Describing his journey with Lucette on Admiral Tobakoff, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Minataor, the famous artificial island on which Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) spent a torrid May:
To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts, and the wash of an old-fashioned swimming pool rhythmically flushed the green tiles, but Lucette was a hardy girl used to bracing winds no less than to the detestable sun. Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs, which looked lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom as the breeze dried her skin. With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse. (3.5)
A torrid May on Minataor brings to mind Zinaida Hippius's story Miss May (1907). Minataor is an anagram of Taormina. The second stanza of Zinaida Hippius’ poem Apel’sinnye tsvety (“The Orange Blossom,” 1897) begins with the line Pod serym nebom Taorminy (beneath gray sky of Taormina):
О, берегитесь, убегайте
От жизни легкой пустоты.
И прах земной не принимайте
За апельсинные цветы.
Под серым небом Таормины
Среди глубин некрасоты
На миг припомнились единый
Мне апельсинные цветы.
Поверьте, встречи нет случайной, —
Как мало их средь суеты!
И наша встреча дышит тайной,
Как апельсинные цветы.
Вы счастья ищете напрасно,
О, вы боитесь высоты!
А счастье может быть прекрасно,
Как апельсинные цветы.
Любите смелость нежеланья,
Любите радости молчанья,
Неисполнимые мечты,
Любите тайну нашей встречи,
И все несказанные речи,
И апельсинные цветы.
Pod serym nebom Taorminy brings to mind Pod znoynym nebom Argentiny, a tango that Van dances on his hands as Mascodagama (Van’s stage name):
Neither was the sheer physical pleasure of maniambulation a negligible factor, and the peacock blotches with which the carpet stained the palms of his hands during his gloveless dance routine seemed to be the reflections of a richly colored nether world that he had been the first to discover. For the tango, which completed his number on his last tour, he was given a partner, a Crimean cabaret dancer in a very short scintillating frock cut very low on the back. She sang the tango tune in Russian:
Pod znóynïm nébom Argentínï,
Pod strástnïy góvor mandolinï
‘Neath sultry sky of Argentina,
To the hot hum of mandolina
Fragile, red-haired ‘Rita’ (he never learned her real name), a pretty Karaite from Chufut Kale, where, she nostalgically said, the Crimean cornel, kizil’, bloomed yellow among the arid rocks, bore an odd resemblance to Lucette as she was to look ten years later. During their dance, all Van saw of her were her silver slippers turning and marching nimbly in rhythm with the soles of his hands. He recouped himself at rehearsals, and one night asked her for an assignation. She indignantly refused, saying she adored her husband (the make-up fellow) and loathed England. (1.30)
At the end of each stanza of her poem Zinaida Hippius mentions apel’sinnye tsvety (the orange blossom), a phrase that brings to mind Ronald Oranger, old Van’s secretary (and the editor of Ada) who marries Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, "little violet") after Van’s and Ada’s death. At the beginning of VN's story Vesna v Fial'te ("Spring in Fialta," 1936) the narrator mentions the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers:
Я этот городок люблю; потому ли, что во впадине его названия мне слышится сахаристо-сырой запах мелкого, тёмного, самого мятого из цветов, и не в тон, хотя внятное, звучание Ялты; потому ли, что его сонная весна особенно умащивает душу, не знаю; но как я был рад очнуться в нём, и вот шлёпать вверх, навстречу ручьям, без шапки, с мокрой головой, в макинтоше, надетом прямо на рубашку!
I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola; and also because there is something in the very somnolence of its humid Lent that especially anoints one's soul. So I was happy to be there again, to trudge uphill in inverse direction to the rivulet of the gutter, hatless, my head wet, my skin already suffused with warmth although I wore only a light mackintosh over my shirt.
A lovely Crimean town is Yalta. According to Van, the names Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive to Aqua (the poor mad twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina):
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)
Palermontovia blends Palermo (the capital of Sicily) with Lermontov (the author of "The Demon"). Taormina is a city in Sicily. The phenomenon of Terra appeared on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century. L is Lermontov's initial. As a result of the L disaster electricity was banned on Antiterra. Elektrichestvo (“Electricity,” 1901) is a poem by Zinaida Hippius quoted by her husband Dmitri Merezhkovski at least ten times in his book “Tolstoy and Dostoevski” (1902). The Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. January 3 is Lucette's birthday (Lucette was born in 1876 and dies on June 4, 1901, the year when Hippius wrote "Electricity").
