Vladimir Nabokov

Ardis & ardor in Ada

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 8 March, 2020

Describing Daniel Veen’s triple trip round the globe, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle, 1969) mentions Dan’s smelly but nice cicerone:

 

Poor Dan’s erotic life was neither complicated nor beautiful, but somehow or other (he soon forgot the exact circumstances as one forgets the measurements and price of a fondly made topcoat worn on and off for at least a couple of seasons) he fell comfortably in love with Marina, whose family he had known when they still had their Raduga place (later sold to Mr Eliot, a Jewish businessman). One afternoon in the spring of 1871, he proposed to Marina in the Up elevator of Manhattan’s first ten-floor building, was indignantly rejected at the seventh stop (Toys), came down alone and, to air his feelings, set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe, adopting, like an animated parallel, the same itinerary every time. In November 1871, as he was in the act of making his evening plans with the same smelly but nice cicerone in a cafe-au-lait suit whom he had hired already twice at the same Genoese hotel, an aerocable from Marina (forwarded with a whole week's delay via his Manhattan office which had filed it away through a new girl's oversight in a dove hole marked RE AMOR) arrived on a silver salver telling him she would marry him upon his return to America. (1.1)

 

In Myortvye dushi (“Dead Souls,” 1842) Gogol compares a clerk in the service of Themis (the ancient Greek goddess of justice) to Virgil and Chichikov and Manilov, to Dante:

 

- Вот он вас проведёт в присутствие! - сказал Иван Антонович, кивнув головою, и один из священнодействующих, тут же находившихся, приносивший с таким усердием жертвы Фемиде, что оба рукава лопнули на локтях и давно лезла оттуда подкладка, за что и получил в своё время коллежского регистратора, прислужился нашим приятелям, как некогда Виргилий прислужился Данту, и провёл их в комнату присутствия, где стояли одни только широкие кресла и в них перед столом, за зерцалом и двумя толстыми книгами, сидел один, как солнце, председатель. В этом месте новый Вергилий почувствовал такое благоговение, что никак не осмелился занести туда ногу и поворотил назад, показав свою спину, вытертую, как рогожка, с прилипнувшим где-то куриным пером.

 

Upon that one of the toilers in the service of Themis—a zealot who had offered her such heartfelt sacrifice that his coat had burst at the elbows and lacked a lining—escorted our friends (even as Virgil had once escorted Dante) to the apartment of the office. In this sanctum were some massive armchairs, a table laden with two or three fat books, and a large looking-glass. Lastly, in (apparently) sunlike isolation, there was seated at the table the President. On arriving at the door of the apartment, our modern Virgil seemed to have become so overwhelmed with awe that, without daring even to intrude a foot, he turned back, and, in so doing, once more exhibited a back as shiny as a mat, and having adhering to it, in one spot, a hen's feather. (chapter VII)

 

Like Dan's cicerone, Chichikov's serf Petrushka has his own peculiar smell:

 

Кроме страсти к чтению, он имел ещё два обыкновения, составлявшие две другие его характерические черты: спать не раздеваясь, так, как есть, в том же сюртуке, и носить всегда с собою какой-то свой особенный воздух, своего собственного запаха, отзывавшийся несколько жилым покоем, так что достаточно было ему только пристроить где-нибудь свою кровать, хоть даже в необитаемой дотоле комнате, да перетащить туда шинель и пожитки, и уже казалось, что в этой комнате лет десять жили люди.

