According to Van, the delightful gliders called Magicarpets (or 'jikkers') were given to him on his twelfth birthday:

What pleasure (thus in the MS.). The pleasure of suddenly discovering the right knack of topsy turvy locomotion was rather like learning to man, after many a painful and ignominious fall, those delightful gliders called Magicarpets (or 'jikkers') that were given a boy on his twelfth birthday in the adventurous days before the Great Reaction - and then what a breathtaking long neural caress when one became airborne for the first time and managed to skim over a haystack, a tree, a burn, a barn, while Grandfather Dedalus Veen, running with upturned face, flourished a flag and fell into the horsepond. (1.13)

Van got twelve on Jan. 1, 1882. On Jan. 3, 1882, Lucette got six. There is pet in Magicarpet. Pet is Lucette’s nickname that she received when she was six:

'Pop in, pet (it all started with the little one letting wee winds go free at table, circa 1882). And you, Garden God, ring up room service - three coffees, half a dozen soft-boiled eggs, lots of buttered toast, loads of -'

'Oh no!' interrupted Van. 'Two coffees, four eggs, et cetera. I refuse to let the staff know that I have two girls in my bed, one (teste Flora) is enough for my little needs.'

'Little needs!' snorted Lucette. 'Let me go, Ada. I need a bath, and he needs you.'

'Pet stays right here,' cried audacious Ada, and with one graceful swoop plucked her sister's nightdress off. Involuntarily Lucette bent her head and frail spine; then she lay back on the outer half of Ada's pillow in a martyr's pudibund swoon, her locks spreading their orange blaze against the black velvet of the padded headboard. (2.8)

The Garden God to whom Ada compares Van is Priapus. In his poem Mogushchiy bog sadov – padu pered toboy… (“The mighty god of gardens – I shall fall before you…” 1818) Pushkin says that he erected lik urodlivyi (an ugly idol) of Priapus in his humble kitchen-garden:

Могущий бог садов — паду перед тобой,
Прияп, ты, коему всё жертвует в природе,
Твой лик уродливый поставил я с мольбой
B моём смиренном огороде,

Не с тем, чтоб удалял ты своенравных коз
И птичек от плодов и нежных и незрелых,
Тебя украсил я венком из диких роз
При пляске поселян веселых

In the closing lines of his poem <To Prince Kozlovski> (1836) Pushkin mentions the shameless verses that protrude like priapi in Juvenal’s satires and the sounds that crack in them with a strange harmony:

Ценитель умственных творений исполинских,
Друг бардов английских, любовник муз латинских,
Ты к мощной древности опять меня манишь,
Ты снова мне                 велишь.
Простясь с            мечтой и бледным идеалом,
Я приготовился бороться с Ювеналом,
Чьи строгие стихи, неопытный поэт,
Стихами перевесть я было дал обет.
Но, развернув его суровые творенья,
Не мог я одолеть пугливого смущенья...
Стихи бесстыдные приапами торчат,
В них звуки странною гармонией трещат...

In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (One: VI: 3-6) Onegin “had enough knowledge of Latin to make out epigraphs, descant on Juvenal, put at the bottom of a letter vale…”

Onegin’s vale brings to mind apollo, a word used by Van in his apologetic note to Lucette:

Poor L.

We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. Pilots of tremendous airships and even coarse, smelly coachmen are known to have been driven insane by a pair of green eyes and a copper curl. We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene. These are times of emotional stress and reconditioning. Destroy and forget.

Tenderly yours A & V.

(in alphabetic order). (2.8)

“Coarse, smelly coachmen” hint at Ben Wright, the coachman in “Ardis the First” who is associated with his pets (farts). In her PS to Van’s note Ada calls Lucette mon petit:

The above declaration is Van's composition which I sign reluctantly. It is pompous and puritanical. I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly. When you're sick of Queen, why not fly over to Holland or Italy?

