Subject
moles in Ada
From
Date
Body
Most summers she [Ada] spent at Ardis; most winters in their Kaluga town home - two upper stories in the former Zemski chertog (palazzo). (1.24)
He [Van] 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. (ibid.)
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. (ibid.)
Chertog (royal palace) is mentioned in S. T. Aksakov's fairy tale Alen'kiy tsvetochek ("The Little Scarlet Flower") appended to "The Childhood Years of Bagrov Grandson" (1858):
Выходит он под конец на поляну широкую, и посередь той поляны широкой стоит дом не дом, чертог не чертог, а дворец королевский или царский, весь в огне, в серебре и золоте и в каменьях самоцветных, весь горит и светит, а огня не видать; ровно солнышко красное, индо тяжело на него глазам смотреть.
At last he emerged into a wide clearing and there in the centre a fantastic sight met his gaze: neither house nor mansion, but a magnificient royal palace decorated with silver, and gold, and precious stones. It blazed and glittered, but no fire was to be seen. It was like staring into the brilliant sun, and the vision hurt his eyes.
On the other hand, Pushkin's poem "Cleopatra" (recited by the improvisatore in "The Egyptian Nights," 1835) begins: "Chertog siyal..." ("The palace shone...")
Chertog has chert (also spelt chort and chyort), "devil," in it.
They traveled to Kaluga and drank the Kaluga Waters, and saw the family dentist. Van, flipping through a magazine, heard Ada scream and say 'chort' (devil) in the next room, which he had never heard her do before. (1.22)
In Lipetskie vody ("The Lipetsk Waters," 1815), a comedy by "caustic" Shakhovskoy, the poet Zhukovski* is satirized as Fialkin. Fialka being Russian for "violet," Ada calls Violet Knox (old Van's secretary, 5.4) Fialochka (little violet). "The Night Violet" is a poem (1906) by Blok. Blok's Incognita (1906) ends in the lines:
В моей душе лежит сокровище,
И ключ поручен только мне!
Ты право, пьяное чудовище!
Я знаю: истина в вине.
A treasure lies in my soul,
And the key is entrusted to me alone!
The drunken monster, you are right!
I know: in wine is truth.
Klyuch (key) brings to mind klyuchnitsa (housekeeper)** Pelageya who in The Childhood Years of Bagrov Grandson tells little hero the fairy tale “Alen’kiy tsvetochek.” As to p'yanoe chudovishche (drunken monster), it reminds one of chudishche mokhnatoe (shaggy monster), the owner of chertog in Aksakov's fairy tale.
...he [Van] indulged in a brutal outburst triggered by her suggesting - quite sweetly and casually (as she [Ada] might suggest walking a little way on the edge of a bog to see if a certain orchid was out) - that they visit the late Krolik's grave in a churchyard by which they were passing - and he had suddenly started to shout ('You know I abhor churchyards, I despise, I denounce death, dead bodies are burlesque, I refuse to stare at a stone under which a roly-poly old Pole is rotting, let him feed his maggots in peace, the entomologies of death leave me cold, I detest, I despise...' (1.41)
In Chapter Three of Blok's Retribution (1910-21) the hero visits the grave of his father (Demon) in Warsaw:
Отец лежит в Аллее Роз.
The Father lies in the Rose Avenue [a street in Warsaw].
At Marina's cremation Demon (whose life "was a rose garden all the time") promises not to fool the poor grubs but five years later breaks his promise perishing in an airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7).
chertog + barin/brain + malen'kiy + Ada = chert + Bog + Marina + alen'kiy + ad/da
luna + Charski = Lunacharski
voda + barin = vino/voin + da + bar/rab
barin - master
malen'kiy - little
Bog - God
ad - hell
da - yes
luna - moon
Charski - the author-like figure in "The Egyptian Nights"
Lunacharski - the minister of education in Lenin's government
voda - water
vino - wine
voin - warrior
rab - slave
Chekhov is the author of Volodya bol'shoy i Volodya malen'kiy ("The Two Volodyas," 1893). One of the story's characters, Rita, is a spinster who can drink any amount of wine and liquors without being drunk and who tells scandalous anecdotes in a languid and tasteless way. In Chekhov's story Women from the Point of View of a Drunkard (1885), signed "My brother's brother," girls under sixteen are compared to distilled water. Poor Aqua's last note is signed "My sister's sister who teper' iz ada [now is out of hell]" (1.3) Aqua's twin sister Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) is a namesake of Marina Mnishek, the Polish beauty in Pushkin's play "Boris Godunov" (1825).
