Tak ty 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.’ (3.2)
Note
the rhyme "know it - poet."
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): So you are married, etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Eight:
XVIII: 1-4.
"Так ты женат! не знал я ране!
Давно ли?"
- Около двух лет. -
"На ком?" - На Лариной. -
"Татьяне!"
- Ты ей знаком? - "Я им сосед".
"So you are married! Didn't know before.
How long?" "About two years."
"To whom?" "The Larin girl." "Tatiana!"
"She knows you?" "I'm their neighbor."
Note the rich inner rhyme in the original: na kom (to whom) -
znakom (familiar).
The first six stanzas [of Chapter
Four of EO] were omitted (wisely) by Pushkin in the complete
editions. By 1833 he had been married to Natalia Goncharov as long as Prince N.,
in 1824, had been married to Tatiana Larin: about two years. The first four
stanzas, under the heading "Women: a Fragment from Eugene Onegin,"
appeared in the Moscow Herald (Moskovskiy vestnik), pt. 5, no.
20 (1827), 365-67; the fair copy is in MB 3515. (EO
Commentary, vol. II, p. 414)
In this Fragment (EO, 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."
It seems to me that, like Pushkin's Triquet (a resourceful
poet who in the place of "belle Nina" boldly puts "belle
Tatiana"), VN would be tempted to put different names in
the place of "Thamyra, Daphne, and Lileta:"
Словами вещего поэта
и мне сказать позволено:
как сон забыты мной
давно.
In the words of a vatic poet
I also am allowed to say:
"Tamara, Ada and Lucette
I've long forgotten, like a dream."
The real name of Tamara of VN's Drugie berega
("Other Shores," 1954) and Speak, Memory (1967) was Valentina
("Lyusya")* Shulgin. The name of Van's and Ada's half-sister,
Lucette, can hint at VN's Lyusya. On the other hand, Ada marries
Andrey Vinelander (an Arizonian Russian) in Valentine
State:
'O dear Van, this is the last attempt
I am making. You may call it a document in madness or the herb of repentance,
but I wish to come and live with you, wherever you are, for ever and ever. If
you scorn the maid at your window I will aerogram my immediate acceptance of a
proposal of marriage that has been made to your poor Ada a month ago in
Valentine State. He is an Arizonian Russian, decent and gentle, not overbright
and not fashionable. The only thing we have in common is a keen interest in many
military-looking desert plants especially various species of agave, hosts of the
larvae of the most noble animals in America, the Giant Skippers (Krolik, you
see, is burrowing again). He owns horses, and Cubistic pictures, and "oil wells"
(whatever they are-our father in hell who has some too, does not tell me,
getting away with off-color allusions as is his wont). I have told my patient
Valentinian that I shall give him a definite answer after consulting the only
man I have ever loved or shall ever love. Try to ring me up tonight. Something
is very wrong with the Ladore line, but I am assured that the trouble will be
grappled with and eliminated before rivertide. Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya
(thine). A.' (2.5)
In Ada's letter to Van there are many allusions to
Shakespeare's Hamlet. In EO (Two: XXXVII: 6-7) Lenski at the
grave of Dmitri Larin (Tatiana's and Olga's father) quotes Hamlet's
exclamaition over the skull of the fool:
"Poor Yorick!" молвил он
уныло,
"Он на руках меня
держал."
"Poor Yorick!" mournfully he uttered,
"in his arms he hath borne
me."
It seems to me that in Pushkin's lines
in EO (Four: III: 1-4) VN would also be tempted to substitute obsolete
and solemn piit for modern poet:
Словами вещего пиита
и мне сказать
позволено:
Татьяна, Ольга и
Лолита
как сон забыты мной
давно.
In the words of a vatic poet
I also am allowed to say:
"Tatiana, Olga and Lolita
I've long forgotten, like a dream."
Lolita is the eponymous little girl in VN's most
famous novel (1955). Tatiana and Olga are the Larin sisters in Eugene
Onegin.
The name Larin exists. Sometime in the 1840s, in
Moscow, the writer Aleksandr Veltman (Weldmann; 1800-60) ran into into an old
acquaintance of his, Ilya Larin. He was "a character," a crackpot and a bum who
had roamed all over Russia and, a quarter of century before, in Kishinev, had
amused Pushkin with his antics and drinking parties - incidentally presenting
the poet with a name of his squire (perhaps a subliminal link may be
distinguished here connecting Larin, Pushkin's court fool, and Yorick of the
next lines). In the course of the conversation, Larin asked Veltman, "Do you
remember Pushkin? He was a good soul. Where is he, do you know?" "Long dead,"
answered Veltman. "Really? Poor fellow. And what about Vladimir Petrovich"
(whoever that was) "what is he doing?"** (EO Commentary,
vol. II, p. 303)
Alas, poor Larin! In EO (Two: XXXVI: 9-14) Larin rhymes with
barin (squire):
Он был простой и добрый
барин,
И там, где прах его лежит,
Надгробный памятник гласит:
Смиренный грешник, Дмитрий
Ларин,
Господний раб и
бригадир
Под камнем сим вкушаеит
мир.
