As he speaks to Van, Demon calls Blanche, a French handmaid at
Ardis, "a passing angel:"
'Did what's-her-name go with you?'
Well, my boy, frankly, the nomenclature is getting more
and more confused every year. Let us speak of plainer things. Where are the
drinks? They were promised me by a passing angel.'
(Passing angel?) (1.38)
In Saltykov-Shchedrin's Istoriya odnogo goroda ("The History of
One City," 1870) the list of mayors includes vicomte Du Chariot, Angel
Dorofeevich, a French emigrant:
Дю Шарио, виконт, Ангел Дорофеевич, французский
выходец. Любил рядиться в женское платье и лакомиться лягушками. По
рассмотрении, оказался девицею. Выслан в 1821 году за границу. ("The List of Town Governors")
On the other hand, in "The History of One City" (and in some other books)
Saltykov mentions Blanche Gandon, a French operetta actress who in the
1860s performed in St. Petersburg:
В довершение всего, очистили какой-то манеж и поставили
в нём "Прекрасную Елену", пригласив, в качестве исполнительницы, девицу Бланш
Гандон.
On top of it all, they cleaned some manège and staged there La belle
Hélène having invited, as a performer, Mlle
Blanche Gandon. ("Worship of the Mammon and Repentance")
A famous operetta by Jacques Offenbach, La belle Hélène
(1864) is also mentioned by Saltykov-Shchedrin in Gospoda Golovlyovy (“The Golovlyovs,”
1875-80):
She [Iudushka's niece and Lyubinka's twin sister Anninka, a provincial actress who leads a
dream-like existence] 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 was not 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 Little Niece”)
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.
In Ada, Chose is Van's and Demon's
University:
In 1885, having completed
his prep-school education, he [Van] went up to
Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time
to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials
called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel).
(1.28)
Demon to Van: 'Let our sweethearts never
meet, as we used to say, up at Chose. Only Yukonians think cognac is bad for the
liver, because they have nothing but vodka. Well, I'm glad you get along so well
with Ada. That's fine. A moment ago, in that gallery, I ran into a remarkably
pretty soubrette [Blanche!]. She never once raised
her lashes and answered in French when I - Please, my boy, move that screen a
little, that's right, the stab of a sunset, especially from under a thunderhead,
is not for my poor eyes. Or poor ventricles. Do you like the type, Van - the
bowed little head, the bare neck, the high heels, the trot, the wiggle, you do,
don't you?' (1.38)
Du Chariot's patronymic, Dorofeevich, brings
to mind Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse in
the Kalugano hospital:
He [Van] begged her [Tatiana] to massage his legs but she tested him with
one glance of her grave, dark eyes - and delegated the task to Dorofey, a
beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed, with the
sick child clasping the massive nape. (1.42)
According to Van, Tatiana (a remarkably
pretty and proud young nurse) is "a torturing angel in her own right." Much
later Tatiana wrote Van a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink
paper.
Demon first possessed Marina (Van's, Ada's
and Lucette's mother) between the two scenes of a stage performance in which
Marina plays the heroine (Pushkin's Tatiana Larin who got mixed with Pasternak's
Lara Antipov):
In the first of these she had
undressed in graceful silhouette behind a semitransparent screen, reappeared in
a flimsy and fetching nightgown, and spent the rest of the wretched scene
discussing a local squire, Baron d'O., with an old nurse in Eskimo boots. Upon
the infinitely wise countrywoman's suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of
her bed, on a side table with cabriole legs, a love letter and took five minutes
to reread it in a languorous but loud voice for no body's benefit in particular
since the nurse sat dozing on a kind of sea chest, and the spectators were
mainly concerned with the artificial moonlight's blaze upon the lovelorn young
lady's bare arms and heaving breasts.
Even before the old Eskimo had
shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and
proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the
fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last
dance on New Year's Eve...
At an invisible sign of
Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva
or 'ribbon boule' in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen
(tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.'s rose-red banknote in his
pocket) to fall from his seat...
By the time he went to
fetch his new mistress in his jingling sleigh, the last-act ballet of Caucasian
generals and metamorphosed Cinderellas had come to a sudden close, and Baron
d'O., now in black tails and white gloves, was kneeling in the middle of an
empty stage, holding the glass slipper that his fickle lady had left him when
eluding his belated advances. (1.2)
Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess)
calls Blanche "Cendrillon:"
What was her name?
