'Which reminds me painfully of the
golubyanki (petits bleus) Aqua used to send me,' remarked
Demon with a sigh (having mechanically opened the message). 'Is tender Vicinity
some girl I know? Because you may glare as much as you like, but this is
not a wire from doctor to doctor.'
Van raised his eyes to the Boucher
plafond of the breakfast room, and shaking his head in derisive admiration,
commented on Demon's acumen. (1.29)
Ëàìîð ðàññåÿííî îáâîäèë âçãëÿäîì ðàñïèñàííûé ïîä Áóøå ïîòîëîê êîìíàòû, â
êîòîðîé îíè óæèíàëè.
Lamore absent-mindedly looked at the plafond
painted à la Boucher of the room
[in the former palace of Marquise de Pompadour] where they [Lamore
& Talleyrand] had supper. (Aldanov, Devil's Bridge,
1925, Part Two, IV)
Pompadury i Pompadurshi ("Pompadours and
Pompadouresses," 1863) is a satire by Saltykov-Shchedrin.
Aqua and her twin sister Marina (Demon's misress, mother of
Van, Ada and Lucette) seem to be linked to Lyubinka and Anninka, the twin
sisters in Saltykov's novel Gospoda Golovlyovy ("The Golovlyovs,"
1875-80). A niece of Iudushka (“little Judas”) Golovlyov, Anninka is a provincial actress, who leads a
dream-like existence. She “undressed in La belle Hélène, appeared drunk in La Prichole, sang all kind of shameless
things in the scenes from La grande
duchesse de Gerolstein and even regretted that it wasn’t accepted to act on
stage “la chose” and “l’amour,” imagining how seductively she would have jerked
her waist and how splendidly she would have twirled the tail of her
dress.” The reader of Shchedrin’s novel is supposed to know this; still,
men in the audience devour with their eyes the curve of Anninka’s naked body
hoping that she would explain to them what exactly “la chose”
is.
Like Shchedrin’s Anninka, Marina
Durmanov is an actress devoid of talent. Chose is Van's alma
mater (see in Zembla my article "The Naked Truth or the Reader's
Sentimental Education in Ada's Quelque Chose
University").
Christosik ("little Christ," as G.
A. Vronsky called all pretty starlets, including Marina, 1.3) is a negative, as
it were, of Saltykov's Iudushka (Russian diminutive of
Judas).
There is Lubyanka
(headquarters of Cheka, GPU, NKVD, KGB - Lenin's, Stalin's, et
al.'s secret police - in Moscow) in golubyanka. In his
reminiscences of Ilya Fondaminski (VN's "Fondik") VN's friend V.
M. Zenzinov tells about Fondaminski's wife Amalia
Gavronsky who as a young girl lived in the
Lubyanka house (that belonged then to an insurance company):
Ñòðàøíî ïîäóìàòü,
÷òî â íàèâíîé äåâè÷üåé êîìíàòêå Àìàëèè Ãàâðîíñêîé, îêíàìè âûõîäèâøåé íà
Ëóáÿíñêóþ ïëîùàäü, ñåé÷àñ áûòü ìîæåò êàáèíåò ñîâåòñêîãî æåñòîêîãî
ñëåäîâàòåëÿ.
Marina spent a rukuliruyushchiy
month with Demon at Kitezh (1.3). The non-Russian verb rukulirovat'
("to coo") is used by
Saltykov in Gospoda Tashkenttsy ("Gentlemen of Tashkent,"
1875). The cooing birds (vorkuyushchie ptitsy) are golubi
(doves).
In November 1871,
as he [Daniel Veen, Demon's cousin] was in the
act of making his evening plans with the same smelly but nice cicerone in a
café-au-lait suit whom he had hired already twice at the same Genoese
hotel, an aerocable from Marina (forwarded with a whole week's delay via his
Manhattan office which had filed it away through a new girl's oversight in a
dove hole marked RE AMOR) arrived on a silver salver telling him she would marry
him upon his return to America.
(1.1)
Alexey
Sklyarenko