Like her grandmother, Marina (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) likes to have her hair done in the open:
On the morning of the day preceding the most miserable one in his life, he found he could bend his leg without wincing, but he made the mistake of joining Ada and Lucette in an impromptu lunch on a long-neglected croquet lawn and walked home with difficulty. A swim in the pool and a soak in the sun helped, however, and the pain had practically gone when in the mellow heat of the long afternoon Ada returned from one of her long ‘brambles’ as she called her botanical rambles, succinctly and somewhat sadly, for the florula had ceased to yield much beyond the familiar favorites. Marina, in a luxurious peignoir, with a large oval mirror hinged before her, sat at a white toilet table that had been carried out onto the lawn where she was having her hair dressed by senile but still wonderworking Monsieur Violette of Lyon and Ladore, an unusual outdoor activity which she explained and excused by the fact of her grandmother’s having also liked qu’on la coiffe au grand air so as to forestall the zephyrs (as a duelist steadies his hand by walking about with a poker).
‘That’s our best performer,’ she said, indicating Van to Violette who mistook him for Pedro and bowed with un air entendu. (1.40)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): qu’on la coiffe etc.: to have her hair done in the open.
un air entendu: a knowing look.
It was Pushkin who "carried an iron club to strengthen and steady his pistol hand in view of a duel he intended to have with Fyodor Tolstoy [Count Tolstoy the American] at the first opportunity." (Eugene Onegin Commentary, vol. II, pp. 458) "Oddly enough, Tolstoy became Pushkin's spokesman in the days of Pushkin's courtship of Natalia Goncharov." (ibid., p. 429)
In his poem Tlennost' ("Mortality"), first published with the title Violet and Rose (1815), Pushkin's Lyceum friend Delvig mentions a zephyr playing with the lock of a girl while she bends to pick a violet:
Там фиалку, наклонясь,
Девица срывает,
Зефир, в волосы вплетясь,
Локоном играет, —
Юноша! краса летит,
Деву старость посетит.
Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zéphyre... (“Like a last ray, like a last zephyr…” 1794) is the first line of André Chénier's last poem. In the first of the seven footnotes that he appended to his elegy Andrey Shen'ye (1825) Pushkin quotes the first three lines of Chénier’s poem in his translation:
Как последний луч, как последнее веяние ветра
Оживляет вечер прекрасного дня,
Так у подножья эшафота я ещё пробую свою лиру.
Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zéphyre
Anime la fin d'un beau jour,
Au pied de l'échafaud j'essaye encor ma lyre.
L'échafaud (scaffold) brings to mind Andromache's échafaudage (intricate hairdo) in Annenski's poem Drugomu ("To Another," 1909):
Я полюбил безумный твой порыв,
Но быть тобой и мной нельзя же сразу,
И, вещих снов иероглифы раскрыв
Узорную пишу я четко фразу.
Фигурно там отобразился страх,
И как тоска бумагу сердца мяла,
Но по строкам, как призрак на пирах,
Тень движется так деланно и вяло.
Твои мечты – менады по ночам,
И лунный вихрь в сверкании размаха
Им волны кос взметает по плечам.
Мой лучший сон – за тканью Андромаха.
На голове ее эшафодаж,
И тот прикрыт кокетливо платочком.
Зато нигде мой строгий карандаш
Не уступал своих созвучий точкам.
Ты весь – огонь. И за костром ты чист.
Испепелишь, но не оставишь пятен,
И бог ты там, где я лишь моралист,
Ненужный гость, неловок и невнятен.
Пройдут года… Быть может, месяца…
Иль даже дни, – и мы сойдём с дороги,
Ты – в лепестках душистого венца,
Я просто так, задвинутый на дроги.
Наперекор завистливой судьбе
И нищете убого-слабодушной,
Ты памятник оставишь по себе,
Незыблемый, хоть сладостно-воздушный…
Моей мечты бесследно минет день…
Как знать? А вдруг, с душой подвижней моря,
Другой поэт ее полюбит тень
В нетронуто-торжественном уборе…
Полюбит, и узнает, и поймёт,
И, увидав, что тень проснулась, дышит, –
Благословит немой ее полёт
Среди людей, которые не слышат…
Пусть только бы в круженьи бытия
Не вышло так, что этот дух влюблённый,
Мой брат и маг не оказался я,
В ничтожестве слегка лишь подновлённый.
In Homer's Iliad Andromache is Hector's faithful wife. When Ada refuses to leave her sick husband, Van compares her to Helen of Troy:
As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.
‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’
‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’
‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet —’
‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).
‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène —’
‘Ach, perestagne!’
‘— et le phalène.’
‘Je t’emplie ("prie" and "supplie"), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘But, but, but’ — (slapping every time his forehead) — ‘to be on the very brink of, of, of — and then have that idiot turn Keats!’
‘Bozhe moy, I must be going. Say something to me, my darling, my only one, something that might help!’
There was a narrow chasm of silence broken only by the rain drumming on the eaves.
‘Stay with me, girl,’ said Van, forgetting everything — pride, rage, the convention of everyday pity.
For an instant she seemed to waver — or at least to consider wavering; but a resonant voice reached them from the drive and there stood Dorothy, gray-caped and mannish-hatted, energetically beckoning with her unfurled umbrella.
‘I can’t, I can’t, I’ll write you,’ murmured my poor love in tears.
Van kissed her leaf-cold hand and, letting the Bellevue worry about his car, letting all Swans worry about his effects and Mme Scarlet worry about Eveline’s skin trouble, he walked some ten kilometers along soggy roads to Rennaz and thence flew to Nice, Biskra, the Cape, Nairobi, the Basset range
— And o'er the summits of the Basset —
Would she write? Oh, she did! Oh, every old thing turned out superfine! Fancy raced fact in never-ending rivalry and girl giggles. Andrey lived only a few months longer, po pal’tzam (finger counting) one, two, three, four — say, five. Andrey was doing fine by the spring of nineteen six or seven, with a comfortably collapsed lung and a straw-colored beard (nothing like facial vegetation to keep a patient busy). Life forked and reforked. Yes, she told him. He insulted Van on the mauve-painted porch of a Douglas hotel where van was awaiting his Ada in a final version of Les Enfants Maudits. Monsieur de Tobak (an earlier cuckold) and Lord Erminin (a second-time second) witnessed the duel in the company of a few tall yuccas and short cactuses. Vinelander wore a cutaway (he would); Van, a white suit. Neither man wished to take any chances, and both fired simultaneously. Both fell. Mr Cutaway’s bullet struck the outsole of Van’s left shoe (white, black-heeled), tripping him and causing a slight fourmillement (excited ants) in his foot — that was all. Van got his adversary plunk in the underbelly — a serious wound from which he recovered in due time, if at all (here the forking swims in the mist). Actually it was all much duller. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): phalène: moth (see also p.111).
tu sais etc.: you know it will kill me.
Bozhe moy: Russ., oh, my God.
Describing his meetings with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in 1905 in Mont Roux, Van mentions Vere’s Ninon and Ada’s lenclose:
Before the two ladies proceeded toward the lift, Ada glanced at Van - and he - no fool in amorous strategy - refrained to comment on her 'forgetting' her tiny black silk handbag on the seat of her chair. He did not accompany them beyond the passage leading liftward and, clutching the token, awaited her planned return behind a pillar of hotel-hall mongrel design, knowing that in a moment she would say to her accursed companion (by now revising, no doubt, her views on the 'beau ténébreux') as the lift's eye turned red under a quick thumb: 'Akh, sumochku zabïla (forgot my bag)!' – and instantly flitting back, like Vere's Ninon, she would be in his arms.
Their open mouths met in tender fury, and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening. 'We'll vroom straight to my place as soon as you wake up, don't bother to bathe, jump into your lenclose -' and, with the burning sap brimming, he again devoured her, until (Dorothy must have reached the sky!) she danced three fingers on his wet lips - and escaped. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Olorinus: from Lat. olor, swan (Leda’s lover).
lenclose: distorted ‘clothes’ (influenced by ‘Ninon de Lenclos’), the courtesan in Vere de Vere’s novel mentioned above.
In a letter of Nov. 6, 1833, to his wife Pushkin calls Ninon de Lenclos (a courtesan, 1620-1705, whose hairdo Natalia Nikolaevna just copied) kurva (a whore) and quotes Ninon’s words "Il est écrit sur le coeur de tout homme: à la plus facile (it is written on the heart of every man: to the most accessible):”
Курва, у которой переняла ты причёску (NB: ты очень должна быть хороша в этой причёске; я об этом думал сегодня ночью), Ninon говорила: Il est écrit sur le coeur de tout homme: à la plus facile. После этого, изволь гордиться похищением мужских сердец.
Describing the beginning of Demon's affair with Marina, Van mentions the violent dance called kurva or 'ribbon boule:'
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).