According to Ada, at the funeral of Marina (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) she met d’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles? (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.
chiens etc.: dogs not allowed.
In March 1869 Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) fought a sword duel with Baron d'Onsky (Marina's lover who married a Bohemian lady, one-armed d'Onsky's mother). Duel' ("The Duel," 1891) is a story by Chekhov. In Chekhov's play The Three Sisters (1901), known on Demonia (Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) as Four Sisters (2.1, et passim), Solyony kills Baron Tuzenbakh in a pistol duel. In his memoir essay A. P. Chekhov v khudozhestvennom teatre (A. P. Chekhov at the Art Theater) K. S. Stanislavski says that the characters in Chekhov's play Vishnyovyi sad ("The Cherry Orchard," 1904) initially included an one-armed billiard player (who eventually became Gayev, Mme Ranevski's brother):
Мне посчастливилось наблюдать со стороны за процессом создания Чеховым его пьесы «Вишневый сад». Как-то при разговоре с Антоном Павловичем о рыбной ловле наш артист А. Р. Артем изображал, как насаживают червя на крючок, как закидывают удочку донную или с поплавком. Эти и им подобные сцены передавались неподражаемым артистом с большим талантом, и Чехов искренне жалел о том, что их не увидит большая публика в театре. Вскоре после этого Чехов присутствовал при купании в реке другого нашего артиста и тут же решил:
– Послушайте, надо же, чтобы Артем удил рыбу в моей пьесе, а N купался рядом в купальне, барахтался бы там и кричал, а Артем злился бы на него за то, что он ему пугает рыбу.
Антон Павлович мысленно видел их на сцене – одного удящим около купальни, другого – купающимся в ней, то есть за сценой. Через несколько дней Антон Павлович объявил нам торжественно, что купающемуся ампутировали руку, но, несмотря на это, он страстно любит играть на бильярде своей единственной рукой. Рыболов же оказался стариком лакеем, скопившим деньжонки.
Через некоторое время в воображении Чехова стало рисоваться окно старого помещичьего дома, через которое лезли в комнату ветки деревьев. Потом они зацвели снежно-белым цветом. Затем в воображаемом Чеховым доме поселилась какая-то барыня.
– Но только у вас нет такой актрисы. Послушайте! Надо же особую старуху, – соображал Чехов. – Она же все бегает к старому лакею и занимает у него деньги…
Около старухи очутился не то ее брат, не то дядя – безрукий барин, страстный любитель игры на бильярде. Это большое дитя, которое не может жить без лакея. Как-то раз последний уехал, не приготовив барину брюк, и потому он пролежал весь день в постели…
Мы знаем теперь, что уцелело в пьесе и что отпало без всякого следа или оставило незначительный след.
Before the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon tells Van that his favorite word in the language rhymes with "billiard:"
‘I say,’ exclaimed Demon, ‘what’s happened — your shaftment is that of a carpenter’s. Show me your other hand. Good gracious’ (muttering:) ‘Hump of Venus disfigured, Line of Life scarred but monstrously long…’ (switching to a gipsy chant:) ‘You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man’ (reverting to his ordinary voice:) ‘What puzzles me as a palmist is the strange condition of the Sister of your Life. And the roughness!’
‘Mascodagama,’ whispered Van, raising his eyebrows.
‘Ah, of course, how blunt (dumb) of me. Now tell me — you like Ardis Hall?’
‘I adore it,’ said Van. ‘It’s for me the château que baignait la Dore. I would gladly spend all my scarred and strange life here. But that’s a hopeless fancy.’
‘Hopeless? I wonder. I know Dan wants to leave it to Lucile, but Dan is greedy, and my affairs are such that I can satisfy great greed. When I was your age I thought that the sweetest word in the language rhymes with "billiard," and now I know I was right. If you’re really keen, son, on having this property, I might try to buy it. I can exert a certain pressure upon my Marina. She sighs like a hassock when you sit upon her, so to speak. Damn it, the servants here are not Mercuries. Pull that cord again. Yes, maybe Dan could be made to sell.’ (1.38)
and Van mentions The Cherry Orchard:
‘It is incredible that a young boy should control his father’s liquor intake,’ remarked Demon, pouring himself a fourth shallow. ‘On the other hand,’ he went on, nursing the thin-stemmed, gold-rimmed cup, ‘open-air life may be pretty bleak without a summer romance, and not many decent girls haunt the neighborhood, I agree. There was that lovely Erminin girl, une petite juive très aristocratique, but I understand she’s engaged. By the way, the de Prey woman tells me her son has enlisted and will soon be taking part in that deplorable business abroad which our country should have ignored. I wonder if he leaves any rivals behind?’
