On a bleak morning between
the spring and summer of 1901, in Paris, as Van, black-hatted, one hand playing
with the warm loose change in his topcoat pocket and the other, fawn-gloved,
upswinging a furled English umbrella, strode past a particularly unattractive
sidewalk café among the many lining the Avenue Guillaume Pitt, a chubby bald man
in a rumpled brown suit with a watch-chained waistcoat stood up and hailed
him. (3.2)
Paris is also known on Antiterra as Lute (from 'Lutèce,' ancient name of
Paris). In his "Ода его сият. гр. Дм. Ив. Хвостову" (Ode to his
Excellency Count Dm. Iv. Khvostov, 1825)
Pushkin mentions lyutyi Pit (ferocious Pitt):
Султан
ярится. Кровь Эллады
И peзвocкачет, и
кипит.
Открылись
грекам древни клады,
Трепещет в
Стиксе лютый Пит.
The sultan gets furious. Hellas's
blood
is galloping fast and boiling.
The Greeks discovered ancient
treasures,
ferocious Pitt trembles in Styx.
In
a footnote Pushkin comments on "Pit:"
Г. Питт,
знаменитый английский министр и известный противник Свободы.
G. Pitt, the famous English minister
and notorious enemy of Freedom.
In the closing lines of his
parodic ode Pushkin mentions, among other gods and goddesses, Cytherea:
И да блюдут твой
мирный сон
Нептун, Плутон, Зевс, Цитерея,
Гебея, Псиша,
Крон, Астрея,
Феб, Игры, Смехи, Вакх, Харон.
Neptune, Pluto, Zeus, Cytherea,
Hebe, Psiche, Cronus, Astraea,
Phoebus, Ludi, Risi, Bachus,
Charon
may keep your peaceful sleep.
In a footnote Pushkin comments
on "Cytherea:"
Цитерея (Венера)
осыпает цветами своего любимого певца.
Cytherea (Venus) is strewing with
flowers her favorite singer.
Cytherea comes from Cythera, one of
the Ionian islands where stood a temple of Aphrodite, or Venus, the frail
(slabaya, "weak," "delicate") goddess of love.
Pushkin's Vol'nost' ("Ode to
Liberty," 1817) begins:
Беги, сокройся от
очей,
Цитеры слабая царица!
Begone, be hidden from my eyes,
delicate Queen of Cythera!
In his commentary on
Liberty VN points out a curious obsession with
"heads" throughout the ninety-six lines of the ode. This proximal part of the
body is implied in ll. 5 and 61 and named in 25, 31, 47, 50, 68, and 93.
(EO Commentatry, vol. III, p. 342)
Golova (head) is also
mentioned by Pushkin in the last footnote to his elegy Andrey
Shen'e (André Chénier, 1825):
На месте казни он
ударил себя в голову и сказал: pourtant j'avais quelque chose là.
On the spot of his execution he hit himself on the head and
said: pourtant j'avais quelque chose là.
Quelque chose is French for "something." While
chose (thing) brings to mind Chose, Van's University (1.28 et
passim), quelque (some) reminds one
of Quelque Fleurs, Aqua's favorite talc powder (1.3).
Those fleurs bring to mind the flowers with which Cytherea is
strewing her favorite singer (Count Khvostov).
The twin sister of Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother),
poor mad Aqua is Demon Veen's wife. In his Ode to Count Khvostov
Pushkin compares Khvostov to Byron (the poet who had an affair with his
half-sister, divorced his wife and had a daughter named Ada) and mentions
Khvostov's wife:
Вам с Бейроном шипела злоба,
Гремела и
правдива лесть.
Он лорд — граф ты! Поэты оба!
Се, мнится, явно сходство
есть. —
Никак! Ты с верною супругой
Под бременем Судьбы упругой
Живёшь в любви — и наконец
Глубок он, но единобразен,
А ты глубок,
игрив и разен,
И в шалостях ты впрям певец.
In a footnote Pushkin comments on Khvostov's "faithful
spouse:"
Графиня Хвостова, урожденная княжна Горчакова,
достойная супруга маститого нашего Певца. Во многочисленных своих стихотворениях
везде называет он её Темирою (см. последн. замеч. в оде «Заздравный
кубок»).
"In his numerous poems he [Khvostov] throughout calls
her [Khvostov's wife, born Princess Gorchakov] Temira
(Thamyra)."
In Eugene Onegin (Four: III: 1-4) Pushkin quotes
Delvig's Ode to Fani (c. 1815):
Словами вещего поэта
и мне сказать позволено:
Темира, Дафна и
Лилета
как сон забыты мной
давно.
In the words of a vatic poet
I also am allowed to say:
"Thamyra, Daphne, and Lileta
I've long forgotten, like a dream."
