Who cried? Stopchin cried? Larivière cried? Larivière?
Answer! Crying that the barn flambait?
No, she was fast ablaze - I mean, asleep. I know, said
Van, it was she, the hand-painted handmaid, who used your watercolors to touch
up her eyes, or so Larivière said, who accused her and Blanche of fantastic
sins.
Oh, of course! But not Marina's poor French - it was
our little goose Blanche. Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a
miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English
version. (1.19)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Mlle Stopchin: a
representative of Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, author of Les Malheurs de
Sophie (nomenclatorially occupied on Antiterra by Les Malheurs de
Swann).
Ashette: 'Cendrillon' in the French
original.
In Povest' o Sonechke ("The Tale about Little Sonya,"
1937) Marina Tsvetaev praises Ségur's Nouveaux Contes de Fées
published in the Bibliothèque Rose
series:
Графиня де Сегюр - большая писательница, имевшая
глупость вообразить себя бабушкой и писать только для детей. Прошу обратить
внимание на её сказки «Nouveaux Contes de Fées» (Bibliothèque Rose)
- лучшее и наименее известное из всего ею написанного - сказки
совершенно-исключительные, потому что совершенно единоличные (без ни единого
заимствования - хотя бы из народных сказок). Сказки, которым я верна уже
четвертый десяток, сказки, которые я уже здесь в Париже четырежды дарила и
трижды сохранила, ибо увидеть их в витрине для меня - неизбежно -
купить).
Marina Tsvetaev compares Sonya Gollidey to
zhivoy pozhar (a
live fire):
Передо мною - живой пожар. Горит
всё, горит - вся. Горят щёки, горят губы, горят глаза, несгораемо горят в костре
рта белые зубы, горят - точно от пламени вьются! - косы, две чёрных косы, одна
на спине, другая на груди, точно одну костром отбросило. И взгляд из этого
пожара - такого восхищения, такого отчаяния, такое: боюсь! такое:
люблю!
and to
Zolushka
(Cinderella):
Она, кротко: - У других мужья, Марина. У кого по одному, а у кого и по два.
А у меня - только Юра. И мама. И две сестры. Они ведь у меня...
- Красавицы.
Знаю и видела. А вы - Золушка, которая должна золу золить, пока другие танцуют.
Но актриса-то - вы.
- А зато они - старшие. Нет, Марина, после папиной смерти
я сразу поняла - и решила.
A talented actress, Sonya Gollidey had two elder
sisters, tall long-necked blond girls whom Sonya, after their father's death,
decided to support financially.
A French handmaid at Ardis, Blanche is throughout
associated with Cendrillon:
Mlle Larivière called her
'Cendrillon' because her stockings got so easily laddered, see, and because she
broke and mislaid things, and confused flowers. His loose attire revealed his
desire; this could not escape a girl's notice, even if color-blind, and as he
drew up still closer, while looking over her head for a suitable couch to take
shape in some part of this magical manor - where any place, as in Casanova's
remembrances could be dream-changed into a sequestered seraglio nook - she
wiggled out of his reach completely and delivered a little soliloquy in her soft
Ladoran French:
'Monsieur a quinze ans, je crois, et moi, je sais,
j'en ai dixneuf. Monsieur is a nobleman; I am a poor peat-digger's
daughter. Monsieur a tâté, sans doute, des filles de la ville; quant à moi,
je suis vierge, ou peu s'en faut. De plus, were I to fall in love with you
- I mean really in love - and I might, alas, if you possessed me rien qu'une
petite fois - it would be, for me, only grief, and infernal fire,
and despair, and even death, Monsieur. Finalement, I might add
that I have the whites and must see le Docteur Chronique, I
mean Crolique, on my next day off. Now we have to separate, the sparrow has
disappeared, I see, and Monsieur Bouteillan has entered the next room, and can
perceive us clearly in that mirror above the sofa behind that silk
screen.' (1.7).
The name Tsvetaev comes from tsvet which means both "flower"
and "color." Casanova is the main character in Marina Tsvetaev's play
Priklyuchenie ("The Adventure," 1919) based on Casanova's memoirs.
According to Van, that double-whencher had a definitely
monochromatic pencil - in keeping with the memoirs of his dingy era
(2.8).
Unlike Cendrillon (and Sonya Gollidey), Blanche
has two younger sisters ("demoiselles de Tourbe"). Van, as he
leaves Ardis forever, gives Blanche a lift to Tourbière, her home
village:
They passed undulating fields of
wheat speckled with the confetti of poppies and bluets. She talked all the way
about the young chatelaine and her two recent lovers in melodious low tones as
if in a trance, as if en rapport with a dead minstrel's spirit. Only the other
day from behind that row of thick firs, look there, to your right (but he did
not look - sitting silent, both hands on the knob of his cane), she and her
sister Madelon, with a bottle of wine between them, watched Monsieur le Comte
courting the young lady on the moss, crushing her like a grunting bear as he
also had crushed - many times! - Madelon who said she, Blanche, should warn him,
Van, because she was a wee bit jealous but she also said - for she had a good
heart - better put it off until 'Malbrook' s'en va t'en guerre,
otherwise they would fight; he had been shooting a pistol at a scarecrow all
morning and that's why she waited so long, and it was in Madelon's hand, not in
hers. She rambled on and on until they reached Tourbière; two rows of cottages
and a small black church with stained-glass windows. Van let her out. The
youngest of the three sisters, a beautiful chestnut-curled little maiden with
lewd eyes and bobbing breasts (where had he seen her before? - recently, but
where?) carried Blanche's valise and birdcage into a poor shack smothered in
climbing roses, but for the rest, dismal beyond words. He kissed Cendrillon's
shy hand and resumed his seat in the carriage, clearing his throat and plucking
at his trousers before crossing his legs. Vain Van
Veen.
