'Who cares,' cried Van, 'who cares about all
those stale myths, what does it matter - Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola,
mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts
with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal
mind.'
'How did this idiotic conversation start in the
first place?' Ada wished to be told, cocking her head at the partly ornamented
dackel or taksik.
'Mea culpa,' Mlle Larivière
explained with offended dignity. 'All I said, at the picnic, was that Greg might
not care for ham sandwiches, because Jews and Tartars do not eat
pork.'
'The Romans,' said Greg, 'the Roman
colonists, who crucified Christian Jews and Barabbits, and other unfortunate
people in the old days, did not touch pork either, but I certainly do and so did
my grandparents.' (1.14)
One is reminded of the conversation in
Saltykov-Shchedrin's Gospoda Golovlyovy ("The
Golovlyovs"):
Подают другое кушанье: ветчину с горошком.
Иудушка пользуется этим случаем, чтоб возобновить прерванный
разговор.
— Вот жиды этого кушанья не едят, —
говорит он.
— Жиды — пакостники, — отзывается отец
благочинный, — их за это свиным ухом дразнят.
— Однако ж, вот и татары... Какая-нибудь
причина этому да есть...
— И татары тоже пакостники — вот и
причина.
— Мы конины не едим, а татары — свининой
брезгают. Вот в Париже, сказывают, крыс во время осады ели.
— Ну, те — французы!
At the funeral repast Iudushka (whose brother Pavel just
died) remarks that Jews and Tartars do not eat pork. The priest replies
that Jews are mocked "a pig's ear" for that. Iudushka adds that during the
siege of Paris people are said to have eaten rats. "Well, those were
the French!" the priest says.
"Bronzes" mentioned by Van bring to mind Yakov Ivanov,
nicknamed Bronze, the coffin-maker in Chekhov's story Skripka
Rotshilda ("Rothschild's Fiddle," 1894). Both Rothschild (the
flutist in a Jewish orchestra) and Bronze are mocked by the town
boys:
Rothschild was petrified with terror. He sank to
the ground and waved his hands over his head as if to protect himself from
falling blows; then he jumped up and ran away as fast as his legs could carry him. As he ran he leaped and waved his arms, and
his long, gaunt back could be seen quivering. The little boys were delighted at
what had happened, and ran after him screaming: "Jew, Jew!" The dogs also joined
barking in the chase. Somebody laughed and then whistled, at which the dogs
barked louder and more vigorously than ever.
Then one of them must have bitten Rothschild,
for a piteous, despairing scream rent the air.
Yakov walked across the common to the edge
of the town without knowing where he was going, and the little boys shouted
after him. "There goes old man Bronze! There goes old
man Bronze!"
Van's and Ada's father Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious
airplane disaster above the Pacific and is never buried (for Van and Ada their
father was buried on the same day as their uncle Daniel Veen, though: 3.8).
Demon's colleague Kithar Sween is the author of The Waistline, a satire
in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin,
an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith:
The last occasion on which Van had seen
his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been
present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and
Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon's new secretary, and
solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde
author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The
Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and
Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman
faith. (3.7)
The first part of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
(1922) is entitled The Burial of the Dead and the fourth part,
Death by Water. Water is the element that kills Van's and Ada's
half-sister Lucette (who drowns in the Atlantic and is never buried
either):
Three elements, fire, water, and air,
destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited.
(3.1)
Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina dies of cancer
(sgoret' means "to burn down" and "to die fast"). When she was pregnant
with Ada (who becomes Van's mistress in the night of the Burning Barn: 1.19),
Marina spent with Demon a rukuliruyushchiy month at
Kitezh:
Some confusion ensued less than two years
later (September, 1871 - her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when
upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband's
unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: 'Signor Konduktor, ay vant
go Lago di Luga, hier geld') she [Aqua] took advantage of his being massaged in the
solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom - and experienced a delicious shock:
her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs
still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay
rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had
obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along -
ever since Shakespeare's birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other
people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G. A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left
Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty
starlets) had conceived, c'est bien le cas de le dire, the
brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought
(happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. Marina had spent a
rukuliruyushchiy month with him at Kitezh but when she smugly divulged
her intentions (just before Aqua's arrival) he threw her out of the
house. (1.3).
