'His
ancestor,' Van pattered on, 'was the famous or fameux Russian admiral
who had an épée duel with Jean Nicot and after whom the Tobago Islands,
or the Tobakoff Islands, are named, I forget which, it was so long ago, half a
millennium.' (2.5)
Cordula de Prey's first husband, Ivan Tobak, the
shipowner ("a splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap,"
2.10), is a descendant of Admiral Tobakoff, the
Russian navigator who founded Viedma, also known on Demonia
(aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) as Witch.
According to Pushkin's friend Aleksey Vulf (a Dorpat student, rake
and diarist, Anna Kern's first cousin and lover), in 1825 in Mikhailovskoe
the poet, looking forward to meeting Tolstoy the American in
single combat, told him:
"Этот меня не убьёт, а убьёт
белокурый, ведьма врать не станет."
"This one won't kill me, a fair-haired one will,
ved'ma ("the witch," i. e. Charlotte Kirchhof, a
German fortune-teller in St. Petersburg whom Pushkin visited in 1819) would
not lie."
'Ada supposed, at first, that Tapper was an invented name - that you fought
your duel with another person - but that was before anybody heard of
the other person's death in Kalugano. Demon said you should have simply cudgeled
him.'
'I could not,' said Van, 'the rat was
rotting away in a hospital bed.'
'I meant the real Tapper,' cried Lucette
(who was making a complete mess of her visit), 'not my poor, betrayed, poisoned,
innocent teacher of music, whom not even Ada, unless she fibs, could cure of his
impotence.' (ibid.)
"The rat" is Philip Rack, Lucette's poor teacher of
music. In 1803, while taking part in the first lap of Admiral Krusenstern's
famous voyage around the world, Count Tolstoy the American was dumped for
insubordination on Rat Island, in the Aleutians (EO Commentary, vol.
II, p. 428).
Captain Tapper with whom Van has a pistol duel in the Kalugano
forest is an expert on maps (1.42). Fyodor Luginin, a young officer whom Pushkin
met in Kishinev, was a cartographer. In his diary (an entry of June 15, 1822)
Luginin notes that Pushkin had a duel in St. Petersburg in connection with the
spreading of the rumors about his having been whipped in the secret chancellary
(EO Commentary, vol. II, p. 431) and that Pushkin wants to call out
Count Tolstoy the American who spread these rumors:
Носились слухи, что его (Пушкина) высекли в
Тайной канцелярии, но это вздор. В Петербурге имел он за это дуэль. Также в
Москву этой зимой хочет он ехать, чтоб иметь дуэль с одним графом Толстым,
Американцем, который главный распустил эти слухи...
According to VN's hypothesis, Pushkin had a pistol duel
with Ryleev between May 6 and May 9, 1820, at Ryleev's maternal countryseat,
Batovo (forty-five miles S of St. Petersburg, near the highway to
Luga). The estate of Batovo later belonged to VN's grandparents, Dmitri
Nikolaevich Nabokov, Minister of Justice under Alexander II, and his wife Maria
Ferdinandovna, née Baroness von Korff. (ibid., p. 433). Maria
Ferdinandovna believed that Corfu (one of the Ionian Islands off the
NW coast of Greece; in Lolita Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert's first
love, dies of typhus in Corfu) was named after her ancestor, a
crusader:
Бабка же моя, мать отца, рожденная
баронесса Корф, была из древнего немецкого (вестфальского) рода и
находила простую прелесть в том, что в честь предка-крестоносца был будто
бы назван остров Корфу. Корфы эти обрусели ещё в восемнадцатом веке, и
среди них энциклопедии отмечают много видных людей. По отцовской линии мы
состоим в разнообразном родстве или свойстве с Аксаковыми, Шишковыми, Пущиными,
Данзасами. (Drugie berega, 3.1)
According to VN, his paternal ancestors were related to
the Aksakov, Shishkov, Pushchin and Danzas families. Aleksandr Shishkov is
mentioned in Eugene Onegin. Ivan Pushchin was Pushkin's best friend at
the lyceum. Konstantin Danzas was Pushkin's second in his fatal duel with
d'Anthès (who was fair-haired). Sergey Aksakov (1791-1859) is the author of
The Childhood Years of Bagrov's Grandson and The Family
Chronicle (both alluded to in Ada). His namesake, Andrey
Andreevich Aksakov (AAA) is Van's Russian tutor:
In 1880, Van, aged ten, had traveled in
silver trains with showerbaths, accompanied by his father, his father's
beautiful secretary, the secretary's eighteen-year-old white-gloved sister (with
a bit part as Van's English governess and milkmaid), and his chaste, angelic
Russian tutor, Andrey Andreevich Aksakov ('AAA'), to gay resorts in Louisiana
and Nevada. (1.24)
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive -
somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in
his long, too long, never too long life... He passed through various little
passions - parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs,
stunt-riding - and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations
when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake
and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her
sister and Demon and Demon's casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian
angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper.
