In my previous post I mentioned Gorky's play Deti
solntsa ("Children of the Sun") written when the author was imprisoned in
St. Petersburg's Peter-and-Paul Fortress. As the readers of The Gift
would know, another famous book written there was Chernyshevsky's Chto
delat'? ("What to Do?"). Chernyshevsky and Gorky (and Lenin who also
entitled his book Chto delat'?) are all natives of Volgan
cities (Saratov, Nizhniy Novgorod and Simbirsk). Moreover, Chernyshevsky died in
Astrakhan (a city at the mouth of the Volga) in 1889. Two centuries before
(1670), Astrakhan was taken by Sten'ka Razin (a Don Cossack who led a
major uprising against the nobility and Czar's bureaucracy in South Russia). One
of Razin's comrades-in-arms (who governed Astrakhan while Sten'ka was
busy taking other Volgan cities) was another Don Cossack,
Vas'ka Us (a namesake of Red Vaska, the bouncer in
a Volgan brothel in a story by Gorky).
Us means in Russian "whisker" and reminds
one of Stalin's tarakan'i usishcha ("cockroach
whiskers"), in Mandelshtam's poem (alluded to in Ada:
1.2) My zhivyom, pod soboyu ne chuya strany ("We live not feeling
land beneath us..."). It was Stalin (whose personality is split on Antiterra
between Colonel St. Alin and Khan Sosso) who renamed St. Petersburg (VN's
home city) Leningrad, Tsaritsyn (yet another city
on the Volga, now Volgograd) Stalingrad (Simbirsk became Ul'yanovsk,
and Nizhniy Novgorod, Gorky). Grad (obs., city) + us = Gradus.
Yacob Gradus is the killer in Nabokov's Pale Fire. In Ada
(3.5), Pale Fire is a racehorse (in a painting above the Tobaks' bed in their
cabin). On the other hand, we measure alcohol percentage in liquors
in gradusy. Pod gradusom means in Russian "drunk." Also,
gor'kiy (A. M. Peshkov's penname) means "bitter" and makes one think of
the phrase gor'kiy p'yanitsa (hard drinker, sot). In
Pushkin's Vystrel ("The Pistol Shot") the narrator refers to local
sots gorkie (omitting the noun).
R (Razin's initial) + us = Rus (obs.,
Russia); Rus + us =
Ursus (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan
Major). One of the songs that Van, Ada and Lucette listen in Ursus
(where they get drunk on champagne: 2.8) is "There's a crag on the Ross,
overgrown with wild moss..." The original song about Sten'ka Razin begins:
Est' na Volge utyos ("There's a crag on the
Volga..."). In another popular song about Sten'ka ("Volga, Volga, mat'
rodnaya..."), drunken Razin throws his
concubine, a Persian princess, in the Volga.
Onboard the Tobakoff, Lucette drinks three Cossack
ponies of Klass vodka - hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff - before she
jumps in the Atlantic (3.5).
Razin = Arzni = Iran + z (in
1868 Razin made a sally in the North Iran)
Volga + shcheli + rusalka + gol' =
vlagalishche + Rus + alkogol'
Arzni - mineral
springs in Armenia; according to Mandelshtam, Arzni is "the most truthful
water" (samaya pravdivaya voda)
shcheli - clefts, slits;
cf. malebolge, zlye shcheli (evil
slits), the eighth circle in Dante's Inferno
rusalka -
mermaid
gol' -
the poor, utterly destitute; bare place
vlagalishche - vagina
alkogol' -
alcohol
As I
pointed out before, Ursus is a character in Hugo's L'homme qui rit
("The Laughing Man"). Another character in that novel is a blind girl Dea
(dea means in Latin "goddess" and is an anagram of eda,
Russian for "food"). There are three blind characters in Ada
(besides Amor, the blind god of love). But one is also reminded of
Albinus, the hero of Nabokov's "Laughter in the Dark" who loses his
sight, and Vasiliy Tyomnyi (Dark Vasiliy, the Great Prince of
Moscow, 1415-62, dubbed thus because he was blinded by his rivals; cf. Dark
Walter, Demon Veen's nickname; btw., Vas'ka is a derogatory form of
Vasiliy). Vasiliy Tyomnyi (who took Demon, now Dem'yansk, an old city in
the Province of Novgorod) was a grandson of Dmitri Donskoy (cf. Baron
d'Onsky in Ada), the Great Prince of Moscow who defeated Khan
Mamai in the Kulikovo battle (1380). On Antiterra, the Russians must
have lost that battle and had to flee, crossing what was later called
the Bering Strait (which may not exist, or be narrower, on Demonia), to
America. That's why Van is surprised to learn that on Terra (Antiterra's twin
planet) "instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur
Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was
governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through)
which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst." (2.2)
Not only does Nabokov give his reader a whole planet, he also prolongs his
reader's life to a number of
centuries!
Alexey Sklyarenko