Khristosik (little Christ) is a negative, as it were,
of Saltykov's Iudushka (little Judas). Rukuliruyushchiy
(roucoulant, cooing) has the same French origin
as rukuliruya (gerund of rukulirovat'), a
quaint non-Russian word used by Saltykov in Gospoda Tashkenttsy (“Gentlemen of
Tashkent,” 1873) instead of vorkuya (cooing).* Grombchevski and
his nephew Gromwell (the lawyers who were present when Van saw his father for
the last time) seem to hint at the Russian lawyers Karabchevski (the
author of memoirs "What my Eyes have Seen," 1921, in which VN's father is
mentioned) and Gromnitski. In "The Golovlyovs" Iudushka's brother Pavel,
who believes that it is dangerous to have a real estate, is afraid of lawyers:
— А то и вздумалось, что, по нынешнему времени,
совсем собственности иметь не надо! Деньги — это так! Деньги взял, положил в
карман и удрал с ними! А недвижимость эта…
— Да что ж это за время такое за особенное, что уж
и собственности иметь нельзя?
— А такое время, что вы вот газет не читаете, а я
читаю. Нынче адвокаты везде пошли — вот и понимайте. Узнает адвокат, что у тебя
собственность есть — и почнёт кружить!
— Как же он тебя кружить будет, коль скоро у тебя
праведные документы есть?
— Так и будет кружить, как кружат. Или вот
Порфишка-кровопивец: наймёт адвоката, а тот и будет тебе повестку за повесткой
присылать!
— Что ты! не бессудная, чай, земля?
Before his death Demon bought a small, perfectly round Pacific
island:
Demon had recently bought a small, perfectly round
Pacific island, with a pink house on a green bluff and a sand beach like a frill
(as seen from the air), and now wished to sell the precious little palazzo in
East Manhattan that Van did not want. Mr Sween, a greedy practitioner with
flashy rings on fat fingers, said he might buy it if some of the pictures were
thrown in. The deal did not come off. (3.7)
According to a Russian saying, a man needs only three arshins of land (one
arshin is equivalent to 28 inches). But Ivan Ivanovich
Chimsha-Gimalayski, the main character in Chekhov's story Kryzhovnik
("The Gooseberries," 1898), disagrees:
"It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet
of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a man... A man needs, not six feet
of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he
can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit."
When Ivan Ivanovich visits his brother, an elderly official who
settled in the country and who can eat at last the gooseberries that grows
in his own garden, the latter resembles a pig:
I went in to my brother and found him sitting on his
bed with his knees covered with a blanket; he looked old, stout, flabby; his
cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like a
pig.
Years later, when Van meets Greg Eminin in Paris, both are fat:
Van considered for a moment those red round cheeks,
that black goatee.
'Ne uznayosh' (You don't recognize
me)?'
'Greg! Grigoriy Akimovich!' cried Van tearing off his
glove.
'I grew a regular vollbart last summer. You'd
never have known me then. Beer? Wonder what you do to look so boyish,
Van.'
'Diet of champagne, not beer,' said Professor Veen,
putting on his spectacles and signaling to a waiter with the crook of his
'umber.' 'Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum
crisp.'
'I'm also very fat, yes?'
'What about Grace, I can't imagine her getting
fat?'
'Once twins, always twins. My wife is pretty portly,
too.'
'Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn't
know it. How long?'
'About two years.'
'To whom?'
'Maude Sween.'
'The daughter of the poet?'
'No, no, her mother is a Brougham.' (3.2)
After the picnic in Ardis the First Grace Erminin was laid up with acute indigestion:
Greg said that both Aunt Ruth and Grace were laid up
with acute indigestion - 'not because of your wonderful sandwiches,' he hastened
to add, 'but because of all those burnberries they picked in the bushes.'
