There is in ADA an incidental character, Mrs
Tapirov: "A few blocks from the schoolgrounds, a widow, Mrs Tapirov, who was
French but spoke English with a Russian accent, had a shop of objets d'art and
more or less antique furniture" (1.4). As a boy of thirteen, Van was
secretly in love with Mrs Tapirov's daughter (whom he never spoke to).
The widow's name comes from tapir, "any of
several large, stout, three-toed ungulates of the family Tapiridae, of Central
and South America, the Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra, somewhat resembling a swine
and having a long, flexible snout." This exotic animal is mentioned by
Valeriy Bryusov's in his 1911 poem "Весёлый зов весенней зелени..." ("The merry
call of the vernal green..."):
От тяжкой поступи тапира
До лёгких трепетов стрекоз
From a tapir's heavy gait
To dragon-flies' light trepidations.
These lines are quoted by the critic Yuliy
Aikhenval'd (who was VN's friend in the emigration) in his devastating essay on
Bryusov. Aikhenwald notes that this tapir, artificially called for from
such far-away land only for the rhyme's sake, tramples down with its
heavy gait the entire poem. The critic wonders, if it is not owing to this
animal's awkward presense that the poem's last line is so difficult to
recite:
Блеск дня, чернь ночи, вёсны, зимы ("The day's
brightness, the night's blackness, springs, winters"; no "scuds" in the
original's iambic line beginning with two spondees).
Another, more melodious, line
of Bryusov's poem reads:
Цветок шиповника в расселине ("A wild rose's flower
in the cleft").
Mrs Tapirov's daughter used to put a bunch of real
roses among the fake ones pour attraper le client. Years later Van,
standing before a shop-window with vased flowers on consoles, recalls his
first love and wonders if the girl's name wasn't Rose or Roza. On the other
hand, the name of Ada's headmisstress at Brownhill is Miss Cleft (1.27).
About the erotic connotations of the names of some of Ada's
characters and those of Van's and Ada's schools, see my essay on Chose (the
name of Van's University) in Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sklyarenko7.doc.
Bryusov's contemporaries (Khodasevich, Sadovskoy et
al.) laid the blame on him when Nadezhda L'vov, a young poetess who was
Bryusov's mistress, committed a suicide. It was Bryusov who gave her the
revolver from which she shot herself dead (see also my article "Russian Poets
& Potentates as Scots & Scandinavians in Ada", Part Two, in The
Nabokovian #57). Nadya L'vov's family name comes from лев, Russian for
"lion." This animal is present in Ardelion, the name of Daniel Veen's father.
Alexey Sklyarenko