When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) visits Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie) in Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital, male nurse Dorofey reads the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos):
For half a minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the general ward of Lakeview (Lakeview!) Hospital, between two series of variously bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. When he understood this, his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic. His next request was that he be told how seriously he was hurt and how long he was expected to remain incapacitated. His third action was to resume what constituted the sole reason of his having to visit Kalugano (visit Kalugano!). His new quarters, where heartbroken kings had tossed in transit, proved to be a replica in white of his hotel apartment — white furniture, white carpet, white sparver. Inset, so to speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes — and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed. with the sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed more aptly than she thought ‘that soft dangle.’ An exhibition of his state with a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened, and he never met her again). His suitcase promptly arrived from the hotel; the stick, however, could not be located (it must be climbing nowadays Wellington Mountain, or perhaps, helping a lady to go ‘brambling’ in Oregon); so the hospital supplied him with the Third Cane, a rather nice, knotty, cherry-dark thing with a crook and a solid black-rubber heel. Dr Fitzbishop congratulated him on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus. Doc Fitz commented on Van’s wonderful recuperational power which was already in evidence, and promised to have him out of disinfectants and bandages in ten days or so if for the first three he remained as motionless as a felled tree-trunk. Did Van like music? Sportsmen usually did, didn’t they? Would he care to have a Sonorola by his bed? No, he disliked music, but did the doctor, being a concert-goer, know perhaps where a musician called Rack could be found? ‘Ward Five,’ answered the doctor promptly. Van misunderstood this as the title of some piece of music and repeated his question. Would he find Rack’s address at Harper’s music shop? Well, they used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest, but now some other people had moved in. Ward Five was where hopeless cases were kept. The poor guy had always had a bad liver and a very indifferent heart, but on top of that a poison had seeped into his system; the local ‘lab’ could not identify it and they were now waiting for a report, on those curiously frog-green faeces, from the Luga people. If Rack had administered it to himself by his own hand, he kept ‘mum’; it was more likely the work of his wife who dabbled in Hindu-Andean voodoo stuff and had just had a complicated miscarriage in the maternity ward. Yes, triplets — how did he guess? Anyway, if Van was so eager to visit his old pal it would have to be as soon as he could be rolled to Ward Five in a wheelchair by Dorofey, so he’d better apply a bit of voodoo, ha-ha, on his own flesh and blood.
That day came soon enough. After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin’s coachman, said priehali (‘we have arrived’) and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos). (1.42)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): palata: Russ., ward.
Vo ves' golos ("At the Top of my Voice," 1930) is a poem by Mayakovski (VN's "late namesake," 1893-1930). In his poem Pyatyi Internatsional ("Fifth International," 1922) Mayakovski mentions Logos:
Мистики пишут: «Логос,
Это всемогущество. От господа бога-с».
The mystics write: "Logos,
this is omnipotence. From God, the Lord."
Hodasevich's essay on Mayakovski is entitled Dekol’tirovannaya loshad’ (“The Horse in the Décolleté Dress,” 1927). Hodasevich says in it that Mayakovski was the first who made poshlost' (vulgarity) not a material, but the meaning of poetry and mentions grubiyan i poshlyak (a boor and a vulgarian) who began to neigh, like horses ("Here we are! We can think!"), from Mayakovski's verses:
Он первый сделал пошлость и грубость не материалом, но смыслом поэзии. Грубиян и пошляк заржали из его стихов: "Вот мы! Мы мыслим!"
A surgeon in the Kalugano hospital, Dr Fitzbishop is what Russians call a poshlyak ('pretentious vulgarian'):
On Monday around noon he was allowed to sit in a deckchair, on the lawn, which he had avidly gazed at for some days from his window. Dr Fitzbishop had said, rubbing his hands, that the Luga laboratory said it was the not always lethal 'arethusoides' but it had no practical importance now, because the unfortunate music teacher, and composer, was not expected to spend another night on Demonia, and would be on Terra, ha-ha, in time for evensong. Doc Fitz was what Russians call a poshlyak ('pretentious vulgarian') and in some obscure counter-fashion Van was relieved not to be able to gloat over the wretched Rack's martyrdom. (1.42)
Dr Fitzbishop (whom Van calls Doc Fitz) brings to mind Fits-Patrik, a stallion's name in Gogol's list of horse names in his Zapisnaya knizhka ("A Notebook," 1845):
О КОННОМ ЗАВОДЕ [ГЛЕБОВА]
Название жеребцов
Васька
Диктатор
Ворон
Соколенок
Фиц-Патрик
Красненький
Мужичок
Рулет
Свирепый
Бриллиант
Потешный
Цыган
Атласный
Юпитер.
Loshadinaya familiya ("A Horsey Name," 1885) is a humorous story by Chekhov, the author of Palata № 6 (Ward No. 6, 1892). In his essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (Creation from Nothing, 1905), Lev Shestov speaks of Chekhov’s story The Duel (1891) and uses the phrase pervyi vstrechnyi poshlyak (the first vulgar person [she encountered]):
Неизвестно зачем, без любви, даже без влечения она отдаётся первому встречному пошляку. Потом ей кажется, что её с ног до головы облили грязью, и эта грязь так пристала к ней, что не смоешь даже целым океаном воды.
For no reason at all, without love, without even attraction she [Nadezhda Fyodorovna, Layevski’s mistress] gives herself to the first vulgar person [poshlyak] she met. Then she feels that mud was flung at her and this mud got stuck to her whole body so that even an ocean of water would not wash it off. (VI)
In his essay Ob agitpyesakh Vladimira Mayakovskogo (“On the Propaganda Plays of Vladimir Mayakovski,” 1920) Lunacharski (the minister of education in Lenin’s government) says that Mayakovski is not pervyi vstrechnyi (just anyone):
Маяковский не первый встречный. Это один из крупнейших русских талантов, имеющий широкий круг поклонников, как в среде интеллигентской, так и в среде пролетариата (целый ряд пролетарских поэтов — его ученики и самым очевидным образом ему подражают), это человек, большинство произведений которого переведено на все европейские языки, поэт, которого очень высоко ценят такие отнюдь не футуристы, как Горький и Брюсов.
According to Lunacharski, even such writers as Gorki and Bryusov (who are not futurists at all) appreciate Mayakovski. In Gorki's novel Zhizn' Klima Samgina ("The Life of Klim Samgin," 1925-36) Lydia Varavka (Klim's step-sister and mistress) says that in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin everybody is a horse [vse loshadi]: this Anna, and Vronski, and all the rest. The title character of Gorki's novel is a namesake of Baron Klim Avidov (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), one of Marina's lovers who gave her children a set of Flavita (Russian Scrabble):
The set our three children received in 1884 from an old friend of the family (as Marina’s former lovers were known), Baron Klim Avidov, consisted of a large folding board of saffian and a boxful of weighty rectangles of ebony inlaid with platinum letters, only one of which was a Roman one, namely the letter J on the two joker blocks (as thrilling to get as a blank check signed by Jupiter or Jurojin). It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa.
By July the ten A’s had dwindled to nine, and the four D’s to three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned Armchair, but the D was lost — faking the fate of its apostrophizable double as imagined by a Walter C. Keyway, Esq., just before the latter landed, with a couple of unstamped postcards, in the arms of a speechless multilinguist in a frock coat with brass buttons. The wit of the Veens (says Ada in a marginal note) knows no bounds. (1.36)
Jupiter (also known as Jove, the ancient Roman god of the sky and thunder) brings to mind Yupiter, the name of the last stallion in Gogol's list of horse names.