(1.14)
Greg's and Grace's father, Colonel Erminin does not come to the
picnic saying in a note that his liver (Russ.,
pechen') behaves like a pecheneg (savage). (1.13)
Pecheneg ("The Savage," 1894) is a story by Chekhov. According to Van,
Greg's father (who died just before "your aunt," as Greg calls Marina)
"preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel" (3.2).
Van and Ada discover that Marina, not her twin sister Aqua, is Van's
mother thanks to Marina's old herbarium (1.1). But, as the proverb
says, this is only tsvetochki (little flowers), yagodki
(little berries) are to come. Describing Aqua's suicide, Van compares
her pills to berries:
Sly Aqua twitched, simulated a yawn, opened her
light-blue eyes (with those startlingly contrasty jet-black pupils that Dolly,
her mother, also had), put on yellow slacks and a black bolero, walked through a
little pinewood, thumbed a ride with a Mexican truck, found a suitable gulch in
the chaparral and there, after writing a short note, began placidly eating from
her cupped palm the multicolored contents of her handbag, like any Russian
country girl lakomyashchayasya yagodami (feasting on berries) that she
had just picked in the woods. (1.3)
Marina Durmanov is a professional actress. The characters of "The
Golovlyovs" include the twin sisters Anninka and Lyubinka, both of whom are
provincial actresses. Like Aqua, Lyubinka commits suicide by taking
poison.
Van had seen the picture [the
Holliwood film version of Four Sisters, as Chekhov's play The
Three Sisters, 1901, is known on Antiterra] and had liked it.
An Irish girl, the infinitely graceful and melancholy Lenore Colline
-
Oh! qui me rendra ma colline
Et le grand chêne and my colleen!
- harrowingly resembled Ada Ardis as photographed with
her mother in Belladonna, a movie magazine which Greg Erminin had sent
him, thinking it would delight him to see aunt and cousin, together, on a
California patio just before the film was released. (2.9)
Belladonna is a poisonous plant Atropa belladonna. On
the other hand, Belladonna is the eldest of the three Parcae. She is mentioned
by Eliot in The Waste Land:
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. (chapter I "The
Burial of the Dead")
Marina to Demon: 'You have no idea, Demon, how I dread
meeting again, after all those years, that dislikable Norbert von Miller, who
has probably become even more arrogant and obsequious, and moreover does not
realize, I'm sure, that Dan's wife is me. He's a Baltic Russian' (turning to
Van) 'but really echt deutsch, though his mother was born Ivanov or
Romanov, or something, who owned a calico factory in Finland or Denmark. I can't
imagine how he got his barony; when I knew him twenty years ago he was plain Mr
Miller.'
'He is still that,' said Demon drily, 'because you've
got two Millers mixed up. The lawyer who works for Dan is my old friend Norman
Miller of the Fainley, Fehler and Miller law firm and physically bears a
striking resemblance to Wilfrid Laurier. Norbert, on the other hand, has, I
remember, a head like a kegelkugel, lives in Switzerland, knows
perfectly well whom you married and is an unmentionable blackguard.'
(1.38)
Fehler is German for "mistake." The girl in The Waste
Land is not a Russian at all, but comes from Lithuania being echt
deutsch:
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt
deutsch. ("The Burial of the Dead")
The execution [at the picnic in
Ardis the Second] was interrupted by the arrival of Uncle Dan. He
had a remarkably reckless way of driving, as happens so often, goodness knows
why, in the case of many dour, dreary men. Weaving rapidly between the pines, he
brought the little red runabout to an abrupt stop in front of Ada and presented
her with the perfect gift, a big box of mints, white, pink and, oh boy, green!
He had also an aerogram for her, he said, winking.