He was a simple and kind squire,
and there where lies his dust
the monument above the grave proclaims:
"The humble sinner Dmitri Larin,
slave of our Lord, and Brigadier,
beneath this stone enjoyeth piece."
When Van leaves Ardis forever, Trofim Fartukov (the Russian
coachman who brings Van to "Volosyanka," as Trofim calls
Maidenhair, the nearest station to Ardis Hall) addresses him
"barin" ("master"):
'Barin, a
barin,' said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his
passenger.
'Da?'
'Dazhe skvoz' kozhanïy fartuk ne stal-bï ya trogat'
etu frantsuzskuyu devku.'
Barin: master. Dázhe skvoz' kózhanïy
fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bï ya trógat': I
would not think of touching. étu: this (that). Frantsúzskuyu:
French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. úzhas, otcháyanie:
horror, despair. Zhálost': pity, Kóncheno, zagázheno,
rastérzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds. (1.41)
Trofim Fartukov eventually marries Blanche (the "French
wench" who leaves Ardis with Van but comes back later):
'By the way, where is my poor little Blanche
now?'
'Oh, she's all right. She's still
around. You know, she came back - after you abducted her. She married our
Russian coachman, the one who replaced Bengal Ben, as the servants called
him.'
'Oh she did? That's delicious. Madame
Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it.'
'They have a blind child,' said
Ada.
'Love is blind,' said Van.
(2.7)
shato + barin/brain/bairn/Brian =
Shatobrian
shato - Russian spelling of
chateau (Fr., castle)
Brian - Russian spelling of Briand
(Aristide Briand, 1862-1932, a French statesman mentioned in Ilf and Petrov's
"The Golden Calf," 1931)
Shatobrian - Russian spelling
of Chateaubriand
'C'est ma dernière nuit au
château,' she [Blanche] said softly, and
rephrased it in her quaint English, elegiac and stilted, as spoken only in
obsolete novels. ''Tis my last night with thee.'
'Your last night? With me? What do you mean?' He [Van] considered her with the eerie uneasiness one
feels when listening to the utterances of delirium or intoxication. (1.41)
His bandages had been removed; nothing but a special vest-like affair of flannel enveloped his torso, and
though it was tight and thick it did not protect him any longer from the
poisoned point of Ardis. Arrowhead Manor. Le Château de la Flèche,
Flesh Hall. (1.42)
One of Van's and Ada's favorite writers, Chateaubriand is often
mentioned in Ada. In EO (Four: XXVI: 1-4) Lenski sometimes reads
to Olya "a moralistic novel in which the author has more knowledge of nature
than Chateaubriand."
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)
The Spanish tale dear to Ladore schoolgirls is
Osberg's novel The Gitanilla. The name of Osberg's gitanilla is Lolita
(1.13). In VN's Lolita Humbert Humbert gives to Lolita the
sleeping pills:
I glanced around, satisfied myself that
the last diner had left, removed the stopped, and with the utmost deliberation
tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a mirror the
gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a (fictitious)
pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial with its plump, beautifully
colored capsules loaded with Beauty's Sleep.
"Blue!" she
exclaimed. "Violet blue. What are they made of?"
"Summer skies," I
said, "and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of emperors."
"No, seriously -
please."
"Oh, just
Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try
one?"
Lolita stretched
out her hand, nodding vigorously.
I had hoped the
drug would work fast. It certainly did. (1.27)
One is reminded of Reveillez-vous,
belle endormie ("Wake up, the beautiful sleeping girl"), a stanza that
in EO (Five: XXVII) Triquet brought for Tatiana:
С семьёй Панфила Харликова
Приехал и мосье
Трике,
Остряк, недавно из Тамбова,
В очках и в рыжем парике.
Как
истинный француз, в кармане
Трике привез куплет Татьяне
На голос, знаемый
детьми:
Reveillez-vous, belle endormie.
Меж ветхих песен альманаха
Был
напечатан сей куплет;
Трике, догадливый поэт,
Его на свет явил из
праха,
И смело вместо belle Nina
Поставил belle Tatiana.
