Reading about poisons in an encyclopedia, Martha and Franz (the characters in VN’s novel “King, Queen, Knave,” 1928) find out that Roman law saw in venefitsiy (deliberate toxication) a blend of murder and betrayal:
Из энциклопедического словаря они узнали о ядах Локусты и Борджиа. Какой-то отравленный перстень недели две мучил воображение Франца. По ночам ему снилось коварное рукопожатие. Он спросонья шарахался в сторону, и замирал, приподнявшись на напряженной руке; где под ним, на простыне, только что перекатился колючий перстень, и страшно было на него ненароком лечь. Но днём, при спокойном свете Марты, всё было опять так просто. Тоффана продавала свою водицу в склянках с невинным изображением святого. Словно после благодушной понюшки, почихивала жертва министра Лэстера. Марта нетерпеливо захлопывала словарь и искала в другом томе. Оказывалось, что римское право видело в венефиции сочетание убийства и предательства. "Умники..."- усмехалась Марта, резко перевертывая страницу. Но она не могла добраться до сути дела. Ироническое "смотри" отсылало ее к каким-то алкалоидам. Франц дышал, глядя через её плечо.
From a second-rate encyclopedia they learned about all sorts of dismal Lucrezias and Locustas. A hollow-diamond ring, filled with rainbow venom, tormented Franz's imagination. He would dream at night of a treacherous handshake. Half-awake, he would recoil and not dare to move: somewhere under him, on the sheet, the prickly ring had just rolled, and he was terrified it might sting him. But in the daytime, by Martha’s serene light, all was simple again. Tofana, a Sicilian girl, who dispatched 639 people, sold her “aqua” in vials mislabelled with the innocent image of a saint. The Earl of Leicester had a mellower method: his victim would blissfully sneeze after a pinch of lethal snuff. Martha would impatiently shut the P-R volume and search in another. They learned, with complete indifference, that toxemia caused anemia and that Roman law saw in deliberate toxication a blend of murder and betrayal. “Deep thinkers,” remarked Martha with a snarling laugh, sharply turning the page. Still she could not get to the heart of the matter. A sardonic “See” sent her to something called “alkaloids.” Another “See” led to the fang of a centipede, magnified, if you please. Franz, unaccustomed to big encyclopedias, breathed heavily as he looked over her shoulder. (Chapter 8)
Latin for “poisoning” and “witchcraft,” veneficium brings to mind a closet marked Venena in the third poem of Alexander Blok's cycle Plyaski Smerti (“Dances of Death,” 1912-14):
Пустая улица. Один огонь в окне.
Еврей-аптекарь охает во сне.
А перед шкапом с надписью Venena,
Хозяйственно согнув скрипучие колена,
Скелет, до глаз закутанный плащом,
Чего-то ищет, скалясь чёрным ртом...
Нашёл... Но ненароком чем-то звякнул,
И череп повернул... Аптекарь крякнул,
Привстал - и на другой свалился бок...
А гость меж тем - заветный пузырёк
Суёт из-под плаща двум женщинам безносым
На улице, под фонарём белёсым.
An empty street. A window's sole gleam.
A chemist-Jew is soughing in his dream.
And at the closet with a sign «Venena»,
His creaking knees bent in an earnest manner,
A skel'ton, in a cloak to his brows,
Is searching; a black grin untied his mouth.
Has found...Unintentionally clinked...
And turned his skull; a sleepy chemist winked,
And rose a bit — and was asleep again.
His visitor just took a little can
To offer to the couple of noseless maids,
Right outside — where the lonely gleaming fades.
(tr. B. Leyvi)
In the second poem of “Dances of Death” Blok famously mentions apteka (a drugstore):
Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века -
Все будет так. Исхода нет.
Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.
Night, street, lamp, drugstore,
A dull and meaningless light.
Go on and live another quarter century -
Nothing will change. There's no way out.
You'll die, then start from the beginning,
It will repeat, just like before:
Night, icy ripples on a canal,
Drugstore, street, lamp.
Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a Phree Pharmacy that Aqua organized in Belokonsk (the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse,’ a city in NW Canada) with Milton Abraham’s invaluable help:
In her erratic student years Aqua had left fashionable Brown Hill College, founded by one of her less reputable ancestors, to participate (as was also fashionable) in some Social Improvement project or another in the Severnïya Territorii. She organized with Milton Abraham’s invaluable help a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk, and fell grievously in love there with a married man, who after one summer of parvenu passion dispensed to her in his Camping Ford garçonnière preferred to give her up rather than run the risk of endangering his social situation in a philistine town where businessmen played ‘golf’ on Sundays and belonged to ‘lodges.’ The dreadful sickness, roughly diagnosed in her case, and in that of other unfortunate people, as an ‘extreme form of mystical mania combined with existalienation’ (otherwise plain madness), crept over her by degrees, with intervals of ecstatic peace, with skipped areas of precarious sanity, with sudden dreams of eternity-certainty, which grew ever rarer and briefer. (1.3)
General Ivan Durmanov (Aqua and Marina’s father) asked his wife why she did not call her daughter Tofana:
The Durmanovs’ favorite domain, however, was Raduga near the burg of that name, beyond Estotiland proper, in the Atlantic panel of the continent between elegant Kaluga, New Cheshire, U.S.A., and no less elegant Ladoga, Mayne, where they had their town house and where their three children were born: a son, who died young and famous, and a pair of difficult female twins. Dolly had inherited her mother's beauty and temper but also an older ancestral strain of whimsical, and not seldom deplorable, taste, well reflected, for instance, in the names she gave her daughters: Aqua and Marina ('Why not Tofana?' wondered the good and sur-royally antlered general with a controlled belly laugh, followed by a small closing cough of feigned detachment - he dreaded his wife's flares). (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Tofana: allusion to 'aqua tofana' (see any good dictionary).
sur-royally: fully antlered, with terminal prongs.
Tofana was a Sicilian girl. Describing Aqua’s bivouacs in her War of Worlds, Van mentions Palermontovia (a country that blends Palermo, the capital of Sicily, with Lermontov):
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)
Aqua’s pseudonym hints at shchemyashchiy zvuk (a heart-rending sound), a phrase used by Blok in the first line of his poem Priblizhaetsya zvuk... (“A sound approaches...” 1912):
Приближается звук. И, покорна щемящему звуку,
Молодеет душа.
И во сне прижимаю к губам твою прежнюю руку,
Не дыша.
Снится - снова я мальчик, и снова любовник,
И овраг, и бурьян,
И в бурьяне - колючий шиповник,
И вечерний туман.
Сквозь цветы, и листы, и колючие ветки, я знаю,
Старый дом глянет в сердце моё,
Глянет небо опять, розовея от краю до краю,
И окошко твоё.
Этот голос - он твой, и его непонятному звуку
Жизнь и горе отдам,
Хоть во сне твою прежнюю милую руку
Прижимая к губам.
At the beginning of his poem Borodino (1837) Lermontov repeats the word ved’ (it is, isn’t it) twice, in his poem Pered sudom (“Before the Trial,” 1915) Blok repeats it three times. Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set), Van uses the word ved’:
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)
The Amerussia of Abraham Milton brings to mind Milton Abraham who helped Aqua to organize a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk. One of Blok's poems begins: Belyi kon' chut' stupaet ustaloy nogoy... ("The white horse carefully treads with his tired foot..." 1905). In Blok’s poem Novaya Amerika (“The New America,” 1913) the new America is Russia.
Describing Eric Veen’s floramors (one hundred palatial brothels built by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, all over the world) Van mentions fabulous Palermontovia:
But on the whole it was the idyllic and the romantic that he favored. English gentlemen of parts found many pleasures in Letchworth Lodge, an honest country house plastered up to its bulleyes, or Itchenor Chat with its battered chimney breasts and hipped gables. None could help admiring David van Veen’s knack of making his brand-new Regency mansion look like a renovated farmhouse or of producing a converted convent on a small offshore island with such miraculous effect that one could not distinguish the arabesque from the arbutus, ardor from art, the sore from the rose. We shall always remember Little Lemantry near Rantchester or the Pseudotherm in the lovely cul-de-sac south of the viaduct of fabulous Palermontovia. We appreciated greatly his blending local banality (that château girdled with chestnuts, that castello guarded by cypresses) with interior ornaments that pandered to all the orgies reflected in the ceiling mirrors of little Eric’s erogenetics. Most effective, in a functional sense, was the protection the architect distilled, as it were, from the ambitus of his houses. Whether nestling in woodland dells or surrounded by a many-acred park, or overlooking terraced groves and gardens, access to Venus began by a private road and continued through a labyrinth of hedges and walls with inconspicuous doors to which only the guests and the guards had keys. Cunningly distributed spotlights followed the wandering of the masked and caped grandees through dark mazes of coppices; for one of the stipulations imagined by Eric was that ‘every establishment should open only at nightfall and close at sunrise.’ A system of bells that Eric may have thought up all by himself (it was really as old as the bautta and the vyshibala) prevented visitors from running into each other on the premises, so that no matter how many noblemen were waiting or wenching in any part of the floramor, each felt he was the only cock in the coop, because the bouncer, a silent and courteous person resembling a Manhattan shopwalker, did not count, of course: you sometimes saw him when a hitch occurred in connection with your credentials or credit but he was seldom obliged to apply vulgar force or call in an assistant. (2.3)
The author of an essay entitled “Villa Venus: an Organized Dream,” Eric Veen brings to mind Erica, Dreyer’s former mistress in King, Queen, Knave:
Помнишь, - сказал он и пропел фальшиво, но с чувством: "меня зовут Мими..."