'The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it,
Trofim?'
'I'll take you five versts across the bog,' said
Trofim, 'the nearest is Volosyanka.'
His vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop;
train probably crowded.
Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by
now! (1.41)
Van regrets that he refused to fight a duel with Percy
de Prey (one of Ada's lovers who goes to the Crimean war and perishes
there).
Versty ("The Versts") is the title of two
collections of poetry (1916, 1920) by Marina Tsvetaev. In her drafts
(Svodnye tetradi, 1928-31) Marina Tsvetaev quotes the
song about Malbrook:
Мальбрук в поход собрался
— Mironton — mironton — mirontaine —
Мальбрук в поход собрался —
Зарыт...
Malbrook prepared to fight a campaign
- Mironton-mironton-mirontaine -
Malbrook prepared to fight a campaign
-
Buried...
Folding the linen, Blanche hums this song in
French:
Everything appeared as it always used to be, the little nymphs and goats on
the painted ceiling, the mellow light of the day ripening into evening, the
remote dreamy rhythm of Blanche's 'linen-folding' voice humming 'Malbrough'
(...ne sait quand reviendra, ne sait quand reviendra) and the two
lovely heads, bronze-black and copper-red, inclined over the table...
'Mon page, mon beau page,
- Mironton-mironton-mirontaine -
Mon page, mon beau page...' (1.40)
Btw., Malen'kiy
pazh ("Little Page") is a poem by Marina Tsvetaev included in Vecherniy
albom ("The Evening Album," 1910).
In one of her letters to Van Ada calls Blanche (who
returned to Ardis and married Trofim Fartukov, the coachman) "Cinderella de
Torf:" Je réalise, as your sweet Cinderella de
Torf (now Madame Trofim Fartukov) used to say, that I'm being coy and
obscene. (2.1)
Torf is Russian for "peat." Pasternak's
poem "To Marina Tsvetaev" (1929) ends in the lines:
Он вырвется, курясь, из прорв
Судеб, расплющенных в лепёху,
И внуки
скажут, как про торф:
Горит такого-то эпоха.
...And the grandchildren will say, as of
peat:
the epoch of So-and-so is burning.
One is tempted to substitute Nabokova ("of
Nabokov") for takogo-to ("of So-and-so"):
И внуки скажут, как про торф:
Горит Набокова эпоха.
On Antiterra Pasternak's novel Doktor
Zhivago (1957) is known as Les
Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor, and
Mertvago Forever (2.5). A tattered copy of the former romance was
mislaid by Blanche:
A pointer of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where
croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled down the hill by
some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who were now Van's age and had grown
very nice and quiet.
'As we all are at that age,' said Van and stooped to pick up a curved
tortoiseshell comb - the kind that girls use to hold up their hair behind; he
had seen one, exactly like that, quite recently, but when, in whose
hairdo?
'One of the maids,' said Ada. 'That tattered chapbook must also belong to
her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor.'
(1.8)
Erminin + vair = miniver + rain
Marina Tsvetaev's essay on Pasternak is entitled
Svetovoy liven' ("The Shower of Light," 1922). The name Blanche means
"white." Blanche is the mistress of Bouteillan (the butler at Ardis) and of
his bastard Bout. She also has a romance with old Sore, the Burgundian
night watchman (1.31). Marina Tsvetaev is the author of Plennyi
dukh ("The Captive Spirit," 1934), a memoir essay about Andrey Bely (the
penname of Boris Bugaev, 1880-1934). Belyi means "white."
In "The Shower of Light" Marina Tsvetaev compares
Pasternak to Mayakovski:
Господа, эта книга - для всех. И надо, чтоб её все знали, эта книга для душ
то, что Маяковский для тел: разряжение в действии. Не только целебна - как те
его сонные травы - чудотворна.
According to Marina Tsvetaev, Pasternak's book
Sestra moya zhizn' ("My Sister Life," 1922) is for souls what Mayakovski is
for bodies: the discharging in action.
In his poem O Pravitelyakh (On Rulers, 1945)
VN mentions his "late namesake" (V. V. Mayakovski), the coachmen of
empires and monstrous pumpkin:
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
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 (where Van
and Ada, on the black divan with yellow cushions, made love for the
first time):
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)
"Ashette" hints at Hachette, a French publishing firm.
One is reminded of Ole Lukoye, Sergey Efron's and Marina Tsvetaev's
bogus publishing house (Ole Lukøje is a fairy tale by H. Ch.
Andersen).