In the next three stills [the photos of Van making love to Ada taken by Kim
Beauharnais] la force des choses ('the fever of
intercourse') had sufficiently disturbed the lush herbage to allow one to
distinguish the details of a tangled composition consisting of clumsy Romany
clips and illegal nelsons. (Ada,
2.7)
Kim Beauharnais is a kitchen boy (povaryonok) and
photographer at Ardis. His name hints at Josephine
Beauharnais, Napoleon's first wife.
Povara (cooks) and Napoleon are mentioned
in Chapter Ten of Eugene Onegin:
Его мы очень смирным знали,
Когда не наши
повара
Орла двуглавого щипали
У Бонапартова шатра.
(We knew him [Alexander I] to be very
tame
when not our cooks
plucked the two-headed eagle
near Bonaparte's tent. Stanza II)
In one of the next stanzas (IV) of this fragmentary
chapter Pushkin used the phrase siloyu veshchey (by the force of
the circumstances):
Но бог помог — стал ропот ниже,
И скоро
силою вещей
Мы очутилися в Париже,
А
русский царь главой царей.
Моря достались
Албиону...
(But [God?] helped - lower grew the murmer
and, by the force of circumstances, soon
we found ourselves in Paris,
and the Russian tsar was the head of kings.
The seas to Albion were apportioned...)
VN comments on it: by the force of
circumstances / siloyu veshchey: A Gallicism, par la force force de
choses. (EO Commentary, vol. III, p.
322)
In my article "Grattez le Tartar... or Who are the
Parents of Ada's Kim Beauharnais?" I argue that Kim is a son of
Arkadiy Dolgoruki, the hero and narrator in Dostoevski's Podrostok
(The Adolescent). In Chapter Ten of EO Pushkin mentions the "highborn
poetaster" Prince Ivan Dolgoruki (1764-1823) and Ilya Dolgoruki
(1797-1848), a prominent member of the Union of Welfare:
"Mayhap" - O national shibboleth!
I'd dedicate an ode to you,
had not a highborn poetaster
anticipated me already. (stanza VI)
For trenchant oratory famed,
the members of this group assembled
at unquiet Nikita's,
at circumspect Ilya's... (stanza XV)
Besides, Prince Peter Dolgoruki (nicknamed le
bancal) who is believed to be the author of the anonymous
letters that Pushkin and his friends received on November 4, 1836, was a
notorious blackmailer (in the 1850s he blackmailed the former target of
Pushkin's epigrams, Count Mikhail Vorontsov).
Kim Beauharnais spied on Van's and Ada's frolics and
later attempts to blackmail Ada (2.7).
Chose is Van's University in England. "Albion" is mentioned in Chapter Ten of EO (see above).
The arrogant Angloman "Milord Uorontsov" (the Governor
General of Novorossiya, to whose chancery in Odessa Pushkin was
attached) was the son of Count Semyon Worontsoff, Russian
ambassador in London.
Kim Beauharnais was blinded by vindictive Van (2.11).
Beau ("fair") + voir ("to see") = Beauvoir. Simone de
Beauvoir is the author of La force de l'âge (1960) and
La force des choses (1963).