Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (Earth's twin planet also known as Demonia), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions the details of the L disaster that happened on Demonia in the beau milieu of the 19th century:
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.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.)
There were those who maintained that the discrepancies and ‘false overlappings’ between the two worlds were too numerous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive events, not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness; and there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only confirmed the live organic reality pertaining to the other world; that a perfect likeness would rather suggest a specular, and hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development.
The modest narrator has to remind the rereader of all this, because in April (my favorite month), 1869 (by no means a mirabilic year), on St George’s Day (according to Mlle Larivière’s maudlin memoirs) Demon Veen married Aqua Veen — out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend.
Was there some additional spice? 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.
Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth — say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia — as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua’s bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health (‘just a little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black’) in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive... But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (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.
The L disaster happened on Antiterra in the beau milieu of the 19th century. 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.
Pushkin calls 1830 cette maudite année (this accursed year). At the beginning of his prophetic poem Predskazanie ("Prediction," 1830) Lermontov says "Nastanet god, Rossii chyornyi god (There will come a year, Russia's black year):"
Настанет год, России черный год,
Когда царей корона упадет;
Забудет чернь к ним прежнюю любовь,
И пища многих будет смерть и кровь;
Когда детей, когда невинных жен
Низвергнутый не защитит закон;
Когда чума от смрадных, мертвых тел
Начнет бродить среди печальных сел,
Чтобы платком из хижин вызывать,
И станет глад сей бедный край терзать;
И зарево окрасит волны рек:
В тот день явится мощный человек,
И ты его узнаешь -- и поймешь,
Зачем в руке его булатный нож:
И горе для тебя! -- твой плач, твой стон
Ему тогда покажется смешон;
И будет все ужасно, мрачно в нем,
Как плащ его с возвышенным челом.
There will come a year, Russia's black year.
The tsar's crown will fall to the ground and,
the people will forget that they once loved him.
Many will be left with only the dead and blood for food;
Law will provide no shelter for innocent children and women.
When the plague of stinking, dead bodies
begins to rot amidst the grieving villages
and death stalking the living in its covered cowl.
When peace and quiet falls over those tormented regions
and the dawn reddens the river's waves:
On that very day there will appear a man of power
and you will recognize and know him,
by the sword in his hand:
and woe unto you! To your wailing, your groans;
he will just smile;
and everything about him will be horrible, gloomy,
concealed beneath his cloak-covered brow.
(tr. C. T. Evans)
L is both Lermontov's and Lenin's initial. Chyornyi god (the black year) in Lermontov's poem brings to mind chyornyi chelovek (the black man) who in Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Saliei (1830) comissioned a Requiem:
Моцарт
Так слушай.
Недели три тому, пришёл я поздно
Домой. Сказали мне, что заходил
За мною кто-то. Отчего — не знаю,
Всю ночь я думал: кто бы это был?
И что ему во мне? Назавтра тот же
Зашел и не застал опять меня.
На третий день играл я на полу
С моим мальчишкой. Кликнули меня;
Я вышел. Человек, одетый в черном,
Учтиво поклонившись, заказал
Мне Requiem и скрылся. Сел я тотчас
И стал писать — и с той поры за мною
Не приходил мой черный человек;
А я и рад: мне было б жаль расстаться
С моей работой, хоть совсем готов
Уж Requiem. Но между тем я...
Сальери
Что?
Моцарт
Мне совестно признаться в этом...
Сальери
В чём же?
Моцарт
Мне день и ночь покоя не даёт
Мой черный человек. За мною всюду
Как тень он гонится. Вот и теперь
Мне кажется, он с нами сам-третей
Сидит.
Mozart
Then listen:
About three weeks ago, I came back home
Quite late at night. They told me that some person
Had called on me. And then, I don't know why,
The whole night through I thought: who could it be?
What does he need of me? Tomorrow also
The same man came and didn't find me in.
The third day, I was playing with my boy
Upon the floor. They hailed me; I came out
Into the hall. A man, all clad in black,
Bowed courteously in front of me, commissioned
A Requiem and vanished. I at once
Sat down and started writing it -- and since,
My man in black has not come by again.