(1.28)
"He [Count Tolstoy the American] was known to cheat at
cards... oddly enough, Tolstoy became Pushkin's spokesman in the days of
Pushkin's courtship of Natalia Gontcharov." (EO Commentary, vol. II, pp.
428-29)
The Goncharovs' countryseat where Natalia Pushkin used
to spend summers, Polotnyanyi Zavod, was situated near Kaluga. Seven years
after Pushkin's death his widow married Peter Lanskoy. Percy de Prey's
mother (a widow whose husband died in a duel) was born Praskovia Lanskoy (1.40).
One of Ada's lovers whom Van nearly challenges to a duel, Percy is the second
cousin of Cordula de Prey (who becomes Van's mistress soon after his duel with
Tapper, 1.42).
Before she met her husband, A. P. Chekhov, Olga Knipper
(a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theatre) had spent a couple of
years years in Polotnyanyi Zavod. Chekhov is the author of The Flying
Islands. After Jules Verne (1883), The Witch (1886), The
Duel (1891), The Lady with the Dog (1899) and two
monologue scenes On the Harm of Tobacco (1886, 1903). In his
letters to his wife Chekhov often calls her lovingly moya
sobaka ("my dog"). When he meets Cordula Tobak in Paris,
Van quotes the stale but
appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with
them:
The Veens speak only to Tobaks
But Tobaks speak only to dogs. (3.2)
If translated back to Russian, these lines are
rhymed:
Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami,
a Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami.
Just before he finds out that Van and Ada had been lovers
for seven years and a half Demon meets the lady with a dog:
Next day, February 5, around nine p.m.,
Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan's lawyer, Demon noted - just as he
was about to cross Alexis Avenue, an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs
Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the
street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to
raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very
exotic and potent pill to face the day's ordeal on top of a sleepless journey),
contented himself - quite properly - with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled
with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and
smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out
of the way of Mrs R4. (2.10)
Van's and Ada's father, Demon Veen (the husband of
Marina's twin sister Aqua) perishes in a mysterious airplane
disaster above the Pacific:
In the fourth or fifth worst airplane
disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably
disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and
Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. (3.7)
One of the Northwestern Hawaiian
Islands, Lisianski Island was named after Yuri Lisianski, the
commanding officer of the sloop-of-war Neva, an exploratory ship which
participated in Admiral Krusenstern's voyage and which ran aground on the
island in 1805. Laysan is another island (an atoll of sorts) in the same
region.
For Van and Ada their father (who broke his
promise given at Marina's cremation not to cheat the poor grubs) was buried
on the same day as Uncle Dan:
'Extraordinary,' said Van, 'they had been growing
younger and younger - I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old
Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been
poaching them from the hatching chamber.'
'You never loved your father,' said Ada
sadly.
'Oh, I did and do - tenderly, reverently,
understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something
not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was
buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.' (3.8)
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin begins:
"My uncle has most honest principles,
when taken ill in earnest... etc."
The opening line of EO is an echo of l. 4 of Krylov's fable
The Ass and the Boor (1818), osyol byl samykh chestnykh pravil
(the donkey had most honest principles). In 1819, in Petersburg, Pushkin
had heard Krylov recite this fable at the house of Alexey Olenin, the well-known
patron of arts. "At this memorable party... twenty-year-old Pushkin hardly
noticed Olenin's daughter, Annette (1808-88), whom he was to court so
passionately, and so unfortunately, in 1828... but did notice Mrs. Olenin's
niece, Anna Kern (Cairn), née Poltoratski (1800-79), to whom at a second meeting
(in the Pskovan countryside, July 1825) he was to dedicate his famous short
poem beginning "I recollect a woundrous moment," which he presented to her in an
uncut copy of the separate edition of Chapter One of EO... in exchange for the
sprig of heliotrope from her bosom." (EO Commentary, vol. II, p. 30)
Olenin = O + Lenin
"Anagrams in French of "Annette Olénine" blossom here and there in the
margins of our poet's manuscripts." (EO Commentary, vol. III, p.
206)
Five minutes after the attack in the crepuscule,
between porch step and cricket-crazed garden, a fiery irritation would set in,
which the strong and the cold ignored (confident it would last a mere hour) but
which the weak, the adorable, the voluptuous took advantage of to scratch and
scratch and scratch scrumptiously (canteen cant). 'Sladko! (Sweet!)'
Pushkin used to exclaim in relation to a different species in Yukon.
(1.17)
It was in Priyutino, the Olenins' estate near St. Petersburg, that Pushkin,
bitten by mosquitoes, exclaimed "Sladko!" (see Vyazemski's letters
to his wife)
Alexey Sklyarenko