Describing the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the muscat wine:
The muscat wine was uncorked. Ada’s and Ida’s healths drunk. ‘The conversation became general,’ as Monparnasse liked to write.
Count Percy de Prey turned to Ivan Demianovich Veen:
‘I’m told you like abnormal positions?’
The half-question was half-mockingly put. Van looked through his raised lunel at the honeyed sun.
‘Meaning what?’ he enquired.
‘Well — that walking-on-your-hands trick. One of your aunt’s servants is the sister of one of our servants and two pretty gossips form a dangerous team’ (laughing). ‘The legend has it that you do it all day long, in every corner, congratulations!’ (bowing).
Van replied: ‘The legend makes too much of my specialty. Actually, I practice it for a few minutes every other night, don’t I, Ada?’ (looking around for her). ‘May I give you, Count, some more of the mouse-and-cat — a poor pun, but mine.’
‘Vahn dear,’ said Marina, who was listening with delight to the handsome young men’s vivacious and carefree prattle, ‘tell him about your success in London. Zhe tampri (please)!’
‘Yes,’ said Van, ‘it all started as a rag, you know, up at Chose, but then —’
‘Van!’ called Ada shrilly. ‘I want to say something to you, Van, come here.’
Dorn (flipping through a literary review, to Trigorin): ‘Here, a couple of months ago, a certain article was printed... a Letter from America, and I wanted to ask you, incidentally’ (taking Trigorin by the waist and leading him to the front of the stage), ‘because I’m very much interested in that question...’
Ada stood with her back against the trunk of a tree, like a beautiful spy who has just rejected the blindfold.
‘I wanted to ask you, incidentally, Van’ (continuing in a whisper, with an angry flick of the wrist) — ‘stop playing the perfect idiot host; he came drunk as a welt, can’t you see?’ (1.39)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): etc.: Russ., distortion of je t’en prie.
Trigorin etc.: a reference to a scene in The Seagull.
At the end of Chekhov’s play Chayka (“The Seagull,” 1896) Dorn tells Trigorin to somehow get Arkadina away, for Konstantin Gavrilovich has just shot himself. In a letter of Feb. 17, 1900, to V. N. Ladyzhenski Chekhov mentions D. I. Tikhomirov and his vino muskat (Muskat vomitif):
Vive la Penza! Vive monsieur le membre de l’hôtel de Zemstvo! Vive la punition corporelle pour les moujiks!
Здравствуй, милый поэт, ревнитель просвещения, литературный летописец и будущий, как надо надеяться, историк пензенской цивилизации! Низко тебе кланяюсь и благодарю за письмо и книжицу! Письмо твое полно льстиво-величавых выражений; вероятно, недавно ты был в Москве на юбилее «Русской мысли», останавливался у Д. И. Тихомирова, слушал его слова и пил его вино мускат (Muskat vomitif) — и все это должно было повлиять на твой слог! Благодарю тебя и за поздравление с избранием в академики и позволяю себе выразить тебе сердечное соболезнование по поводу того, что ты не был избран. Против твоего избрания сильно восставал Антоний, митрополит санкт-петербургский. «Пензенских, говорил он, нам не надо!»
Van’s poor pun, “some more of the mouse-and-cat,” brings to mind koshka (cat) and mysh’ (mouse) mentioned by Chekhov in a letter of Feb. 15, 1888, to his brother Aleksandr Pavlovich:
М. Белинский сотрудник подходящий. Но — можешь не скрыть это мое мнение от Буренина — своим появлением в «Новом времени» он плюнул себе в лицо. Ни одна кошка во всем мире не издевалась так над мышью, как Буренин издевался над Ясинским, и... и что же? Всякому безобразию есть свое приличие, а посему на месте Ясинского я не показывал бы носа не только в «Нов<ое> время», но даже на Малую Итальянскую.
According to Chekhov, no cat in the world ever teased a mouse as much, as Burenin (a sarcastic critic) teased Yasinski. Ieronim Yasinski (1850-1931) wrote under the penname Maxim Belinski. In Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”), Chapter Four of VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937), Fyodor points out that when bothersome visitors asked Chernyshevski whom he thought the best living writer he named Maxim Belinski:
Вкусы его были вполне добротны. Его эпатировал Гюго. Ему импонировал Суинберн (что совсем не странно, если вдуматься). В списке книг, прочитанных им в крепости, фамилия Флобера написана по-французски через «о», и действительно, он его ставил ниже Захер-Мазоха и Шпильгагена. Он любил Беранже, как его любили средние французы. «Помилуйте, – восклицает Стеклов, – вы говорите, что этот человек был непоэтичен? Да знаете ли вы, что он со слезами восторга декламировал Беранже и Рылеева!» Его вкусы только окаменели в Сибири, – и по странной деликатности исторической судьбы, Россия за двадцать лет его изгнания не произвела (до Чехова) ни одного настоящего писателя, начала которого он не видел воочию в деятельный период жизни. Из разговоров с ним в Астрахани выясняется: «да-с, графский-то титул и сделал из Толстого великого-писателя-земли-русской»; когда же к нему приставали, кто же лучший современный беллетрист, то он называл Максима Белинского.
