Vladimir Nabokov

Athaulf the Future & Milord Goal in Ada

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 14 April, 2019

Describing the political situation on Terra (Antiterra’s twin planet), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Athaulf the Future:

 

Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)

 

Athaulf the Future seems to be a cross between Adolf Hitler and Athaulf, the king of the Visigoths from 411 to 415. In the first poem of his cycle Ital’yanskie stikhi (“Italian Verses,” 1909), Ravenna, Alexander Blok mentions Galla Placida, Athaulf’s wife who ruled the Western Roman Empire from 425 to 437 and who, like Dante, was buried in Ravenna:

 

Всё, что минутно, всё, что бренно,
Похоронила ты в веках.
Ты, как младенец, спишь, Равенна,
У сонной вечности в руках.

Рабы сквозь римские ворота
Уже не ввозят мозаик.
И догорает позолота
В стенах прохладных базилик.

От медленных лобзаний влаги
Нежнее грубый свод гробниц,
Где зеленеют саркофаги
Святых монахов и цариц.

Безмолвны гробовые залы,
Тенист и хладен их порог,
Чтоб черный взор блаженной Галлы,
Проснувшись, камня не прожёг.

Военной брани и обиды
Забыт и стёрт кровавый след,
Чтобы воскресший глас Плакиды
Не пел страстей протекших лет.

Далёко отступило море,
И розы оцепили вал,
Чтоб спящий в гробе Теодорих
О буре жизни не мечтал.

А виноградные пустыни,
Дома и люди - всё гроба.
Лишь медь торжественной латыни
Поёт на плитах, как труба.

Лишь в пристальном и тихом взоре
Равеннских девушек, порой,
Печаль о невозвратном море
Проходит робкой чередой.

Лишь по ночам, склонясь к долинам,
Ведя векам грядущим счёт,
Тень Данта с профилем орлиным
О Новой Жизни мне поёт.

 

All things ephemeral, fast-fading

In time's dark vaults, hid by you, lie.

A babe, you sleep, Ravenna, cradled

By slumberous eternity.

 

Through Rome's old gates the slaves no longer,

Bright slabs of marble bearing, pass.

The gilt looks charred, seems but to smoulder,

Not flame in the basilicas.

 

The moisture's indolent caresses

Have smoothed the stone of tombs where green

With age the coffins of the blessed,

Of holy monks stand and of queens.

 

The silent crypts, by all forsaken,

Cold shades invite that o'er them roam

So that the gaze of Galla, wakened,

Might not burn through the mass of stone.

 

The bloody trace of war's dark horrors

Has been forgot and wiped away

So that she might not sing the sorrows

And passions of a bygone day.

 

The sea's withdrawn, and o'er the ramparts

The roses climb and form a screen

So that Theodoric might never

Awake or of life's tempests dream.

 

A realm of death. Men, vineyards, houses

Are all as sepulchres. Alone

The brass of Latin, ageless, rousing,

Blares like a trumpet on the stones.

 

But in the gaze intent and peaceful

Of the Ravenna girls the sea

Is glimpsed at times, reminder wistful

Of something that no more will be.

 

And deep at night, the ages counting,

Those meant to come by fate's decree,

The eagle-profiled shade of Dante

Of Vita Nuova sings to me.

 

Vedya vekam gryadushchim schyot (counting the centuries to come), a line in the poem’s last stanza, brings to mind Ataulf Gryadushchiy (Athaulf the Future). In his poem Golos iz khora ("A Voice from the Choir," 1914) Blok says: O esli b znali vy, druz'ya, / Kholod i mrak gryadushchikh dney! ("If you only knew, my friends, / the cold and murk of the days to come!"). When Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband) falls ill, his sister Dorothy reads to him old issues of Golos Feniksa (“The Phoenix Voice,” a Russian-language newspaper in Arizona):

 

Much to Van’s amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed to Visit him ‘because of the constant necessity of routine tests’ — or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront disaster in manly solitude. (3.8)

 

Blok is the author of Sirin i Alkonost, ptitsy radosti i pechali (“Sirin and Alkonost, the Birds of Joy and Sorrow,” 1899). Like Phoenix, Sirin is a fairy tale bird. Sirin was VN’s Russian nom de plume.