 

In addition to his love of poring over books, he could boast of two habits which constituted two other essential features of his character—namely, a habit of retiring to rest in his clothes (that is to say, in the brown jacket above-mentioned) and a habit of everywhere bearing with him his own peculiar atmosphere, his own peculiar smell—a smell which filled any lodging with such subtlety that he needed but to make up his bed anywhere, even in a room hitherto untenanted, and to drag thither his greatcoat and other impedimenta, for that room at once to assume an air of having been lived in during the past ten years. (chapter II)

 

In Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), “The Life of Chernyshevski,” Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev mentions the smell of Gogol's Petrushka. In German Gift means "poison." In Aldanov's novel Klyuch (“The Key,” 1929) the lawyer Kremenetski imagines how he will defend Zagryatski (whom the police suspects of poisoning Fisher, a rich St. Petersburg banker who led a dissipated life and, like VN’s Humbert, loved little girls). Thinking of his future speech at court, Kremenetski calls Zagryatski "Fisher's cicerone in the whirlwind of metropolitan revelry, in the drunken ecstasy of debaucheries" and compares him to "a kind of Virgil of that unattractive Dante:"
 

Зaгряцкий был "чичероне Фишерa в вихре столичного рaзгулa, в пьяном угaре кутежей, своего родa Вергилий при этом мaлопривлекaтельном Дaнте, - с горькой усмешкой говорил нa суде Кременецкий, - дa простит мне неподобaющее срaвнение тень великого поэтa"… (Part One, chpater XXVI)

 

Dan's cousin Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) was a great fisherman in his youth:

 

Daniel Veen’s mother was a Trumbell, and he was prone to explain at great length — unless sidetracked by a bore-baiter — how in the course of American history an English ‘bull’ had become a New England ‘bell.’ Somehow or other he had ‘gone into business’ in his twenties and had rather rankly grown into a Manhattan art dealer. He did not have — initially at least — any particular liking for paintings, had no aptitude for any kind of salesmanship, and no need whatever to jolt with the ups and downs of a ‘job’ the solid fortune inherited from a series of far more proficient and venturesome Veens. Confessing that he did not much care for the countryside, he spent only a few carefully shaded summer weekends at Ardis, his magnificent manor near Ladore. He had revisited only a few times since his boyhood another estate he had, up north on Lake Kitezh, near Luga, comprising, and practically consisting of, that large, oddly rectangular though quite natural body of water which a perch he had once clocked took half an hour to cross diagonally and which he owned jointly with his cousin, a great fisherman in his youth. (1.1)

 

The name Ardis seems to hint at paradise. In her last note Aqua (Demon’s wife who went mad because she was poisoned by her twin sister Marina) mentions Ardis Park:

 

Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.

 

[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’

iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)

 

In Dante's Divine Comedy Virgil is Dante's guide in Hell and Purgatory. In his Eclogue X Virgil famously mentions amor (cf. a dove hole marked RE AMOR):

 

Amor vincit omnia, et nos cedamus amori.
(Love conquers all things, so we too shall yield to love.)

 

Amor is Latin for “love.” On the other hand, Amor is the ancient Roman god of love who is often portrayed with a bow and arrows. As pointed out by Mlle Larivière (Lucette’s governess), in Greek ardis means “the point of an arrow:”

 

He found the game [Flavita, the Russian Scrabble] rather fatiguing, and toward the end played hurriedly and carelessly, not deigning to check ‘rare’ or ‘obsolete’ but quite acceptable possibilities provided by a loyal dictionary. As to ambitious, incompetent and temperamental Lucette, she had to be, even at twelve, discreetly advised by Van who did so chiefly because it saved time and brought a little closer the blessed moment when she could be bundled off to the nursery, leaving Ada available for the third or fourth little flourish of the sweet summer day. Especially boring were the girls’ squabbles over the legitimacy of this or that word: proper names and place names were taboo, but there occurred borderline cases, causing no end of heartbreak, and it was pitiful to see Lucette cling to her last five letters (with none left in the box) forming the beautiful ARDIS which her governess had told her meant ‘the point of an arrow’ — but only in Greek, alas. (1.36)

 

In VN's novel Zashchita Luzhina ("The Luzhin Defence," 1930) Luzhin mentions Amur (Cupid):

 

Тут-то и произошло. Лужин огляделся и протянул трость.

"Дорожка,-- сказал он.-- Смотрите. Дорожка. Я шёл. И вы представьте себе, кого я встретил. Кого же я встретил? Из мифов. Амура. Но не со стрелой, а с камушком. Я был поражён".