His tastes were eminently solid. He was épaté by Hugo. He was impressed by Swinburne (which is not at all strange, come to think of it). In the list of books which he read in the fortress the name of Flaubert is spelled with an “o”—and, indeed, he placed him below Zacher-Masoch and Spielhagen. He loved Béranger the way average Frenchmen loved him. “For goodness’ sake,” exclaims Steklov, “you say that this man was not poetic? Why, do you not know that he would declaim Béranger and Ryleyev with tears of rapture?!” His tastes only congealed in Siberia—and by a strange delicacy of historical fate, Russia did not produce during the twenty years of his banishment a single genuine writer (until Chekhov) whose beginning he had not seen for himself during the active period of his life. From conversations with him in the eighties in Astrakhan it becomes apparent that: “Yes, sir, it is the title of count that made one consider Tolstoy ‘a great writer of the Russian land’;” and when bothersome visitors asked him whom he thought the best living writer he named a complete nonentity: Maxim Belinski.
In a letter to Fyodor his mother Elizaveta Pavlovna mentions Maupassant’ novel Une Vie:
Мучительный, едва выразимый словами, чем-то кощунственный вопрос: хорошо ли ей жилось с ним, врозь и вместе? Затронуть ли этот внутренний мир, или ограничиться лишь описанием дорог – arida quaedam viarum descripto? «Дорогая мама, у меня уже есть к тебе большая просьба. Сегодня 8-ое июля, его день рождения. В другой день я бы не решился об этом обращаться к тебе. Напиши мне что-нибудь о нем и себе. Не такое, что могу найти в нашей общей памяти, а такое, что ты одна перечувствовала и сохранила». И вот ответный отрывок: «…представь себе – свадебное путешествие, Пиренеи, дивное блаженство от всего, от солнца, от ручьев, от цветов, от снежных вершин, даже от мух в отелях, – и оттого что мы каждое мгновение вместе. И вот, как-то утром, у меня разболелась, что ли, голова, или было уж чересчур для меня жарко, он сказал, что до завтрака выйдет на полчаса прогуляться. Почему-то запомнилось, что я сидела на балконе отеля (кругом тишина, горы, чудные скалы Гаварни) и в первый раз читала книгу не для девиц, “Une Vie” Мопассана, мне тогда она очень понравилась, помню. Смотрю на часики, вижу уже пора завтракать, прошло больше часа с тех пор, как он ушел. Жду. Сперва немножко сержусь, потом начинаю тревожиться. Подают на террасе завтрак, не могу ничего съесть. Выхожу на лужайку перед отелем, возвращаюсь к себе, опять выхожу. Еще через час я уже была в неописуемом состоянии ужаса, волнения, Бог знает чего. Я путешествовала впервые, была неопытна и пуглива, а тут еще “Une Vie”…
An agonizing, somehow sacrilegious question, hardly expressible in words: was her life with him happy, together and apart? Shall we disturb this inner world or shall we limit ourselves to a mere description of routes—arida quaedam viarum descripto? “Dear Mamma, I now have a great favor to ask of you. Today is the 8th of July, his birthday. On any other day I could never bring myself to ask you. Tell me something about you and him. Not the sort of thing I can find in our shared memories but the sort of thing you alone have gone through and preserved.” And here is part of the reply:
…imagine—a honeymoon trip, the Pyrenees, the divine bliss of everything, of the sun, the brooks, the flowers, the snowy summits, even the flies in the hotels—and of being every moment together. And then, one morning, I had a headache or something, or the heat was too much for me. He said he would go for a half hour’s stroll before lunch. With odd clearness I remember sitting on a hotel balcony (around me peace, the mountains, the wonderful cliffs of Gavarnie) and reading for the first time a book not intended for young girls, Une Vie by Maupassant. I remember I liked it very much at the time. I look at my little watch and I see that it is already lunchtime, more than an hour has passed since he left. I wait. At first I am a little cross, then I begin to worry. Lunch is served on the terrace and I am unable to eat. I go out onto the lawn in front of the hotel, I return to my room, I go outside again. In another hour I was in an indescribable state of terror, agitation, God knows what. I was traveling for the first time, I was inexperienced and easily frightened, and then there was Une Vie…. (“The Gift,” Chapter Two)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Maupassant does not exist and his story La Parure (1884) is known as La Rivière de Diamants by Guillaume de Monparnasse (the penname of Mlle Ida Larivière, Lucette’s governess). In his memoir essay “A. P. Chekhov” (1906) Boris Lazarevski uses the cliché razgovor stal obshchim (the conversation became general) and mentions Maupassant:
Затем разговор стал общим. Говорили об отдельных актёрах Художественного театра и об их талантах. После чая Чехов ушёл вместе со мною в кабинет. В этот день он много говорил и казался бодрым. Я ловил, а потом, вечером, записал каждое его слово.
