When he tells about the Antiterran L disaster, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) uses the phrase in the beau milieu (right in the middle):
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality. (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
In a letter of October 11, 1830, from Boldino (Pushkin's family estate in the Province of Nizhniy Novgorod) to his bride, Natalia Goncharov, in Moscow Pushkin uses the phrase au beau milieu de la peste (in the midst of the pest, as Pushkin calls the epidemic of cholera):
L’entrée à Moscou est interdite et me voilà confiné à Boldino. Au nom du ciel, chère Наталья Николаевна, écrivez-moi malgré que vous ne le vouliez pas. Dites-moi où êtes-vous? avez-vous quitté Moscou? y a-t-il un chemin de travers qui puisse me mener à vos pieds? Je suis tout découragé et ne sais vraiment que faire. Il est clair que cette année (maudite année) notre mariage n’aura pas lieu. Mais n’est-ce pas que vous avez quitté Moscou? S’exposer de gaîté de cœur au beau milieu de la peste serait impardonnable. Je sais bien qu’on exagère toujours le tableau de ses ravages et le nombre des victimes; une jeune femme de Constantinople me disait jadis qu’il n’y avait que la canaille qui mourait de la peste — tout cela est bel et bon; mais il faut encore que les gens comme il faut prennent leurs précautions, car c’est là ce qui les sauve et non leur élégance et leur bon ton. Vous êtes donc à la campagne, bien à couvert de la choléra, n’est-ce pas? Envoyez-moi donc votre adresse et le bulletin de votre santé. Quant à nous, nous sommes cernés par les quarantaines, mais l’épidémie n’a pas encore pénétré. Boldino a l’air d’une île entourée de rochers. Point de voisins, point de livres. Un temps affreux. Je passe mon temps à griffonner et à enrager. Je ne sais que fait le pauvre monde, et comment va mon ami Polignac. Ecrivez-moi de ses nouvelles, car ici je ne lis point de journaux. Je deviens si imbécile que c’est une bénédiction. Что дедушка с его медной бабушкой? Оба живы и здоровы, не правда ли? Передо мной теперь географическая карта; я смотрю, как бы дать крюку и приехать к вам через Кяхту или через Архангельск? Дело в том, что для друга семь верст не крюк; а ехать прямо на Москву значит семь верст киселя есть (да еще какого? Московского!). Voilà bien de mauvaises plaisanteries. Je ris jaune, comme disent les poissardes. Adieu. Mettez-moi aux pieds de M-me votre mère; mes bien tendres hommages à toute la famille. Adieu, mon bel ange. Je baise le bout de vos ailes, comme disait Voltaire à des gens qui ne vous valaient pas.
Dlya druga sem' vyorst ne kryuk (for a friend seven kilometers is not a detour) and sem' vyorst kiselya est' (to go all that way for nothing), the two Russian sayings used by Pushkin in his letter, bring to mind ten versts (a versta is equal to 1,0668 km), Van's elaboration of Ada's "ten miles:"
Before his boarding-school days started, his father’s pretty house, in Florentine style, between two vacant lots (5 Park Lane in Manhattan), had been Van’s winter home (two giant guards were soon to rise on both sides of it, ready to frog-march it away), unless they journeyed abroad. Summers in Radugalet, the ‘other Ardis,’ were so much colder and duller than those here in this, Ada’s, Ardis. Once he even spent both winter and summer there; it must have been in 1878.
