The characters in VN's novel Ada (1969) include Marina Durmanov (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) and her twin sister Aqua. The surname Durmanov comes from durman (thornapple; intoxicant). In Pavel Bazhov's skaz (folk tale) Kamennyi tsvetok ("The Stone Flower," 1938) Danilo the Craftsman (a namesake of Daniel Veen, Marina's husband) is given an order to make a fine-molded cup, which he creates after a thornapple. In Bazhov's skaz Orlinoe pero ("The Eagle Feather") Aduy (a place name) akvamariny (the aquamarines, gems) are mentioned:
Адуйское место всякому здешнему хоть маленько ведомо. Там главная приманка – аквамаринчики да аметистишки.
Кондрат послушался. Полетела стрела, а яма навстречу ей раскрылась. Не то что все каменные жилки-ходочки, а и занорыши видно. Один вовсе большой. Аквамаринов в нем чуть не воз набито, и они как смеются. Старик, понятно, растревожился, побежал поближе посмотреть, а свет и погас. Маркелыч кричит:
– Прохожий, ты где?
А тот отвечает:
– Дальше пошел.
– Куда ты в темень такую? Хитники пообидеть могут. Неровен час, еще отберут у тебя эту штуку! – кричит Маркелыч, а прохожий отвечает:
– Не беспокойся, дед! Эта штука только в моих руках действует да у того, кому сам отдам.
– Ты хоть кто такой? – спрашивает Маркелыч.
А прохожий уж далеко. Едва слышно донеслось:
– У внучонка спроси. Он знает.
Мишунька весь этот ночной случай не проспал. Светом-то его разбудило, он и глядел из балагашка. Как дедушко пришел, Мишунька и говорит:
– А ведь это, дедушко, у тебя был Ленин!
Старик все-таки не удивился.
– Верно, Мишунька, он. Не зря люди сказывают – ходит он по нашим местам. Ходит! Уму-разуму учит. Чтоб не больно гордились своими крылышками, а к высокому свету тянулись. К орлиному, значит, перу.
The mysterious prokhozhiy (passer-by) in Bazhov's skaz turns out to be Lenin himself. À une passante ("To a Passer-By") is a sonnet by Baudelaire included in his book Les Feurs du Mal ("The Flowers of Evil," 1857). Baudelaire's sonnet was translated into Russian by Bryusov (the author of "Requiem. On the Death of V. I. Lenin. Music by Mozart," 1924). Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua, Van mentions Marina's talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs:
At one time Aqua believed that a stillborn male infant half a year old, a surprised little fetus, a fish of rubber that she had produced in her bath, in a lieu de naissance plainly marked X in her dreams, after skiing at full pulver into a larch stump, had somehow been saved and brought to her at the Nusshaus, with her sister’s compliments, wrapped up in blood-soaked cotton wool, but perfectly alive and healthy, to be registered as her son Ivan Veen. At other moments she felt convinced that the child was her sister’s, born out of wedlock, during an exhausting, yet highly romantic blizzard, in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge, where a Dr Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover, sat providentially waiting near a rude red stove for his boots to dry. Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 — her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband’s unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: ‘Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld’) she took advantage of his being massaged in the solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom — and experienced a delicious shock: her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along — ever since Shakespeare’s birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G.A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. Marina had spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with him at Kitezh but when she smugly divulged her intentions (just before Aqua’s arrival) he threw her out of the house. Still later, on the last short lap of a useless existence, Aqua scrapped all those ambiguous recollections and found herself reading and rereading busily, blissfully, her son’s letters in a luxurious ‘sanastoria’ at Centaur, Arizona. He invariably wrote in French calling her petite maman and describing the amusing school he would be living at after his thirteenth birthday. She heard his voice through the nightly tinnitus of her new, planful, last, last insomnias and it consoled her. He called her usually mummy, or mama, accenting the last syllable in English, the first, in Russian; somebody had said that triplets and heraldic dracunculi often occurred in trilingual families; but there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever now (except, perhaps, in hateful long-dead Marina’s hell-dwelling mind) that Van was her, her, Aqua’s, beloved son. (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Nuss: German for ‘nut’.
Khristosik: little Christ (Russ.).
rukuliruyushchiy: Russ., from Fr. roucoulant, cooing.
Bazhov's Orlinoe pero brings to mind an eagle-feather in Robert Browning's poem Memorabilia (1855):
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
But you were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at—
My starting moves your laughter!
I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
'Mid the blank miles round about:
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—
Well, I forget the rest.