A. (ibid.)

Flora, “a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian? Romany? Ramseyan?) whose ravishing services Van had availed himself of several times in the fall of that year” (2.8) brings to mind Diana’s bosom, Flora’s cheeks and Terpsichore’s little foot mentioned by Pushkin in Chapter One of EO:

Дианы грудь, ланиты Флоры
Прелестны, милые друзья!
Однако ножка Терпсихоры
Прелестней чем-то для меня.

Diana's bosom, Flora's cheeks

are charming, dear friends!

However, the little foot of Terpsichore

is for me in some way more charming. (XXXII: 1-4)

Describing Kim Beauharnais’s album, Van mentions Diana:

'Well,' said Van, when the mind took over again, 'let's go back to our defaced childhood. I'm anxious' - (picking up the album from the bedside rug) - 'to get rid of this burden. Ah, a new character, the inscription says: Dr Krolik.'

'Wait a sec. It may be the best Vanishing Van but it's terribly messy all the same. Okay. Yes, that's my poor nature teacher.'

Knickerbockered, panama-hatted, lusting for his babochka (Russian for 'lepidopteron'). A passion, a sickness. What could Diana know about that chase? (2.7)

Like Dr Krolik, Ada is a passionate lepidopterist. In the entomological entries of her diary Ada mentions her “revolting” (according to Marina) pets:

'I think Marina would stop scolding me for my hobby ("There's something indecent about a little girl's keeping such revolting pets...," "Normal young ladies should loathe snakes and worms," et cetera) if I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness and place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not be roomy enough!) the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff "Sphinxian" attitude.' (1.8)

In ‘Ursus’ Ada and Lucette call Flora blyadushka:

As a 'man of the world,' Van glanced with bland (perhaps too bland) unconcern at her talented charms, but they certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred and placed in the colored blaze of the feast before him; and that thrill was somehow augmented by his awareness (carefully profiled, diaphanely blinkered) of the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference... (2.8)

Ada uses this word again when she and Van ride off to the Film Festival in Sindbad:

How horribly and gratuitously it might hurt her, he foreglimpsed one day in 1926 or '27 when he caught the look of proud despair she cast on nothing in particular before walking away to the car that was to take her on a trip in which, at the last moment, he had declined to join her. He had declined - and had simulated the grimace and the limp of podagra - because he had just realized, what she, too, had realized - that the beautiful native girl smoking on the back porch would offer her mangoes to Master as soon as Master's housekeeper had left for the Film Festival in Sindbad. The chauffeur had already opened the car door, when, with a great bellow, Van overtook Ada and they rode off together, tearful, voluble, joking about his foolishness.

'It's funny,' said Ada, 'what black, broken teeth they have hereabouts, those blyadushki.'

('Ursus,' Lucette in glistening green, 'Subside, agitation of passion,' Flora's bracelets and breasts, the whelk of Time). (5.3)

Sindbad is a character in One Thousand and One Nights, an Arabic collection of fairy tales alluded to elsewhere in Ada:

One day he brought his shaving kit along and helped her to get rid of all three patches of body hair:

‘Now I’m Scheher,’ he said, ‘and you are his Ada, and that’s your green prayer carpet.’ (1.35)

The magic carpets are mentioned in many a fairy tale related by Scheherazade. Incidentally, Shekherezada (1888) is a symphonic suite by Rimski-Korsakov. The name Rimski comes from Rim (Rome in Russian spelling). Describing his reunion with Ada in 1905, Van mentions the painted Priapi set up by the Romans in the arbors of Rufomonticulus:

When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat for the blue haze of an extraordinary October which kept dreamy and warm throughout the duration of adultery, they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus. (3.8)

In his fragment Rim (“Rome,” 1842) Gogol describes a Roman carnival. Gogol is the author of Nos (“Nose,” 1835), a story that brings to mind Van’s “carnival nose:”