Chapter Four of EO has the epigraph: La morale est dans la nature des choses.
Necker.
At the beginning of Four (VIII: 8) a little girl of
thirteen years is mentioned:
Кому не скучно лицемерить,
Различно повторять
одно,
Стараться важно в том уверить,
В чём все уверены давно,
Всё те же
слышать возраженья,
Уничтожать предрассужденья,
Которых не было и нет
У
девочки в тринадцать лет!
Who does not find it tedious to dissemble;
diversely to repeat the
same;
try gravely to convince
one
of what all have been long
convinced;
to hear the same
objections,
annihilate the
prejudices
which never had and
hasn't
a little girl of thirteen
years!
In Ode to Count Khvostov Pushkin calls himself
nevedomyi piita ("an obscure poet") and Khvostov, znamenityi
piit ("the famous poet"):
А я, неведомый Пиита,
В восторге новом
воспою
Во след Пиита знаменита
Правдиву похвалу свою,
Моляся кораблю
бегущу,
Да Бейрона он узрит кущу...
The word piit (also spelt piita, obs.,
"poet") is also used by Pushkin in Exegi Monumentum
(1836):
И славен буду я, доколь в подлунном
мире
жив будет хоть один пиит.
and I'll be famed while there remains
alive
in the sublunar world at least one poet.
Let's now in Pushkin's lines in EO (Four: III:
1-4) substitute piit
for poet:
Словами вещего пиита
и мне сказать позволено:
Тамара, Ада и
Лолита
как сон забыты мной
давно.
In the words of a vatic poet
I also am allowed to say:
"Tamara, Ada and Lolita
I've long forgotten, like a dream."
Tamara is the hero's beloved in VN's Speak, Memory:
an Autobiography Revisited (1967). Lolita is the eponymous little girl
in VN's most famous novel (1955). It was first published in
Paris. On Antiterra Lolita is the name of a gipsy girl in Osberg's novel
The Gitanilla. For the picnic on her twelfth birthday (when Van walks
on his hands for the first time) Ada is allowed to wear her
"lolita:"
For the big picnic on Ada's twelfth
birthday and Ida's forty-second jour de fête, the child was permitted
to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name
in Osberg's novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish 't,' not
a thick English one), a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt, with
red poppies or peonies, 'deficient in botanical reality,' as she grandly
expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in
the terms of this, and only this, dream. (1.13)
Osberg's novel is well-known to Aqua:
In less than a week Aqua had
accumulated more than two hundred tablets of different potency. She knew most of
them - the jejune sedatives, and the ones that knocked you out from eight p.m.
till midnight, and several varieties of superior soporifics that left you with
limpid limbs and a leaden head after eight hours of non-being, and a drug which
was in itself delightful but a little lethal if combined with a draught of the
cleansing fluid commercially known as Morona; and a plump purple pill reminding
her, she had to laugh, of those with which the little gypsy enchantress in the
Spanish tale (dear to Ladore schoolgirls) puts to sleep all the sportsmen and
all their bloodhounds at the opening of the hunting season. (1.3)
In her suicide note Aqua promised that one day Van would
visit Ardis:
Aujourd'hui (heute-toity!) I,
this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with
Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several 'patients,' in the
neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same
skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park,
where you will ramble one day, no doubt. (1.3)
When Van meets Greg Erminin in Paris, they recall the picnics
at Ardis:
'I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony
- no, a black Silentium. Bozhe moy!'
'Yes - Bozhe moy, you can well say that. Those
lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno
(madly) in love with your cousin!'
'You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long
-'
'Neither did she. I was terribly -'
'How long are you staying -'
'- terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I
could not compete with her numerous boy friends.'
Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard
about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three
manors. The noble reticence of our bed makers.
'How long will you be staying in Lute? No, Greg, I
ordered it. You pay for the next bottle. Tell me -'
'So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it
was reality in the x degree. I'd have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I
declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin,
almost a brother, you can't understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And
Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and
pity, and Dr Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer
of genius - dead, dead, all dead!' (3.2)
Van's and Greg's conversation parodies Onegin's dialogue with Prince N.
(Tatiana's husband) in Pushkin's EO (Eight: XVIII: 1-4):
'Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn't
know it. How long?'
'About two years.'
'To whom?'
'Maude Sween.'
'The daughter of the poet?'
'No, no, her mother is a Brougham.'
Might have replied 'Ada Veen,' had Mr Vinelander not
been a quicker suitor. I think I met a Broom somewhere. Drop the subject.
Probably a dreary union: hefty, high-handed wife, he more of a bore than ever.
(ibid.)
October 19 (the Lyceum anniversary)
Alexey Sklyarenko