Of course, of course, because that was the first time, Ada recalled, she had glimpsed him. In his little white sailor suit and blue sailor cap. (Un régulier angelochek, commented Van in the Raduga jargon.) He was eight, she was six. Uncle Dan had unexpectedly expressed the desire to revisit the old estate. At the last moment Marina had said she’d come too, despite Dan’s protests, and had lifted little Ada, hopla, with her hoop, into the calèche. They took, she imagined, the train from Ladoga to Raduga, for she remembered the way the station man with the whistle around his neck went along the platform, past the coaches of the stopped local, banging shut door after door, all six doors of every carriage, each of which consisted of six one-window carrosses of pumpkin origin, fused together. It was, Van suggested, a ‘tower in the mist’ (as she called any good recollection), and then a conductor walked on the running board of every coach with the train also running and opened doors all over again to give, punch, collect tickets, and lick his thumb, and change money, a hell of a job, but another ‘mauve tower.’ Did they hire a motor landaulet to Radugalet? Ten miles, she guessed. Ten versts, said Van. She stood corrected. He was out, he imagined, na progulke (promenading) in the gloomy firwood with Aksakov, his tutor, and Bagrov’s grandson, a neighbor’s boy, whom he teased and pinched and made horrible fun of, a nice quiet little fellow who quietly massacred moles and anything else with fur on, probably pathological. However, when they arrived, it became instantly clear that Demon had not expected ladies. He was on the terrace drinking goldwine (sweet whisky) with an orphan he had adopted, he said, a lovely Irish wild rose in whom Marina at once recognized an impudent scullery maid who had briefly worked at Ardis Hall, and had been ravished by an unknown gentleman — who was now well-known. In those days Uncle Dan wore a monocle in gay-dog copy of his cousin, and this he screwed in to view Rose, whom perhaps he had also been promised (here Van interrupted his interlocutor telling her to mind her vocabulary). The party was a disaster. The orphan languidly took off her pearl earrings for Marina’s appraisal. Grandpa Bagrov hobbled in from a nap in the boudoir and mistook Marina for a grande cocotte as the enraged lady conjectured later when she had a chance to get at poor Dan. Instead of staying for the night, Marina stalked off and called Ada who, having been told to ‘play in the garden,’ was mumbling and numbering in raw-flesh red the white trunks of a row of young birches with Rose’s purloined lipstick in the preamble to a game she now could not remember — what a pity, said Van — when her mother swept her back straight to Ardis in the same taxi leaving Dan — to his devices and vices, inserted Van — and arriving home at sunrise. But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach’im, to hell’s hounds — and it did remind one of Rose’s terrier that had kept trying to hug Dan’s leg) the charming glimpse was granted her of tiny Van, with another sweet boy, and blond-bearded, white-bloused Aksakov, walking up to the house, and, oh yes, she had forgotten her hoop — no, it was still in the taxi. But, personally, Van had not the slightest recollection of that visit or indeed of that particular summer, because his father’s life, anyway, was a rose garden all the time, and he had been caressed by ungloved lovely hands more than once himself, which did not interest Ada. (1.24)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Bagrov’s grandson: allusion to Childhood Years of Bagrov’s Grandson by the minor writer Sergey Aksakov (A.D. 1791–1859).
and "only seven" (a phrase used by Ada in reply to Marina's question how many miles she rode to have Van drained so thoroughly):
Van drank a glass of milk and suddenly felt such a wave of delicious exhaustion invading his limbs that he thought he’d go straight to bed. ‘Tant pis,’ said Ada, reaching voraciously for the keks (English fruit cake). ‘Hammock?’ she inquired; but tottering Van shook his head, and having kissed Marina’s melancholy hand, retired.
‘Tant pis,’ repeated Ada, and with invincible appetite started to smear butter allover the yolk-tinted rough surface and rich incrustations — raisins, angelica, candied cherry, cedrat — of a thick slice of cake.
Mlle Larivière, who was following Ada’s movements with awe and disgust, said:
‘Je rêve. Il n’est pas possible qu’on mette du beurre par-dessus toute cette pâte britannique, masse indigeste et immonde.’
‘Et ce n’est que la première tranche,’ said Ada.
‘Do you want a sprinkle of cinnamon on your lait caillé?’ asked Marina. ‘You know, Belle’ (turning to Mlle Larivière), ‘she used to call it "sanded snow" when she was a baby.’
‘She was never a baby,’ said Belle emphatically. ‘She could break the back of her pony before she could walk.’