With the family of Panfil Harlikov,
there also came Monsieur Triquet,
a wit, late from Tambov,
bespectacled and russet wigged.
As a true
Frenchman, in his pocket
Triquet has
brought a stanza for Tatiana
fitting an air to children
known:
"Réveillez-vous, belle
endormie."
'Mongst the time-worn songs
of an almanac
this stanza had
been printed;
Triquet - resourceful poet
-
out of the dust brought it to
light
and boldly in the place
of "belle Niná"
put "belle
Tatianá."
One is tempted to put "Trofim
Fartukov" (true, the surname is accented on the first syllable) in the
place of "Panfil Harlikov." Imagine Blanche as a guest at Tatiana's
name day party! In French blanche means "withe." In his
country place Onegin sometimes enjoys a young and fresh kiss of chernookaya
belyanka (white-skinned, dark-eyed girl, Four: XXXIX: 3-4). True, Blanche
has light blue eyes.
Golos, znaemyi det'mi (an air
to children known) brings to mind the Russian-language newspapers Golos
(Logos) and Golos Feniksa (The Phoenix Voice).
There
he [the male nurse Dorofey] left Van, while he
seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the
Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos).
(1.42)
In the Kalugano hospital Van recovers from the wound he
received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper. Tatiana, a remarkably pretty
and proud young nurse, later writes him a charming and melancholy
letter:
Inset, so to
speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair
and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony
between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of
feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought
escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a
torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab
of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with
one glance of her grave, dark eyes - and delegated the task to Dorofey, a
beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed, with the
sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her
breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed
more aptly than she thought 'that soft dangle.' An exhibition of his state with
a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that
distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that
sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy
letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened,
and he never met her again). (ibid.)
In Chapter Three of EO Tatiana writes
Onegin a passionate love letter.
In the Bellevue hotel in Mont
Roux Dorothy Vinelander reads to her sick brother old issues of Golos
Feniksa:
Dorothy, a born
nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not
stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such
as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos
Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled him off to the nearby
American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed to visit him ‘because
of the constant necessity of routine tests' - or rather because the poor fellow
wished to confront disaster in manly solitude. (3.8)
Old issues of Golos Feniksa
bring to mind Chatski's words in the beginning of his famous
monologue in Griboedov's Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit,"
1824):
А судьи кто? — За
древностию лет
К свободной жизни их вражда
непримирима.
Сужденья черпают из забытых газет
Времён Очаковских и покоренья
Крыма.
I wonder who the judges are! Old
aged,
they show irreconcilable
hostility to free life.
They derive their
opinions from the forgotten newspapers that date as far back
as the Ochakov times
and the subjugation of the Crimea. (Act Two, scene 5)
In childhood Lenski played
with Dmitri Larin's Ochakov medal:
Как
часто в детстве я играл
Его
Очаковской медалью!
Он Ольгу
прочил за меня,
Он
говорил: дождусь ли дня?.."
И, полный
искренней печалью,
Владимир
тут же начертал
Ему
надгробный мадригал.
"How oft I played in
childhood
with his Ochákov
medal!
For me he
destined Olga;
he said:
‘Shall I be there to see the day?'"
and full of sincere
sadness,
Vladimir there and then set
down
a gravestone madrigal for
him. (Four: XXXVII: 8-14)
One of Ada's lovers, Percy de
Prey, perishes in the Crimean War, on the second day of the
invasion. (1.43)
Dorofey
glanced up from his paper, then went back the article that engrossed him - 'A
Clever Piggy: from the memoirs of an animal trainer),' or else 'The Crimean War:
Tartar Guerillas Help Chinese Troops.' (1.42)
At the Goodson
Airport, in one of the gilt-framed mirrors of its old-fashioned waiting room,
Van glimpsed the silk hat of his father who sat awaiting him in an armchair of
imitation marble-wood, behind a newspaper that said in reversed characters:
'Crime Capitulates.' (2.1)
As he leaves Ardis, Van regrets
that he missed the chance to kill Percy in a pistol duel:
Maidenhair.
Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because
of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely,
confused with the Venus’-hair fern. (1.41)
Volosyanka (Maidenhair) comes from
volos (hair).
Golos +
volos = Logos + slovo
golos -
voice
slovo -
word
In another omitted stanza at
the beginning of Chapter Four (V: 5-14) of EO Pushkin uses slovo
("word") in the sense le mot de l'énigme:
Но я заманчивой
загадкой
Не долго мучился украдкой...
И сами помогли оне,
Шепнули сами
слово мне,
Оно известно было свету,
И даже никому давно
Уж не
казалось и смешно.