‘Goodness no,’ replied honest Van. ‘Ada is a serious young lady. She has no beaux — except me, ça va seins durs. Now who, who, who, Dad, who said that for "sans dire"?’
‘Oh! King Wing! When I wanted to know how he liked his French wife. Well, that’s fine news about Ada. She likes horses, you say?’
‘She likes,’ said Van, ‘what all our belles like — balls, orchids, and The Cherry Orchard.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): une petite juive etc.: a very aristocratic little Jewess.
ça va: it goes.
seins durs: mispronunciation of sans dire ‘without saying’.
In Chapter Four (XLIV: 7-8) of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin Onegin, using two balls, at billiards ever since morning plays:
Прямым Онегин Чильд-Гарольдом
Вдался в задумчивую лень:
Со сна садится в ванну со льдом,
И после, дома целый день,
Один, в расчеты погруженный,
Тупым кием вооруженный,
Он на бильярде в два шара
Играет с самого утра.
Настанет вечер деревенский:
Бильярд оставлен, кий забыт,
Перед камином стол накрыт,
Евгений ждет: вот едет Ленский
На тройке чалых лошадей;
Давай обедать поскорей!
Onegin like a regular Childe Harold
lapsed into pensive indolence:
right after sleep he takes a bath with ice,
and then, at home all day,
alone, absorbed in calculations, armed
with a blunt cue,
using two balls,
ever since morn plays billiards.
The country evening comes; abandoned
are billiards, the cue is forgot.
Before the fireplace the table is laid;
Eugene waits; here comes Lenski,
borne by a troika of roan horses;
quick, let's have dinner!
In Chapter Ten (IX: 3-4) of EO Pushkin mentions bezrukiy knyaz' ("the one-armed prince," as Pushkin calls Alexander Ypsilantis, 1792-1828):
Тряслися грозно Пиренеи,
Волкан Неаполя пылал,
Безрукий князь друзьям Мореи
Из Кишинева уж мигал.
The Pyrenees shook ominously;
Naples's volcano was aflame.
The one-armed prince to the friends of Morea
from Kishinev already winked. (Ten: IX: 3-4)
The surname Veen, of almost all main characters in Ada, means in Dutch what Neva (the legendary river of Old Rus, as Ada calls it in one of her letters to Van) means in Finnish: "peat bog." In Chapter Eight (XVI: 9-10) of EO Pushkin mentions brilliant Nina Voronskoy, that Cleopatra of the Neva:
К ней дамы подвигались ближе;
Старушки улыбались ей;
Мужчины кланялися ниже,
Ловили взор ее очей;
Девицы проходили тише
Пред ней по зале: и всех выше
И нос и плечи подымал
Вошедший с нею генерал.
Никто б не мог ее прекрасной
Назвать; но с головы до ног
Никто бы в ней найти не мог
Того, что модой самовластной
В высоком лондонском кругу
Зовется vulgar. (Не могу…
Люблю я очень это слово,
Но не могу перевести;
Оно у нас покамест ново,
И вряд ли быть ему в чести.
Оно б годилось в эпиграмме…)
Но обращаюсь к нашей даме.
Беспечной прелестью мила,
Она сидела у стола
С блестящей Ниной Воронскою,
Сей Клеопатрою Невы;
И верно б согласились вы,
Что Нина мраморной красою
Затмить соседку не могла,
Хоть ослепительна была.
Closer to her the ladies moved;
old women smiled to her;
the men bowed lower, sought
to catch her gaze;
maidens before her passed more quietly
across the room; and higher
than anyone lifted his nose and shoulders
the general who had come in with her.
None could have called her
a beauty; but from head to foot
none could have found in her
what is by autocratic fashion
in the high London circle
called “vulgar.” (I'm unable —
of that word I am very fond,
but am unable to translate it; in our midst
for the time being it is new
and hardly bound to be in favor;
it might do nicely in an epigram....
But to our lady let me turn.)
Winsome with carefree charm,
she at a table sat
with brilliant Nina Voronskóy,
that Cleopatra of the Neva;
and, surely, you would have agreed
that Nina with her marble beauty
could not — though dazzling —
eclipse her neighbor.
In Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra (2.5) Cleopatra asks Charmian (Cleopatra's maid of honour) and Mardian (a eunuch) to play billiards with her:
Cleopatra. Let it alone; let's to billiards: come, Charmian.
