When Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father) asks Van if he or his poule had got into trouble with the police, Van replies ‘poule’ with the evasive taciturnity of the Roman rabbi shielding Barabbas:
At the Goodson Airport, in one of the gilt-framed mirrors of its old-fashioned waiting room, Van glimpsed the silk hat of his father who sat awaiting him in an armchair of imitation marblewood, behind a newspaper that said in reversed characters: ‘Crimea Capitulates.’ At the same moment a raincoated man with a pleasant, somewhat porcine, pink face accosted Van. He represented a famous international agency, known as the VPL, which handled Very Private Letters. After a first flash of surprise, Van reflected that Ada Veen, a recent mistress of his, could not have chosen a smarter (in all senses of the word) way of conveying to him a message whose fantastically priced, and prized, process of transmission insured an absoluteness of secrecy which neither torture nor mesmerism had been able to break down in the evil days of 1859. It was rumored that even Gamaliel on his (no longer frequent, alas) trips to Paris, and King Victor during his still fairly regular visits to Cuba or Hecuba, and, of course, robust Lord Goal, Viceroy of France, when enjoying his randonnies all over Canady, preferred the phenomenally discreet, and in fact rather creepy, infallibility of the VPL organization to such official facilities as sexually starved potentates have at their disposal for deceiving their wives. The present messenger called himself James Jones, a formula whose complete lack of connotation made an ideal pseudonym despite its happening to be his real name. A flurry and flapping had started in the mirror but Van declined to act hastily. In order to gain time (for, on being shown Ada’s crest on a separate card, he felt he had to decide whether or not to accept her letter), he closely examined the badge resembling an ace of hearts which J.J. displayed with pardonable pride. He requested Van to open the letter, satisfy himself of its authenticity, and sign the card that then went back into some secret pit or pouch within the young detective’s attire or anatomy. Cries of welcome and impatience from Van’s father (wearing for the flight to France a scarlet-silk-lined black cape) finally caused Van to interrupt his colloquy with James and pocket the letter (which he read a few minutes later in the lavatory before boarding the airliner).
‘Stocks,’ said Demon, ‘are on the zoom. Our territorial triumphs, et cetera. An American governor, my friend Bessborodko, is to be installed in Bessarabia, and a British one, Armborough, will rule Armenia. I saw you enlaced with your little Countess near the parking lot. If you marry her I will disinherit you. They’re quite a notch below our set.’
‘In a couple of years,’ said Van, ‘I’ll slide into my own little millions’ (meaning the fortune Aqua had left him). ‘But you needn’t worry, sir, we have interrupted our affair for the time being — till the next time I return to live in her girlinière’ (Canady slang).
Demon, flaunting his flair, desired to be told if Van or his poule had got into trouble with the police (nodding toward Jim or John who having some other delivery to make sat glancing through Crime Copulate Bessarmenia).
‘Poule,’ replied Van with the evasive taciturnity of the Roman rabbi shielding Barabbas.
‘Why gray?’ asked Demon, alluding to Van’s overcoat. ‘Why that military cut? It’s too late to enlist.’
‘I couldn’t — my draft board would turn me down anyway.’
‘How’s the wound?’
‘Komsi-komsa. It now appears that the Kalugano surgeon messed up his job. The rip seam has grown red and raw, without any reason, and there’s a lump in my armpit. I’m in for another spell of surgery — this time in London, where butchers carve so much better. Where’s the mestechko here? Oh, I see it. Cute (a gentian painted on one door, a lady fern on the other: have to go to the herbarium).’
He did not answer her letter, and a fortnight later John James, now got up as a German tourist, all pseudo-tweed checks, handed Van a second message, in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s Bâteau Ivre, the one with a jester drinking in the riggings (poor old Dan thought it had something to do with Brant’s satirical poem!). There would be no answer — though answers were included, with the return ticket, in the price, as the honest messenger pointed out. (2.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): poule: tart.
komsi etc.: comme-ci comme-ça in Russ. mispronunciation: so-so.
mestechko: Russ., little place.
bateau ivre: ‘sottish ship’, title of Rimbaud’s poem here used instead of ‘ship of fools’.