‘I wonder,’ asked Marina, ‘how many miles you rode to have our athlete drained so thoroughly.’
‘Only seven,’ replied Ada with a munch smile. (1.24)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): tant pis: too bad.
je rêve etc.: I must be dreaming. It cannot be that anyone should spread butter on top of all that indigestible and vile British dough.
et ce n’est que etc.: and it is only the first slice.
lait caillé: curds and whey.
In his letter to Natalia Goncharov (whom the poet married on February 18, 1831) Pushkin calls 1830 cette maudite année (this accursed year). Cette maudite année brings to mind cette Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) and Ah, cette Line (a popular novel):
Now what about 1881, when the girls, aged eight-nine and five, respectively, had been taken to the Riviera, to Switzerland, to the Italian lakes, with Marina’s friend, the theatrical big shot, Gran D. du Mont (the ‘D’ also stood for Duke, his mother’s maiden name, des hobereaux irlandais, quoi), traveling discreetly on the next Mediterranean Express or next Simplon or next Orient, or whatever other train de luxe carried the three Veens, an English governess, a Russian nurse and two maids, while a semi-divorced Dan went to some place in equatorial Africa to photograph tigers (which he was surprised not to see) and other notorious wild animals, trained to cross the motorist’s path, as well as some plump black girls in a traveling-agent’s gracious home in the wilds of Mozambique. She could recollect, of course, when she and her sister played ‘note-comparing,’ much better than Lucette such things as itineraries, spectacular flora, fashions, the covered galleries with all sorts of shops, a handsome suntanned man with a black mustache who kept staring at her from his corner in the restaurant of Geneva’s Manhattan Palace; but Lucette, though so much younger, remembered heaps of bagatelles, little ‘turrets’ and little ‘barrels,’ biryul’ki proshlago. She was, cette Lucette, like the girl in Ah, cette Line (a popular novel), ‘a macédoine of intuition, stupidity, naïveté and cunning.’ By the way, she had confessed, Ada had made her confess, that it was, as Van had suspected, the other way round — that when they returned to the damsel in distress, she was in all haste, not freeing herself, but actually trying to tie herself up again after breaking loose and spying on them through the larches. ‘Good Lord,’ said Van, ‘that explains the angle of the soap!’ Oh, what did it matter, who cared, Ada only hoped the poor little thing would be as happy at Ada’s age as Ada was now, my love, my love, my love, my love. Van hoped the bicycles parked in the bushes did not show their sparkling metal through the leaves to some passenger on the forest road. (1.24)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): hobereaux: country squires.
biryul’ki proshlago: Russ., the Past’s baubles.
Ah, cette Line hints at acetylene (a colourless flammable gas used in the acetylene, or 'carbide,' lamps). After the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century electricity was banned on Demonia (Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) and even its name became unmentionable. Van and Ada make a seven-mile-long bicycle ride in Ardis Park. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN describes his trysts with Tamara in the parks of Vyra and Rozhdestveno (the Nabokovs' estates in the Province of St. Petersburg) and mentions the carbide light of his bicycle. In his Eugene Onegin Commentary VN argues that Pushkin's pistol duel with Ryleev (the owner of Batovo, an estate that later belonged to VN's grandmother) in May 1820 took place in the park of Batovo. According to VN, the Chemin du Pendu in the park of Batovo was so named after Ryleev (one of the five Decembrists who were hanged). Chronologically, the Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. January 3 is Lucette's birthday:
According to the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed), and that had survived with other old papers in the cockloft of Ardis Hall, the Veen-Durmanov wedding took place on St Adelaida’s Day, 1871. Twelve years and some eight months later, two naked children, one dark-haired and tanned, the other dark-haired and milk-white, bending in a shaft of hot sunlight that slanted through the dormer window under which the dusty cartons stood, happened to collate that date (December 16, 1871) with another (August 16, same year) anachronistically scrawled in Marina’s hand across the corner of a professional photograph (in a raspberry-plush frame on her husband’s kneehole library table) identical in every detail — including the commonplace sweep of a bride’s ectoplasmic veil, partly blown by a parvis breeze athwart the groom’s trousers — to the newspaper reproduction. A girl was born on July 21, 1872, at Ardis, her putative father’s seat in Ladore County, and for some obscure mnemonic reason was registered as Adelaida. Another daughter, this time Dan’s very own, followed on January 3, 1876. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Goodnight Kids: their names are borrowed, with distortions, from a comic strip for French-speaking children.
