Ada to Van
(3.8): He [Demon] looked positively
Quixotic when I saw him at Mother's funeral... D'Onsky's son, a person
with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept
comme des fontaines.
From Pushkin's The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (ll.
501-504):
Младые девы в той стране
Преданье старины узнали,
И мрачный памятник оне
Фонтаном слёз именовали.
(Young maidens in that land
learned the old legend
and named the grave monument
"the fountain of tears.")
As I pointed out before, the name of d'Onsky
père and his oneway nickname Skonky (anagram of konsky,
"of a horse") suggest that he is a horse (Onegin's Don stallion,
donskoy zherebets, being his ancestor).
At the beginning of Eugene Onegin (One: II: 14)
Pushkin says that the North is harmful to him.
Nord + Gemini = Erminin + god/dog = Gremin +
odin
Gemini (the Twins) is a zodiacal constellation.
As far as horoscopes are concerned, Pushkin and Peter I (the founder
of St. Petersburg, VN's home city) were Gemini.
While god means in
Russian "year," dog is our word for "Great
Dane."
Gremin is the name of Tatiana's husband ("old
general") in Chaykovski's opera (known on Antiterra as Onegin and
Olga by Tschchaikow). Odin means "one; alone."
Speaking of twins, the Dioscuri (Leda's children by Zeus and
Tyndareus) were regarded as the patrons of sailors, to whom they appeared as St.
Elmo's fire, and were also associated with horsemanship. Cf. Aqua's
delirium in Ada (1.3): "a silly pillar
commemorating, he said, the 'elmo' that broke into leaf when they carried
stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, very gradual
shade..." Poor mad Aqua is a twin sister of Marina (Van's, Ada's and
Lucette's mother). Like sever (North), Zeves (Zeus)
is mentioned in the second stanza of EO Canto One. Three
ample-haunched Ledas (in a painting) and as many eggs (in another
painting) are mentioned in Part Four of Ada.
Alexey Sklyarenko