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Shakespeare & Marx pere in Ada
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Lucette to Van: '...otherwise I haven't once kissed male epithelia in all my love - I mean, life. Look, I can swear I never have, by - by William Shakespeare' (extending dramatically one hand toward a shelf with a set of thick red books).
'Hold it!' cried Van. 'That's the Collected Works of Falknermann, dumped by my predecessor.' (Ada, 2.5)
In Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well" (Act One, scene III) the clown says that "honesty be no puritan."
The clown's words are quoted by Marx (who is known on Antiterra as Marx pere, the popular author of 'historical' plays) in "The Holy Family" (Chapter V, section 4, "The Mystery of Probity and Piety"):
"The notary is the secular confessor. He is a puritan by profession, and "honesty", Shakespeare says, is "no Puritan".' He is at the same time the go-between for all possible purposes, the manager of all civil intrigues and plots."
Years later, when Lucette is dead, Van uses the (fictitious) appointment with a lawyer (whose name Van invents impromptu) as a pretext to meet Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in secret from her husband:
'Tomorrow morning, je veux vous accaparer, ma chere. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps, informed you, Lucette's accounts in several Swiss banks -' and he trotted out a prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. 'I suggest,' he added, 'that if you have no other engagements' - (sending a questioning glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval) - 'you and I go to see Maitre Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me, my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour drive from here - who has given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh - I mean sign with a sigh - the matter is tedious. All right? All right.' (3.8)
The Russian title of Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well" is Vsyo horosho, chto horosho konchaetsya. At first Tolstoy (who famously disliked Shakespeare and who, of course, was not a Marxist) wanted to entitle his "War and Peace" Vsyo horosho, chto horosho konchaetsya (see Tolstoy's letter of May 10-20, 1866, to A. A. Fet).
Horosho ("Good!" 1927) is a poem by Mayakovski written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. It is parodied by VN in Tyrants Destroyed (1938):
Хорошо-с, а помните, граждане,
как хирел наш край без отца?...
Now then, citizens,
You remember how long
Our land wilted without a Father?...
The word horosho (in the sense "all right") occurs in Ada (1.23):
On the following day Ada informed her mother that Lucette badly needed a bath and that she would give it to her, whether her governess liked it or not. 'Horosho,' said Marina (while getting ready to receive a neighbor and his protege, a young actor, in her best Dame Marina style), 'but the temperature should be kept at exactly twenty-eight (as it had been since the eighteenth century) and don't let her stay in it longer than ten or twelve minutes.'
...The two elder children, having locked the door of the L-shaped bathroom from the inside, now retired to the seclusion of its lateral part, in a corner between a chest of drawers and an old unused mangle, which the sea-green eye of the bathroom looking-glass could not reach; but barely had they finished their violent and uncomfortable exertions in that hidden nook, with an empty medicine bottle idiotically beating time on a shelf, when Lucette was already calling resonantly from the tub and the maid knocking on the door: Mlle Lariviere wanted some hot water too.
The name of Lucette's governess, Lariviere, means "the river". At the beginning of Horosho Mayakovski suggests that the reader has a drink from the river called "Fact":
Время - вещь необычайно длинная, -
были времена - прошли былинные.
Ни былин, ни эпосов, ни эпопей.
Телеграммой лети, строфа!
Воспалённой губой припади и попей
из реки по имени "Факт".
One wonders though if there is not more blood than water in that river (see also in Topos my Russian article "All's Well that Ends Well. The Optimism of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Mayakovski, Pasternak and Nabokov").
Alexey Sklyarenko
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'Hold it!' cried Van. 'That's the Collected Works of Falknermann, dumped by my predecessor.' (Ada, 2.5)
In Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well" (Act One, scene III) the clown says that "honesty be no puritan."
The clown's words are quoted by Marx (who is known on Antiterra as Marx pere, the popular author of 'historical' plays) in "The Holy Family" (Chapter V, section 4, "The Mystery of Probity and Piety"):
"The notary is the secular confessor. He is a puritan by profession, and "honesty", Shakespeare says, is "no Puritan".' He is at the same time the go-between for all possible purposes, the manager of all civil intrigues and plots."
Years later, when Lucette is dead, Van uses the (fictitious) appointment with a lawyer (whose name Van invents impromptu) as a pretext to meet Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in secret from her husband:
'Tomorrow morning, je veux vous accaparer, ma chere. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps, informed you, Lucette's accounts in several Swiss banks -' and he trotted out a prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. 'I suggest,' he added, 'that if you have no other engagements' - (sending a questioning glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval) - 'you and I go to see Maitre Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me, my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour drive from here - who has given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh - I mean sign with a sigh - the matter is tedious. All right? All right.' (3.8)
The Russian title of Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well" is Vsyo horosho, chto horosho konchaetsya. At first Tolstoy (who famously disliked Shakespeare and who, of course, was not a Marxist) wanted to entitle his "War and Peace" Vsyo horosho, chto horosho konchaetsya (see Tolstoy's letter of May 10-20, 1866, to A. A. Fet).
Horosho ("Good!" 1927) is a poem by Mayakovski written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. It is parodied by VN in Tyrants Destroyed (1938):
Хорошо-с, а помните, граждане,
как хирел наш край без отца?...
Now then, citizens,
You remember how long
Our land wilted without a Father?...
The word horosho (in the sense "all right") occurs in Ada (1.23):
On the following day Ada informed her mother that Lucette badly needed a bath and that she would give it to her, whether her governess liked it or not. 'Horosho,' said Marina (while getting ready to receive a neighbor and his protege, a young actor, in her best Dame Marina style), 'but the temperature should be kept at exactly twenty-eight (as it had been since the eighteenth century) and don't let her stay in it longer than ten or twelve minutes.'
...The two elder children, having locked the door of the L-shaped bathroom from the inside, now retired to the seclusion of its lateral part, in a corner between a chest of drawers and an old unused mangle, which the sea-green eye of the bathroom looking-glass could not reach; but barely had they finished their violent and uncomfortable exertions in that hidden nook, with an empty medicine bottle idiotically beating time on a shelf, when Lucette was already calling resonantly from the tub and the maid knocking on the door: Mlle Lariviere wanted some hot water too.
The name of Lucette's governess, Lariviere, means "the river". At the beginning of Horosho Mayakovski suggests that the reader has a drink from the river called "Fact":
Время - вещь необычайно длинная, -
были времена - прошли былинные.
Ни былин, ни эпосов, ни эпопей.
Телеграммой лети, строфа!
Воспалённой губой припади и попей
из реки по имени "Факт".
One wonders though if there is not more blood than water in that river (see also in Topos my Russian article "All's Well that Ends Well. The Optimism of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Mayakovski, Pasternak and Nabokov").
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/