In her poem Zashchitnikam Stalina (“To the Defenders of Stalin,” 1962) Anna Akhmatova mentions Barabbas (in the New Testament, a prisoner who was chosen by the crowd, over Jesus Christ, to be released by Pontius Pilate in a customary pardon before the feast of Passover):
Это те, что кричали: «Варраву
Отпусти нам для праздника», те,
Что велели Сократу отраву
Пить в тюремной глухой тесноте.
Им бы этот же вылить напиток
В их невинно клевещущий рот,
Этим милым любителям пыток,
Знатокам в производстве сирот.
They are the ones who shouted: “For the holiday
Release to us Barabbas,” the ones
Who ordered Socrates to drink
Poison in the prison’s muffled closeness.
That drink should be poured into their
Innocently slandering mouths,
Those dear lovers of torture,
Experts in the production of orphans.
One of the seconds in Demon’s sword duel with Baron d’Onsky (Skonky) is Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel:
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)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Aardvark: apparently, a university town in New England.
Gamaliel: a much more fortunate statesman than our W.G. Harding.
Demon’s adversary, Baron d’Onsky seems to be a cross between Dmitri Donskoy (a Moscow Prince who defeated Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo, 1380) and Onegin’s donskoy zherebets (Don stallion) in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Two: V: 4). Po toy doroge, gde Donskoy (“Along the road where Donskoy,” 1956) is a poem by Anna Akhmatova:
По той дороге, где Донской
Вел рать великую когда-то,
Где ветер помнит супостата,
Где месяц желтый и рогатый, —
Я шла, как в глубине морской…
Шиповник так благоухал,
Что даже превратился в слово,
И встретить я была готова
Моей судьбы девятый вал.
The poem’s last line, Moey sud’by devyatyi val (the ninth billow of my destiny), brings to mind devyatyi val (the ninth billow) mentioned by Pushkin in an omitted stanza of EO:
Последняя глава «Евгения Онегина» издана была особо, с следующим предисловием:
«Пропущенные строфы подавали неоднократно повод к порицанию и насмешкам (впрочем, весьма справедливым и остроумным). Автор чистосердечно признается, что он выпустил из своего романа целую главу, в коей описано было путешествие Онегина по России. От него зависело означить сию выпущенную главу точками или цифром; но во избежание соблазна решился он лучше выставить, вместо девятого нумера, осьмой над последней главою Евгения Онегина и пожертвовать одною из окончательных строф:
Пора: перо покоя просит;
Я девять песен написал;
На берег радостный выносит
Мою ладью девятый вал —
Хвала вам, девяти каменам, и проч.».
П.А.Катенин (коему прекрасный поэтический талант не мешает быть и тонким критиком) заметил нам, что сие исключение, может быть и выгодное для читателей, вредит, однако ж, плану целого сочинения; ибо чрез то переход от Татьяны, уездной барышни, к Татьяне, знатной даме, становится слишком неожиданным и необъясненным. — Замечание, обличающее опытного художника. Автор сам чувствовал справедливость оного, но решился выпустить эту главу по причинам, важным для него, а не для публики. Некоторые отрывки были напечатаны; мы здесь их помещаем, присовокупив к ним еще несколько строф.
The dropped stanzas gave rise more than once to reprehension and gibes (no doubt most just and witty). The author candidly confesses that he omitted from his novel a whole chapter in which Onegin's journey across Russia was described. It depended upon him to designate this omitted chapter by means of dots or a numeral; but to avoid ambiguity he decided it would be better to mark as number eight, instead of nine, the last chapter of Eugene Onegin, and to sacrifice one of its closing stanzas [Eight: XLVIIIa]:
'Tis time: the pen for peace is asking
nine cantos I have written;
my boat upon the joyful shore
by the ninth billow is brought out.
Praise be to you, O nine Camenae, etc.