- О, я уже не богема,- усмехнулась она, быстро-быстро тряся головой. - А вот ты все такой же, такой... (она не сразу могла подобрать слово) ...пустяковый.
Он опять подтолкнул мальчика, сгорбившегося над рулем, хотел его мимоходом погладить по светлокудрой голове, но тот уже отъехал...
- Ты мне не ответил: ты счастлив? - спросила Эрика.- Скажи?
- Пожалуй - не совсем,- ответил он и прищурился.
- Жена тебя любит?
- Как тебе сказать...-проговорил он и опять прищурился.- ...Видишь ли, она очень холодна... - Верна тебе? Держу пари, что изменяет. Ведь ты... Он рассмеялся:
- Ах, ты ее не знаешь. Я тебе говорю, - она холодна. Я себе не представляю, как она кого-либо - даже меня - по своей бы воле поцеловала.
“Don’t you remember, Erica, you would recite it with curtseys, oh, don’t you remember?”
“I certainly don’t. But I was asking you, Kurt. Does your wife love you?”
“Well, how should I put it. You see. ... She is not what you’d call a passionate woman. She does not make love on a bench in the park, or on a balcony like a swallow.”
“Is she faithful to you, your queen?”
“ Ihr ’ blasse Lippe war rot im Kuss . . . .”
“I bet she deceives you.”
“But I’m telling you she’s cold and reasonable, and self-controlled. Lovers! She does not know the first letter of adultery.” (Chapter 9)
According to Erica, she is not Bohemian anymore. Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) learns of Marina’s affair with Baron d’Onsky from a Bohemian lady:
Next day Demon was having tea at his favorite hotel with a Bohemian lady whom he had never seen before and was never to see again (she desired his recommendation for a job in the Glass Fish-and-Flower department in a Boston museum) when she interrupted her voluble self to indicate Marina and Aqua, blankly slinking across the hall in modish sullenness and bluish furs with Dan Veen and a dackel behind, and said:
‘Curious how that appalling actress resembles "Eve on the Clepsydrophone" in Parmigianino’s famous picture.’
‘It is anything but famous,’ said Demon quietly, ‘and you can’t have seen it. I don’t envy you,’ he added; ‘the naive stranger who realizes that he or she has stepped into the mud of an alien life must experience a pretty sickening feeling. Did you get that small-talk information directly from a fellow named d’Onsky or through a friend of a friend of his?’
‘Friend of his,’ replied the hapless Bohemian lady.
Upon being questioned in Demon’s dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so. Since prudent Veen preferred killing his man in Europe (decrepit but indestructible Gamaliel was said to be doing his best to forbid duels in the Western Hemisphere — a canard or an idealistic President’s instant-coffee caprice, for nothing was to come of it after all), Demon rented the fastest petroloplane available, overtook the Baron (looking very fit) in Nice, saw him enter Gunter’s Bookshop, went in after him, and in the presence of the imperturbable and rather bored English shopkeeper, back-slapped the astonished Baron across the face with a lavender glove. The challenge was accepted; two native seconds were chosen; the Baron plumped for swords; and after a certain amount of good blood (Polish and Irish — a kind of American ‘Gory Mary’ in barroom parlance) had bespattered two hairy torsoes, the whitewashed terrace, the flight of steps leading backward to the walled garden in an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement, the apron of a quite accidental milkmaid, and the shirtsleeves of both seconds, charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, the latter gentlemen separated the panting combatants, and Skonky died, not ‘of his wounds’ (as it was viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston — a city where, incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of Glass Biota at the local museum. (1.2)
The name of Demon’s adversary seems to hint at Onegin’s donskoy zherebets (Don stallion) in Chapter Two (V: 4) of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin:
Сначала все к нему езжали;
Но так как с заднего крыльца
Обыкновенно подавали
Ему донского жеребца,
Лишь только вдоль большой дороги
Заслышит их домашни дроги, -
Поступком оскорбясь таким,
Все дружбу прекратили с ним.
At first they all would call on him,
but since to the back porch
there was habitually brought
a Don stallion for him
the moment that along the highway
one heard their homely shandrydans -
outraged by such behavior,
they all ceased to be friends with him.
The name of the Dreyers’s dog in KQK seems to hint at Tomski, a character in Pushkin’s story Pikovaya dama (“The Queen of Spades,” 1834). According to Tomski, sixty years ago his grandmother (the Old Countess) was known in Paris as la Vénus moscovite:
Надобно знать, что бабушка моя, лет шестьдесят тому назад, ездила в Париж и была там в большой моде. Народ бегал за нею, чтоб увидеть la Vénus moscovite; Ришелье за нею волочился, и бабушка уверяет, что он чуть было не застрелился от её жестокости.
About sixty years ago, my grandmother went to Paris, where she created quite a sensation. People used to run after her to catch a glimpse of the 'Muscovite Venus.' Richelieu courted her, and my grandmother maintains that he almost blew out his brains in consequence of her cruelty. (chapter I)