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Fw:ADA's Mascodagama and Dostoevsky's "The Possessed" (Besy)
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----- Original Message -----
From: alex
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 8:47 AM
Subject: Mascodagama
Nabokov once said that he prefers Joyce to Dostoevsky. But the maniambulation in ADA seems to refer to both Joyce's Ulysses and Dostoevsky's _Besy_ (The Possessed, or, literally, "The Demons").
You remember that, at Chose, Van appears on stage as Mascodagama - a masked giant who walks, or rather runs, and finally even dances, on his hands (1.30). Now, in Besy , there is a famous scene of the "literature quadrille" (kadril' literatury) at the charity ball (Part Three, chapter 2: "End of the festival"). It consists of some six pairs of masks. One of the masked dancers, who later turns out to be Lyamshin (a minor character, one of the novel's demons), plays in that quadrille the allegorical part of a "non-Petersburger but formidable newspaper" (nepeterburgskoe, no groznoe izdanie - in fact, Katkov's "Moskovskie vedomosti"), with a heavy club in his hands. In the quadrille's last figure, under the stare of the bespectacled "upright Russian thought" (chestnaya Russkaya mysl' - the magazine "Delo"), Lyamshin turns head over heels and walks on his hands. This should allegorically mean a permanent topsy-turvical distortion of the common sense in the non-Petersburger but formidable newspaper. That hand-walking in front of the governor's wife happens to be the last drop which overflowes the cup and scandalizes the public at the ball. Somebody shouts: "Flibustiery!" (freebooters, pirates, rather than "filibusters").
Now, I wonder if Van's stage name (if not his whole circus stunt) that puns on the name of the famous Portuguese navigator, Vasco da Gama, c1460-1524, wasn't somehow (subconsiously) inspired to him by that hand-walking and the subsequent mad cry in Besy. Van studies in the Chose University "terrology" - a branch of psychiatry that deals with the problems of Terra, a mysterious sibling planet of Demonia, aka Antiterra, the setting of ADA. On Antiterra, its twin, Terra, is usually believed to exist only in the minds of the insane. Its notion is sometimes confused there with that of the Otherworld. Its name (Earth in Latin) seems to hint, quite clearly, at our planet, Earth. But as I prove in a series of articles (see for instance my notes "Traditions of a Russian Family in Ada" and "A Window onto Terra" in the forthcoming spring issue of The Nabokovian), the Terra planet ows its existence at least as much to Dostoevsky and some French naturalist writers as it does to Earth.
Returning to the Dostoevsky novel, let me also point out that the poor governor, who is present at this charity ball that ends in a Dostoevskian nightmarish scandal, goes mad right here, after that quadrille. Simultanously, the big fire begins in the town and, on the morning, the Lebyadkin couple, brother and sister, is found murdered (the house where they lived doesn't burn down, but they are stabbed by an escaped convict, Fed'ka katorzhnyi, who thinks that he acts upon Stavrogin's will). Ignat Lebyadkin is a wretched poet who attempts to blackmail the demonic Stavrogin, his sister Maria's husband (Stavrogin's marriage to Maria Lebyadkin is a secret to the public), just like "Black Miller" blackmails Demon in ADA sending him the examples of his verse.
There are many other parallels between Demon's marriage to Aqua in ADA and the "krovopiytsa" (blood-sucker) Stavrogin's marriage to poor Maria in Besy.
I quite agree with Brian Boyd (who has told me that he dislikes Dostoevsky) and with Nabokov himself (whose dislike of Dostoevsky is well-known) that Besy is a very dull novel. But it is worth reading once as if "through Nabokov's spectacles." Nabokov was a man of total recall (at least in everything what concerned literature), and I assure everybody that there are many allusions in ADA to Besy and other novels and stories of Dostoevsky. And I still think that Van Veen (in his writings) and F. M. Dostoevsky shared the favors of the same muse.
I hope I have murdered nobody with my reckless English,
Alexey Sklyarenko