After he was rejected by Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Daniel Veen set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe:
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 café-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)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s globetrotter, travelled from West to East.
In VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930) Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is one of little Luzhin’s favorite books:
Были и книги. Книги, сочиненные отцом, в золото-красных, рельефных обложках, с надписью от руки на первой странице: "Горячо надеюсь, что мой сын всегда будет относиться к животным и людям так, как Антоша",- и большой восклицательный знак. Или: "Эту книгу я писал, думая о твоем будущем, мой сын". Эти надписи вызывали в нем смутный стыд за отца, а самые книжки были столь же скучны, как "Слепой музыкант" или "Фрегат Паллада". Большой том Пушкина, с портретом толстогубого курчавого мальчика, не открывался никогда. Зато были две книги - обе, подаренные ему тетей,- которые он полюбил на всю жизнь, держал в памяти, словно под увеличительным стеклом, и так страстно пережил, что через двадцать лет, снова их перечитав, он увидел в них только суховатый пересказ, сокращенное издание, как будто они отстали от того неповторимого, бессмертного образа, который они в нем оставили. Но не жажда дальних странствий заставляла его следовать по пятам Филеаса Фогга и не ребячливая склонность к таинственным приключениям влекла его в дом на Бэкер-стрит, где, впрыснув себе кокаину, мечтательно играл на скрипке долговязый сыщик с орлиным профилем. Только гораздо позже он сак себе уяснил, чем так волновали его эти две книги: правильно и безжалостно развивающийся узор,- Филеас, манекен в цилиндре, совершающий свой сложный изящный путь с оправданными жертвами, то на слоне, купленном за миллион, то на судне, которое нужно наполовину сжечь на топливо; и Шерлок, придавший логике прелесть грезы, Шерлок, составивший монографию о пепле всех видов сигар, и с этим пеплом, как с талисманом, пробирающийся сквозь хрустальный лабиринт возможных дедукций к единственному сияющему выводу. Фокусник, которого на Рождестве пригласили его родители, каким-то образом слил в себе на время Фогга и Холмса, и странное наслаждение, испытанное им в тот день, сгладило все то неприятное, что сопровождало выступление фокусника. Так как просьбы, осторожные, редкие просьбы, "позвать твоих школьных друзей", не привели ни к чему, Лужин старший, уверенный, что это будет и весело, и полезно, обратился к двум знакомым, сыновья которых учились в той же школе, а кроме того, пригласил детей дальнего родственника, двух тихих, рыхлых мальчиков и бледную девочку с толстой черной косой. Все приглашенные мальчики были в матросских костюмах и пахли помадой. В двух из них маленький Лужин с ужасом узнал Берсенева и Розена из третьего класса, которые в школе были одеты неряшливо и вели себя бурно. "Ну вот,- радостно сказал Лужин старший, держа сына за плечо (плечо медленно уходило из-под его ладони).- Теперь вас оставят одних,- познакомьтесь, поиграйте,- а потом позовут, будет сюрприз". Через полчаса он пошел их звать. В комнате было молчание. Девочка сидела в углу и перелистывала, ища картин, приложение к "Ниве". Берсенев и Розен сидели на диване, со сконфуженными лицами, очень красные и напомаженные. Рыхлые племянники бродили по комнате, без любопытства рассматривая английские гравюры на стенах, глобус, белку, давно разбитый педометр, валявшийся на столе. Сам Лужин, тоже в матроске, с белой тесемкой и свистком на груди, сидел на венском стуле у окна и смотрел исподлобья, грызя ноготь большого пальца. Но фокусник все искупил, и даже, когда на следующий день Берсенев и Розен, уже настоящие, отвратительные, подошли к нему в школьном зале, низко поклонились, а потом грубо расхохотались и в обнимку, шатаясь, быстро отошли,- даже и тогда эта насмешка не могла нарушить очарование. По его хмурой просьбе,- что бы он ни говорил теперь, брови у него мучительно сходились,- мать привезла ему из Гостиного Двора большой ящик, выкрашенный под красное дерево, и учебник чудес, на обложке которого был господин с медалями на фраке, поднявший за уши кролика. В ящике были шкатулки с двойным дном, палочка, обклеенная звездистой бумагой, колода грубых карт, где фигурные были наполовину короли и валеты, а наполовину овцы в мундирах, складной цилиндр с отделениями, веревочка с двумя деревянными штучками на концах, назначение которых было неясно... И в кокетливых конвертиках были порошки, окрашивающие воду в синий, красный, зеленый цвет. Гораздо занимательнее оказалась книга, и Лужин без труда выучил несколько карточных фокусов, которые он часами показывал самому себе, стоя перед зеркалом. Он находил загадочное удовольствие, неясное обещание каких-то других, еще неведомых наслаждений, в том, как хитро и точно складывался фокус, но все же недоставало чего-то, он не мог уловить некоторую тайну, в которой вероятно был искушен фокусник, хватавший из воздуха рубль или вынимавший задуманную публикой семерку треф из уха смущенного Розена. Сложные приспособления, описанные в книге, его раздражали. Тайна, к которой он стремился, была простота, гармоническая простота, поражающая пуще самой сложной магии.