Cette maudite année (as Pushkin calls 1830) also brings to mind Mlle Larivière's novel Les Enfants Maudits ("The Accursed Children"):
The shooting script was now ready. Marina, in dorean robe and coolie hat, reclined reading in a long-chair on the patio. Her director, G.A. Vronsky, elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest, was alternately sipping his vodka-and-tonic and feeding Marina typewritten pages from a folder. On her other side, crosslegged on a mat, sat Pedro (surname unknown, stagename forgotten), a repulsively handsome, practically naked young actor, with satyr ears, slanty eyes, and lynx nostrils, whom she had brought from Mexico and was keeping at a hotel in Ladore.
Ada, lying on the edge of the swimming pool, was doing her best to make the shy dackel face the camera in a reasonably upright and decent position, while Philip Rack, an insignificant but on the whole likable young musician who in his baggy trunks looked even more dejected and awkward than in the green velvet suit he thought fit to wear for the piano lessons he gave Lucette, was trying to take a picture of the recalcitrant chop-licking animal and of the girl’s parted breasts which her half-prone position helped to disclose in the opening of her bathing suit.
If one dollied now to another group standing a few paces away under the purple garlands of the patio arch, one might take a medium shot of the young maestro’s pregnant wife in a polka-dotted dress replenishing goblets with salted almonds, and of our distinguished lady novelist resplendent in mauve flounces, mauve hat, mauve shoes, pressing a zebra vest on Lucette, who kept rejecting it with rude remarks, learned from a maid but uttered in a tone of voice just beyond deafish Mlle Larivière’s field of hearing.
Lucette remained topless. Her tight smooth skin was the color of thick peach syrup, her little crupper in willow-green shorts rolled drolly, the sun lay sleek on her russet bob and plumpish torso: it showed but a faint circumlocation of femininity, and Van, in a scowling mood, recalled with mixed feelings how much more developed her sister had been at not quite twelve years of age.
He had spent most of the day fast asleep in his room, and a long, rambling, dreary dream had repeated, in a kind of pointless parody, his strenuous ‘Casanovanic’ night with Ada and that somehow ominous morning talk with her. Now that I am writing this, after so many hollows and heights of time, I find it not easy to separate our conversation, as set down in an inevitably stylized form, and the drone of complaints, turning on sordid betrayals that obsessed young Van in his dull nightmare. Or was he dreaming now that he had been dreaming? Had a grotesque governess really written a novel entitled Les Enfants Maudits? To be filmed by frivolous dummies, now discussing its adaptation? To be made even triter than the original Book of the Fortnight, and its gurgling blurbs? Did he detest Ada as he had in his dreams? He did. (1.32)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Les Enfants Maudits: the accursed children.