Ada tore it open - and saw it was not for her from
dismal Kalugano, as she had feared, but for her mother from Los Angeles, a much
gayer place. Marina's face gradually assumed an expression of quite indecent
youthful beatitude as she scanned the message. Triumphantly, she showed it to
Larivière-Monparnasse, who read it twice and tilted her head with a smile of
indulgent disapproval. Positively stamping her feet with joy:
'Pedro is coming again,' cried (gurgled, rippled)
Marina to calm her daughter.
'And, I suppose, he'll stay till the end of the
summer,' remarked Ada - and sat down with Greg and Lucette, for a game of Snap,
on a laprobe spread over the little ants and dry pine needles.
'Oh no, da net zhe, only for a fortnight'
(girlishly giggling). 'After that we shall go to Houssaie,
Gollivud-tozh' (Marina was really in great form) - 'yes, we shall all
go, the author, and the children, and Van - if he wishes.'
'I wish but I can't,' said Percy (sample of his humor).
(1.39)
Gollivud-tozh brings to mind "Gimalayskoe tozh," the country place
of Ivan Ivanovich's brother in "The Gooseberries." Its name comes from
Gimalai (the Himalayas).
Now Lucette demanded her mother's
attention.
'What are Jews?' she asked.
'Dissident Christians,' answered Marina.
'Why is Greg a Jew?' asked Lucette.
'Why-why!' said Marina; 'because his parents are
Jews.'
'And his grandparents? His arrière
grandparents?'
'I really wouldn't know, my dear. Were your ancestors
Jews, Greg?'
'Well, I'm not sure,' said Greg. 'Hebrews, yes - but
not Jews in quotes - I mean, not comic characters or Christian businessmen. They
came from Tartary to England five centuries ago. My mother's grandfather,
though, was a French marquis who, I know, belonged to the Roman faith and was
crazy about banks and stocks and jewels, so I imagine people may have called him
un juif.'
'It's not a very old religion, anyway, as religions go,
is it?' said Marina (turning to Van and vaguely planning to steer the chat to
India where she had been a dancing girl long before Moses or anybody was born in
the lotus swamp). (1.14)
At the end of her life Marina confessed with an
enigmatic and rather smug smile that much as she liked the rhythmic blue puffs
of incense, and the dyakon's rich growl on the ambon, and the
oily-brown ikon coped in protective filigree to receive the worshipper's kiss,
her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of)
Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism. (3.1) It seems that
Marina is not a vegetarian, though.
It is Tolstoy, the author of Yagody ("The Berries," 1906), who was
a confirmed vegetarian. In Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs" Leo Tolstoy is
mentioned by Kolya Kalachov:
"Leo Tolstoy," said Kolya in a quavering
voice, "didn't eat meat either."
"No,"
retorted Liza, hiccupping through her tears, "the count ate
asparagus."
"Asparagus isn't meat."
"But when he was writing War and
Peace he did eat meat. He did! He did! And when he was writing
Anna Karenin he stuffed himself and stuffed himself."
"Do
shut up!"
"Stuffed himself! Stuffed himself!"
"And I suppose while he was
writing The Kreutzer Sonata he also stuffed himself?" asked Nicky
venomously.
"The Kreutzer Sonata is short. Just imagine him trying
to write War and Peace on vegetarian sausages! "
"Anyway, why do you
keep nagging me about your Tolstoy?" (chapter XVII "Have Respect for
Mattrasses, Citizens!")
In one of the next chapters, "From Seville to Granada," Vorob'yaninov
invites Liza Kalachov to a posh restaurant. The name Vorob'yaninov comes from
vorobey (sparrow). And so does vorobeynik, the Russian name of
gromwell (Lithospermum gen.). The great Grombchevski's nephew,
Mr Gromwell is Van's lawyer (2.2).
p. s. to my previous post: Iuda Apostol ("Judas the Apostle,"
1919) is a poem by Voloshin included in his book Neopalimaya kupina
("The Burning Bush").
*see in Zembla my article "The Naked Truth, or the Reader's Sentimental
Education in Ada's Quelque Chose University"
Alexey
Sklyarenko