There were also books. Books written by his father, with red and gold embossed bindings and a handwritten inscription on the first page: I earnestly hope that my son will always treat animals and people the same way as Tony, and a big exclamation mark. Or: I wrote this book thinking of your future, my son. These inscriptions inspired in him a vague feeling of shame for his father, and the books themselves were as boring as Korolenko's The Blind Musician or Goncharov's The Frigate Pallas. A large volume of Pushkin with a picture of a thick-lipped, curly-haired boy on it was never opened. On the other hand there were two books, both given him by his aunt, with which he had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained. But it was not a thirst for distant peregrinations that forced him to follow on the heels of Phileas Fogg, nor was it a boyish inclination for mysterious adventures that drew him to that house on Baker Street, where the lanky detective with the hawk profile, having given himself an injection of cocaine, would dreamily play the violin. Only much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern: Phileas, the dummy in the top hat, wending his complex elegant way with its justifiable sacrifices, now on an elephant bought for a million, now on a ship of which half has to be burned for fuel; and Sherlock endowing logic with the glamour of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a talisman progressing through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one radiant conclusion. The conjuror whom his parents engaged to perform on Christmas day somehow managed to blend in himself briefly both Fogg and Holmes, and the strange pleasure which Luzhin experienced on that day obliterated all the unpleasantness that accompanied the performance. Since requests--cautious infrequent requests--to "invite your school friends" never led to anything, Luzhin senior, confident that it would be both enjoyable and useful, got in touch with two acquaintances whose children attended the same school, and he also invited the children of a distant relative, two quiet, flabby little boys and a pale little girl with a thick braid of black hair. All the boys invited wore sailor suits and smelled of hair oil. Two of them little Luzhin recognized with horror as Bersenev and Rosen from Class Three, who at school were always dressed sloppily and behaved violently. "Well, here we are," said Luzhin senior, joyfully holding his son by the shoulder (the shoulder slowly sliding out from under his hand). "Now I'll leave you alone. Get to know one another and play for a while--and later you'll be called, we have a surprise for you." Half an hour later he went to call them. In the room there was silence. The little girl was sitting in a corner and leafing through the supplement to the review Niva (The Cornfield), looking for pictures. Bersenev and Rosen were self-consciously sitting on the sofa, both very red and shiny with pomade. The flabby nephews wandered around the room examining without interest the English woodcuts on the walls, the globe, the squirrel and a long since broken pedometer lying on a table. Luzhin himself, also wearing a sailor suit, with a whistle on a white cord on his chest, was sitting on a hard chair by the window, glowering and biting his thumbnail. But the conjuror made up for everything and even when on the following day Bersenev and Rosen, by this time again their real disgusting selves, came up to him in the school hall and bowed low, afterwards breaking into vulgar guffaws of laughter and quickly departing, arm in arm and swaying from side to side--even then this mockery was unable to break the spell. Upon his sullen request--whatever he said nowadays his brows came painfully together--his mother brought him from the Bazaar a large box painted a mahogany color and a book of tricks with a bemedaled gentleman in evening dress on the cover lifting a rabbit by its ears. Inside the box were smaller boxes with false bottoms, a wand covered with starry paper, a pack of crude cards where the picture cards were half jacks or half kings and half sheep in uniforms, a folding top hat with compartments, a rope with two wooden gadgets at the ends whose function was unclear. And there also were coquettish little envelopes containing powders for tinting water blue, red and green. The book was much more entertaining, and Luzhin had no difficulty in learning several card tricks which he spent hours showing to himself before the mirror. He found a mysterious pleasure, a vague promise of still unfathomed delights, in the crafty and accurate way a trick would come out, but still there was something missing, he could not grasp that secret which the conjuror had evidently mastered in order to be able to pluck a ruble out of the air or extract the seven of clubs, tacitly chosen by the audience, from the ear of an embarrassed Rosen. The complicated accessories described in the book irritated him. The secret for which he strove was simplicity, harmonious simplicity, which can amaze one far more than the most intricate magic. (Chapter 2)
Luzhin rereads Fogg's journey and Holmes' memoirs in a Berlin sanatorium (where he recovers from a breakdown that he suffered at the peak of a chess tournament):
Путешествие Фогга и мемуары Холмса Лужин прочел в два дня и, прочитав, сказал, что это не то, что он хотел,- неполное, что ли, издание. Из других книг ему понравилась "Анна Каренина" - особенно страницы о земских выборах и обед, заказанный Облонским. Некоторое впечатление произвели на него и "Мертвые души", причем он в одном месте неожиданно узнал целый кусок, однажды в детстве долго и мучительно писанный им под диктовку. Кроме так называемых классиков, невеста ему приносила и всякие случайные книжонки легкого поведения - труды галльских новеллистов. Все, что только могло развлечь Лужина, было хорошо- даже эти сомнительные новеллы, которые он со смущением, но с интересом читал. Зато стихи (например, томик Рильке, который она купила по совету приказчика) приводили его в состояние тяжелого недоумения и печали. Соответственно с этим профессор запретил давать Лужину читать Достоевского, который, по словам профессора, производит гнетущее действие на психику современного человека, ибо, как в страшном зеркале...