Ada, her silky mane sweeping over his nipples and navel, seemed to enjoy doing everything to jolt my present pencil and make, in that ridiculously remote past, her innocent little sister notice and register what Van could not control. The crushed flower was now being merrily crammed under the rubber belt of his black trunks by twenty tickly fingers. As an ornament it had not much value; as a game it was inept and dangerous. He shook off his pretty tormentors, and walked away on his hands, a black mask over his carnival nose. (1.32)

In his essay Karnaval (“Carnival,” 1901) Maximilian Voloshin describes a carnival in Paris and points out that in Hebrew there is a word that strangely resembles “carnival:” Kern-Abal, which means lik bezumiya (the face of madness):

В древнееврейском языке есть слово, странно созвучное со словом "карнавал". Это слово "Kern-Abal", что значит лик безумия - искажение человеческого лица, понятие, имеющее значение жуткое, граничащее почти с проклятием. Было ли это грозное речение действительно прообразом имени Карнавала, было ли это просто окаменевшим ругательством, которое подобрало пляшущее безумие и стало размахивать им, как побрякушкой, но в этом созвучии таится жуткий и таинственный смысл.

On Antiterra (Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Paris is also known as Lute. Lutetia Parisiorum (1915) is a sonnet by Voloshin, the author of Liki tvorchestva (“The Faces of Creation,” 1914). On the other hand, Lik (1939) is a story by VN. Alexander Lik is the stage name of a Russian actor whose real name seems to be Kulikov. The name Kulikov comes from kulik (stint; sandpiper, any of numerous shore-inhabiting birds of the family Scolopacidae). According to a Russian saying, vsyakiy kulik svoyo boloto khvalit (every stint praises its native bog). The name Veen (of almost all main characters in Ada) means in Dutch “peat bog.” In ‘Ursus’ Flora addresses Van by his surname:

'I say, Veen,' whinnied a voice near him (there were lots of lechers around), 'you don't rally need two, d'you?'

Van veered, ready to cuff the gross speaker - but it was only Flora, a frightful tease and admirable mimic. He tried to give her a banknote, but she fled, bracelets and breast stars flashing a fond farewell. (2.8)

Flora imitates the British pronunciation. And so does Van as he speaks to Dick C., a cardsharp at Chose (Van’s English University):

'I say, Dick, ever met a gambler in the States called Plunkett? Bald gray chap when I knew him.' (1.28)

In Aldanov's novel Bred ("Delirium," 1955) the Soviet Colonel, as he speaks to Shell, mentions asei (as the Englishmen were once called in Russia; from "I say"):

-- Исчезнет Черчилль, и асеи выйдут в тираж, кончена будет совсем Англия как великая держава, -- говорил полковник. Он произносил имя Черчилля с ударением на втором слоге. "Никто и в России уже лет сто не называет англичан "асеями", там и не знают слов "I say". (chapter IV)

Like Flora, Shell and his mistress Edda are of uncertain origin:

Он, собственно, в точности не знал, кто она по национальности (как в клубе не знали, кто по национальности он). По-русски Эдда говорила с малозаметным неопределенным акцентом, а о своём прошлом рассказывала редко, неясно и всегда по-разному. Говорили они то по-русски, то по-французски, то по-немецки; у обоих были необыкновенные способности к языкам. (chapter III)

It is generous Dick who offers Van an introduction to the Venus Villa Club (1.28). Eric Veen's floramors (palatial brothels, aka Villa Venus, 2.3) blend Flora with Amor (aka Cupid, the Roman god of love). Like floramor, Magicarpet is a portemanteau word. Incidentally, Van also mentions Adiana:

'One can always fall back on mutes,' said Van gloomily. 'He could act the speechless eunuch in "Stambul, my bulbul" or the stable boy disguised as a kennel girl who brings a letter.'

'Van, I'm boring you?'

'Oh, nonsense, it's a gripping and palpitating little case history.'

Because that was really not bad: bringing down three in as many years - besides winging a fourth. Jolly good shot - Adiana! Wonder whom she'll bag next. (2.5)

Alexey Sklyarenko