Blanche - but Mlle Larivière called her 'Cendrillon' because her stockings got
so easily laddered, see, and because she broke and mislaid things, and confused
flowers. (1.7)
One of Kim Beauharnais's photographs shows
Blanche and Ben Wright (the coachman in "Ardis the First"):
'Ah, drunken Ben Wright trying
to rape Blanche in the mews - she has quite a big part in this
farrago.'
'He's doing nothing of the sort. You
see quite well they are dancing. It's like the Beast and the Belle at the ball
where Cinderella loses her garter and the Prince his beautiful codpiece of
glass.' (2.7)
Belle is Lucette's name for her
governess:
'And Belle' (Lucette's name for her governess), 'is she
also a dizzy Christian?' (1.14).
Blanche eventually marries Trofim
Fartukov, the Russian coachman in "Ardis the Second" (2.7).
In his poem O pravitelyakh ("On Rulers,"
1944) VN mentions kuchera gosudarstv (the coachmen of
empires):
Кучера государств зато хороши
при
исполнении должности: шибко
ледяная навстречу летит синева,
огневые трещат
на ветру рукава...
Наблюдатель глядит иностранный
и спереди видит
прекрасные очи навыкат,
а сзади прекрасную помесь диванной
подушки с
чудовищной тыквой.
Per contra, the coachmen of empires look
good
when performing their duties: swiftly
toward them flies the blue of the sky;
their flame-colored sleeves clap in the
wind;
the foreign observer looks on and
sees
in front bulging eyes of great beauty
and behind a beautiful blend
of divan cushion and monstrous
pumpkin.
In Charles Perrault's fairy
tale Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de verre (1697) the
carriage is metamorphosed into a pumpkin. In the night of the Burning Barn (when
Van and Ada make love for the first time) Blanche returns to Ardis in a pumpkin-hued police
van:
When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly
breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him as if
she had been love-making for years in all our dreams - but impatient young
passion (brimming like Van's overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a
crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first
few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird uttered a
warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the
firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the carriage
lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well
pleased with the night treat, the cook's niece Blanche jumped out of a
pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas)
- and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress, and giving the
couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent
bedrooms. (1.19)
On the following morning Blanche finds her
slipper in one of the waistpaper-baskets of
the library:
Suddenly Van heard her lovely dark voice on the
staircase saying in an upward direction, 'Je l'ai vu dans une des corbeilles
de la bibliothèque' - presumably in reference to some geranium or violet or
slipper orchid. There was a 'bannister pause,' as photographers say, and after
the maid's distant glad cry had come from the library Ada's voice added: 'Je
me demande, I wonder qui l'a mis là, who put it there.'
Aussitôt après she entered the dining
room. (1.20).
Incidentally, chariot is French for
"carriage."
In "On Rulers" VN compares Stalin to Khan
Mamay ("a particularly evil Tartar prince of the fourteenth century" who opposed
Prince Dmitri of Moscow, nicknamed Donskoy, in the battle of
Kulikovo):
Умирает со скуки
историк:
За Мамаем всё тот же
Мамай.
The historian dies of sheer boredoom:
On the heels of Mamay comes another
Mamay.
Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel, is one of the
seconds in Demon's duel with d'Onsky (1.2). On the other hand, Stalin is
satirized in Ada as Khan Sosso ("the current ruler of the Golden Horde"
pictured as mascodagama by topical cartoonists, 1.30):
Eastward, instead of Khan
Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga
region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous
Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of
Tartary and Trst. (2.2)
Trofim Fartukov and Blanche have a blind child
(2.7). In "The History of One City" sleporody ("the
blindborns") is one of the tribes that lived near Glupov even before
the city was founded:
По соседству с
головотяпами жило множество независимых племён, но только замечательнейшие из
них поименованы летописцем, а именно: моржееды, лукоеды, гущееды, клюковники,
куралесы, вертячие бабы, лягушечники, лапотники, чернонёбые, долбёжники,
проломленные головы, слепороды, губошлёпы, вислоухие, кособрюхие, ряпушники,
заугольники, крошевники и рукосуи. ("On the Origins of the Inhabitants of
Glupov")
The inhabitants of Glupov are descendants of
another tribe mentioned by Shchedrin, golovotyapy ("the bunglers"). I speak of golovotyapy in my
Russian articles "Van Veen or Ivan Golovin: What is the Real Name of
Ada's Main Character?" and "All's Well that Ends Well: the Optimism of
Pushkin, Tolstoy, Mayakovski, Pasternak and Nabokov" available in Topos: http://www.topos.ru/article/7076; http://www.topos.ru/article/6769.