Aqua’s pseudonym seems to hint at shchemyashchiy zvuk (a heart-rending sound) mentioned by Alexander 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.
Blok is the author of Nochnaya fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906), a poem in blank verse subtitled “A Dream,” and Neznakomka (“The Unknown Woman,” 1906). Describing his meeting with Lucette in Paris, Van mentions Blok’s Incognita:
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. 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)
One of young Blok’s poems is addressed to E. A. Baratynski. In his poem Poslednyaya smert’ (“The Last Death,” 1827) Baratynski mentions iskusstvennye ostrova (the artificial islands):
Сначала мир явил мне дивный сад:
Везде искусств, обилия приметы;
Близ веси весь и подле града град,
Везде дворцы, театры, водометы,
Везде народ, и хитрый свой закон
Стихии все признать заставил он.
Уж он морей мятежные пучины
На островах искусственных селил,
Уж рассекал небесные равнины
По прихоти им вымышленных крил;
Всё на земле движением дышало,
Всё на земле как будто ликовало.
In his essay “Pushkin” (1906) Merezhkovski mentions neyasnyi shyopot Sibilly (Sybil’s unclear whisper) in Baratynski’s poetry that was turned into a thunderous war cry by Leo Tolstoy:
Наконец, сомнения в благах западной культуры - неясный шёпот Сибиллы у Баратынского - Лев Толстой превратил в громовый воинственный клич; любовь к природе Лермонтова, его песни о безучастной красоте моря и неба - "в четыре упряжки", в полевую работу; христианство Достоевского и Гоголя, далёкое от действительной жизни, священный огонь, пожиравший их сердца - в страшный циклопический молот, направленный против главных устоев современного общества.
"Sybil’s unclear whisper" brings to mind Sybil Shade, the poet's wife in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962). According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad Commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), the maiden of Shade's mother was Caroline Lukin:
A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, née Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)
The author of a book on surnames, Kinbote points out that that Lukin comes from Luke. Luka (Luke in Russian spelling) is a character in Gorki's play Na dne ("At the Bottom," 1902). Gorki's play Deti solntsa ("Children of the Sun," 1905) brings to mind konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse. In Slovo o Polku Igoreve ("The Song of Igor's Campaign") the path of Great Hors, the Slavic sun god, is mentioned:
The path of Great Hors,
as a wolf, prowling, he [Vseslav] crossed.
For him in Polotsk
they rang for matins early
at St. Sophia the bells;
but he heard the ringing in Kiev. (ll. 665-670)
The "real" name of both Sybil Shade and Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be Sofia Botkin (born Lastochkin). The full name of the last king of Zembla is Charles Xavier Vseslav.
According to Lucette, in her Tobakoff cabin there is a steeplechase picture of 'Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up:'
There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of 'Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up' above dear Cordula's and Tobak's bed, in the suite 'wangled in one minute flat' from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks' love life during sea voyages. (3.5)
On the last day of their long lives Van and Ada translate Shade's famous poem into Russian:
She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed — a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern. They had spent most of the morning reworking their translation of a passage (lines 569–572) in John Shade’s famous poem:
…Sovetï mï dayom
Kak bït’ vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;
On ih vstrechaet — lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,
Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke…
(…We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives, both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another…)
Van pointed out that here was the rub — one is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy is handicapped — to a quite hopeless extent — by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends along — or your enemies for that matter — to the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvelous mortality. Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.
She did not laugh; she repeated to herself the verses that had given them such trouble. The Signy brain-shrinkers would gleefully claim that the reason the three ‘boths’ had been skipped in the Russian version was not at all, oh, not at all, because cramming three cumbersome amphibrachs into the pentameter would have necessitated adding at least one more verse for carrying the luggage.
‘Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right — I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!’ (5.6)