“P[avel] A[leksandrovich] Katenin (whom a fine poetic talent does not prevent from being also a subtle critic) observed to us that this exclusion, though perhaps advantageous to readers, is, however, detrimental to the plan of the entire work since, through this, the transition from Tatiana the provincial miss to Tatiana the grande dame becomes too unexpected and unexplained: an observation revealing the experienced artist. The author himself felt the justice of this but decided to leave out the chapter for reasons important to him but not to the public. Some fragments [XVI–XIX, l–10] have been published [Jan. 1, 1830, Lit. Gaz.] ; we insert them here, subjoining to them several other stanzas.” (Fragments of Onegin’s Journey)
In Otryvki iz puteshestviya Onegina (“Fragments of Onegin’s Journey,” [XIX]: 4) Pushkin mentions Flamandskoy shkoly pyostryi sor (the Flemish School's variegated dross):
Порой дождливою намедни
Я, завернув на скотный двор...
Тьфу! прозаические бредни,
Фламандской школы пестрый сор!
Таков ли был я, расцветая?
Скажи, фонтан Бахчисарая!
Такие ль мысли мне на ум
Навел твой бесконечный шум,
Когда безмолвно пред тобою
Зарему я воображал
Средь пышных, опустелых зал...
Спустя три года, вслед за мною,
Скитаясь в той же стороне,
Онегин вспомнил обо мне.
The other day, during a rainy spell,
as I had dropped into the cattle yard —
Fie! Prosy divagations,
the Flemish School's variegated dross!
Was I like that when I was blooming?
Say, Fountain of Bahchisaray!
Were such the thoughts that to my mind
your endless purl suggested
when silently in front of you
Zaréma I imagined?...
Midst the sumptuous deserted halls
after the lapse of three years, in my tracks
in the same region wandering, Onegin
remembered me.
According to Van, John James handed him a second message from Ada in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s Bâteau Ivre, the one with a jester drinking in the riggings. Le Bâteau Ivre (“The Sottish Ship,” 1871) is a poem by Rimbaud. In the penultimate stanza of P’yanyi korabl’ (1928), the Russian version of Rimbaud’s poem, VN mentions ta luzha chyornaya (that black puddle):
Из европейских вод мне сладостна была бы
та лужа черная, где детская рука,
средь грустных сумерек, челнок пускает слабый,
напоминающий сквозного мотылька.
О, волны, не могу, исполненный истомы,
пересекать волну купеческих судов,
победно проходить среди знамен и грома
и проплывать вблизи ужасных глаз мостов.
If I want a water of Europe, it is the black
Cold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight
A squatting child full of sadness releases
A boat as fragile as a May butterfly.
No longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves,
Follow in the wake of the cotton boats,
Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.
Ta luzha chyornaya brings to mind VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930). At the end of her letter to Onegin (Chapter Three of EO) Tatiana says: tvoey zashchity umolyayu (for your defense I plead):
Но так и быть! Судьбу мою
Отныне я тебе вручаю,
Перед тобою слезы лью,
Твоей защиты умоляю…
Вообрази: я здесь одна,
Никто меня не понимает,
Рассудок мой изнемогает,
И молча гибнуть я должна.
Я жду тебя: единым взором
Надежды сердца оживи,
Иль сон тяжелый перерви,
Увы, заслуженным укором!
Кончаю! Страшно перечесть…
Стыдом и страхом замираю…
Но мне порукой ваша честь,
И смело ей себя вверяю…
But so be it! My fate
henceforth I place into your hands,
before you I shed tears,
for your defense I plead.
Imagine: I am here alone,
none understands me,
my reason sinks,
and, silent, I must perish.
I wait for you: revive
my heart's hopes with a single look
or interrupt the heavy dream
with a rebuke — alas, deserved!
I close. I dread to read this over.
I'm faint with shame and fear... But to me
your honor is a pledge,
and boldly I entrust myself to it.
In her first letter to Van Ada repeats the phrase "I implore you" (ya umolyayu tebya) twice:
[Los Angeles, early September, 1888]
You must pardon me for using such a posh (and also poshlïy) means of having a letter reach you, but I’m unable to find any safer service.
