Zamok Tamary
(Tamara's castle) is mentioned in Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs" (chapter
38 "Up in the Clouds"):
Ипполит
Матвеевич сначала следил за подъёмом великого комбинатора, но потом рассеялся и,
обернувшись, принялся разглядывать фундамент замка Тамары, сохранившийся на
скале, похожей на лошадиный зуб.
At first Ippolit Matveyevich
watched the smooth operator's ascent, but then lost interest and began to
survey the base of Tamara's castle, which stood on a rock like a
horse's tooth.
-- Я отдам
колбасу! -- закричал отец Фёдор.-- Снимите меня!
В ответ грохотал Терек
и из замка Тамары неслись страстные крики. Там жили совы.
"I'll give back
the sausage," cried Father Fyodor, "only get me down."
In reply the Terek roared
and from Tamara's castle passionate cries could be heard. The
owls lived in it.
Queen Tamara visits Father
Fyodor on his rock:
А следующей
ночью он увидел царицу Тамару. Царица прилетела к нему из своего замка и
кокетливо сказала:
-- Соседями будем.
The next night he saw Queen
Tamara. She came flying over to him from her castle and said
coquettishly:
"We'll be neighbors! " (ibid.)
When the fire brigade brings
Father Fyodor down, he sings from Rubinstein's
Demon:
Когда его снимали, он хлопал руками и пел лишённым
приятности голосом:
И будешь ты царицей ми-и-и-и-рра, Подр-р-руга
вe-е-чная моя!
И суровый Кавказ многократно повторил слова М. Ю.
Лермонтова и музыку А. Рубинштейна.
As they were lowering
him, he clapped his hands and sang in a tuneless voice:
"And you will
be queen of the world, My lifelo-ong frie-nd!"
And the rugged Caucuses
re-echoed Rubinstein's setting of the Lermontov poem many times.
(ibid)
A young Georgian knyazhna
(Princess) with whom Lermontov's (and Rubinstein's) Demon
falls in love, has nothing to do with tsaritsa Tamara,
the eponymous Queen ("beautiful as a heavenly angel, sly and evil as a demon")
in a poem (1841) by Lermontov.
Lowden (according to
Darkbloom, "a portmanteau name combining two contemporary
bards") confuses two Tamaras. But he also seems to confuse two Demons!
For Demon (1823) is a "short poem treating of the spirit of
cynicism and negation" by Pushkin. In a letter of Sept. 10, 1824, to
Pushkin Delvig says that most readers will not understand the beauty of
Proserpina and Demon and asks Pushkin (whom Delvig addresses
"your Parnassian majesty;" cf. Monparnasse [sic], Mlle Larivière's penname) to
send for his magazine Severnye tsvety (Northern
Flowers) a score of verses from Eugene Onegin:
Есть ещё у меня
не просьба, но только спрос: не вздумаешь ли ты дать мне стихов двадцать из
Евгения Онегина? Это хорошо бы было для толпы, которая не поймёт всей красоты
твоей Прозерпины или Демона, а уж про Онегина давно горло дерёт. Подумайте, ваше
Парнасское величество!
According to Delvig,
Pushkin's poem Proserpina (1824) is pure music: a bird
of paradise's singing that one can hear for a thousand years without
noticing the passage of time:
Прозерпина не
стихи, а музыка: это пенье райской птички, которое слушая, не увидешь, как
пройдёт тысяча лет. Эти двери давно мне знакомы. Сквозь них, ещё в Лицее,
меня [иногда] часто выталкивали из Элизея. Какая искустная щеголиха у тебя
истина. Подобных цветов мороз не тронет!
"What a smart dashing lady is
istina (truth) in your poems. Such flowers will be spared by the
frost!"
A line in
Proserpina, Ada gordaya tsaritsa ("the proud queen of Hades"),
can be read as "proud Queen Ada."
