When Van first meets Ada in Ardis, her
fingernails are badly bitten. She stops biting them on her
twelfth birthday (July 21, 1884). When her fingernails became strong
enough, Ada tries to assuage with them the itch caused by the bites of a
local mosquito (Culex chateaubriandi Brown): "Five
minutes after the attack in the crepuscle... a fiery irritation would set in,
which the strong and the cold ignored (confident it would last a mere hour) but
which the weak, the adorable, the voluptuous took advantage of to scratch and
scratch and scratch scrumptiously (canteen cant). 'Sladko! (Sweet!)'
Pushkin used to exclaim in relation to a different species in Yukon.*"
(1.17)
The antonym of sladkiy (sweet) is
gor'kiy (bitter). Maksim Gork'iy (or "Maxim Gorky") is a
pen-name of Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov (1868-1936).** In
Gorky's story "Pozhary" ("The Fires") there is a character who
doesn't throw out his pared fingernails but keeps them waiting for a fire
somewhere and then casts them in the flames. At nineteen he wanted to
commit a suicide, but met a fortuneteller, who inspected his palm,
said that he was condemned to live and gave him this advice
about fingernails. He followed it and soon inherited unexpected
property, became popular with women, won in a lottery, etc. Having
tired of his good luck, he consulted a German psychiatrist (who failed to help
him). At fifty-three he still continued to throw his pared
fingernails in the flames, while doing everything to ruin his health, and
dies of an apoplectic stroke several years later.
I don't think that Ada is so superstitious that
she asks Kim or Blanche to throw her pared fingernails in the flames of the
Burning Barn; yet, Gorky's story seems to me another indirect
evidence that the "Baronial" Barn was set on fire on purpose and that Ada was
involved in the arson. Interestingly, Baron is a character in Gorky's play
"Na dne" ("At the Bottom", 1902). On the other hand, palm-reading
and fortune-telling are mentioned in the "mosquito" chapter of Ada
(1.17):
"As he looks, the palm of a
gipsy asking for alms fades into that of the almsgiver asking for a long life.
(When will filmmakers reach the stage we have reached?) Blinking
in the green sunshine under a birch tree, Ada explained to her passionate
fortuneteller..."
Incidentally, Herostratus set fire to the Temple of
Artemis at Ephesus on fire on July 21, 356 BC. The name Herostratus
(that Vyazemsky spells Erostrat in his Memoirs, comparing Count
Rostopchin to Herostratus) has both Hero and Eros in
it. "Mlle Stopchin" is mentioned in the Burning Barn chapter of Ada
(1.19).
Finally, sladostrastie (sladost',
sweetness, + strast', passion) is Russian for
"voluptuousness".
*actually, P. exclaimed "sladko!" in
Priyutino, the Olenins' estate near St. Petersburg, where he courted Annette
Olenin (whose name P. wrote backwards in the drafts of Poltava:
ettenna eninelo); Olenin + Anna Snegin*** +
a = Onegin + Lenin + ananas
**Karl Radek, Gorky's contemporary, used to
say that he lived in the maksimal'no gor'kuyu (maximally
bitter) epoch.
***a poem by Esenin (1925)
Alexey Sklyarenko