Browning's poem is addressed to Thomas Love Peacock (an English novelist and poet, 1785-1866). When Van makes Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) learn by heart Robert Brown's poem Peter and Margaret, Ada tells Van "Let her try the one about finding a feather and seeing Peacock plain:"
They tried all sorts of other tricks.
Once, for example, when Lucette had made of herself a particular nuisance, her nose running, her hand clutching at Van’s all the time, her whimpering attachment to his company turning into a veritable obsession, Van mustered all his persuasive skill, charm, eloquence, and said with conspiratory undertones: ‘Look, my dear. This brown book is one of my most treasured possessions. I had a special pocket made for it in my school jacket. Numberless fights have been fought over it with wicked boys who wanted to steal it. What we have here’ (turning the pages reverently) ‘is no less than a collection of the most beautiful and famous short poems in the English language. This tiny one, for example, was composed in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress, looking down on the foaming turquoise surf near Nice, an unforgettable sight for all concerned. It is called "Peter and Margaret." Now you have, say’ (turning to Ada in solemn consultation), ‘forty minutes’ (‘Give her a full hour, she can’t even memorize Mironton, mirontaine’) — ‘all right, a full hour to learn these eight lines by heart. You and I’ (whispering) ‘are going to prove to your nasty arrogant sister that stupid little Lucette can do anything. If’ (lightly brushing her bobbed hair with his lips), ‘if, my sweet, you can recite it and confound Ada by not making one single slip — you must be careful about the "here-there" and the "this-that", and every other detail — if you can do it then I shall give you this valuable book for keeps.’ (‘Let her try the one about finding a feather and seeing Peacock plain,’ said Ada drily — ‘it’s a bit harder.’) ‘No, no, she and I have already chosen that little ballad. All right. Now go in here’ (opening a door) ‘and don’t come out until I call you. Otherwise, you’ll forfeit the reward, and will regret the loss all your life.’
‘Oh, Van, how lovely of you,’ said Lucette, slowly entering her room, with her bemused eyes scanning the fascinating flyleaf, his name on it, his bold flourish, and his own wonderful drawings in ink — a black aster (evolved from a blot), a doric column (disguising a more ribald design), a delicate leafless tree (as seen from a classroom window), and several profiles of boys (Cheshcat, Zogdog, Fancytart, and Ada-like Van himself).
Van hastened to join Ada in the attic. At that moment he felt quite proud of his stratagem. He was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston address on June 2, 1901, ‘just in case,’ wrote:
‘I kept for years — it must be in my Ardis nursery — the anthology you once gave me; and the little poem you wanted me to learn by heart is still word-perfect in a safe place of my jumbled mind, with the packers trampling on my things, and upsetting crates, and voices calling, time to go, time to go. Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. Now read on:
‘Here, said the guide, was the field,
There, he said, was the wood.
This is where Peter kneeled,
That’s where the Princess stood.
No, the visitor said,
You are the ghost, old guide.
Oats and oaks may be dead,
But she is by my side.’ (1.23)
On his first night onboard Admiral Tobakoff Van dreams of an aquatic peacock:
At five p.m., June 3, his ship had sailed from Le Havre-de-Grâce; on the evening of the same day Van embarked at Old Hantsport. He had spent most of the afternoon playing court tennis with Delaurier, the famous Negro coach, and felt very dull and drowsy as he watched the low sun’s ardency break into green-golden eye-spots a few sea-serpent yards to starboard, on the far-side slope of the bow wave. Presently he decided to turn in, walked down to the A deck, devoured some of the still-life fruit prepared for him in his sitting room, attempted to read in bed the proofs of an essay he was contributing to a festschrift on the occasion of Professor Counterstone’s eightieth birthday, gave it up, and fell asleep. A tempest went into convulsions around midnight, but despite the lunging and creaking (Tobakoff was an embittered old vessel) Van managed to sleep soundly, the only reaction on the part of his dormant mind being the dream image of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman’s extremely compliant and accomplished niece. He wanted to make a note of it — and was amused to find that all three pencils had not only left his bed table but had neatly aligned themselves head to tail along the bottom of the outer door of the adjacent room, having covered quite a stretch of blue carpeting in the course of their stopped escape. (3.5)
The ship on which Van and Lucette cross the Atlantic, Admiral Tobakoff brings to mind Nikolay Aduyev's comedy Tabachnyi kapitan ("The Tobacco Captain," 1944). The tsar Peter I sends Anton Svin'yin, a young nobleman, and his serf Ivashka (the Tobacco Captain) to Amsterdam to study seamanship. Like VN and Osip Mandelshtam, Nikolay Aduyev (1895-1950, Aduyev's real name was Rabinovich) finished the St. Petersburg Tenishev school.