On Antiterra (the planet on which Ada is
set), Sigmund Freud is represented by the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in
the Ardennes and his émigré brother (who may be the same man) with a
passport-changed name, a Dr Froid (1.3). As I pointed out
before, "Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu" seems to refer to Ostap Bender's
words in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf" (1931). Speaking to Vasisualiy
Lokhankin (an inhabitant of Voron'ya slobodka, "the Raven's nest,"
whose favorite book is the heavy volume "Man and Woman"), Bender uses the French
exclamation "Mon Dieu" and then repeats it in German: "Mein
Gott." To another character in the same novel Bender says that he
happened to treat his friends using the Freudian method.
There is froid (French for "cold") in sang-froid. An
amusing qui pro quo with le bon Dieu and sang-froid
is mentioned by Ilya Tolstoy in his Reminiscences of his father.
At an evening tea Leo Tolstoy was reading a newspaper article translating
it into French for the benefit of m-r Nief, his childrens' French governor. The
article was about an (unsuccessful) attempt upon the life of Alexander
II. "Mais le bon Dieu conservé son, son..." Tolstoy was looking for the
French equivalent of pomazannik, "the annointed sovereign," when M-r
Nief suggested: "Son sang froid." Everybody at the table laughed (and the tsar
was killed two years later).
Incidentally, only after m-r Nief (a former
Communard who always wore blue and was nicknamed by the Tolstoy
children Posinev to distinguish him from
Poserev, the Swiss governor m-r Rey who always wore gray*)
had left for Algeria, did the Tolstoys learn that his real name
was vicomte de Montels.
The twice repeated mon Dieu also
occurs in Ada's epilogue: 'Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon
Dieu,' Dr [Professor. Ed.] Lagosse exclaimed,
weighing the master copy which the flat pale parents of the future Babes, in the
brown-leaf Woods, a little book in the Ardis Hall nursery, could no longer prop
up in the mysterious first picture: two people in one bed. In the
next paragraph Van (or whoever writes the epilogue) remarks that nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy's
reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the
'Ardis' part of the book. (5.5)
*siniy means in Russian "blue" and
seryi, "gray"
Alexey Sklyarenko