 

This is when it happened. Luzhin looked around and held out his cane.
"This footpath," he said. "Consider this footpath. I was walking along. And just imagine whom I met. Whom did I meet? Out of the myths. Cupid. But not with an arrow--with a pebble. I was struck." (Chapter 7)

 

The son of Venus and Mars, Amor brings to mind Eric Veen’s floramors (palatial brothels):

 

After being removed from Note to a small private school in Vaud Canton and then spending a consumptive summer in the Maritime Alps, he [Eric Veen] was sent to Ex-en-Valais, whose crystal air was supposed at the time to strengthen young lungs; instead of which its worst hurricane hurled a roof tile at him, fatally fracturing his skull, Among the boy’s belongings David van Veen found a number of poems and the draft of an essay entitled ‘Villa Venus: an Organized Dream.’

To put it bluntly, the boy had sought to solace his first sexual torments by imagining and detailing a project (derived from reading too many erotic works found in a furnished house his grandfather had bought near Vence from Count Tolstoy, a Russian or Pole): namely, a chain of palatial brothels that his inheritance would allow him to establish all over ‘both hemispheres of our callipygian globe.’ The little chap saw it as a kind of fashionable club, with branches, or, in his poetical phrase, ‘Floramors,’ in the vicinity of cities and spas. (2.3)

 

Floramor is a portmanteau combining Flora (the Roman goddess of flowers) with Amor. In Eugene Onegin (One: XXXII: 1-4) Pushkin mentions Diana's bosom and Flora's cheeks:

 

Дианы грудь, ланиты Флоры
Прелестны, милые друзья!
Однако ножка Терпсихоры
Прелестней чем-то для меня.

 

Diana's bosom, Flora's cheeks

are charming, dear friends!

However, the little foot of Terpsichore

is for me in some way more charming.

 

When Lucette tells him about Ada’s amours, Van mentally calls Ada ‘Adiana:’

 

‘Van, I’m boring you?’

‘Oh, nonsense, it’s a gripping and palpitating little case history.’

Because that was really not bad: bringing down three in as many years — besides winging a fourth. Jolly good shot — Adiana! Wonder whom she’ll bag next. (2.5)

 

Like her mother Marina, Ada is an actress. Describing Onegin’s visit to a theater in Chapter One (XXII) of EO, Pushkin mentions amury, cherti, zmei (amors, diaboli, and dragons):

 

Ещё амуры, черти, змеи
На сцене скачут и шумят;
Ещё усталые лакеи
На шубах у подъезда спят;
Ещё не перестали топать,
Сморкаться, кашлять, шикать, хлопать;
Ещё снаружи и внутри
Везде блистают фонари;
Ещё, прозябнув, бьются кони,
Наскуча упряжью своей,
И кучера, вокруг огней,
Бранят господ и бьют в ладони:
А уж Онегин вышел вон;
Домой одеться едет он.

 

Amors, diaboli, and dragons

still on the stage jump and make noise;

still at the carriage porch the weary footmen

on the pelisses are asleep;

still people have not ceased to stamp,

blow noses, cough, hiss, clap;

still, outside and inside,

lamps glitter everywhere;

still, chilled, the horses fidget,

bored with their harness,

and round the fires the coachmen curse their masters

and beat their palms together;

and yet Onegin has already left;

he's driving home to dress.