— Теперь к писателю предъявляются огромные требования и выбраться из рядовых очень трудно. Мопассан взял мировую славу и известность в области короткого рассказа. Публике всё остальное кажется уже повторением и слабым повторением…
Вспомнили о Гаршине.
— Гаршин… — Что же Гаршин? — сказал Антон Павлович. — Большим талантом его назвать нельзя. «Четыре дня» и «Записки рядового Иванова» — это вещи хорошие, а всё остальное наивно.
— А «Художники»? — спросил я.
— По-моему, очень наивная вещь… Гаршин был чудесный человек и писал в очень выгодное для беллетриста время, — после войны. Книги всегда имеют огромный сбыт и читаются особенно охотно после окончания больших народных бедствий.
According to Lazarevski, Chekhov praised Garshin’s stories Chetyre dnya (“Four Days”) and Zapiski ryadovogo Ivanova (“The Memoirs of Private Ivanov”) and said that the rest of Garshin’s writings were naïve. In both stories that Chekhov praised Garshin describes the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 in which he participated as a volunteer soldier. Soon after the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday Percy de Prey goes to a distant war and perishes on the second day of the invasion. After Percy left for some Greek or Turkish port, Ada tells Van that her lover was going to do everything to get killed (like Treplev in "The Seagull," Percy de Prey commits suicide):
She walked swiftly toward him across the iridescently glistening lawn. ‘Van,’ she said, ‘I must tell you my dream before I forget. You and I were high up in the Alps — Why on earth are you wearing townclothes?’
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ drawled dreamy Van. ‘I’ll tell you why. From a humble but reliable sauce, I mean source, excuse my accent, I have just learned qu’on vous culbute behind every hedge. Where can I find your tumbler?’
‘Nowhere,’ she answered quite calmly, ignoring or not even perceiving his rudeness, for she had always known that disaster would come today or tomorrow, a question of time or rather timing on the part of fate.
‘But he exists, he exists,’ muttered Van, looking down at a rainbow web on the turf.
‘I suppose so,’ said the haughty child, ‘however, he left yesterday for some Greek or Turkish port. Moreover, he was going to do everything to get killed, if that information helps. Now listen, listen! Those walks in the woods meant nothing. Wait, Van! I was weak only twice when you had hurt him so hideously, or perhaps three times in all. Please! I can’t explain in one gush, but eventually you will understand. Not everybody is as happy as we are. He’s a poor, lost, clumsy boy. We are all doomed, but some are more doomed than others. He is nothing to me. I shall never see him again. He is nothing, I swear. He adores me to the point of insanity.’
‘I think,’ said Van, ‘we’ve got hold of the wrong lover. I was asking about Herr Rack, who has such delectable gums and also adores you to the point of insanity.’
He turned, as they say, on his heel, and walked toward the house. (1.41)
Lucette's music teacher (and a composer of genius) who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie, Philip Rack dies in Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital. In his essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), Shestov calls Chekhov (the author of "Ward Six," 1892) pevets beznadezhnosti (“a poet of hopelessness):
Чтобы в двух словах определить его тенденцию, я скажу: Чехов был певцом безнадежности. Упорно, уныло, однообразно в течение всей своей почти 25-летней литературной деятельности Чехов только одно и делал: теми или иными способами убивал человеческие надежды. В этом, на мой взгляд, сущность его творчества.
According to Shestov, in the course of his almost twenty-five-year-long literary work Chekhov was stubbornly and methodically killing human hopes.
When Van visits dying Rack in Ward Five, poor Rack says that he must vomit:
With a not unfamiliar gesture, Van tore up his prepared speech and said:
‘Mr Rack, open your eyes. I’m Van Veen. A visitor.’
The hollow-cheeked, long-jawed face, wax-pale, with a fattish nose and a small round chin, remained expressionless for a moment; but the beautiful, amber, liquid, eloquent eyes with pathetically long lashes had opened. Then a faint smile glimmered about his mouth parts, and he stretched one hand, without raising his head from the oil-cloth-covered pillow (why oil-cloth?).
Van, from his chair, extended the end of his cane, which the weak hand took, and palpated politely, thinking it was a well-meant offer of support. ‘No, I am not yet able to walk a few steps,’ Rack said quite distinctly, with the German accent which would probably constitute his most durable group of ghost cells.