"Ах, господин Лужин не задумывается над книгой,- весело сказала она.- - А стихи он плохо понимает из-за рифм, рифмы ему в тягость".
Luzhin read Fogg's journey and Holmes' memoirs in two days, and when he had read them he said they were not what he wanted--this was an incomplete edition. Of the other books, he liked Anna Karenin--particularly the pages on the zemstvo elections and the dinner ordered by Oblonski. Dead Souls also made a certain impression on him, moreover in one place he unexpectedly recognized a whole section that he had once taken down in childhood as a long and painful dictation. Besides the so-called classics his fiancée brought him all sorts of frivolous French novels. Everything that could divert Luzhin was good--even these doubtful stories, which he read, though embarrassed, with interest. Poetry, on the other hand (for instance a small volume of Rilke's that she had bought on the recommendation of a salesman) threw him into a state of severe perplexity and sorrow. Correspondingly, the professor forbade Luzhin to be given anything by Dostoevski, who, in the professor's words, had an oppressive effect on the psyche of contemporary man, for as in a terrible mirror—
"Oh, Mr. Luzhin doesn't brood over books," she said cheerfully. "And he understands poetry badly because of the rhymes, the rhymes put him off." (Chapter 10)
During Van’s first tea party at Ardis Marina mentions Dostoevski:
They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada’s black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van’s teacher of history, ‘Jeejee’ Jones.
‘He resembles my teacher of history,’ said Van when the man had gone.
‘I used to love history,’ said Marina, ‘I loved to identify myself with famous women. There’s a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties — Lincoln’s second wife or Queen Josephine.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed — it’s beautifully done. We’ve got a similar set at home.’
‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.
‘Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),’ replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis’ (with a slight smile). ‘Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.’
‘Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.’
‘Pah,’ uttered Ada.
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.
Describing the beginning of Marina’s affair with Demon, Van mentions a stage play in which several merry young gardeners are popping raspberries into their mouths:
Marina’s affair with Demon Veen started on his, her, and Daniel Veen’s birthday, January 5, 1868, when she was twenty-four and both Veens thirty.
As an actress, she had none of the breath-taking quality that makes the skill of mimicry seem, at least while the show lasts, worth even more than the price of such footlights as insomnia, fancy, arrogant art; yet on that particular night, with soft snow falling beyond the plush and the paint, la Durmanska (who paid the great Scott, her impresario, seven thousand gold dollars a week for publicity alone, plus a bonny bonus for every engagement) had been from the start of the trashy ephemeron (an American play based by some pretentious hack on a famous Russian romance) so dreamy, so lovely, so stirring that Demon (not quite a gentleman in amorous matters) made a bet with his orchestra-seat neighbor, Prince N., bribed a series of green-room attendants, and then, in a cabinet reculé (as a French writer of an earlier century might have mysteriously called that little room in which the broken trumpet and poodle hoops of a forgotten clown, besides many dusty pots of colored grease, happened to be stored) proceeded to possess her between two scenes (Chapter Three and Four of the martyred novel). In the first of these she had undressed in graceful silhouette behind a semitransparent screen, reappeared in a flimsy and fetching nightgown, and spent the rest of the wretched scene discussing a local squire, Baron d’O., with an old nurse in Eskimo boots. Upon the infinitely wise countrywoman’s suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of her bed, on a side table with cabriole legs, a love letter and took five minutes to reread it in a languorous but loud voice for no body’s benefit in particular since the nurse sat dozing on a kind of sea chest, and the spectators were mainly concerned with the artificial moonlight’s blaze upon the lovelorn young lady’s bare arms and heaving breasts.