Which makes me glad, because I would be sorry
To part with my endeavor, though the Requiem
Is nearly done. But meanwhile I am...
Salieri
What?
Mozart
I'm quite ashamed to own to this...
Salieri
What is it?
Mozart
By day and night my man in black would not
Leave me in peace. Wherever I might go,
He tails me like a shadow. Even now
It seems to me he's sitting here with us,
A third... (Scene II, tr. Genia Gurarie)
Russia's black year was 1917 (in February the tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and in October Lenin came to power). Lenin died in 1924. Bryusov's poem on Lenin's death, Requiem, was meant to be sung to the tune of Mozart's Requiem:
На смерть В. И. Ленина (Музыка Моцарта)
Все голоса
Горе! горе! умер Ленин.
Вот лежит он, скорбно тленен.
Вспоминайте горе снова!
Горе! горе! умер Ленин!
Вот лежит он, скорбно тленен.
Вспоминайте снова, снова!
Ныне наше строго слово:
С новой силой, силой строй сомкни!
Вечно память сохрани!
Сопрано, тенор, бас
Вечно память, память
вечно –
Альт
Вечно память
Ленина –
Сопрано, тенор, бас
Сохрани!
Альт
Храни!
Все голоса
Память!
24 января 1924
A Russian poet, Valeriy Bryusov (1873-1924) brings to mind Lermontov's poem Valerik (1840). Valerik is a rivulet in the Caucasus. Its name means in Chechen "a river of death" (a fact mentioned by Lermontov in his poem):
Я думал: «Жалкий человек.
Чего он хочет!.. небо ясно,
Под небом места много всем,
Но беспрестанно и напрасно
Один враждует он — зачем?»
Галуб прервал мое мечтанье,
Ударив по плечу; он был
Кунак мой; я его спросил,
Как месту этому названье?
Он отвечал мне: «Валерик,
А перевесть на ваш язык,
Так будет речка смерти: верно,
Дано старинными людьми».
A line in Lermontov's poem, Pod nebom mesta mnogo vsem ('Neath the sky there's plenty of space for all), brings to mind "there is but one sky" (a thought that crosses Demon's mind as he walks past the tall Manhattan house crowned by Van's penthouse):
Van’s father had just left one Santiago to view the results of an earthquake in another, when Ladore Hospital cabled that Dan was dying. He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling. He had not many interests in life. At the airport of the moonlit white town we call Tent, and Tobakov’s sailors, who built it, called Palatka, in northern Florida, where owing to engine trouble he had to change planes, Demon made a long-distance call and received a full account of Dan’s death from the inordinately circumstantial Dr Nikulin (grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov — we can’t get rid of the lettuce). Daniel Veen’s life had been a mixture of the ready-made and the grotesque; but his death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch.
Next day, February 5, around nine p.m., Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan’s lawyer, Demon noted — just as he was about to cross Alexis Avenue, an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very exotic and potent pill to face the day’s ordeal on top of a sleepless journey), contented himself — quite properly — with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out of the way of Mrs R4. But precisely in regard to such a contingency, Fate had prepared an alternate continuation. As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered) by the Monaco, where he had often lunched, it occurred to him that his son (whom he had been unable to ‘contact’) might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building. He had never been up there — or had he? For a business consultation with Van? On a sun-hazed terrace? And a clouded drink? (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.)
With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute multicolored optical sparks), Demon hastened to enter the lobby and catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two on a wiggle-wheel table and the Manhattan Times among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas. Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon, placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes. Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter.
‘Then we are fellow travelers,’ said Demon inhaling not without gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain.
On that memorable morning, Van, after ordering breakfast, had climbed out of his bath and donned a strawberry-red terrycloth roalbe when he thought he heard Valerio’s voice from the adjacent parlor. Thither he padded, humming tunelessly, looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance). (2.10)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): R4: 'rook four', a chess indication of position (pun on the woman's name).