Mlle Larivière's novel is made into a film by G. A. Vronsky as The Young and the Doomed:
After some exploration, they tracked down a rerun of The Young and the Doomed (1890) to a tiny theater that specialized in Painted Westerns (as those deserts of nonart used to be called). Thus had Mlle Larivière’s Enfants Maudits (1887) finally degenerated! She had had two adolescents, in a French castle, poison their widowed mother who had seduced a young neighbor, the lover of one of her twins. The author had made many concessions to the freedom of the times, and the foul fancy of scriptwriters; but both she and the leading lady disavowed the final result of multiple tamperings with the plot that had now become the story of a murder in Arizona, the victim being a widower about to marry an alcoholic prostitute, whom Marina, quite sensibly, refused to impersonate. But poor little Ada had clung to her bit part, a two-minute scene in a traktir (roadside tavern). During the rehearsals she felt she was doing not badly as a serpentine barmaid — until the director blamed her for moving like an angular ‘backfish.’ She had not deigned to see the final product and was not overeager to have Van see it now, but he reminded her that the same director, G.A. Vronsky, had told her she was always pretty enough to serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline, who at twenty had been as attractively gauche as she, raising and tensing forward her shoulders in the same way, when crossing a room. Having sat through a preliminary P.W. short, they finally got to The Young and the Doomed only to discover that the barmaid scene of the barroom sequence had been cut out — except for a perfectly distinct shadow of Ada’s elbow, as Van kindly maintained. (2.9)
A traktir (roadside tavern) brings to mind the traktir visited by Van and Ada during their bicycle ride:
The day was darkening; a beaming vestige of sunlight lingered in a western strip of the overcast sky: we have all seen the person who after gaily greeting a friend crosses the street with that smile still fresh on his face — to be eclipsed by the stare of the stranger who might have missed the cause and mistaken the effect for the bright leer of madness. Having worked out that metaphor, Van and Ada decided it was really time to go home. As they rode through Gamlet, the sight of a Russian traktir gave such a prod to their hunger that they dismounted and entered the dim little tavern. A coachman drinking tea from the saucer, holding it up to his loud lips in his large claw, came straight from a pretzel-string of old novels. There was nobody else in the steamy hole save a kerchiefed woman pleading with (ugovarivayushchaya) a leg-dangling lad in a red shirt to get on with his fish soup. She proved to be the traktir-keeper and rose, ‘wiping her hands on her apron,’ to bring Ada (whom she recognized at once) and Van (whom she supposed, not incorrectly, to be the little chatelaine’s ‘young man’) some small Russian-type ‘hamburgers’ called bitochki. Each devoured half a dozen of them — then they retrieved their bikes from under the jasmins to pedal on. They had to light their carbide lamps. They made a last pause before reaching the darkness of Ardis Park. (1.24)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): traktir: Russ., pub.
In June 1901 Lucette commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic after watching with Van in the Tobakoff cinema hall Don Juan's Last Fling, a movie in which Ada played the gitanilla. On Demonia VN's Lolita (1955) is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg:
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.
(Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.)
She had stepped into it, naked, while her legs were still damp and ‘piney’ after a special rubbing with a washcloth (morning baths being unknown under Mlle Larivière’s regime) and pulled it on with a brisk jiggle of the hips which provoked her governess’s familiar rebuke: mais ne te trémousse pas comme ça quand tu mets ta jupe! Une petite fille de bonne maison, etc. Per contra, the omission of panties was ignored by Ida Larivière, a bosomy woman of great and repulsive beauty (in nothing but corset and gartered stockings at the moment) who was not above making secret concessions to the heat of the dog-days herself; but in tender Ada’s case the practice had deprecable effects. The child tried to assuage the rash in the sort arch, with all its accompaniment of sticky, itchy, not altogether unpleasurable sensations, by tightly straddling the cool limb of a Shattal apple tree, much to Van’s disgust as we shall see more than once. Besides the lolita, she wore a short-sleeved white black-striped jersey, a floppy hat (hanging behind her back from an elastic around her throat), a velvet hairband and a pair of old sandals. Neither hygiene, nor sophistication of taste, were, as Van kept observing, typical of the Ardis household. (1.13)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared. Incidentally, that title’s pronunciation has nothing to do with English or Russian (pace an anonymous owl in a recent issue of the TLS).
