From: Alexey Sklyarenko <skylark1970@MAIL.RU>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Tue, March 19, 2013 3:05:40 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Ada's dissolved epigraph
Unlike Invitation to a Beheading or The Gift
(or Tolstoy's Anna Karenin), Ada has no
epigraph. But one feels that, as in Lolita (or in The
Event), the epigraph is "dissolved" in the text of the novel.
It seems to me that a line from Pushkin's Eugene
Onegin (Four: XXI: 14) would do perfectly as an epigraph to Ada or
Ardor: a Family Chronicle:
lyubov'yu shutit
satana
(with love jokes Satan).
The novel's main characters, Van and Ada are not only
passionate lovers but also brother and sister. Van's and Ada's half-sister
Lucette commits suicide because of her unrequited love to Van. Van's, Ada's
and Lucette's mother Marina is a twin sister of Aqua, the poor mad wife of Demon
Veen (Van's and Ada's father).
Chapter Four of EO has an epigraph from Necker:*
La morale est dans la nature des
choses.
Chose University in England is Van's alma
mater.
In the next three stills 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)
In wrestling, nelson is a hold. On the other hand,
Viscount Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) is the British admiral who participated
in the Napoleonic wars and who was killed during the Battle of Trafalgar
(Nelson's best known and most notable victory).
But [God?] helped - lower grew the murmur
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... (EO, Ten: IV:
1-5)
by the force of circumstances / siloyu
veshchey: A Gallicism, par la force des choses. (EO
Commentary, vol. III, p. 322)
As a student of Chose Van performs in variety shows
dancing on his hands (1.30). Van's stage name, Mascodagama, hints at Vasco da
Gama, the famous Portuguese navigator.
*Pushkin's quotation is either from De la
Littérature (1818) or from Considérations
sur les principaus événemens de la Révolution française (1818) by Mme de Staёl (Jacques Necker's
daughter). According to Pushkin, Adolph (1816) by Benjamin
Constant (a close friend of Mme de Staёl) belongs to the number of
"two or three novels
in which the epoch is reflected
and modern man
rather correctly represented
with his immoral soul,
selfish and dry,
to dreaming measurelessly given,
with his embittered mind
boiling in empty action." (EO, Seven: XXII: 7-14)
Adolph was translated to Russian by Prince Vyazemski
and came out in 1830 with a dedication to Pushkin.
Chapter One of EO has an epigraph from Prince Vyazemski:
To live it hurries and to feel it hastes.
In Vyazemski's poem Pervyi sneg ("The First Snow",
1822) "it" stands for goryachnost' molodaya (young
ardor):
O'er life thus glides young ardor:
to live it hurries and to feel it hastes...
The son of Prince Vseslav Zemski and Princess Sofia
Temnosiniy, Peter Zemski (a namesake of Pyotr Vyazemski) was a grandfather
of Aqua and Marina Durmanov. Peter Zemski's sister Olga married Erasmus Veen,
the grandfather of the cousins Demon and Daniel Veens who married the
twins Aqua and Marina. (Ada, Family Tree)
Alexey Sklyarenko
All private editorial communications are
read by both co-editors.