Glupov also brings to mind Lucette's Queenston
College for Glamorous and Glupovatyh ('dumb') Girls (2.5).
When she visits Van (who teaches in nearby Kingston University) in
Kingston, Lucette wears very chic patent-leather Glass shoes. Lucette's
krestik (not quite "little cross" as Van believes) also reminds
one of kresty, the signatures of 213 illiterate inhabitants
of Glupov:
К сему прошению, вместо людишек
города Глупова, за неграмотностью их, поставлено двести и тринадцать крестов.
("The Hungry City")
The petition signed by the illiterate persons with
crosses was composed by Bogolepov, a former scribe. In VN's Pnin (1957)
Liza Bogolepov is Pnin's wife.
Shchedrin's Bogolepov is a drunkard. After the
dinner in 'Ursus' (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan
Major) Van heard Ada
Vinelander's voice calling for her Glass bed slippers (which, as in Cordulenka's
princessdom too, he found hard to distinguish from dance footwear), and a minute
later, without the least interruption in the established tension, Van found
himself, in a drunken dream, making violent love to Rose - no, to Ada, but in
the rosacean fashion, on a kind of lowboy. She complained he hurt her ‘like a
Tiger Turk.' (2.8)
"A Tiger Turk" is Ada's first lover, Dr Krolik's
brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik, a Doctor of Philosophy, born in Turkey
(2.7). In Blok's poem Incognita (1906) p'yanisty s
glazami krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of rabbits) cry out:
"in vino veritas!"
In On Rulers VN mentions a banquet with
Caucasian wine:
Но детина в регалиях или
волк в
макинтоше,
в фуражке с немецким крутым козырьком,
охрипший и весь
перекошенный,
в остановившемся автомобиле -
или опять же банкет
с
кавказским вином -
нет.
Покойный мой тёзка,
писавший стихи
и в полоску,
и в клетку, на самом восходе
всесоюзно-мещанского
класса,
кабы дожил до полдня,
нынче бы рифмы натягивал
на
"монументален",
на "переперчил"
и так далее.
But the decorated big fellow or else
the trench-coated wolf
in his army cap with a German steep
peak,
hoarse-voiced, his face all distorted,
speaking from immobile convertible,
or, again, a banquet
with Caucasian wine.
No, thank you.
If my late namesake,
who used to write verse, in rank
and in file, at the very dawn
of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order
had lived till its noon,
he would be now finding taut rhymes
such as "praline"
or "air chill,"
and others of the same kind.
VN's late namesake is V. V. Mayakovski
(1893-1930), "minor Soviet poet endowed with a certain brilliance and bite
but fatally corrupted by the regime he faithfully served." In his poem "The
Brooklyn Bridge" (1925) Mayakovski mentions many unemployed who jump
from the bridge into Hudson River (sic, instead of East
River).
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.' (2.8)
"Ursus" and "Manhattan Major" bring to mind the
constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). The French call it "le Grand Chariot,
Chariot de David." According to the Bible, David was the second king of
Isral, psalmist, slayer of the giant Goliath. On the other hand,
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) was the French painter, author of "The Death of
Marat" (1893). The French revolutionary leader Jean Paul Marat
(1743-93) was stabbed in his shoe-shaped bath by Charlotte
Corday. The latter is known on Antiterra as Cora Day, and Marat is blended
with General Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, and Tolstoy's Haji Murat (a
Caucasian chieftain):
He [Van] struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA
[Andrey Andreevich Aksakov, Van's angelic Russian
tutor] blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint
of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written
the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general's bastard, shot by
Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! (1.28)
VN was a prophet, for in 1992 Rodion Shchedrin
(the author of Anna Karenin, 1972) composed the opera
Lolita whose libretto is based on VN's novel.
Alexey
Sklyarenko