From Aqua's last note: Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but 'a tit of it' as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.

[Signed] My sister's sister who teper'

iz ada ('now is out of hell') (1.3)

La Princesse Lointaine (1895) is a play in verse by Edmond Rostand (1868-1918). In her reminiscences of Marina Tsvetaev (Novyi Zhurnal, 1967) Zinaida Shakhovskoy expresses her surprise how the vodopadnaya (waterfall) Marina Tsvetaev could love and appreciate Rostand, the rucheykovyi (rill) author of L'Aiglon and Chantecler:

Меня, конечно, удивляло, как водопадная Марина Цветаева могла любить и ценить ручейкового автора Орлёнка и Шантеклера, Ростана, или Анри де Ренье.

At the beginning of her memoir essay Shakhovskoy quotes the two lines that Marina Tsvetaev wrote in under her poem Rolandov rog ("Roland's Horn," 1921) printed in Yakor' ("The Anchor," an anthology of emigre poetry):

Тише, тише, тише, век мой громкий!

За меня потоки и потомки.

Сидя как-то у меня в Брюсселе, Марина Цветаева взяла в руки «Якорь» — антологию зарубежной поэзии и, найдя в ней свои стихи, сперва поставила знак ударенья в последней строке своего стихотворения «Заочность» на слове «для», на полях отметив «NB! о дить», а затем приписала под стихотворением «Роландов рог» это двустишие:

She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water - which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one's ears while one washes one's hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach'im (Russian 'to the devil') with the banning of an unmentionable 'lammer.' Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water's enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking - not necessarily to her - forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator's patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van's lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the 'elmo' that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can't do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly - or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor - to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first 'home' she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether. (1.3)

Marina Tvetaev was a daughter of Ivan Tsvetaev, the founder of the magnificent Alexander III Museum (now the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts) in Moscow. The museum was built by the Italians:

"А это итальянцы, они приехали из Италии, чтобы строить музей. Скажи им: "Buon giorno, come sta?" В ответ на привет -- зубы, белей всех сахаров и мраморов, в живой оправе благодарнейшей из улыбок. Годы (хочется сказать столетия) спустя, читая на листке почтовой бумаги посвященную мне О. Мандельштамом "Флоренцию в Москве" -- я не вспомнила, а увидела тех итальянских каменщиков на Волхонке. ("Father and his Museum," 1933).

Marina Tsvetaev mentions Osip Mandelshtam's "Florence in Moscow," as she calls Mandelshtam's poem "V raznogolositse devicheskogo khora..." ("In the Discordance of the Choir of Maidens..." 1916) dedicated to her. There are lines in Mandelshtam's poem:

Не диво ль дивное, что вертоград нам снится,
Где реют голуби в горячей синеве,
Что православные крюки поёт черница:
Успенье нежное — Флоренция в Москве.

Vertograd (obs., garden) mentioned by Mandelshtam brings to mind Demon's librarian:

Soon upon his arrival at Ardis, Van warned his former governess (who had reasons to believe in his threats) that if he were not permitted to remove from the library at any time, for any length of time, and without any trace of 'en lecture,' any volume, collected works, boxed pamphlets or incunabulum that he might fancy, he would have Miss Vertograd, his father's librarian, a completely servile and infinitely accommodative spinster of Verger's format and presumable date of publication, post to Ardis Hall trunkfuls of eighteenth century libertines, German sexologists, and a whole circus of Shastras and Nefsawis in literal translation with apocryphal addenda. (1.21).

As to Monsieur Philippe Verger (the librarian at Ardis, "diminutive old bachelor, morbidly silent and shy"), his name reminds one of another poem by Mandelshtam:

На полицейской бумаге верже

Ночь наглоталась колючих ершей —
Звёзды живут, канцелярские птички,
Пишут и пишут свои раппортички.

Marina Tsvetaev is the author of a memoir essay on Mandelshtam, Istoriya odnogo posvyashcheniya ("The Story of One Dedication," 1931, publ. 1964).

Btw., "gradual, gradual shade" blends Jacob Gradus with John Shade (two of the three main characters in Pale Fire; the third main character, Charles Kinbote, is mad).

In her Poema Lestnitsy ("The Poem of Staircase," 1926) Marina Tsvetaev calls every staircase in the house where people do not sleep at night vodopad v ad ("the waterfall to hell"):

В доме, где по ночам не спят,

Каждая лестница водопад - в ад...

Van compares the narrow staircase in the Voltemand Hall (Van's house in Kingston) to a cataract:

Then he [Van] clattered, in Lucette's wake, down the cataract of the narrow staircase, katrakatra (quatre a quatre). Please, children not katrakatra (Marina). (2.5)

Presently, as Marina had promised, the two children [Van and Ada] went upstairs. 'Why do stairs creak so desperately, when two children go upstairs,' she thought, looking up at the balustrade along which two left hands progressed with strikingly similar flips and glides like siblings taking their first dancing lesson. 'After all, we were twin sisters; everybody knows that.' The same slow heave, she in front, he behind, took them over the last two steps, and the staircase was silent again. 'Old-fashioned qualms,' said Marina. (1.5)

Voltemand is a courtier in Hamlet and Van's penname:

Letters from Terra, by Voltemand, came out in 1891 on Van's twenty-first birthday, under the imprint of two bogus houses, 'Abencerage' in Manhattan, and 'Zegris' in London. (2.2)

Aqua believed in the existence of Terra, Demonia's (or Antiterra's) twin planet:

But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. (1.3)

Marina Tsvetaev is the author of "Ophelia to Hamlet" and "Ophelia in the Defence of the Queen." Lucette (who "is punning in an Ophelian frenzy on the feminine glans," as Ada puts it) comes to Kingston from Queenston:

At present, she was studying the History of Art ('the second-rater's last refuge,' she said) in nearby Queenston College for Glamorous and Glupovatïh ('dumb') Girls. (2.5)

In a letter to Vyazemski Pushkin famously said that poetry should be glupovata (silly). Glupovatost' poezii ("The Silliness of Poetry," 1927) is an article by VN's friend Vladislav Hodasevich (who knew Marina Tsvetaev well). Hodasevich and Marina Tsvetaev are mentioned by VN in Speak, Memory (Chapter Fourteen).