By a marvelous
coincidence, Delvig (1798-1830) died on the anniversary of the death of the
fictional Lenski (who is compared to him here on the eve of a fatal duel); and
the wake commemorating Delvig's death was held by his friends (Pushkin,
Vyazemski, Baratynski, and Yazykov) in a Moscow restaurant, on Jan. 27, 1831,
exactly six years before Pushkin's fatal duel.
It was
Delvig who quipped that the nearer to heaven, the colder one's verses get (as
reported by Pushkin in a MS note)... (EO Commentary, vol. III, p.
23)
Van's and Ada's father, Demon
Veen dies in an airplane disaster above the Pacific. (3.7)
Tamara + istina
+ venets + krylo + tail/lait + Vera = Marina + aktrisa + tsvety + Lolita +
Venera/Erevan
istina
- truth; in Blok's Incognita (1906) the
drunks s glazami krolikov (with the eyes of rabbits) cry
out: "istina v vine (in vino veritas)!" In EO (Six: XX: 12-14)
Lenski is compared to drunken Delvig (see below)
venets
- crown
krylo
- wing
lait
-milk
Marina
- Marina Durmanov, Van's and Ada's
mother
aktrisa
- actress (Ada follows in her mother's
footsteps and becomes a professional actress)
tsvety
- flowers
Lolita
- from Demon's letter to Marina: You had gone to Boston to see an old aunt - a cliché, but the
truth for the nonce - and I had gone to my aunt's ranch near Lolita,
Texas. Early one February morning (around noon
chez vous) I rang you up at your hotel from a roadside booth of pure
crystal still tear-stained after a tremendous thunderstorm to ask you to fly
over at once, because I, Demon, rattling my crumpled wings and cursing the
automatic dorophone, could not live without you and because I wished you to see,
with me holding you, the daze of desert flowers that the rain had brought out.
(1.2) According to Darkbloom, Lolita has been renamed after the
appearance of the notorious novel.
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)
Venera - Russ., Venus
Ereven - the capital of Armenia
He [Lenski] reads them
aloud, in lyric
fever,
like drunken
D[elvig] at a feast.
The verses
chanced to be preserved;
I have them;
here they are:
"Whither, ah!
whither are ye fled,
my
springtime's golden days?.."
Two opening lines of
stanza XXI (EO, Six) are quoted by Van:
‘Old storytelling
devices,’ said Van, ‘may be parodied only by very great and inhuman artists, but
only close relatives can be forgiven for paraphrasing illustrious poems. Let me
preface the effort of a cousin — anybody’s cousin — by a snatch of Pushkin, for
the sake of rhyme —’
‘For the snake
of rhyme!’ cried Ada. ‘A paraphrase, even my paraphrase, is like the
corruption of "snakeroot" into "snagrel" — all that remains of a delicate
little birthwort.’
‘Which is amply
sufficient,’ said Demon, ‘for my little needs, and those of my little
friends.’
‘So here goes,’
continued Van (ignoring what he felt was an indecent allusion, since the
unfortunate plant used to be considered by the ancient inhabitants of the Ladore
region not so much as a remedy for the bite of a reptile, as the token of a very
young woman’s easy delivery; but no matter).
‘By chance preserved
has been the poem. In fact, I have it. Here it is: Leur chute est lente
and one can know ‘em…’
‘Oh, I
know ‘em,’ interrupted Demon:
‘Leur
chute est lente. On peut les suivre
Du
regard en reconnaissant
Le
chêne à sa feuille de cuivre
L’érable à sa
feuille de sang
‘Grand
stuff!’
‘Yes, that was
Coppée and now comes the cousin,’ said Van, and he recited:
‘Their fall is
gentle. The leavesdropper
Can follow each
of them and know
The oak tree by
its leaf of copper,
The maple by
its blood-red glow.’
‘Pah!’ uttered
the versionist.
‘Not at all!’
cried Demon. ‘That "leavesdropper" is a splendid trouvaille, girl.’ He pulled
the girl to him, she landing on the arm of his Klubsessel, and he glued
himself with thick moist lips to her hot red ear through the rich black strands.
