'Actually,' observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope
which a drop of soda had stained, 'Bergson is only for very young people or very
unhappy people, such as this available rousse.'
'Spotting Bergson,' said the assistant lecher, 'rates a
B minus dans ton petit cas, hardly more. Or shall I reward you with a
kiss on your krestik - whatever that is?' (ibid.)
Lucette's krestik (not quite "little cross" as Van believes)
brings to mind emalevyi krestik v petlitse, the little enamel cross is
the tab of Prince Alexey's uniform (in the opening line of Ivanov's famous
poem). The execution of the royal family in Ekaterinburg is described by
Voloshin in Rossiya:
И где-то на Урале средь лесов
Латышские
солдаты и мадьяры
Расстреливают царскую семью
В сумятице поспешных
отступлений:
Царевич на руках царя, одна
Царевна мечется, подушкой
прикрываясь,
Царица выпрямилась у стены...
Потом их жгут и зарывают
пепел.
Всё кончено. Петровский замкнут круг. (5)
"All is over. Peter's circle is closed."
"The Arctic no longer vicious Circle" is mentioned by
Van:
Ved' ('it is, isn't it')
sidesplitting to imagine that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym of
Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle
to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as
if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the
opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's Tartary, from Kurland
to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in
Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its
components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than
poetical, notions of 'America' and 'Russia,' a more complicated and even more
preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time - not only because the history
of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart
in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or
another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of
directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers
of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other.
(1.3)
In his poem Voloshin says that in three centuries Russia has
covered the distance from the shores of Livonia (i. e. Kurland) to Alaska (known
on Antiterra as Lyaska):
Есть дух Истории - безликий и
глухой,
Что действует помимо нашей воли,
Что направлял топор и мысль
Петра,
Что вынудил мужицкую Россию
За три столетья сделать перегон
От
берегов Ливонских до Аляски.
И тот же дух ведёт большевиков
Исконными
народными путями.
Грядущее - извечный сон корней:
Во время революций
водоверти
Со дна времён взмывают старый ил
И новизны рыгают
стариною. (5)
According to Voloshin, the future is izvechnyi son
korney ("a perennial dream of roots"). Korney (Gen. pl. of
koren', "root") brings to mind Korney Chukovski (the author of
Tarakanishche, etc.) - but also Kuz'ma Prutkov's advice zri
v koren' ("get at the root"), Chekhov's von Koren and Van's
"tribadic" dream of Indian corn (2.4). After the dinner in Ursus and the
debauche à
trois in his Manhattan penthouse flat Van promises to Ada that from now on
life will be "corn in cans:"
'You cried over my unseemly scar, but now
life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans.'
(2.8)
Van's scar (left on his body by Tapper's bullet) is even
longer than his male organ (that Van compares to "a drained root" before
Lucette's suicide):
He went back to whatever he was eating, and
cruelly stroked Lucette's apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian 'I'm
drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore
more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably
(ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, please, don't let me swill
(hlestat') champagne any more, not only because I will jump into
Goodson River if I can't hope to have you, and not only because of the physical
red thing - your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen'ka
('darling,' more than 'darling'), it looked to me at least eight inches long
-'
'Seven and a half,' murmured modest Van, whose
hearing the music impaired.
'- but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing
but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life,
Van, Van, Van.' (ibid.)
Lyaska (the Antiterran name of Alaska) rhymes with
plyaska (dance) - but also with kolyaska (carriage).
Kolyaska (1836) is a story by Gogol. In a letter of beginning of May,
1889, to Suvorin Chekhov says that Gogol's Carriage alone is worth
two hundred thousand roubles. In Rossiya Voloshin blends the February
Revolution of 1917 with the October coup and points out that the
Martober was forseen by Gogol (the author of Notes of a
Madman, 1835):
До Мартобря (его предвидел Гоголь)
В России
не было ни буржуа,
Ни классового пролетариата:
Была земля, купцы да
голытьба,
Чиновники, дворяне да крестьяне...
Мы бредили, переломав машины,
Об
электрофикации; среди
Стрельбы и голода - о социальном рае,
И ели
человечью колбасу.
We raved, after we had broken the machines,
about electrification, in the midst of shooting
and famine - about the social paradise,
and ate the human sausage. (5)
Small wonder that after the L disaster electricity was banned
on Antiterra!