When I said I could not speak and would write, I meant I could not utter the proper words at short notice. I implore you. I felt that I could not produce them and arrange them orally in the necessary order. I implore you. I felt that one wrong or misplaced word would be fatal, you would simply turn away, as you did, and walk off again, and again, and again. I implore you for breath [sic! Ed.] of understanding. But now I think that I should have taken the risk of speaking, of stammering, for I see now that it is just as dreadfully hard to put my heart and honor in script — even more so because in speaking one can use a stutter as a shutter, and plead a chance slurring of words, like a bleeding hare with one side of its mouth shot off, or twist back, and improve; but against a background of snow, even the blue snow of this notepaper, the blunders are red and final. I implore you.
One thing should be established once for all, indefeasibly. I loved, love, and shall love only you. I implore you and love you with everlasting pain and passion, my darling. Tï tut stoyal (you stayed here), in this karavansaray, you in the middle of everything, always, when I must have been seven or eight, didn’t you? (2.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): poshlïy: Russ., vulgar.
This karavansaray and Anna Gorenko's Tartar penname (Akhmatova) make one think of the mosques in Moscow mentioned by Van during a conversation about religions in "Ardis the First:"
A tall rosy-faced youngster in smart riding breeches dismounted from a black pony.
‘It’s Greg’s beautiful new pony,’ said Ada.
Greg, with a well-bred boy’s easy apologies, had brought Marina’s platinum lighter which his aunt had discovered in her own bag.
‘Goodness, I’ve not even had time to miss it. How is Ruth?’
Greg said that both Aunt Ruth and Grace were laid up with acute indigestion — ‘not because of your wonderful sandwiches,’ he hastened to add, ‘but because of all those burnberries they picked in the bushes.’
Marina was about to jingle a bronze bell for the footman to bring some more toast, but Greg said he was on his way to a party at the Countess de Prey’s.
‘Rather soon (skorovato) she consoled herself,’ remarked Marina, alluding to the death of the Count killed in a pistol duel on Boston Common a couple of years ago.
‘She’s a very jolly and handsome woman,’ said Greg.
‘And ten years older than me,’ said Marina.
Now Lucette demanded her mother’s attention.
‘What are Jews?’ she asked.
‘Dissident Christians,’ answered Marina.
‘Why is Greg a Jew?’ asked Lucette.
‘Why-why!’ said Marina; ‘because his parents are Jews.’
‘And his grandparents? His arrière grandparents?’
‘I really wouldn’t know, my dear. Were your ancestors Jews, Greg?’
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ said Greg. ‘Hebrews, yes — but not Jews in quotes — I mean, not comic characters or Christian businessmen. They came from Tartary to England five centuries ago. My mother’s grandfather, though, was a French marquis who, I know, belonged to the Roman faith and was crazy about banks and stocks and jewels, so I imagine people may have called him un juif.’
‘It’s not a very old religion, anyway, as religions go, is it?’ said Marina (turning to Van and vaguely planning to steer the chat to India where she had been a dancing girl long before Moses or anybody was born in the lotus swamp).
‘Who cares —’ said Van.
‘And Belle’ (Lucette’s name for her governess), ‘is she also a dizzy Christian?’
‘Who cares,’ cried Van, ‘who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter — Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mind.’
‘How did this idiotic conversation start in the first place?’ Ada wished to be told, cocking her head at the partly ornamented dackel or taksik.
‘Mea culpa,’ Mlle Larivière explained with offended dignity. ‘All I said, at the picnic, was that Greg might not care for ham sandwiches, because Jews and Tartars do not eat pork.’
‘The Romans,’ said Greg, ‘the Roman colonists, who crucified Christian Jews and Barabbits, and other unfortunate people in the old days, did not touch pork either, but I certainly do and so did my grandparents.’
Lucette was puzzled by a verb Greg had used. To illustrate it for her, Van joined his ankles, spread both his arms horizontally, and rolled up his eyes.
‘When I was a little girl,’ said Marina crossly, ‘Mesopotamian history was taught practically in the nursery.’