Van felt a shiver of delight. (1.38)
Van recites his own version
of Coppée's poem. Four years earlier, after the night of the Burning Barn (when
Van and Ada make love for the first time), Ada showed to Van her
translation of these lines and Van mentioned Lowden:
She had to
finish a translation for Mlle Larivière. She showed him her draft.
François
Coppée? Yes.
Their fall is gentle. The woodchopper
Can tell, before they reach the mud,
The oak tree by its leaf of copper,
The maple by
its leaf of blood.
‘Leur chute est lente,’ said Van, ‘on peut les suivre du regard en reconnaissant
— that paraphrastic touch of "chopper" and "mud" is, of course, pure Lowden
(minor poet and translator, 1815–1895). Betraying the first half of the stanza
to save the second is rather like that Russian nobleman who chucked his coachman
to the wolves, and then fell out of his sleigh.’ (1.20)
Ada's husband Andrey
Vinelander calls Demon, the son of Dedalus Veen, "Dementiy
Labirintovich:"
'And
then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again
poor Andrey's poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vy, Dementiy Labirintovich)
or what Dorothy, l'impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity")
Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand,
to protect me from lions.' (3.8)
In a poem written in
Sept., 1835, and consisting of two EO stanzas Pushkin mentions labyrinth:
В мои осенние досуги,
В те дни, как любо мне писать,
Вы мне советуете, други,
Рассказ забытый продолжать.
Вы говорите
справедливо,
Что странно, даже
неучтиво
Роман не конча
перервать,
Отдав уже его в
печать,
Что должно своего
героя
Как бы то ни было
женить,
По крайней мере
уморить,
И лица прочие
пристроя,
Отдав им дружеский
поклон,
Из лабиринта вывесть
вон.
During my days of autumn leisure -
those days when I so love to write -
you, friends, advise me to go on
with my forgotten tale.
You say - and you are right -
that it is odd, and even impolite,
to interrupt an uncompleted novel
and have it published as it is;
that one must marry off one's hero in any
case,
or kill him off at least, and, after
having
disposed of the remaining characters
and made to them a friendly bow,
expel them from a labyrinth. (EO Commentary, vol.
III, p. 377)
In his garland of sonnets Corona astralis
(1909) Maximilian Voloshin mentions Daedalus' son Icarus:
Мы правим путь свой к солнцу, как
Икар,
Плащом ветров и пламенем одеты.
Like Icarus, we are heading for the
sun,
clothed in a cloak of winds and in
fire.
According to Voloshin (Cosmos in the
cycle "The Paths of Cain"),
Нет выхода из лабиринта
знанья,
И человек не станет никогда
Иным, чем то, во что он страстно
верит.
There is no exit from the labyrinth of knowledge,
and man will never become anything
else
than that in what he passionately
believes.
Voloshin is the author of Demony glukhonemye
("Deaf-Mute Demons," 1917) and Rus' glukhonemaya ("Deaf-Mute
Russia," 1918).
In his poem Nochnoe nebo tak ugryumo... ("The
nocturnal sky is so gloomy..." 1865) Tyutchev compares sheetlightnings to
deaf-mute demons talking to each other.
‘What was
that?’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did
the Antiamberians of Ladore County.
‘Sheet lightning,’
suggested Van.
‘If you ask me,’ said Demon, turning on his chair to
consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After
all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.’
Ada ran to the
window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping
handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was
only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except
Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. (1.38)
After he was forced by Demon to give up
Ada, Van blinds Kim Beauharnais, the snoopy kitchen boy and photographer at
Ardis who blackmailed Ada (2.11). At the end of his letter of Sept. 10,
1824, to Pushkin Delvig mentions the blind poet Ivan Kozlov:
Матюшкин тебе
кланяется и слепец Козлов, который только что и твердит о тебе да о Байроне.
Люби Дельвига.
Kozlov is the author of Princess
Natalia Dolgoruki (1828). Kim Beauharnais seems to be a son of Arkadiy
Dolgoruki, the narrator and main character in Dostoevski's Podrostok
("The Adolescent," 1875).
Alexey
Sklyarenko