mais ne te etc.: now don’t fidget like that when you put on your skirt! A well-bred little girl…
At the end of his letter Pushkin calls his bride mon bel ange ("my fair angel"). Belle is Lucette's name for her governess (Mlle Larivière). Aksakov is Van's angelic Russian tutor:
In 1880, Van, aged ten, had traveled in silver trains with showerbaths, accompanied by his father, his father’s beautiful secretary, the secretary’s eighteen-year-old white-gloved sister (with a bit part as Van’s English governess and milkmaid), and his chaste, angelic Russian tutor, Andrey Andreevich Aksakov (‘AAA’), to gay resorts in Louisiana and Nevada. AAA explained, he remembered, to a Negro lad with whom Van had scrapped, that Pushkin and Dumas had African blood, upon which the lad showed AAA his tongue, a new interesting trick which Van emulated at the earliest occasion and was slapped by the younger of the Misses Fortune, put it back in your face, sir, she said. He also recalled hearing a cummerbunded Dutchman in the hotel hall telling another that Van’s father, who had just passed whistling one of his three tunes, was a famous ‘camler’ (camel driver — shamoes having been imported recently? No, ‘gambler’). (1.24)
1880 was the most retentive and talented year in Van's life:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper.
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad, (a Caucasian chieftain) is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
In Chapter Ten of his autobiography Speak, Memory VN describes his childhood games with his cousin Yuri Rausch and mentions Captain Mayne Reid’s novel:
THE Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid (1818–1883), translated and simplified, was tremendously popular with Russian children at the beginning of this century, long after his American fame had faded. Knowing English, I could savor his Headless Horseman in the unabridged original. Two friends swap clothes, hats, mounts, and the wrong man gets murdered—this is the main whorl of its intricate plot. The edition I had (possibly a British one) remains in the stacks of my memory as a puffy book bound in red cloth, with a watery-gray frontispiece, the gloss of which had been gauzed over when the book was new by a leaf of tissue paper. I see this leaf as it disintegrated—at first folded improperly, then torn off—but the frontispiece itself, which no doubt depicted Louise Pointdexter’s unfortunate brother (and perhaps a coyote or two, unless I am thinking of The Death Shot, another Mayne Reid tale), has been so long exposed to the blaze of my imagination that it is now completely bleached (but miraculously replaced by the real thing, as I noted when translating this chapter into Russian in the spring of 1953, and namely, by the view from a ranch you and I rented that year: a cactus-and-yucca waste whence came that morning the plaintive call of a quail—Gambel’s Quail, I believe—overwhelming me with a sense of undeserved attainments and rewards). (1)
Ada's "only seven" (i. e. seven miles) makes one think of the formula 3 × 4 = 12 engraved on the gilt inside of Yuri's cigarette case:
When he arrived for a week’s visit in June 1914 (now sixteen and a half to my fifteen, and the interval was beginning to tell), the first thing he did, as soon as we found ourselves alone in the garden, was to take out casually an “ambered” cigarette from a smart silver case on the gilt inside of which he bade me observe the formula 3 × 4 = 12 engraved in memory of the three nights he had spent, at last, with Countess G. He was now in love with an old general’s young wife in Helsingfors and a captain’s daughter in Gatchina. I witnessed with a kind of despair every new revelation of his man-of-the-world style. “Where can I make some rather private calls?” he asked. So I led him past the five poplars and the old dry well (out of which we had been rope-hauled by three frightened gardeners only a couple of years before) to a passage in the servants’ wing where the cooing of pigeons came from an inviting windowsill and where there hung on the sun-stamped wall the remotest and oldest of our country-house telephones, a bulky boxlike contraption which had to be clangorously cranked up to educe a small-voiced operator. Yuri was now even more relaxed and sociable than the mustanger of former years. Sitting on a deal table against the wall and dangling his long legs, he chatted with the servants (something I was not supposed to do, and did not know how to do)—with an aged footman with sideburns whom I had never seen grin before or with a kitchen flirt, of whose bare neck and bold eyes I became aware only then. After Yuri had concluded his third long-distance conversation (I noticed with a blend of relief and dismay how awful his French was), we walked down to the village grocery which otherwise I never dreamed of visiting, let alone buying there a pound of black-and-white sunflower seeds. Throughout our return stroll, among the late afternoon butterflies that were preparing to roost, we munched and spat, he showing me how to perform it conveyer-wise: split the seed open between the right-side back teeth, ease out the kernel with the tongue, spit out the husk halves, move the smooth kernel to the left-side molars, and munch there, while the next seed which in the meantime has already been cracked on the right, is being processed in its turn. Speaking of right, he admitted he was a staunch “monarchist” (of a romantic rather than political nature) and went on to deplore my alleged (and perfectly abstract) “democratism.” He recited samples of his fluent album poetry and proudly remarked that he had been complimented by Dilanov-Tomski, a fashionable poet (who favored Italian epigraphs and sectional titles, such as “Songs of Lost Love,” “Nocturnal Urns,” and so on), for the striking “long” rhyme “vnemlyu múze ya” (“I hearken to the Muse”) and “lyubvi kontúziya” (“love’s contusion”), which I countered with my best (and still unused) find: “zápoved’ ” (commandment) and “posápïvat’ ” (to sniffle). He was boiling with anger over Tolstoy’s dismissal of the art of war and burning with admiration for Prince Andrey Bolkonski—for he had just discovered War and Peace which I had read for the first time when I was eleven (in Berlin, on a Turkish sofa, in our somberly rococo Privatstrasse flat giving on a dark, damp back garden with larches and gnomes that have remained in that book, like an old postcard, forever). (ibid.)
An "ambered" cigarette brings to mind an unmentionable 'lammer' banned after the L disaster:
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether. (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.
my lad, my pretty, etc: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.
ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255–1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’
In his letter to Natalia Goncharov Pushkin calls the epidemic of cholera (btw., Cholera jasna! is a popular Polish oath) le peste. Describing Culex chateaubriandi Brown (a rare mosquito that flies in Ardis in July), Van calls it the 'pest:'
The ‘pest’ appeared as suddenly as it would vanish. It settled on pretty bare arms and legs without the hint of a hum, in a kind of recueilli silence, that — by contrast — caused the sudden insertion of its absolutely hellish proboscis to resemble the brass crash of a military band. Five minutes after the attack in the crepuscule, between porch step and cricket-crazed garden, a fiery irritation would set in, which the strong and the cold ignored (confident it would last a mere hour) but which the weak, the adorable, the voluptuous took advantage of to scratch and scratch and scratch scrumptiously (canteen cant). ‘Sladko! (Sweet!)’ Pushkin used to exclaim in relation to a different species in Yukon. During the week following her birthday, Ada’s unfortunate fingernails used to stay gamet-stained and after a particularly ecstatic, lost-to-the-world session of scratching, blood literally streamed down her shins — a pity to see, mused her distressed admirer, but at the same time disgracefully fascinating — for we are visitors and investigators in a strange universe, indeed, indeed. (1.17)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): recueilli: concentrated, rapt.
canteen: a reference to the ‘scrumpets’ (crumpets) provided by school canteens.
In May 1828 Pushkin actually exclaimed Sladko! when he was bitten by the mosquitoes in Priyutino, the Olenins' family estate some 25 kilometers east of St. Petersburg (where the poet courted Annette Olenin, a girl to whom Pushkin proposed in that month and was rejected). In May 1831 Pushkin and his young wife arrived in St. Petersburg and put up at the Demutov traktir (a hotel in St. Petersburg):
Приехали мы благополучно, мой милый Павел Воинович, в Демутов трактир и на днях отправляемся в Царское Село, где мой домик еще не меблирован (мой будущий адрес: в дом Китаевой). Поливанов сейчас был у меня; кажется, очень влюблен. Завтра отправляется к вам. Дела мои в лучшем порядке, нежели я думал. На днях отправляю тебе 2000 рублей для Горчакова. Не знаю, получил ли ты тысячу от Вяземского. С ним перепишусь. Что ты делаешь, душка? что твоя хозяйка? что Марья Ивановна? спровадил ли ты ее? и что твои хлопоты касательно моего дома и твоего долга. До сих пор я не получал еще черновой доверенности, а сам сочинять ее не сумею. Перешли поскорее.
