Van Veen states in Ada (1.3): "Revelation can be more perilous than
Revolution."
Revelation and Revolution are
also paired in Turgenev's Smoke (ch. VIII): "One foreign diplomatist, hearing she [Irina Osinin, the novel's heroine who created a furore at the
court ball] was a Moscow girl, said to the Tsar: 'Sire,' he
said, 'décidément c'est Moscou qui est le centre de votre
empire!' and another diplomatist added: 'C'est une vraie
revolution, Sire--révélation or révolution . . .' something of that
sort."
Turgenev's novel is once mentioned in Ada
(1.21): "As to dear, frivolous Marina, she only
remarked, when consulted, that at Van's age she would have poisoned her
governess with anti-roach borax if forbidden to read, for example,
Turgenev's Smoke."
When Dolly Durmanov gave her daughters
the names Aqua and Marina, Dolly's husband wondered: "why not Tofana?" (1.1). Tofana was a lady from Palermo who
sold poison, the so-called aqua tofana. As I pointed out earlier,
das Aquatofana der Verleumdung ("the aqua tofana of slander") is
mentioned in Heine's "Ludwig Boerne". In the same work (Book Three) Heine
writes:
"Eine Revolution ist ein
Unglueck, aber ein noch groesseres Unglueck ist eine verunglueckte
Revolution..." (Revolution is a disaster, but even more disastrous is a
failed revolution)
The Russian 1917 Revolution ending in the
Bolshevist coup d'etat was a failed one. Ada's L
disaster that happened on Antiterra in the middle of the 19th
century and was followed by the years of Great Revelation seems to
have little to do with Russia's tragic fate in the 20th century. All
the same, one feels that the mysterious disaster's initial hints, among
other things and names, at Lenin.
Alexey Sklyarenko