'Playing croquet with you,' said Van, 'should be
rather like using flamingoes and hedgehogs.'
'Our reading lists do not match,' replied
Ada. 'That Palace in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so
often promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable prejudice
toward it. (1.8)
"Palace in Wonderland" seems to hint at the Winter Palace in
St. Petersburg. In Epos i lirika sovremennoy Rossii ("The
Epic and Lyric Poetry of Contemporary Russia: Vladimir
Mayakovski and Boris Pasternak," 1932) Marina Tsvetaev quotes Mayakovski's
poem Horosho! ("Good!" 1927):
От витии до рыночного зазывалы Маяковский
неустанно что-то в мозги вбивает, чего-то от нас добивается — какими угодно
средствами, вплоть до грубейших, неизменно удачных. Пример последнего:
И
на кровати Александры Феодоровны
Развалился Александр Феодорович.
— то, что мы все знали, созвучие имён, которое все отмечали —
ничего нового но — здорово! И как бы мы ни относились и к Александре
Феодоровне, и к Александру Фёдоровичу, и к самому Маяковскому, каждый из
нас этими строками удовлетворён, как формулой.
"And Aleksandr Fyodorovich sprawled
on the bed of Aleksnadra Fyodorovna."
Mayakovski plays on the fact that A. F. Kerenski, the premier
in 1917, is a "namesake" of the last Russian Empress, wife of Nicholas
II. V. V. Mayakovski happens to be VN's namesake. In his poem O
pravitelyakh ("On Rulers," 1945) VN mentions his "late namesake," the
coachmen of Empires and monstrous pumpkin. In Charles Perrault's fairy
tale Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de verre a pumpkin is
metamorphosed into the carriage and a rat into the
coachman:
Золушка принесла крысоловку, из которой выглядывали три
большие крысы.
Фея выбрала одну из них, самую крупную и усатую,
дотронулась до неё своей палочкой, и крыса сейчас же превратилась в толстого
кучера с пышными усами, – таким усам позавидовал бы даже главный королевский
кучер.
In the Russian version the fat coachman with droopy mustache resembles
Stalin very much. In her Povest' o Sonechke Marina Tsvetaev compares
Sonya Gollidey to Zolushka (Cendrillon): А вы -
Золушка, которая должна золу золить, пока другие
танцуют.
Sonya being Russian for "dormouse," Sonya is
also a character in Anya v strane chudes, VN's Russian version of Lewis
Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Anya is a diminutive of Anna. VN's Ada or Ardor: A Family
Chronicle begins:
'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all
unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the
beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina,
transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That
pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a
family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy
work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius
Press, 1858).
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are
ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy's novel is turned inside out and
Anna Arkadievna's patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an
incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. 'Mount Tabor' and 'Pontius'
allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner's term, I believe) and betrayals
to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant
versionists.
In Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago
(1957) Preobrazhenie ("Transfiguration") is one of Yuri Zhivago's
poems. See also in Topos my Russian article "All's Well that Ends Well: the
Optimism of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Mayakovski, Pasternak and Nabokov."
"The time of dream" in my previous post should be "the dream
time."
Alexey Sklyarenko