Жена тебе очень кланяется. (a letter of about May 20, 1831, to P. V. Nashchyokin)
Traktir zhizni ("The Tavern of Life," 1904) is a poem by Nik. T-o ("Mr. Nobody," I. Annenski's penname):
Вкруг белеющей Психеи
Те же фикусы торчат,
Те же грустные лакеи,
Тот же гам и тот же чад…
Муть вина, нагие кости,
Пепел стынущих сигар,
На губах — отрава злости,
В сердце — скуки перегар…
Ночь давно снега одела,
Но уйти ты не спешишь;
Как в кошмаре, то и дело:
«Алкоголь или гашиш?»
А в сенях, поди, не жарко:
Там, поднявши воротник,
У плывущего огарка
Счёты сводит гробовщик.
The essays in Annenski's Vtoraya kniga otrazheniy ("The Second Book of Reflections," 1909) include Problema Gamleta ("The Problem of Hamlet"). At the end of "Ardis the First" Van and Ada visit a Russian traktir in Gamlet (a half-Russian village near Ardis Hall). Annenski's Traktir zhizni brings to mind Pushkin's poem Telega zhizni ("The Cart of Life," 1823):
Хоть тяжело подчас в ней бремя,
Телега на ходу легка;
Ямщик лихой, седое время,
Везет, не слезет с облучка.
С утра садимся мы в телегу;
Мы рады голову сломать
И, презирая лень и негу,
Кричим: пошел! . . . .
Но в полдень нет уж той отваги;
Порастрясло нас; нам страшней
И косогоры и овраги;
Кричим: полегче, дуралей!
Катит по-прежнему телега;
Под вечер мы привыкли к ней
И, дремля, едем до ночлега —
А время гонит лошадей.
Though hard is a burden in it sometime,
The cart is light at fair speed;
The driver is dashing, grey-haired Time,
Drives on, not getting off the seat.
At dawn we spring up on the cart;
We gladly risk our own neck
And, having scorned sloth and delight,
Call: off you go! For God's sake.
At noon there are no former nerves;
Having been jolted, more we dread
All those slopes and steeps, and curves;
We shout: not so fast, blockhead!
Same as before the cart is on its way;
We do get used to it when evening closes,
And dozing off we come to the night’s stay,
While Time drives on the sturdy horses.
(tr. Emil Sharafutdinov)
Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when he and Ada make love for the first time), Van mentions telegas (pl. of telega, a cart) among the vehicles used by the inhabitants of Ardis Hall to reach the site of the fire:
With the tartan toga around him, he accompanied his black double down the accessory spiral stairs leading to the library. Placing a bare knee on the shaggy divan under the window, Van drew back the heavy red curtains.
Uncle Dan, a cigar in his teeth, and kerchiefed Marina with Dack in her clutch deriding the watchdogs, were in the process of setting out between raised arms and swinging lanterns in the runabout — as red as a fire engine! — only to be overtaken at the crunching curve of the drive by three English footmen on horseback with three French maids en croupe. The entire domestic staff seemed to be taking off to enjoy the fire (an infrequent event in our damp windless region), using every contraption available or imaginable: telegas, teleseats, roadboats, tandem bicycles and even the clockwork luggage carts with which the stationmaster supplied the family in memory of Erasmus Veen, their inventor. Only the governess (as Ada, not Van, had by then discovered) slept on through everything, snoring with a wheeze and a harkle in the room adjacent to the old nursery where little Lucette lay for a minute awake before running after her dream and jumping into the last furniture van.
Van, kneeling at the picture window, watched the inflamed eye of the cigar recede and vanish. That multiple departure... Take over. (1.19)