Charmian. My arm is sore; best play with Mardian.
Cleopatra. As well a woman with an eunuch play'd
As with a woman. Come, you'll play with me, sir?
Mardian. As well as I can, madam.
Cleopatra. And when good will is show'd, though't come
too short,
The actor may plead pardon. I'll none now:
Give me mine angle; we'll to the river: there,
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finn'd fishes; my bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and, as I draw them up,
I'll think them every one an Antony,
And say 'Ah, ha! you're caught.'
Charmian. 'Twas merry when
You wager'd on your angling; when your diver
Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he
With fervency drew up.
The characters in Chekhov's story Moya zhizn' ("My Life," 1896) include Misail's sister Kleopatra. In Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov (1825) Varlaam and Misail are the monks whom Grishka Otrepiev meets in a tavern near the Lithuanian border. On Van's eighth birthday (January 1, 1878) Demon made himself up as Boris Godunov in an amateur parody:
Demon spoke on: ‘I cannot disinherit you: Aqua left you enough "ridge" and real estate to annul the conventional punishment. And I cannot denounce you to the authorities without involving my daughter, whom I mean to protect at all cost. But I can do the next proper thing, I can curse you, I can make this our last, our last —’
Van, whose finger had been gliding endlessly to and fro along the mute but soothingly smooth edge of the mahogany desk, now heard with horror the sob that shook Demon’s entire frame, and then saw a deluge of tears flowing down those hollow tanned cheeks. In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity. Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? The funest gamester… the pale fatal girl, in another well-known melodrama…. In this one. Van gave him a clean handkerchief to replace the soiled rag. His own marble calm did not surprise Van. The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion. (2.11)
In Pushkin's poem Kleopatra ("Cleopatra," 1828) sometimes included in Pushkin's unfinished novella Egipetskie nochi ("The Egyptian Nights," 1835) Cleopatra offers to buy her night and names death as the price of her love:
Чертог сиял. Гремели хором
Певцы при звуке флейт и лир.
Царица голосом и взором
Свой пышный оживляла пир;
Сердца неслись к её престолу,
Но вдруг над чашей золотой
Она задумалась и долу
Поникла дивною главой…
И пышный пир как будто дремлет,
Безмолвны гости. Хор молчит.
Но вновь она чело подъемлет
И с видом ясным говорит:
В моей любви для вас блаженство?
Блаженство можно вам купить…
Внемлите ж мне: могу равенство
Меж нами я восстановить.
Кто к торгу страстному приступит?
Свою любовь я продаю;
Скажите: кто меж вами купит
Ценою жизни ночь мою? —
Pushkin’s poem begins: Chertog siyal... ("The palace shone..."). As a little girl, Ada spent the winters in the former Zemski chertog:
Another time, on a bicycle ride (with several pauses) along wood trails and country roads, soon after the night of the Burning Barn, but before they had come across the herbarium in the attic, and found confirmation of something both had forefelt in an obscure, amusing, bodily rather than moral way, Van casually mentioned he was born in Switzerland and had been abroad twice in his boyhood. She had been once, she said. Most summers she spent at Ardis; most winters in their Kaluga town home - two upper stories in the former Zemski chertog (palazzo). (1.24)
Van meets Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in Mont Roux in October, 1905, half a year after Demon's death in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Van does not realize that his father died because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot (whom Ada must have promised a night of love) to destroy his machine in midair. A spicy bit is that in February 1905, when she writes to Van telling him that they can meet in October, Ada is pregnant. Because love is blind, Van fails to see that Andrey Vinelander and Ada have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren. During one of their walks in Ardis Park Ada tells Van that she saw the verse ‘far enough, fair enough’ in small violet letters before he put it into orange ones:
They walked through a grove and past a grotto.
Ada said: ‘Officially we are maternal cousins, and cousins can marry by special decree, if they promise to sterilize their first five children. But, moreover, the father-in-law of my mother was the brother of your grandfather. Right?’
‘That’s what I’m told,’ said Van serenely.
‘Not sufficiently distant,’ she mused, ‘or is it?’
‘Far enough, fair enough.’
‘Funny — I saw that verse in small violet letters before you put it into orange ones — just one second before you spoke. Spoke, smoke. Like the puff preceding a distant cannon shot.’
‘Physically,’ she continued, ‘we are more like twins than cousins, and twins or even siblings can’t marry, of course, or will be jailed and "altered," if they persevere.’
‘Unless,’ said Van, ‘they are specially decreed cousins.’ (1.24)