Subject
corrections & additions, Blanche in Ada
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In my previous post two friends of Chekhov, the writers Lazarev-Gruzinski and Leontiev-Shcheglov, got confused. I wonder if VN could make the same mistake: after all, Gruzinski means "Georgian" and Jean Shcheglov is the author of the play V gorakh Kavkaza ("In the Mountains of the Caucasus"). Btw., Prince Sumbatov-Yuzhin (a playwright and actor of the time) and the brothers Nemirovich-Danchenko (to name only people who were close to Chekhov) also had Caucasian blood.
The Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin was assassinated in the Kiev Opera House in 1911, the year of the posthumous publication of Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. Murat, assassination and opera are mentioned in the following passage of Ada:
He [Van] struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA [Andrey Andreevich Aksakov, Van's Russian tutor] blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general's bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows - English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. (1.28)
It seems that Marat, Charlotte Corday and Napoleon (whose first wife is known on Antiterra as "Queen" Josephine) did not exist on Demonia - the world where France was annexed by England in 1815. (1.40)
Btw., Blanche (a French hand-maid at Ardis who placed an anonymous note in Van's dinner jacket, 1.41) brings to mind Alba, the nickname Chekhov gave to Jean Shcheglov because of his "inquisitorial" hand-writing. In Spanish Alba means what Blanche does in French: "white." One is also reminded of A Daughter of Albion, Chekhov's story about the imperturbable English governess of a Russian gentleman's children. Albion comes from albus (Lat., "white") and is an anagram of albino.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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