One can even surmise that if our time-racked, flat-lying couple
ever intended to die they would die, as it were, into the
finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of
its blurb.
...Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the
delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty
plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and
butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from
marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more.
(5.6)
Van and Ada (whom Dr Lagosse made the final merciful injection of
morphine) die immediately after completing their book. "A doe at
gaze" in Ada's last sentence brings to mind a herd of deer that
the hero of Chekhov's story Ward No. 6 (1892) sees before his
death:
Andrey Efimych understood that his end had come, and
remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mikhail Averyanych, and millions of people
believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want
immortality -- and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer,
extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day
before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a
registered letter. . . . Mikhail Averyanych said something, then it all
vanished, and Andrey Efimych sank into oblivion forever. (chapter
XIX)
We never see a doe (the female of the deer, antelope, goat, rabbit, and
certain other animals) in Ardis Park, but at the picnic in "Ardis the
First" a wild cat appears:
The ruins of the turkey, the port wine which only the
governesses had touched, and a broken Sèvres plate were quickly removed by the
servants. A cat appeared from under a bush, stared in a shock of intense
surprise, and, despite a chorus of 'kitty-kitty,' vanished. (1.13)
Another cat appeared in the middle of a stage performance with Cordula's
mother:
'Cordula,' said the old actress (with the same apropos
with which she once picked up and fondled a fireman's cat that had strayed into
Fast Colors in the middle of her best speech), 'why don't you go with
this angry young demon to the tea-car? I think I'll take my thirty-nine winks
now.' (1.42)
The passengers of Cordula's compartment include, beside her
mother, Dr Platonov and his grandson Russel:
The two other places were occupied by a stout, elderly
gentleman in an old-fashioned brown wig with a middle parting, and a
bespectacled boy in a sailor suit sitting next to Cordula, who was in the act of
offering him one half of her chocolate bar. Van entered, moved by a sudden very
bright thought, but Cordula's mother did not recognize him at once, and the
flurry of reintroductions combined with a lurch of the train caused Van to step
on the prunella-shod foot of the elderly passenger, who uttered a sharp cry and
said, indistinctly but not impolitely: 'Spare my gout (or 'take care' or 'look
out'), young man!'
'I do not like being addressed as "young man,"' Van
told the invalid in a completely uncalled-for, brutal burst of
voice.
'Has he hurt you, Grandpa?' inquired the little
boy.
'He has,' said Grandpa, 'but I did not mean to offend
anybody by my cry of anguish.'
'Even anguish should be civil,' continued Van (while
the better Van in him tugged at his sleeve, aghast and ashamed).
...'Well, we know Dr
Platonov slightly, and there was absolutely no reason for you to be so
abominably rude to the dear old man.' (ibid.)
Platonov is the main character in Chekhov's juvenile
P'yesa bez
nazvaniya (<Play without a Title>).
Old Van regrets that in his philosopical work Texture of Time
(Part Four of Ada) he did not mention pain:
Was it time for the morphine? No, not yet.
Time-and-pain had not been mentioned in the Texture.
Pity, since an element of pure time enters into pain, into the thick,
steady, solid duration of I-can’t-bear-it pain; nothing gray-gauzy about it,
solid as a black bole, I can’t, oh, call Lagosse. (5.6)
Nor did Andrey Efimovich Ragin notice pain until one day he feels
it:
He bit the pillow from pain and clenched his teeth, and
all at once through the chaos in his brain there flashed the terrible unbearable
thought that these people, who seemed now like black shadows in the moonlight,
had to endure such pain day by day for years. How could it have happened that
for more than twenty years he had not known it and had refused to know it? He
knew nothing of pain, had no conception of it, so he was not to blame, but his
conscience, as inexorable and as rough as Nikita, made him turn cold from the
crown of his head to his heels. (
Ward No. 6, chapter XVIII)
Ivan Dmitrich (Andrey Efimych's former patient, another inhabitant of Ward
No. 6) wonders if na tom svete net ada (can really be no hell in
the next world):
"Î ãîñïîäè, íåóæåëè æå â ñàìîì äåëå íà òîì
ñâåòå íåò àäà è ýòè íåãîäÿè áóäóò ïðîùåíû?"
Oh, Lord, can there really be no hell in the next world, and will these
scoundrels be forgiven? (ibid.)
One of the two seconds in Demon's duel with d'Onsky is Colonel St. Alin, a
scoundrel (1.2). His name clearly hints at Stalin. One wonders if
Dzhugashvili (Stalin's real name) and his assistants will be
forgiven?