Even before the old Eskimo had shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last dance on New Year’s Eve. Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in, the penetrative sense of her own beauty, the ardent pulses of the imagined maiden, and the gallant applause of an almost full house made her especially vulnerable to the tickle of Demon’s moustache. She had ample time, too, to change for the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed — the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat. (1.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).
Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).
Marina's impresario, Scotty brings to mind Skotoprigonievsk, the setting of Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov (1880). At late evening tea with her husband and son Luzhin’s mother silently slits her eyes at her plate of raspberries:
По лестнице он попробовал съехать, как делалось в школе, как он сам никогда в школе не делал; но ступени были слишком высокие. Под лестницей, в шкалу, еще не до конца исследованном, он поискал журналов. Журнал он выкопал, нашел в нем шашечный отдел, глупые неповоротливые плошки, тупо стоявшие на доске, но шахмат не было. Под руку все попадался альбом-гербарий с сухими эдельвейсами и багровыми листьями и с надписями детским, тоненьким, бледно-лиловым почерком, столь непохожим на теперешний почерк матери: Давос, 1885 г.; Гатчина, 1886 г. Он в сердцах стал выдирать листья и цветы и зачихал от мельчайшей пыли, сидя на корточках среди разбросанных книг. Потом стало так темно под лестницей, что уже страницы журнала, который он снова перелистывал, стали сливаться в серую муть, и иногда какая-нибудь небольшая картинка обманывала, казалась в расплывчатой темноте шахматной задачей. Он засунул кое-как книги в шкал, побрел в гостиную, вяло подумал, что, верно, уже восьмой час, так как буфетчик зажигает керосиновые лампы. Опираясь на трость и держась за перила, в сиреневом пеньюаре, тяжело спускалась мать, и лицо у нее было испуганное. "Я не понимаю, почему твой отец еще не приехал",- сказала она и, с трудом передвигаясь, вышла на веранду, стала вглядываться в дорогу между еловых стволов, обтянутых там и сям ярко-рыжим лучом.
Он приехал только к десяти, опоздал, оказывается, на поезд, очень много было дел, обедал с издателем,- нет, нет, супа не нужно. Он смеялся и говорил очень громко и шумно ел, и Лужин вдруг почувствовал, что отец все время смотрит на него, точно ошеломлен его присутствием. Обед как-то слился с вечерним чаем, мать, облокотясь на стол, молча щурилась, глядя на тарелку с малиной, и, чем веселее рассказывал отец, тем больше она щурилась. Потом она встала и тихо ушла, и Лужину показалось, что все это уже раз было. Он остался на веранде один с отцом и боялся поднять голову, все время чувствуя на себе пристальный, странный взгляд.
He tried to slide down the stairs the way they did at school--the way he himself never did it there; but the steps were too high. Beneath the staircase, in a cupboard that had still not been thoroughly explored, he looked for magazines. He dug out one and found a checkers section in it, diagrams of stupid clumsy round blobs on their boards, but there was no chess. As he rummaged on, he kept coming across a bothersome herbarium album with dried edelweiss and purple leaves in it and with inscriptions in pale violet ink, in a childish, thin-spun hand that was so different from his mother's present handwriting: Davos 1885; Gatchina 1886. Wrathfully he began to tear out the leaves and flowers, sneezing from the fine dust as he squatted on his haunches amid the scattered books. Then it got so dark beneath the stairs that the pages of the magazine he was again leafing through began to merge into a gray blur and sometimes a small picture would trick him, because it looked like a chess problem in the diffuse darkness. He thrust the books back anyhow into the drawers and wandered into the drawing room, thinking listlessly that it must be well past seven o'clock since the butler was lighting the kerosene lamps. Leaning on a cane and holding on to the banisters, his mother in mauve peignoir came heavily down the stairs, a frightened look on her face. "I don't understand why your father isn't here yet," she said, and moving with difficulty she went out onto the veranda and began to peer down the road between the fir trunks that the setting sun banded with bright copper.