Marina = Armina = Ariman
Armina - Villa Armina, Demon's Mediterranean Villa that he gave to Marina
Ariman - Russian spelling of Ahriman (in Zoroastrianism, the impersonification of evil); in Garshin's story Krasnyi tsvetok ("The Red Flower," 1883) the flowers of poppy are compared to Ahriman:
Это было таинственное, страшное существо, противоположность Богу, Ариман, принявший скромный и невинный вид.
It was a mysterious, terrible creature, God’s opposite, Ahriman, that adopted a humble and innocent disguise.
He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space's recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok's Incognita. (3.3)
The girl whom Van does not recognize at first turns out to be Lucette.
In his memoir essay on Chekhov, Iz vospominaniy ob Antone Chekhove ("From the Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov," 1906), Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov speaks of op'yanenie Chekhovym (intoxication with Chekhov):
Даже выражение "знакомство с Чеховым" как-то сюда не укладывается - вернее было бы назвать тогдашнее настроение - "опьянение Чеховым"... опьянение его талантом, умом, юмором, всей его личностью, чуждой фразы и мелочной условности. (chapter I "The First Acquaintance")
Shcheglov's essay begins as follows:
Одно из самых дорогих украшений моего рабочего стола - портрет Антона Чехова с дружеской надписью: "...на добрую нежную память о старине глубокой, когда мы познакомились..."
One of the dearest things that grace my writing-table is the picture of Anton Chekhov with his friendly inscription: "...as a fond and tender memento of deep ancientry when we got acquainted..."
O starine glubokoy ("of deep ancientry") is a reference to the opening lines of Canto One of Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820):
Дела давно минувших дней,
Преданья старины глубокой.
The ways and deeds of days gone by,
the legends of deep ancientry.
Her florimania endured, alas; but after Dr Krolik died (in 1886) of a heart attack in his garden, she had placed all her live pupae in his open coffin where he lay, she said, as plump and pink as in vivo. (1.35)
in vivo + starine = in vino veritas
As he speaks of the circumstances of his first meeting with Chekhov, Shcheglov mentions the poet Nadson (1862-87):
Знакомство произошло в большой зале ресторана гостиницы "Москва"; помню даже такую мелочь - именно за последним столом у окна, что против входа в залу, - тем более помню, что за этим самым столом, по странной случайности, не раз приходилось скромно пировать со свежеиспечённым офицериком Каспийского полка Семёном Надсоном...
In a letter to Suvorin in which he says that the works of contemporary writers lack the alcohol that would intoxicate the reader Chekhov mentions Nadson:
Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade?
Shcheglov was a playwright. In his letters to Shcheglov Chekhov tried to persuade his friend to stop writing for the stage and return to plain prose. (Similarly, Tolstoy said to Chekhov that he disliked Chekhov's plays and that they were even worse than Shakespeare's.)
According to Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, "Lermontov was the first Nadson of Russian literature" (The Gift, Chapter Four). Lermontov is the author of Demon (1829-39). Demon is the society nickname of Van's and Ada's father.
With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich [Aksakov], he [Van] 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. (1.28)
*Zhukovski was a son of Afanasiy Bunin, a Tula landowner, and Salha, a Turkish girl from Bendery (Bessarabia)
**Note also the housekeeper of Onegin’s late uncle who forty years had squabbled with her (EO, Two, III, 2-3) and Van'ka klyuchnik, the hero of a popular folk song
p.s. Carolyn: your "lights" dimmed in my memory. Do you mean that Krolik was poisoned, like Hamlet's father? Or that he was asleep, not dead?
