Как некогда святой Франциск
Видал: разверзся солнца
диск,
И пясти рук и ног — Распятый
Ему лучом пронзил трикраты —
Так ты в молитвах приняла
Чужих страстей, чужого зла
Кровоточащие стигматы.
According to Voloshin, the Russian Revolution is
exclusively a nervous-and-religious disease. A professional terrapist (terrology
being a branch of psychiatry), Van says of Aqua's delusion
(caused by the mysterious L disaster):
Aqua was not quite twenty when the
exaltation of her nature had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically,
the initial stage of her mental illness coincided with the first decade of the
Great Revelation, and although she might have found just as easily another theme
for her delusion, statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable,
Revelation caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation
with religion had in medieval times.
Revelation can be more perilous
than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of
another world and this 'Other World' got confused not only with the 'Next World'
but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are
noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings;
but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere
where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but
vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the
fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the
opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants
of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds,
with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and
divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.
(1.3)
In his poem Voloshin says that in Russia we did not
know that "formidable demon, the Capital." Baron Demon Veen (poor mad
Aqua's husband, Van's and Ada's father) is "a Manhattan banker of
ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry" (1.1). Das Kapital, Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie (1867) is the main opus of Karl Marx
(1818-83). On Antiterra Marx père is the popular author of
'historical' plays:
Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the
editor of Ada] liked to change his abode at the end of a section or
chapter or even paragraph, and he had almost finished a difficult bit dealing
with the divorce between time and the contents of time (such as action on
matter, in space, and the nature of space itself) and was contemplating moving
to Manhattan (that kind of switch being a reflection of mental rubrication
rather than a concession to some farcical ‘influence of environment' endorsed by
Marx père, the popular author of ‘historical' plays), when he received
an unexpected dorophone call which for a moment affected violently his entire
pulmonary and systemic circulation. (2.5)
According to V. V. Mayakovski (VN's "late namesake" who
in Vladimir Il'yich Lenin also speaks of capital), Karl Marx is Lenin's
elder brother:
Время часы капитала крало.
Побивая
прожекторов яркость,
время родило брата Карла, -
старший Ленинский брат
Маркс.
Time was stealing the hours of capital.
Beating the search-lights's brightness,
Time gave birth to brother Karl, -
Marx is Lenin's elder brother.
Van Veen is the author of Texture of Time (Part Four).
In Chetvert' veka ("The Quarter of the Century. 1900-1925")
Voloshin says that he saw, among other things, the glory of the "Kakangel"
of Marx:
Видел позорное самоубийство
Трона, династии,
срам алтарей,
Славу "Какангелия" от Маркса,
Новой враждой разделившего
мир.
I saw the infamous suicide
of throne, dynasty, the shame of altars,
the glory of the Kakangel of Marx
that had divided the world with new enmity.
According to Van, Demon is a form of Demian or Dementius (1.1). Demian
Bednyi (penname of Efim Pridvorov, 1883-1945) is the author of Novyi
zavet bez iz'yana evangelista Demiana ("The New Testament without
Omission of the Evangelist Demian," 1925). Bednye Lyudi ("Poor
Folk," 1846) is Dostoevski's first novel. In the old Russian alphabet letter L
was called lyudi. The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu
of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of
Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on January 3, 1850 (New Style). Demian
Bednyi's parody of Sirin's poem Bilet ("The Ticket," 1927) was
published in Pravda. It was the first mention of VN in the Soviet
press.
Alexey Sklyarenko