Так разгадав загадку
эту,
Сказал я: только-то, друзья,
Куда как недогадлив
я.
But by the luring
riddle
not long was I tormented
furtively...
<... themselves did help me
greatly>
by whispering to me the
word;
<for a long time> known to
the world of fashion,
and it had even ceased to
seem
funny to
anyone.
Thus <having solved that
riddle>
I said: So this is all, my
friends?
How slow-witted I
am!
the word /
slovo: a Gallicism, le mot de 'énigme. One wonders
what was its simple solution. Perhaps: "le fruit de l'amour mondain n'est
autre chose que la jouissance..." (Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de
Brantôme, Recueil des dames, pt. II, Les Dames galantes,
Discours II).
See also
Seven: XXV: 2. (EO Commentary, vol. II, p.
418)
In his poem
Shakespeare (1924) VN mentions Brantôme (c.
1540-1614):
Мало ль
низких,
ничтожных душ оставили свой след -
каких имён не сыщешь у
Брантома!
Откройся, бог ямбического грома,
стоустый и немыслимый
поэт!
Look what numbers
of lowly,
worthless souls have left their trace,
what countless names Brantôme has for
the asking!
Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder,
you hundred-mouthed,
unthinkably great bard!
On Antiterra Brantôme is a village near
Ladore:
The orchards
and vineyards were particularly picturesque that year; and Ben Wright was fired
after letting winds go free while driving Marina and Mlle Lariviere home from
the Vendange Festival at Brantôme near Ladore.
Anyway (this
may be purely a stylistic transition), he felt himself transferred into that
forbidden masterpiece, one afternoon, when everybody had gone to Brantôme, and
Ada and he were sunbathing on the brink of the Cascade in the larch plantation
of Ardis Park, and his nymphet had bent over him and his detailed desire.
(1.22)
In Chapter Seven of EO
Tatiana finds slovo (the word, le mot de l'énigme) for
Onegin:
Чудак печальный и опасный,
Созданье ада иль
небес,
Сей ангел, сей надменный бес,
Что ж он? Ужели
подражанье,
Ничтожный призрак, иль еще
Москвич в Гарольдовом
плаще,
Чужих причуд истолкованье,
Слов модных полный лексикон?..
Уж не
пародия ли он?
Ужель загадку разрешила?
Ужели слово
найдено?
A sad and dangerous eccentric,
creature of hell or heaven,
this angel, this arrogant fiend,
who's he then? Can it be - an
imitation,
an insignificant phantasm, or else
a Muscovite in Harold's mantle,
a glossary of other people's megrims,
a complete lexicon of words in
vogue?...
Might he not be, in fact, a parody?
Can it be that she has resolved the
riddle?
Can it be that "the word" is found? (XXIV: 6-14,
XXV: 1-2)
"The word" found by Tatiana
is "parody." Note ada ("of hell") in the original (XXIV: 7)
and the rhyme nebes (of heaven) - bes (fiend). "Harold's mantle" brings to mind a bayronka (open shirt)
in which Uncle Ivan is clad on the portrait in Marina's
bedroom. (2.7)
According to Bess (which
is ‘fiend’ in Russian), Dan’s buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he
preferred to all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract
orally a few last drops of ‘play-zero’ (as the old whore called it) out of his
poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada’s sudden
departure, that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent
desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity.
(2.10)
'Play-zero' is a play on paisir
(pleasure), the word that occurs in Ada:
Marina, with perverse
vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon's senses must have been influenced
by a queer sort of "incestuous" (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the
sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal
vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in
unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that
of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin
peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate
gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations. (1.3)
The adverb "incestuously" is used by Demon as he
speaks to Van:
‘If I could write,’ mused
Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how
incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet
in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet.
(2.10)
When at the picnic on Ada's twelfth birthday Ada
and Grace Erminin play anagrams, Grace innocently suggests
"insect:"
Lying on his stomach, leaning his
cheek on his hand, Van looked at his love’s inclined neck as she played anagrams
with Grace, who had innocently suggested ‘insect.’
‘Scient,’ said Ada, writing it
down.
‘Oh no!’ objected Grace.
‘Oh yes! I’m sure it exists. He is a
great scient. Dr Entsic was scient in insects.’
Grace meditated, tapping her puckered
brow with the eraser end of the pencil, and came up with:
‘Nicest!’
‘Incest,’ said Ada
instantly.
‘I
give up,’ said Grace. ‘We need a dictionary to check your little
inventions.’