 

In the first poem of his cycle Na pole Kulikovom (“On Kulikovo Field,” 1908) Blok exclaims: Rus’ moya! Zhena moya! (“My Rus! My wife!”):

 

Река раскинулась. Течёт, грустит лениво

     И моет берега.

Над скудной глиной жёлтого обрыва

     В степи грустят стога.

 

О, Русь моя! Жена моя! До боли

     Нам ясен долгий путь!

Наш путь - стрелой татарской древней воли

     Пронзил нам грудь.

 

Наш путь - степной, наш путь - в тоске безбрежной -

     В твоей тоске, о, Русь!

И даже мглы - ночной и зарубежной -

     Я не боюсь.

 

Пусть ночь. Домчимся. Озарим кострами

     Степную даль.

В степном дыму блеснет святое знамя

     И ханской сабли сталь...

 

И вечный бой! Покой нам только снится

     Сквозь кровь и пыль...

Летит, летит степная кобылица

     И мнет ковыль...

 

И нет конца! Мелькают версты, кручи...

     Останови!

Идут, идут испуганные тучи,

     Закат в крови!

 

Закат в крови! Из сердца кровь струится!

     Плачь, сердце, плачь...

Покоя нет! Степная кобылица

     Несётся вскачь!

 

The river spreads out. It flows, sorrowful, lazy

     And washes the banks.

Above the bare clay of the yellow cliff

     Haystacks languish on the steppe.

    

O my Rus! My wife! Our long path

     Is painfully clear!

Our path has pierced our breast like an arrow

     Of ancient Tatar will.

    

Our path leads through the steppe, through endless yearning,

     Through your yearning, O Rus!

And I do not even fear the darkness

     Of night beyond the border.

    

Let night come. We will speed to our goal, light up

     The steppe with campfires.

In the smoky reaches a holy banner will shine

     Along with the Khan's steel sabre...

    

And the battle is eternal! We can only dream of peace

     Through blood and dust...

The mare of the steppe flies on and on

     And tramples the steppe grass...

    

And there is no end! the miles and slopes flash by...

     Stop!

The frightened thunderheads approach,

     The sunset bleeds!

    

The sunset bleeds! Blood streams from the heart!

     Weep, heart, weep.

There is no peace! The mare of the steppe

     Flies at full gallop!

 

In the battle of Kulikovo (1380) the Russians led by Prince Dmitri (surnamed Donskoy) defeated the Tartars led by Khan Mamay. In his poem O pravitelyakh (“On Rulers,” 1945) VN mentions volk v makintoshe, v furazhke s nemetskim krutym kozyr'kom, okhripshiy i ves' perekoshennyi ("the trench-coated wolf in his army cap with a German steep peak, hoarse-voiced, his face all distorted," i. e. Hitler) and compares Stalin (who said that life became better and merrier) to Khan Mamay ("a particularly evil Tartar prince of the fourteenth century"):

 

Умирает со скуки историк:

за Мамаем все тот же Мамай.

В самом деле, нельзя же нам с горя

поступить, как чиновный Китай,

кучу лишних веков присчитавший

к истории скромной своей,

от этого, впрочем, не ставшей

ни лучше, ни веселей.

                                  

The historian dies of sheer boredom:

on the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.

Does our plight really force us to do

what did bureaucratic Cathay

that with heaps of superfluous centuries

augmented her limited history

which, however, hardly became

either better or merrier.

 

On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Stalin is represented by Khan Sosso and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel (one of the seconds in Demon Veen’s sword duel with Baron d’Onsky):

 

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).

 

In VN’s story Lik (1939) Alexander Lik’s real name seems to be Kulikov. Like Marina Durmanov (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Lik is an actor. In his Parizhskaya poema (“The Paris Poem,” 1943) VN mentions aktyory (actors):

 

В этой жизни, богатой узорами

(неповторной, поскольку она

по-другому, с другими актёрами,

будет в новом театре дана)…

 

In this life, rich in patterns (a life

unrepeatable, since with a different

cast, in a different manner,

in a new theater it will be given)…

 

“The Paris Poem” was written after the battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 to February 1943) in which the Russians defeated the Germans. The dominant height overlooking the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) is called Mamaev kurgan (the Mamay tumulus).