‘Not all little girls can learn what they are taught,’ observed Ada.
‘Are we Mesopotamians?’ asked Lucette.
‘We are Hippopotamians,’ said Van. ‘Come,’ he added, ‘we have not yet ploughed today.’
A day or two before, Lucette had demanded that she be taught to hand-walk. Van gripped her by her ankles while she slowly progressed on her little red palms, sometimes falling with a grunt on her face or pausing to nibble a daisy. Dack barked in strident protest.
‘Et pourtant,’ said the sound-sensitive governess, wincing, ‘I read to her twice Ségur’s adaptation in fable form of Shakespeare’s play about the wicked usurer.’
‘She also knows my revised monologue of his mad king,’ said Ada:
Ce beau jardin fleurit en mai,
Mais en hiver
Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais
N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert.
‘Oh, that’s good,’ exclaimed Greg with a veritable sob of admiration. (1.14)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): un juif: a Jew.
et pourtant: and yet.
ce beau jardin etc.: This beautiful garden blooms in May, but in Winter never, never, never, never, never is green etc.
Greg Erminin's arrival on a pony in "Ardis the First" is a parody of Jesus Christ's arrival on a donkey in Jerusalem. In The Luzhin Defense the mother of Luzhin's bride wonders if the surname Luzhin is a pseudonym:
Решив, что она отсутствовала достаточно, она легонько провело рукой по затылку, приглаживая волосы и, улыбаясь, вошла в холл. Лужин и ее мать, которых она только что познакомила, сидели в плетеных креслах под пальмой, и Лужин, насупившись, рассматривал свою неприличную соломенную шляпу, которую он держал на коленях, и в эту минуту ей было одинаково страшно подумать о том, какими словами о ней говорил Лужин (если, вообще, говорил), как и о том, какое впечатление сам Лужин произвел на ее мать. Накануне, как только мать приехала и стала пенять на то, что окно на север, и не горит лампочка на ночном столике, она рассказала, стараясь держать слова на том же уровне, как и все предыдущие, что очень подружилась со знаменитым шахматистом Лужиным. "Наверное, пвсевдоним,- сказала мать, копаясь в несессере,- какой нибудь Рубинштейн или Абрамсон". "Очень, очень знаменитый,- продолжала дочь,- и очень милый". "Помоги-ка мне лучше найти мое мыло",- сказала мать. И теперь, познакомив их, оставя их наедине под предлогом заказать лимонаду, она ощущала, возвращаясь в холл, такой страх, такую непоправимость уже происшедших катастроф, что еще издали стала громко говорить, и споткнулась о край ковра, и рассмеялась, балансируя руками. Бессмысленная игра с соломенной шляпой, молчание, удивленные, блестящие глаза матери, неожиданное воспоминание о том, как он на днях плакал, обняв паровое отопление,- все это было очень тяжело вынести. Но вдруг Лужин поднял голову, его рот скривился знакомой хмурой улыбкой,- и сразу ее страх исчез, и возможная беда показалась чем-то удивительно забавным, ничего не меняющим. Лужин, как будто ожидавший ее прихода, чтобы ретироваться, крякнул, встал и замечательным образом кивнув- ("по-хамски",- весело подумала она, переводя этот кивок на язык матери), направился к лестнице. По дороге он встретил лакея, несшего на подносе три стакана лимонаду. Он остановил его, взял один из стаканов и, осторожно держа его перед собой, бровями вторя колеблющемуся уровню жидкости, стал медленно подниматься по лестнице. Когда он исчез за поворотом, она стала преувеличенно внимательно сдирать тонкую бумажку с соломинки. "Хам",- довольно громко сказала мать, и дочь почувствовала то удовольствие, которое бывает когда угаданное значение иностранного слова находишь в словаре. "Это же не человек,- продолжала с сердитым изумлением мать.- Что это такое? Ведь это же не человек. Он меня называл мадам, просто мадам, как приказчик. Не человек, а Бог знает что. И у него, наверное советский паспорт. Большевик, просто большевик. Я сидела, как дура. Ну и разговорчики. Совершенно грязные манжеты. Ты заметила? Совершенно грязные и обдрипанные".