 

Like Onegin, Demon Veen (who made love to Marina between the two scenes) left the theater before the end of the performance (a stage version of what looks like a cross between Pushkin’s EO and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago):

 

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss, as she ran, flushed and flustered, in a pink dress into the orchard, earning a claque third of the sitting ovation that greeted the instant dispersal of the imbecile but colorful transfigurants from Lyaska — or Iveria. Her meeting with Baron O., who strolled out of a side alley, all spurs and green tails, somehow eluded Demon’s consciousness, so struck was he by the wonder of that brief abyss of absolute reality between two bogus fulgurations of fabricated life. Without waiting for the end of the scene, he hurried out of the theater into the crisp crystal night, the snowflakes star-spangling his top hat as he returned to his house in the next block to arrange a magnificent supper. By the time he went to fetch his new mistress in his jingling sleigh, the last-act ballet of Caucasian generals and metamorphosed Cinderellas had come to a sudden close, and Baron d’O., now in black tails and white gloves, was kneeling in the middle of an empty stage, holding the glass slipper that his fickle lady had left him when eluding his belated advances. The claqueurs were getting tired and looking at their watches when Marina in a black cloak slipped into Demon’s arms and swan-sleigh. (1.2)

 

On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) Pasternak's novel is known as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor, and Mertvago Forever:

 

She showed him next where the hammock — a whole set of hammocks, a canvas sack full of strong, soft nets — was stored: this was in the corner of a basement toolroom behind the lilacs, the key was concealed in this hole here which last year was stuffed by the nest of a bird — no need to identify it. A pointer of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled down the hill by some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who were now Van’s age and had grown very nice and quiet.

‘As we all are at that age,’ said Van and stooped to pick up a curved tortoiseshell comb — the kind that girls use to hold up their hair behind; he had seen one, exactly like that, quite recently, but when, in whose hairdo?

‘One of the maids,’ said Ada. ‘That tattered chapbook must also belong to her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor.’

‘Playing croquet with you,’ said Van, ‘should be rather like using flamingoes and hedgehogs.’

‘Our reading lists do not match,’ replied Ada. ‘That Palace in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so often promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable prejudice toward it. Have you read any of Mlle Larivière’s stories? Well, you will. She thinks that in some former Hindooish state she was a boulevardier in Paris; and writes accordingly. We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage, but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne which is really an elm.’ Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?

‘And now,’ she said, and stopped, staring at him.

‘Yes?’ he said, ‘and now?’

‘Well, perhaps, I ought not to try to divert you — after you trampled upon those circles of mine; but I’m going to relent and show you the real marvel of Ardis Manor; my larvarium, it’s in the room next to mine’ (which he never saw, never — how odd, come to think of it!). (1.8)

 

‘Who told you about that lewd cordelude — I mean, interlude?’

‘Your father, mon cher — we saw a lot of him in the West. Ada supposed, at first, that Tapper was an invented name — that you fought your duel with another person — but that was before anybody heard of the other person’s death in Kalugano. Demon said you should have simply cudgeled him.’

‘I could not,’ said Van, ‘the rat was rotting away in a hospital bed.’

‘I meant the real Tapper,’ cried Lucette (who was making a complete mess of her visit), ‘not my poor, betrayed, poisoned, innocent teacher of music, whom not even Ada, unless she fibs, could cure of his impotence.’

‘Driblets,’ said Van.

‘Not necessarily his,’ said Lucette. ‘His wife’s lover played the triple viol. Look, I’ll borrow a book’ (scanning on the nearest bookshelf The Gitanilla, Clichy Clichés, Mertvago Forever, The Ugly New Englander) ‘and curl up, komondi, in the next room for a few minutes, while you — Oh, I adore The Slat Sign.’ (2.5)

 

In his 'Notes to Ada' Vivian Darkbloom explains that zhiv means in Russian "alive" and mertv, "dead." At the end of EO (Eight: XLVIII: 10) Pushkin uses the phrase nadolgo… navsegda (for long… forever):

 

Она ушла. Стоит Евгений,
Как будто громом поражен.
В какую бурю ощущений
Теперь он сердцем погружен!
Но шпор незапный звон раздался,
И муж Татьянин показался,
И здесь героя моего,
В минуту, злую для него,
Читатель, мы теперь оставим,
Надолго... навсегда. За ним
Довольно мы путём одним
Бродили по свету. Поздравим
Друг друга с берегом. Ура!
Давно б (не правда ли?) пора!