Van drew in his useless weapon. Controlling himself, he thumped it against the footboard of his wheelchair. Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then went back to the article that engrossed him — ‘A Clever Piggy (from the memoirs of an animal trainer),’ or else ‘The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas Help Chinese Troops.’ A diminutive nurse simultaneously stepped out from behind the farther screen and disappeared again.
Will he ask me to transmit a message? Shall I refuse? Shall I consent — and not transmit it?
‘Have they all gone to Hollywood already? Please, tell me, Baron von Wien.’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Van. ‘They probably have. I really —’
‘Because I sent my last flute melody, and a letter for all the family, and no answer has come. I must vomit now. I ring myself.’ (1.42)
Rack's words bring to mind Muskat vomitif mentioned by Chekhov in his letter to Ladyzhenski. In his letter Chekhov says that he still lives in Yalta:
Я всё в той же Ялте. Приятели сюда ко мне не ездят, снегу нет, саней нет, нет и жизни. Cogito ergo sum — и кроме этого «cogito» нет других признаков жизни.
Yalta is a lovely Crimean town. Percy de Prey dies in the Crimea.
In his letter Chekhov tells Ladyzhenski that many organs of his body turned out to be useless in Yalta, therefore he sold them to a Turk:
За отсутствием практики многие органы моего тела оказались ненужными, так что за ненадобностью я продал их тут одному турку. Читай сии строки и казнись. Пусть совесть терзает тебя за то, что ты так редко мне пишешь!
In Kalugano Rack's wife Elsie worked at Muzakovski’s Organs:
The melancholy young German was in a philosophical mood shading into the suicidal. He had to return to Kalugano with his Elsie, who Doc Ecksreher thought ‘would present him with driplets in dry weeks.’ He hated Kalugano, his and her home town, where in a moment of ‘mutual aberration’ stupid Elsie had given him her all on a park bench after a wonderful office party at Muzakovski’s Organs where the oversexed pitiful oaf had a good job.
‘When are you leaving?’ asked Ada.
‘Forestday — after tomorrow.’
‘Fine. That’s fine. Adieu, Mr Rack.’
Poor Philip drooped, fingerpainting sad nothings on wet stone, shaking his heavy head, gulping visibly.
‘One feels... One feels,’ he said, ‘that one is merely playing a role and has forgotten the next speech.’
‘I’m told many feel that,’ said Ada; ‘it must be a furchtbar feeling.’
‘Cannot be helped? No hope any more at all? I am dying, yes?’
‘You are dead, Mr Rack,’ said Ada. (1.32)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Forestday: Rack’s pronunciation of ‘Thursday’.
furchtbar: Germ., dreadful.
In a letter of Feb. 9, 1888, to Pleshcheyev Chekhov says that wine and music always were to him a wonderful corkscrew:
На обещание поместить «Степь» целиком и высылать журнал я отвечаю обещанием угостить Вас отличнейшим донским, когда мы будем ехать летом по Волге. К несчастью, Короленко не пьет, а не уметь пить в дороге, когда светит луна и из воды выглядывают крокодилы, так же неудобно, как не уметь читать. Вино и музыка всегда для меня были отличнейшим штопором. Когда где-нибудь в дороге в моей душе или в голове сидела пробка, для меня было достаточно выпить стаканчик вина, чтобы я почувствовал у себя крылья и отсутствие пробки.
...Whenever there was a cork in my soul or in my head, it would be enough for me to drink a glass of wine to feel the wings and the abscence of the cork.
Chekhov's promise to treat Pleshcheyev otlichneyshim donskim (to a superb Don wine) when they travel down the Volga brings to mind Baron d'Onsky (Demon Veen's adversary in a sword duel, 1.2) and d'Onsky's son, a person with only one arm, whom Ada meets at Marina's funeral:
‘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.’ (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.
In his memoir essay "A. P. Chekhov" (1906) Lazarevski says that in a conversation with him Chekhov mentioned Cervantes (the one-armed author of Don Quixote who began to write rather late):
Чехов всегда настаивал на необходимости для молодого писателя работать как можно больше и однажды сказал мне:
- Печатать можно и немного, но писать следует как можно больше. К тридцати годам обязательно нужно определиться: все определялись к этому времени. Исключение составляет Сервантес... Да и невозможно было ему раньше писать, а потом тоже очень трудно, - в тюрьме бумаги не давали. Знаете, как нужно писать, чтобы вышла хорошая повесть? В ней не должно быть ничего лишнего. Вот как на военном корабле на палубе: там нет ничего лишнего, - так следует делать и в рассказе...
Chekhov compares a good story to the deck of a warship on which there is nothing that would be unnecessary.