Deciding that she had been absent long enough, she gently passed her hand over the back of her head, smoothing down her hair, and returned smiling to the lobby. Luzhin and her mother, whom she had only just introduced to one another, were sitting in wicker armchairs beneath a potted palmetto, and Luzhin, his brows knitted, was examining his disgraceful straw hat which he was holding in his lap, and at that moment she was equally terrified by the thought of what words Luzhin was using about her (if, indeed, he was using any) and the thought of what impression Luzhin himself was making on her mother. The day before, as soon as her mother had arrived and begun to complain that her window faced north and the bedside lamp was not working, the daughter had related, trying to keep all her words on the same level, how she had become great friends with the famous chess player Luzhin. "No doubt a pseudonym," said her mother, burrowing in her toilet case. "His real name is Rubinstein or Abramson." "Very, very famous," continued the daughter, "and very nice." "Help me rather to find my soap," said her mother. And now, having introduced them and left them alone on the pretext of ordering some lemonade, she experienced as she returned to the lobby such a feeling of horror, of the irreparability of already completed catastrophes that while still some distance away she began to speak loudly, then tripped on the edge of the carpet and laughed, waving her hands to keep her balance. His senseless fiddling with the boater, the silence, her mother's amazed, gleaming eyes, and the sudden recollection of how he had sobbed the other day, his arms round the radiator--all this was very hard to bear. But suddenly Luzhin raised his head, his mouth twisted into that familiar, morose smile--and at once her fear vanished and the potential disaster seemed something that was extraordinarily amusing, changing nothing. As if he had waited for her return in order to retire, Luzhin grunted, stood up and gave a remarkable nod ("boorish," she thought gaily, translating this nod into her mother's idiom) before proceeding toward the staircase. On the way he met the waiter bringing three glasses of lemonade on a tray. He stopped him, took one of the glasses, and holding it carefully in front of him, mimicking the swaying level of the liquid with his eyebrows, began slowly to mount the stairs. When he had disappeared round the bend she began with exaggerated care to peel the thin paper from her straw. "What a boor!" said her mother loudly, and the daughter felt the kind of satisfaction you get when you find in the dictionary the meaning of a foreign term you have already guessed. "That's not a real person," continued her mother in angry perplexity. "What is he? Certainly not a real person. He calls me madame, just madame, like a shop assistant. He's God knows what. And I'll guarantee he has a Soviet passport. A Bolshevik, just a Bolshevik. I sat there like an idiot. And his small talk ...! His cuffs are quite soiled, by the way. Did you notice? Soiled and frayed." (Chapter 6)
Anton Rubinstein is the author of The Demon, an opera based on a poem (1829-40) by Lermontov. Describing his father's death in an airplane disaster, Van "quotes" Lermontov's poem:
He greeted the dawn of a placid and prosperous century (more than half of which Ada and I have now seen) with the beginning of his second philosophic fable, a ‘denunciation of space’ (never to be completed, but forming in rear vision, a preface to his Texture of Time). Part of that treatise, a rather mannered affair, but nasty and sound, appeared in the first issue (January, 1904) of a now famous American monthly, The Artisan, and a comment on the excerpt is preserved in one of the tragically formal letters (all destroyed save this one) that his sister sent him by public post now and then. Somehow, after the interchange occasioned by Lucette’s death such nonclandestine correspondence had been established with the tacit sanction of Demon:
And o’er the summits of the Tacit
He, banned from Paradise, flew on:
Beneath him, like a brilliant’s facet,
Mount Peck with snows eternal shone.
