"Wincing and rearraging his
legs, our young Vandemonian cursed under his breath the condition in which the
image of the four embers of a vixen's cross had now solidly put him. One of the
synonyms of 'condition' is 'state,' and the adjective 'human' may be construed
as 'manly' (since L'Humanité means 'Mankind'!), and that's how, my dears, Lowden
recently translated the title of the malheureux Pompier's cheap novel
La Condition Humaine, wherein, incidentally, the term 'Vandemonian' is
hilariously glossed as 'Koulak tasmanien d'origine
hollandaise'." (2.5)
The term 'Vandemonian' (absent from Malraux's
La Condition Humaine) reminds one of pandemonium, "the abode
of all the demons" and hell's capital in Milton's Paradise
Lost, but also of Van Diemen's Land, the former name of Tasmania. Van
Diemen's Land is mentioned in the beginning of Swift's Gulliver's
Travels: "in our passage from thence to the
East-Indies, we were driven by a violent storm to the north-west of Van Diemen's
Land" (A Voyage to Lilliput, Chapter
I).
The name of the ship onboard
which Gulliver sails from Bristol to the South-Sea, Antelope, brings to
mind Antelope Gnu, the name Ostap Bender gives to Adam Kozlevich's
car in Ilf and Petrov's The Golden Calf.
As to pandemonium, it is mentioned in
The Twelve Chairs, the first novel of Ilf
and Petrov's dilogy: "If I stole them [the chairs] from you, then take the matter to court,
but don't cause pandemonium in my house" (Chapter Thirty-Seven, "The
Green Cape"). Engineer Bruns addresses these words to Father Fyodor, the
priest who became a diamond hunter. Earlier in
the novel, as they stay in Sorbonne, a cheap hotel in Stargorod, Ostap
Bender asks Father Fyodor through the keyhole of a locked door: "How much is opium for the people [i. e.
religion]?" (Chapter Twelve, "The Sultry Woman, a Poet's
Dream").
One of five or six words glossed in Malraux's
"Chinese" novel is nguyen, "to need badly" in the slang of
Shanghai opium-smokers. Nguyen is an imperfect anagram of
Jungen, German for "boys". In The Twelve Chairs (Chapter
Thirty-One, "A Magic Night on the Volga") Vorob'yaninov (who is about
fifty) travels as Ostap's "boy" (an artist's assistant) onboard the Skryabin
ship.
pandemonium + Van Diemen =
Vandemonian + pen + medium
Laputa + lopata + plebs +
pagoda + doroga + Daugava + Ind = palata + bes poputal + Ladoga +
pogoda + raduga + Dvina
Laputa - the flying island in Gulliver's Travels; Laputa =
uplata (payment, paying); cf. in Ada (Part Four): "Her two maids, who were supposed to have flown over the day before
on a Laputa (freight airplane) with her trunks, had got
stranded somewhere... they couldn't pay the absolutely medieval new
droits de douane"
lopata - Russ., spade,
shovel; lopata = oplata (pay, payment)
doroga - Russ., road;
doroga = goroda (cities)
Daugava - Latvian name
of Dvina
Ind - Russian name of
Indus; Ind = dni (days)
palata - Russ., palace;
chamber, hall
bes poputal - Russ.,
"it's the devil's work"
Ladoga -
lake in NW Russia, the biggest in Europe; the Neva flows from the Ladoga
lake to the Bay of Finland; on Antiterra, an elegant town in Mayne,
U.S.A.; Ladoga = Lagado (the metropolis of
Balnibarbi, the continent in Part III of Gulliver's
Travels)
pogoda - Russ., weather
raduga - Russ., rainbow
Dvina - see Daugava; Dvina =
divan
Alexey Sklyarenko