After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple
of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to
collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada's choosing
the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband's endless periods
of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin's select sanatorium, Dorothy
Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where
eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and
handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout
the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be
directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the
'Lyaskan Herculanum'); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another
question. (3.8)
In his Literaturnaya ispoved' ("The Literary Confession,"
1854) Vyazemski uses the word bred (delirium):
И я бы мог сказать, хоть не с таким
почётом:
«Из колыбели я уж вышел
рифмоплётом».*
Безвыходно больной в безвыходном
бреду
От
римфы к рифме я до старости бреду.
I too could have said,
not with that honour though:
"From the cradle I
already came out as a rhymester."
Hopelessly ill, in a
delirium with no way out,
I walk from rhyme to
rhyme till my old age.
Pompeii and Herculaneum
were destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius (A. D. 79). In one of his poems (written in
1857, in the same meter and with the same rhyme scheme aabb)
Vyazemski calls his countryseat Ostafievo (five miles from Podolsk, province of
Moscow) "the Pompeii of my soul:"
Приветствую тебя, в минувшем
молодея,
Давнишних дней приют, души моей
Помпея!
Getting younger in the past, I salute you,
The abode of the old
days, the Pompeii of my soul.
Vyazemski's
poem proceeds:
...Нет, не Помпея ты, моя
святыня, нет,
Ты не развалина, не пепел древних лет,
—
Ты всё еще
жива, как и во время оно:
Источником живым кипит благое
лоно,
В
котором утолял я жажду бытия.
Не изменилась ты, но изменился
я.
Обломком
я стою в виду твоей нетленной
Святыни, пред твоей красою
неизменной,
Один я устарел под ношею
годов.
...No, you are not Pompeii, my sacred place, no,
You are not a ruin, not the
ashes of ancient times...
*«Au
sortir du berceau je bégayais des vers». Voltaire. (Vysaemski's
footnote)
In Aldanov's novel
Bred ("Delirium," 1955) the Soviet Colonel ("Colonel No. 2") avidly
reads Aksakov's book on hunting. In "The Literary Confession" Vyazemski mentions
Aksakov and his book (see my previous post).
Goreloe comes from
goret' ("to burn") and means "a burnt down place." One of
Vyazemski's memoir essays is entitled Moskva dopotopnaya ili
dopozharnaya ("Moscow before the Deluge or, rather, before the Fire").
In her letter to Van Ada speaks of Dasha Vinelander's affinity with Kim
Beauharnais (3.7). Josephine Beauharnais was Napoleon's first wife. It was
Kim Beauharnais (the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis) whom Ada bribed
to set the barn near Ardis hall on fire.
Alexey
Sklyarenko