But the glow of the afternoon had entered its most oppressive phase, and
the first bad mosquito of the season was resonantly slain on Ada’s shin by alert
Lucette. The charabanc had already left with the armchairs, the hampers and the
munching footmen, Essex, Middlesex and Somerset; and now Mlle Larivière
and Mme Forestier were exchanging melodious adieux. (1.13)
Pushkin's fragment
Zhenshchiny ("Women," EO, Four: I: 1-4) begins:
В
начале жизни мною правил
Прелестный, хитрый, слабый пол;
Тогда в закон
себе я ставил
Его единый произвол.
In the beginning
of my life ruled me
the charming, sly,
weak sex;
I then would set
myself for law
nought but its
arbitrary will.
In a letter of May
9, 1834, to Olga Pavlishchev (Pushkin's sister) the poet's mother
Nadezhda Osipovna calls Eliza Khitrovo (Kutuzov's daughter who was
hopelessly in love with Pushkin) "Erminia" (after a character in Torquato
Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata). Pushkin is the author of Vertograd
moey sestry ("My Sister's Garden," 1825). In Ada (1.21) Miss
Vertograd is Demon Veen's librarian. Greg Erminin (Grace's twin brother whom Van
meets in Paris) is hopelessly in love with Ada:
...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.
‘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!’
‘I really
know very little about music but it was a great pleasure to make your chum howl.
I have an appointment in a few minutes, alas. Za tvoyo zdorovie, Grigoriy
Akimovich.’
‘Arkadievich,’ said Greg, who had let it pass once
but now mechanically corrected Van.
‘Ach yes! Stupid slip of the
slovenly tongue. How is Arkadiy Grigorievich?’
‘He died. He died just before your aunt. I thought
the papers paid a very handsome tribute to her talent. And where is Adelaida
Danilovna? Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?’
‘In California or Arizona. Andrey’s the name, I
gather. Perhaps I’m mistaken. In fact, I never knew my cousin very well: I
visited Ardis only twice, after all, for a few weeks each time, years
ago.’
‘Somebody told me she’s a movie
actress.’
‘I’ve no idea, I’ve never seen her on the
screen.’
‘Oh, that would be terrible, I declare — to switch
on the dorotelly, and suddenly see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole
past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund. She must have
been terribly affected by her mother’s terrible death.’
Likes the word ‘terrible,’ I declare. A terrible
suit of clothes, a terrible tumor. Why must I stand it? Revolting — and yet
fascinating in a weird way: my babbling shadow, my burlesque
double.
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed
chauffeur came up to inform ’my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of
rue Saigon and was summoning him to appear.
‘Aha,’ said Van, ‘I see you are using your British
title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.’
‘Maude is
Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better
service abroad. By the way, somebody told me — yes, Tobak! — that Lucette
is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good
health?’ (Van bowed,) ‘And how is the guvernantka belletristka?’
‘Her last novel is called L'ami Luc. She just got the Lebon
Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.’
They parted
laughing. (3.2)
At the picnic on Ada's twelfth birthday
(1.13) Colonel Erminin does not turn up, because his liver
(pechen') is behaving like a pecheneg
(savage). Pecheneg (1894) is a stroy by Chekhov. Chekhov
is the author of Zhenshchiny s tochki zreniya p'yanitsy ("Women from
the Point of View of a Drunkard," 1885), a story signed Brat moego
brata (My brother's brother). Girls under sixteen are compared in it to
distilled water (aqua distillata). Aqua is Marina's twin sister
who married Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father). Her suicide note was signed 'My
sister's sister who teper' iz ada' (now is out of hell).
(1.3)
In Blok's poem Neznakomka ("Incognita,"
1906) p'yanitsy s glazami Krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of
rabbits) cry out: "In vino veritas!" Blok is the author of
Zhenshchina ("A Woman," 1914).
He [Van] headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of
wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical
mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having
seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing
alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita.
(3.3)
‘Hullo there, Ed,’ said Van to the barman, and she [Lucette] turned at the sound of his dear rasping
voice.
‘I didn’t expect you to wear glasses. You almost got le
paquet, which I was preparing for the man supposedly "goggling" my hat.
Darling Van! Dushka moy!’ (ibid.)
From Blok's poem
Zhenshchina:
Но чувствую: он за
плечами
Стоит, он подошел в упор...
Ему я гневными речами
Уже готовлюсь
дать отпор...
But I feel: at my back
he
Stands, he approached and
froze…
Already with angry words
I
Prepare to rebuff
him...***
*There is Lyusya in Valyusya, Valentina's
diminutive.
** Quoted by Lerner, Zven'ya, no. 5
(1935), p. 70.
***see also my article in Zembla "Aleksandr Blok's Dreams as
Enacted in Ada by Van Veen and Vice Versa"
Alexey
Sklyarenko