 

She has gone. Eugene stands

as if by thunder struck.

In what a tempest of sensations

his heart is now immersed!

But there resounds a sudden clink of spurs,

and there appears Tatiana's husband,

and here my hero,

at an unfortunate minute for him,

reader, we now shall leave

for long... forever.... After him

sufficiently along one path

we've roamed the world. Let us congratulate

each other on attaining land. Hurrah!

It long (is it not true?) was time.

 

At the beginning of EO (One: VI: 7-8) Pushkin says that Onegin remembered, though not without fault, two lines from The Aeneid. In Book VII (ll. 411-412) of The Aeneid Virgil mentions Ardea:

 

Locus Ardea quondam Dictus avis: et nunc magnum manet Ardea nomen; Sed fortuna fuit.

(The place of old was called Ardea by our forefathers; and Ardea now remains an illustrious name; but its fortune has departed.)

 

Ardea brings to mind ardor, a word in the title of VN’s novel that comes from ardere (Lat., “to burn”).

 

At the beginning of Eclogue X Virgil mentions Arethusa (a nymph):

 

Extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem:
pauca meo Gallo, sed quae legat ipsa Lycoris,
carmina sunt dicenda: neget quis carmina Gallo?

Sic tibi, cum fluctus subterlabere Sicanos,
Doris amara suam non intermisceat undam;
incipe; sollicitos Galli dicamus amores,
dum tenera attondent simae uirgulta capellae.

 

O Arethusa, help me once again
To string some verses for my Gallus' ear,
Fit for Lycoris fair herself to read.
To Gallus mine, who would refuse such songs?

So may the bitter stream that Doris pours
Mingle not with thy wave as thou dost flow
Into the flood that loves fair Sicily!

(tr. J. W. Mackail)

 

According to Dr Fitzbishop (the surgeon in the Kalugano hospital where Van recovers after his duel with Captain Tapper), Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher) was poisoned with the not always lethal 'arethusoides:'

 

He wrote Cordula a short letter, saying he had met with a little accident, was in the suite for fallen princes in Lakeview Hospital, Kalugano, and would be at her feet on Tuesday. He also wrote an even shorter letter to Marina, in French, thanking her for a lovely summer. This, on second thought, he decided to send from Manhattan to the Pisang Palace Hotel in Los Angeles. A third letter he addressed to Bernard Rattner, his closest friend at Chose, the great Rattner’s nephew. ‘Your uncle has most honest standards,’ he wrote, in part, ‘but I am going to demolish him soon.’

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.

A large pine tree cast its shadow upon him and his book. He had borrowed it from a shelf holding a medley of medical manuals, tattered mystery tales, the Rivière de Diamants collection of Monparnasse stories, and this odd volume of the Journal of Modern Science with a difficult essay by Ripley, ‘The Structure of Space.’ He had been wrestling with its phoney formulas and diagrams for several days now and saw he would not be able to assimilate it completely before his release from Lakeview Hospital on the morrow.

A hot sunfleck reached him. and tossing the red volume aside, he got up from his chair. With the return of health the image of Ada kept rising within him like a bitter and brilliant wave, ready to swallow him. His bandages had been removed; nothing but a special vest-like affair of flannel enveloped his torso, and though it was tight and thick it did not protect him any longer from the poisoned point of Ardis. Arrowhead Manor. Le Château de la Flèche, Flesh Hall. (1.42)

 

Pushkin's EO begins: Moy dyadya samykh chestnykh pravil ("My uncle has most honest principles").

 

Van, Ada and their half-sister Lucette are the descendants of Prince Zemski. In his poem Pervyi sneg ("The First Snow," 1819) Prince Vyazemski compares a sleigh ride to the passing of youth:

 

По жизни так скользит горячность молодая,

И жить торопится, и чувствовать спешит!

 

O'er life thus glides young ardor:

to live it hurries and to feel it hastes...

 

The second line was used by Pushkin as a motto of Chapter One of EO.