He came only around ten, said he had missed the train, had been extremely busy, had dined with his publisher--no, no soup, thank you. He laughed and spoke very loudly and ate noisily, and Luzhin was struck by the feeling that his father was looking at him all the time as if staggered by his presence. Dinner graded into late evening tea. Mother, her elbow propped on the table, silently slitted her eyes at her plate of raspberries, and the gayer her husband's stories became the narrower her eyes grew. Then she got up and quietly left and it seemed to Luzhin that all this had happened once before. He remained alone on the veranda with his father and was afraid to raise his head, feeling that strange searching stare on him the whole time. (Chapter 4)
Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina’s old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall:
The two kids’ best find, however, came from another carton in a lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex, a mountain resort, not far from Brig, Switzerland, where she had sojourned before her marriage, mostly in a rented chalet. The first twenty pages were adorned with a number of little plants collected at random, in August, 1869, on the grassy slopes above the chalet, or in the park of the Hotel Florey, or in the garden of the sanatorium neat: it (‘my nusshaus,’ as poor Aqua dubbed it, or ‘the Home,’ as Marina more demurely identified it in her locality notes). Those introductory pages did not present much botanical or psychological interest; and the fifty last pages or so remained blank; but the middle part, with a conspicuous decrease in number of specimens, proved to be a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers. The specimens were on one side of the folio, with Marina Dourmanoff (sic)’s notes en regard.
Ancolie Bleue des Alpes, Ex en Valais, i.IX.69. From Englishman in hotel. ‘Alpine Columbine, color of your eyes.’
Epervière auricule. 25.X.69, Ex, ex Dr Lapiner’s walled alpine garden.
Golden [ginkgo] leaf: fallen out of a book’ The Truth about Terra’ which Aqua gave me before going back to her Home. 14.XII.69.
Artificial edelweiss brought by my new nurse with a note from Aqua saying it came from a ‘mizernoe and bizarre’ Christmas Tree at the Home. 25.XII.69.
Petal of orchid, one of 99 orchids, if you please, mailed to me yesterday, Special Delivery, c’est bien le cas de le dire, from Villa Armina, Alpes Maritimes. Have laid aside ten for Aqua to be taken to her at her Home. Ex en Valais, Switzerland. ‘Snowing in Fate’s crystal ball,’ as he used to say. (Date erased.)
Gentiane de Koch, rare, brought by lapochka [darling] Lapiner from his ‘mute gentiarium’ 5.I.1870.
[blue-ink blot shaped accidentally like a flower, or improved felt-pen deletion] (Compliquaria compliquata var. aquamarina. Ex, 15.I.70.
Fancy flower of paper, found in Aqua’s purse. Ex, 16.II.1870, made by a fellow patient, at the Home, which is no longer hers.
Gentiana verna (printanière). Ex, 28.III.1870, on the lawn of my nurse’s cottage. Last day here.
The two young discoverers of that strange and sickening treasure commented upon it as follows:
‘I deduce,’ said the boy, ‘three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her. married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.’
‘I can add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s — an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this’ (American finger-snap). ‘You will be grateful,’ she continued, embracing him, ‘for my not mentioning its scientific name. Incidentally the other foot — the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand — possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College.’
‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?
‘Right,’ answered Ada. ‘Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea.’
Re the ‘dark-blue’ allusion, left hanging:
A former viceroy of Estoty, Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, father of the children’s great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski (1755-1809), and a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times, had a millennium-old name that meant in Russian ‘dark blue.’ While happening to be immune to the sumptuous thrills of genealogic awareness, and indifferent to the fact that oafs attribute both the aloofness and the fervor to snobbishness, Van could not help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet background he was always able to distinguish as a comforting, omnipresent summer sky through the black foliage of the family tree. In later years he had never been able to reread Proust (as he had never been able to enjoy again the perfumed gum of Turkish paste) without a roll-wave of surfeit and a rasp of gravelly heartburn; yet his favorite purple passage remained the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes,’ with whose hue his adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s artistic vanity.
Hue or who? Awkward. Reword! (marginal note in Ada Veen’s late hand). (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French ‘lapin’ in Lapiner is matched by the Russian ‘Krolik’, the name of Ada’s beloved lepidopterist (p.13, et passim) and the Russian ‘zayats’ (hare) sounds like ‘Seitz’ (the German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin ‘cuniculus’ in ‘Nikulin’ (‘grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov’, p.341), and a Greek ‘lagos’ in ‘Lagosse’ (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p.298.
mizernoe: Franco-Russian form of ‘miserable’ in the sense of ‘paltry’.
c’est bien le cas de le dire: and no mistake.
lieu de naissance: birthplace.
pour ainsi dire: so to say.
Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.
‘Bear-Foot’, not ‘bare foot’: both children are naked.
Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called ‘Spring’) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.
Marina + Ada + Stalin = malina + ad + starina
malina - raspberry
ad - hell
starina - antiquity, olden times