Alexey Sklyarenko
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He [Van] 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. (ibid.)
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. (ibid.)
Chertog (royal palace) is mentioned in S. T. Aksakov's fairy tale Alen'kiy tsvetochek ("The Little Scarlet Flower") appended to "The Childhood Years of Bagrov Grandson" (1858):
Выходит он под конец на поляну широкую, и посередь той поляны широкой стоит дом не дом, чертог не чертог, а дворец королевский или царский, весь в огне, в серебре и золоте и в каменьях самоцветных, весь горит и светит, а огня не видать; ровно солнышко красное, индо тяжело на него глазам смотреть.
At last he emerged into a wide clearing and there in the centre a fantastic sight met his gaze: neither house nor mansion, but a magnificient royal palace decorated with silver, and gold, and precious stones. It blazed and glittered, but no fire was to be seen. It was like staring into the brilliant sun, and the vision hurt his eyes.
On the other hand, Pushkin's poem "Cleopatra" (recited by the improvisatore in "The Egyptian Nights," 1835) begins: "Chertog siyal..." ("The palace shone...")
Chertog has chert (also spelt chort and chyort), "devil," in it.
They traveled to Kaluga and drank the Kaluga Waters, and saw the family dentist. Van, flipping through a magazine, heard Ada scream and say 'chort' (devil) in the next room, which he had never heard her do before. (1.22)
In Lipetskie vody ("The Lipetsk Waters," 1815), a comedy by "caustic" Shakhovskoy, the poet Zhukovski* is satirized as Fialkin. Fialka being Russian for "violet," Ada calls Violet Knox (old Van's secretary, 5.4) Fialochka (little violet). "The Night Violet" is a poem (1906) by Blok. Blok's Incognita (1906) ends in the lines:
В моей душе лежит сокровище,
И ключ поручен только мне!
Ты право, пьяное чудовище!
Я знаю: истина в вине.
A treasure lies in my soul,
And the key is entrusted to me alone!
The drunken monster, you are right!
I know: in wine is truth.
Klyuch (key) brings to mind klyuchnitsa (housekeeper)** Pelageya who in The Childhood Years of Bagrov Grandson tells little hero the fairy tale “Alen’kiy tsvetochek.” As to p'yanoe chudovishche (drunken monster), it reminds one of chudishche mokhnatoe (shaggy monster), the owner of chertog in Aksakov's fairy tale.
...he [Van] indulged in a brutal outburst triggered by her suggesting - quite sweetly and casually (as she [Ada] might suggest walking a little way on the edge of a bog to see if a certain orchid was out) - that they visit the late Krolik's grave in a churchyard by which they were passing - and he had suddenly started to shout ('You know I abhor churchyards, I despise, I denounce death, dead bodies are burlesque, I refuse to stare at a stone under which a roly-poly old Pole is rotting, let him feed his maggots in peace, the entomologies of death leave me cold, I detest, I despise...' (1.41)
In Chapter Three of Blok's Retribution (1910-21) the hero visits the grave of his father (Demon) in Warsaw:
Отец лежит в Аллее Роз.
The Father lies in the Rose Avenue [a street in Warsaw].
At Marina's cremation Demon (whose life "was a rose garden all the time") promises not to fool the poor grubs but five years later breaks his promise perishing in an airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7).
chertog + barin/brain + malen'kiy + Ada = chert + Bog + Marina + alen'kiy + ad/da
luna + Charski = Lunacharski
voda + barin = vino/voin + da + bar/rab
barin - master
malen'kiy - little
Bog - God
ad - hell
da - yes
luna - moon
Charski - the author-like figure in "The Egyptian Nights"
Lunacharski - the minister of education in Lenin's government
voda - water
vino - wine
voin - warrior
rab - slave
Chekhov is the author of Volodya bol'shoy i Volodya malen'kiy ("The Two Volodyas," 1893). One of the story's characters, Rita, is a spinster who can drink any amount of wine and liquors without being drunk and who tells scandalous anecdotes in a languid and tasteless way. In Chekhov's story Women from the Point of View of a Drunkard (1885), signed "My brother's brother," girls under sixteen are compared to distilled water. Poor Aqua's last note is signed "My sister's sister who teper' iz ada [now is out of hell]" (1.3) Aqua's twin sister Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) is a namesake of Marina Mnishek, the Polish beauty in Pushkin's play "Boris Godunov" (1825).