It would seem indeed that continued ignorance of each other’s existence might have looked more suspicious than the following sort of note:
Agavia Ranch
February 5, 1905
I have just read Reflections in Sidra, by Ivan Veen, and I regard it as a grand piece, dear Professor. The ‘lost shafts of destiny’ and other poetical touches reminded me of the two or three times you had tea and muffins at our place in the country about twenty years ago. I was, you remember (presumptuous phrase!), a petite fille modèle practicing archery near a vase and a parapet and you were a shy schoolboy (with whom, as my mother guessed, I may have been a wee bit in love!), who dutifully picked up the arrows I lost in the lost shrubbery of the lost castle of poor Lucette’s and happy, happy Adette’s childhood, now a ‘Home for Blind Blacks’ — both my mother and L., I’m sure, would have backed Dasha’s advice to turn it over to her Sect. Dasha, my sister-in-law (you must meet her soon, yes, yes, yes, she’s dreamy and lovely, and lots more intelligent than I), who showed me your piece, asks me to add she hopes to ‘renew’ your acquaintance — maybe in Switzerland, at the Bellevue in Mont Roux, in October. I think you once met pretty Miss ‘Kim’ Blackrent, well, that’s exactly dear Dasha’s type. She is very good at perceiving and pursuing originality and all kinds of studies which I can’t even name! She finished Chose (where she read History — our Lucette used to call it ‘Sale Histoire,’ so sad and funny!). For her you’re le beau ténébreux, because once upon a time, once upon libellula wings, not long before my marriage, she attended — I mean at that time, I’m stuck in my ‘turnstyle’ — one of your public lectures on dreams, after which she went up to you with her latest little nightmare all typed out and neatly clipped together, and you scowled darkly and refused to take it. Well, she’s been after Uncle Dementiy to have him admonish le beau ténébreux to come to Mont Roux Bellevue Hotel, in October, around the seventeenth, I guess, and he only laughs and says it’s up to Dashenka and me to arrange matters.
So ‘congs’ again, dear Ivan! You are, we both think, a marvelous, inimitable artist who should also ‘only laugh,’ if cretinic critics, especially lower-upper-middle-class Englishmen, accuse his turnstyle of being ‘coy’ and ‘arch,’ much as an American farmer finds the parson ‘peculiar’ because he knows Greek.
P.S.
Dushevno klanyayus’ (‘am souledly bowing’, an incorrect and vulgar construction evoking the image of a ‘bowing soul’) nashemu zaochno dorogomu professoru (‘to our "unsight-unseen" dear professor’), o kotorom mnogo slïshal (about whom have heard much) ot dobrago Dementiya Dedalovicha i sestritsï (from good Demon and my sister).
S uvazheniem (with respect),
Andrey Vaynlender
Furnished Space, l’espace meublé (known to us only as furnished and full even if its contents be ‘absence of substance’ — which seats the mind, too), is mostly watery so far as this globe is concerned. In that form it destroyed Lucette. Another variety, more or less atmospheric, but no less gravitational and loathsome, destroyed Demon.
Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. A list of ‘leading figures’ dead in the explosion comprised the advertising manager of a department store, the acting foreman in the sheet-metal division of a facsimile corporation, a recording firm executive, the senior partner of a law firm, an architect with heavy aviation background (a first misprint here, impossible to straighten out), the vice president of an insurance corporation, another vice president, this time of a board of adjustment whatever that might be —
‘I’m hongree,’ said a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers.
‘Use bell,’ said Van, continuing in a state of odd fascination to go through the compilation of labeled lives:
— the president of a wholesale liquor-distributing firm, the manager of a turbine equipment company, a pencil manufacturer, two professors of philosophy, two newspaper reporters (with nothing more to report), the assistant controller of a wholesome liquor distribution bank (misprinted and misplaced), the assistant controller of a trust company, a president, the secretary of a printing agency —
The names of those big shots, as well as those of some eighty other men, women, and silent children who perished in blue air, were being withheld until all relatives had been reached; but the tabulatory preview of commonplace abstractions had been thought to be too imposing not to be given at once as an appetizer; and only on the following morning did Van learn that a bank president lost in the closing garble was his father.
‘The lost shafts of every man’s destiny remain scattered all around him,’ etc. (Reflections in Sidra). (3.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): And o’er the summits of the Tacit etc.: parody of four lines in Lermontov’s The Demon (see also p.115).
le beau ténébreux: wrapt in Byronic gloom.