According to Van, the father of the Erminin twins Greg and Grace "preferred
to pass for a Chekhovian colonel" (3.2). Like Dr Krolik, he does not appear at
the picnic on Ada's twelfth birthday:
Three adult gentlemen, moreover, were expected but
never turned up: Uncle Dan, who missed the morning train from town; Colonel
Erminin, a widower, whose liver, he said in a note, was behaving like a
pecheneg; and his doctor (and chess partner), the famous Dr Krolik, who
called himself Ada's court jeweler, and indeed brought her his birthday present
early on the following day (1.13).
Pecheneg ("The Savage," 1894) is a story by Chekhov. Colonel
Erminin's pechen' (liver) behaves like a
pecheneg probably because he drinks hard after his wife's suicide.
When four years later Demon visits Ardis, he tells Van that Colonel Erminin
(whose young sister-in-law Ruth probably died in childbirth, she was
pregnant when she came to the picnic in "Ardis the First") is
"practically mad." In Chekhov's story Andrey Efimych, before he "goes mad" (in
the opinion of others), starts to drink much:
On two or three occasions Andrey Efimych was visited by
his colleague Hobotov, who also advised him to give up spirituous liquors, and
for no apparent reason recommended him to take bromide. (chapter
XII)
"In vino veritas!" cry out p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov
(the drunks with the eyes of rabbits) in Blok's Incognita (1906).
In a letter of 25 November 1892 to Suvorin Chekhov complains of the lack of
alcohol in the works of contemporary artists:
That is just what is lacking in
our productions—the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state
that very well. Why not? Putting aside "Ward No. 6" and myself, let us discuss
the matter in general, for that is more interesting. Let us discuss the general
causes, if that won't bore you, and let us include the whole age. Tell me
honestly, who of my contemporaries—that is, men between thirty and
forty-five—have given the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko,
Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Repin's or Shishkin's
pictures turned your head? ...We are stale and dull
ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys,* and the only person who does
not see that is Stasov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting
drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our
lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a disease which
for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something,"
that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find
within an empty void.
While the comfortably resting lady [Mlle Larivière, Lucette's governess] was describing
the bank of a brook where little Rockette liked to frolic, Ada sat reading on a
similar bank, wistfully glancing from time to time at an inviting clump of
evergreens (that had frequently sheltered our lovers) and at brown-torsoed,
barefooted Van, in turned-up dungarees, who was searching for his wristwatch
that he thought he had dropped among the forget-me-nots (but which Ada, he
forgot, was wearing). Lucette had abandoned her skipping rope to squat on the
brink of the brook and float a fetus-sized rubber doll. Every now and then she
squeezed out of it a fascinating squirt of water through a little hole that Ada
had had the bad taste to perforate for her in the slippery orange-red
toy. (1.23)
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)
"Arcadian innocence" brings to mind Arkadina, the ageing actress in
Chekhov's play The Seagull (1896), and Arkadiy Erminin who preferred to
pass for "a Chekhovian colonel:"
Greg Erminin to Van: 'Ah, those picnics! And Percy de
Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr
Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius -
dead, dead, all dead!'
'I really know very little about music but it was a
great pleasure to make your chum howl. I have an appointment in a few minutes,
alas. Za tvoyo zdorovie, Grigoriy Akimovich.'
'Arkadievich,' said Greg, who had let it pass once but
now mechanically corrected Van.
'Ach yes! Stupid slip of the slovenly tongue. How is
Arkadiy Grigorievich?'
'He died. He died just before your aunt. I thought the
papers paid a very handsome tribute to her talent. And where is Adelaida
Danilovna? Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?' (3.2)
Marina whom Greg calls "your aunt" is actually Van's mother:
On the fabulous country estate of his art-collecting
uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of
fascinating scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine, daughter
of Marina, Daniel's stage-struck wife. That the relationship is not simply
dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the
very first pages.
In spite of the many intricacies of plot and
psychology, the story proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take
breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer's magic
carpet has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen,
Marina's younger daughter, has also been swept off her feet by Van, the
irresistible rake. Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this
delightful book.
The rest of Van's story turns frankly and colorfully
upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to an
Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country. After
her husband's death our lovers are reunited. (5.6)
Like Keats and Chekhov ("consumptive Anton" as Demon calls him, 3.6),
Ada's husband Andrey Vinelander dies of tuberculosis (3.8).
*an allusion to a story by Grigorovich
Alexey Sklyarenko