a Karaite girl from Chufut Kale. Van dances on his hands, while Rita sings the tango tune in Russian: “Pod znoinym nebom Argentiny, / Pod strastnyi govor mandoliny.” As it has been observed before, it is the same tango (“Pod znoinym nebom Argentiny, / Gde nebo yuzhnoe tak sine”) that Ostap Bender is dancing in “The Golden Calf,” just before his visit to Koreyko.[21]

         Please tell me where I can receive $ 1 000 000 (it seems to me I have deserved this remuneration) on a saucer with a blue border? Otherwise, I will have to re-qualify into a house manager. J          

Alexey Sklyarenko (who apologizes for his poor translations from Russian classics)