A wiater at the 'Monaco,' Valerio is a ginger-haired elderly Roman. In her memoir essay on Bryusov, Geroy truda (“The Hero of Toil,” 1925), Marina Tsvetaev says that Bryusov was trizhdy rimlyanin (a triple Roman):
Три слова являют нам Брюсова: воля, вол, волк. Триединство не только звуковое - смысловое: и воля - Рим, и вол - Рим, и волк - Рим. Трижды римлянином был Валерий Брюсов: волей и волом - в поэзии, волком (homo homini lupus est) в жизни.
L is the Roman numeral for 50. 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.
Btw., 'Monaco' (a good restaurant in the entresol of the tall building crowned by Van's penthouse) seems to hint at Kavkazskiy nash Monako (our Caucasian Monaco), as in an impromptu poem (one of Lermontov's last poems) Lermontov calls Pyatigorsk:
Очарователен кавказский наш Монако!
Танцоров, игроков, бретеров в нем толпы;
В нем лихорадят нас вино, игра и драка,
И жгут днем женщины, а по ночам — клопы.
Tolpy bretyorov (crowds of bretteurs) mentioned by Lermontov bring to mind "that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine" (as Ada calls Van):
‘Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,’ suggested Van. ‘I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.’
‘Last night two men recognized me,’ she said. ‘Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow — with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other, with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.’
‘We shall now go for a ride in the park,’ said Van firmly, and rang, first of all, for a Sunday messenger to take the letter to Lucette’s hotel — or to the Verma resort, if she had already left.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’ observed Ada.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘You are breaking her heart,’ said Ada.
‘Ada girl, adored girl,’ cried Van, ‘I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.’
‘Au fond,’ said Ada, ‘first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want. After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day,’
She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.
‘Tower,’ she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: ‘And you?’
‘A regular ziggurat.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): bretteur: duelling bravo.
au fond: actually.
At the end of his letter to Natalia Goncharov Pushkin quotes Voltaire's words "I kiss the tips of your wings." In Voltaire (the pseudonym of François Marie Arouet, 1694-1778, a French writer and poet) there is Volta. An Italian chemist and physicist, Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) was a pioneer in electricity. After the L disaster electricity was banned on Antiterra. Volta la terrea is an aria in Verdi's opera Un Ballo in Maschera (1859):
Volta la terrea fronte alle stelle
come sfavilla la sua pupilla,
Quando alle belle
Il fin predice
Mesto felice dei loro amor
È con Lucifero d’accordo ognor,
Chi la profetica sua gonna afferra
O passi’l mare, voli alla guerra,
Le sue vicende soavi, amare
Da questa apprende nel dubbio cor!
Turning her face to the stars
how her pupils sparkle.
When to the beautiful ones
The end predicts
Sad or happy with their love
She is with Lucifer always in agreement
Whoever grabs her prophetic skirt
Whether he passes the sea or flies to war
His stories sweet, or loving
from this he learns his doubting heart!
Maskarad ("Masquerade," 1835) is a play in verse by Lermontov. At the picnic on Ada's sixteenth birthday Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) sings the Green Grass aria from the “Traverdiata:”
Gradually their presence dissolved from Van’s mind. Everybody was now having a wonderful time. Marina threw off the pale raincoat or rather ‘dustcoat’ she had put on for the picnic (after all, with one thing and another, her domestic gray dress with the pink fichu was quite gay enough, she declared, for an old lady) and raising an empty glass she sang, with brio and very musically, the Green Grass aria: ‘Replenish, replenish the glasses with wine! Here’s a toast to love! To the rapture of love!’ With awe and pity, and no love, Van kept reverting to that poor bald patch on Traverdiata’s poor old head, to the scalp burnished by her hairdye an awful pine rust color much shinier than her dead hair. He attempted, as so many times before, to squeeze out some fondness for her but as usual failed and as usual told himself that Ada did not love her mother either, a vague and cowardly consolation. (1.39)
In his lecture on Dostoevski (in Lectures on Russian Literature) VN says that Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata:
We must distinguish between "sentimental" and "sensitive." A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother's Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata. A whole century of authors praised the simple life of the poor, and so on. Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoevski, we mean the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader. Dostoevski never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos.