Arch and grandiloquent, Ada would be
describing a dream, a natural history wonder, a special belletristic device -
Paul Bourget's 'monologue intérieur' borrowed from old Leo - or some
ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary
demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol'nïy
tulup, 'a muzhik's sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in,' as
defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be
procurable by Elsies. (1.10)
In a letter of December 27, 1889,* to Suvorin Chekhov pairs
Paul Bourget (the author of Le Disciple, 1889) and Leo
Tolstoy:
Когда я в одном из своих последних писем писал
Вам о Бурже и Толстом, то меньше всего думал о прекрасных одалисках и о том, что
писатель должен изображать одни только тихие радости. Я хотел только сказать,
что современные лучшие писатели, которых я люблю, служат злу, так как разрушают.
Одни из них, как Толстой, говорят: «не употребляй женщин, потому что у них бели;
жена противна, потому что у неё пахнет изо рта; жизнь — это сплошное лицемерие и
обман, так как человек по утрам ставит себе клистир, а перед смертью с трудом
сидит на судне, причём видит свои исхудалые ляжки». Другие же, ещё не импотенты,
не пресыщенные телом, но уж пресыщенные духом, изощряют свою фантазию до зелёных
чёртиков и изобретают несуществующего полубога Сикста и «психологические» опыты.
(Apologies, no translation)
...Германия не знает авторов вроде Бурже и
Толстого, и в этом её счастье. В ней и наука, и патриотизм, и хорошие дипломаты,
и всё, что хотите. Она побьёт Францию, и союзниками её будут французские
авторы.
Germany is happy not to know authors like Bourget and
Tolstoy. Chekhov predicts that Germany will defeat France. (The World War I
began ten years after Chekhov's death in Badenweiler, a German
spa.)
Elsie de Nord hints at Elsinore, the royal castle in
Shakespeare's Hamlet. In a letter of Nov. 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov
mentions the ghost of Hamlet's father:
Let me remind you that the
writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us,
have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards
something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your
mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost
of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for
nothing.
On the other hand, Nord is an anagram of Dorn (the doctor in
Chekhov's play The Seagull, 1896). The play's characters include the
actress Arkadina, whose stage name comes from Arkadiy (a male given name) or
Arkady (any real or imaginary place offering peace and simplicity). "Old
romances as arch as Arcady" are mentioned by Van:
The vague commonplaces of
vague modesty so dreadfully in vogue eighty years ago, the unsufferable
banalities of shy wooing buried in old romances as arch as Arcady, those moods,
those modes, lurked no doubt behind the hush of his [Van's] ambuscades, and that of her [Ada's] toleration. (1.16)
According to Van,
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.
(5.6)
Tolstoy's semi-autobiographical Detstvo
(Childhood, 1852) and Otrochestvo (Boyhood,
1854) are alluded to in the opening paragraph of VN's Family
Chronicle:
'All happy families are
more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great
Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch
Karenina, transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor
Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be
unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to
another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and
Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858). (1.1)
Anna's patronymic (otchestvo,
not to be confused with otechestvo, "fatherland") is, of course,
Arkadievna and the English title of Tolstoy's novel is Anna Karenin
(see Vivian Dakbloom's 'Notes to Ada'). It was in the scene of
Anna's suicide that Tolstoy used the inner monologue for the first
time:
'The express does not stop at
Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?'
'I'll take you five versts across the
bog,' said Trofim, 'the nearest is Volosyanka.'
His vulgar Russian word for
Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.
Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy
might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge
spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with
the Venus'-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy's
novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and
the Irish. N'est vert, n'est vert, n'est vert. L'arbre aux
quarante écus d'or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again
her 'botanical' voice fall at biloba, 'sorry, my Latin is showing.'
Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury's adiantofolia,
Ada's infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness,
marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall! (1.41)
In a letter of June 12, 1891, to Lika
Mizinov Chekhov mentions lomovoy izvozchik (the carter) Trophim:
“A good smack,” “rabble,” “overeaten myself.”
Your friends — such as Trophim — with their cabmen’s talk certainly have an
improving influence on you.
Instead of signature
Chekhov drew a heart pierced with an arrow (in Greek, Ardis
means "the point of an arrow").
In 1782 the Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich
(the future tsar Paul I) and his wife Maria Fyodorovna traveled in western
Europe incognito as "Count and Countess du Nord." The unfortunate son of Peter
III and Catherine II, Paul I was often called (for instance, by Hodasevich
who planned to write a book on him) "the Russian Hamlet." The paulownia
tree was named after Paul's daughter Anna, the wife of
the Prince of Orange (later King William II of the
Netherlands):
On the first floor, a
yellow drawing room hung with damask and furnished in what the French once
called the Empire style opened into the garden and now, in the late afternoon,
was invaded across the threshold by the large leaf shadows of a paulownia tree
(named, by an indifferent linguist, explained Ada, after the patronymic,
mistaken for a second name or surname of a harmless lady, Anna Pavlovna Romanov,
daughter of Pavel, nicknamed Paul-minus-Peter, why she did not know, a cousin of
the non-linguist's master, the botanical Zemski, I'm going to scream, thought
Van). (1.6)
Van, Ada and their half-sister Lucette
are the children of Marina Durmanov, Daniel Veen's "stage-struck wife" (5.6).
Her surname comes from durman (thorn-apple, the
plant Datura stramonium). On the other hand,
durman means "drug, narcotic; intoxicant." According to Treplev
(Arkadina's son in The Seagull), his mother can not live without
the intoxicant (durman) of stage:
She alone must be praised
and written about, raved over, her marvellous acting in "La Dame aux Camelias"
or in "Life's Intoxication" [Chad zhizni, a play by
Boleslav Markevich] extolled to the skies. As she cannot get all
that durman [intoxicant] in the country, she grows
peevish and cross, and thinks we are all against her, and to blame for it all.
She is superstitious, too. She dreads burning three candles, and fears the
thirteenth day of the month. (Act One)
Note that Arkadina's maiden name, Sorin, is
but one letter away from Sirin (VN's Russian nom de
plume).
The Seagull ends in Treplev's
suicide. There is in Ada a reminiscence of the play's last
scene:
'Van!' called Ada
shrilly. 'I want to say something to you, Van, come here.'
Dorn (flipping through a literary review, to Trigorin):
'Here, a couple of months ago, a certain article was printed... a Letter from
America, and I wanted to ask you, incidentally' (taking Trigorin by the waist
and leading him to the front of the stage), 'because I'm very much interested in
that question...' (1.39)
Among the guests at the picnic party on Ada's sixteenth birthday (1.39) is
Greg Erminin, the son of Colonel Arkadiy Erminin. According to Van, Greg's
(and his twin sister Grace's) late father (who died just before
Marina) preferred to pass for a Chekhovian Colonel (3.2).
In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, a leading actress of the Moscow
Art Theatre, and three years later died of tuberculosis. Like her mother,
Ada becomes an actress. Ada's husband, Andrey Andreevich Vinelander, is as
modest as Chekhov and, like Chekhov, dies of tuberculosis (3.8). In Chekhov's
last story Nevesta (The Bride, 1903) Andrey Andreich is the
heroine's unattractive fiancé.
The narrator and main character of Ada, Van Veen, lives
almost a whole century dying at ninety seven. According to Suvorin,
Chekhov wanted to write a novel with the main character who
lives hundred years and witnesses all the major events of the 19th
century:
Несколько раз он развивал передо мною широкую тему романа с
полуфантастическим героем, который живёт целый век и участвует во всех событиях
XIX века.
*in the same letter of Dec. 27,
1889, Chekhov criticizes Russian society that hypocritically grieves for Dr
Botkin who died recently:
Где
вырождение и апатия, там половое извращение, холодный разврат, выкидыши, ранняя
старость, брюзжащая молодость, там падение искусств, равнодушие к науке, там
несправедливость во всей своей форме. Общество, которое не верует в бога,
но боится примет и чёрта, которое отрицает всех врачей и в то же время
лицемерно оплакивает Боткина и поклоняется Захарьину, не смеет и заикаться о
том, что оно знакомо с справедливостью.
Alexey
Sklyarenko