Marina = Armina = Ariman
Armina - Villa Armina, Demon's Mediterranean Villa that he gave to Marina
Ariman - Russian spelling of Ahriman (in Zoroastrianism, the impersonification of evil); in Garshin's story Krasnyi tsvetok ("The Red Flower," 1883) the flowers of poppy are compared to Ahriman:
Это было таинственное, страшное существо, противоположность Богу, Ариман, принявший скромный и невинный вид.
It was a mysterious, terrible creature, God’s opposite, Ahriman, that adopted a humble and innocent disguise.
He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space's recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok's Incognita. (3.3)
The girl whom Van does not recognize at first turns out to be Lucette.
In his memoir essay on Chekhov, Iz vospominaniy ob Antone Chekhove ("From the Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov," 1906), Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov speaks of op'yanenie Chekhovym (intoxication with Chekhov):
Даже выражение "знакомство с Чеховым" как-то сюда не укладывается - вернее было бы назвать тогдашнее настроение - "опьянение Чеховым"... опьянение его талантом, умом, юмором, всей его личностью, чуждой фразы и мелочной условности. (chapter I "The First Acquaintance")
Shcheglov's essay begins as follows:
Одно из самых дорогих украшений моего рабочего стола - портрет Антона Чехова с дружеской надписью: "...на добрую нежную память о старине глубокой, когда мы познакомились..."
One of the dearest things that grace my writing-table is the picture of Anton Chekhov with his friendly inscription: "...as a fond and tender memento of deep ancientry when we got acquainted..."
O starine glubokoy ("of deep ancientry") is a reference to the opening lines of Canto One of Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820):
Дела давно минувших дней,
Преданья старины глубокой.
The ways and deeds of days gone by,
the legends of deep ancientry.
Her florimania endured, alas; but after Dr Krolik died (in 1886) of a heart attack in his garden, she had placed all her live pupae in his open coffin where he lay, she said, as plump and pink as in vivo. (1.35)
in vivo + starine = in vino veritas
As he speaks of the circumstances of his first meeting with Chekhov, Shcheglov mentions the poet Nadson (1862-87):
Знакомство произошло в большой зале ресторана гостиницы "Москва"; помню даже такую мелочь - именно за последним столом у окна, что против входа в залу, - тем более помню, что за этим самым столом, по странной случайности, не раз приходилось скромно пировать со свежеиспечённым офицериком Каспийского полка Семёном Надсоном...
In a letter to Suvorin in which he says that the works of contemporary writers lack the alcohol that would intoxicate the reader Chekhov mentions Nadson:
Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade?
Shcheglov was a playwright. In his letters to Shcheglov Chekhov tried to persuade his friend to stop writing for the stage and return to plain prose. (Similarly, Tolstoy said to Chekhov that he disliked Chekhov's plays and that they were even worse than Shakespeare's.)
According to Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, "Lermontov was the first Nadson of Russian literature" (The Gift, Chapter Four). Lermontov is the author of Demon (1829-39). Demon is the society nickname of Van's and Ada's father.
With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich [Aksakov], he [Van] 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. (1.28)
*Zhukovski was a son of Afanasiy Bunin, a Tula landowner, and Salha, a Turkish girl from Bendery (Bessarabia)
**Note also the housekeeper of Onegin’s late uncle who forty years had squabbled with her (EO, Two, III, 2-3) and Van'ka klyuchnik, the hero of a popular folk song
p.s. Carolyn: your "lights" dimmed in my memory. Do you mean that Krolik was poisoned, like Hamlet's father? Or that he was asleep, not dead?
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/