 

On Antiterra the Russians must have lost the battle of Kulikovo and migrated, across "the ha-ha of a doubled ocean," to America:

 

For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality. (1.3)

 

In his poem Pered sudom (“At the Trial,” 1915) Blok repeats the word ved’ three times:

 

Что же ты потупилась в смущеньи?
Погляди, как прежде, на меня,
Вот какой ты стала - в униженьи,
В резком, неподкупном свете дня!

Я и сам ведь не такой - не прежний,
Недоступный, гордый, чистый, злой.
Я смотрю добрей и безнадежней
На простой и скучный путь земной.

Я не только не имею права,
Я тебя не в силах упрекнуть
За мучительный твой, за лукавый,
Многим женщинам суждённый путь...

Но ведь я немного по-другому,
Чем иные, знаю жизнь твою,
Более, чем судьям, мне знакомо,
Как ты очутилась на краю.

Вместе ведь по краю, было время,
Нас водила пагубная страсть,
Мы хотели вместе сбросить бремя
И лететь, чтобы потом упасть.

Ты всегда мечтала, что, сгорая,
Догорим мы вместе - ты и я,
Что дано, в объятьях умирая,
Увидать блаженные края...

Что же делать, если обманула
Та мечта, как всякая мечта,
И что жизнь безжалостно стегнула
Грубою верёвкою кнута?

Не до нас ей, жизни торопливой,
И мечта права, что нам лгала. -
Всё-таки, когда-нибудь счастливой
Разве ты со мною не была?

Эта прядь - такая золотая
Разве не от старого огня? -
Страстная, безбожная, пустая,
Незабвенная, прости меня!

 

The two poets who could not stand each other, Blok and Gumilyov died almost simultaneously in August 1921. In his poem Otyezzhayshchemu (“To a Departing Person,” 1913) Gumilyov twice repeats the word ved’:

 

Нет, я не в том тебе завидую
С такой мучительной обидою,
Что уезжаешь ты и вскоре
На Средиземном будешь море.

И Рим увидишь, и Сицилию,
Места любезные Виргилию,
В благоухающей, лимонной
Трущобе сложишь стих влюблённый.

Я это сам не раз испытывал,

Я солью моря грудь пропитывал,
Над Арно, Данта чтя обычай,
Слагал сонеты Беатриче.

Что до природы мне, до древности,
Когда я полон жгучей ревности,
Ведь ты во всём её убранстве
Увидел Музу Дальних Странствий.

Ведь для тебя в руках изменницы
В хрустальном кубке нектар пенится,
И огнедышащей беседы
Ты знаешь молнии и бреды.

А я, как некими гигантами,
Торжественными фолиантами
От вольной жизни заперт в нишу,
Её не вижу и не слышу. 

 

Gigantami (by the giants) in the poem’s last stanza brings to mind “a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform” (Athaulf the Future). In his story Radosti zemnoy lyubvi ("The Joys of Earthly Love," 1908) Gumilyov mentions the poisoned arrows of the inhabitants of the wild Tartary:

 

В то время вся Флоренция говорила о заезжем венецианском синьоре и о его скорее влюблённом, чем почтительном, преклонении перед красотой Примаверы. Этот венецианец одевался в костюмы, напоминающие цветом попугаев; ломаясь, пел песни, пригодные разве только для таверн или грубых солдатских попоек; и хвастливо рассказывал о путешествиях своего соотечественника Марко Поло, в которых сам и не думал участвовать. И как-то Кавальканти видел, что Примавера приняла предложенный ей сонет этого высокомерного глупца, где воспевалась её красота в выражениях напыщенных и смешных: её груди сравнивались со снеговыми вершинами Гималайских гор, взгляды с отравленными стрелами обитателей дикой Тартарии, а любовь, возбуждаемая ею, с чудовищным зверем Симлой, который живёт во владениях Великого Могола, ежедневно пожирая тысячи людей; вдобавок размер часто пропадал, и рифмы были расставлены неверно.

 

The main character in Gumilyov’s story is the poet Guido Cavalcanti (a friend of Dante). Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (Marina’s twin sister), Van mentions her doctor who quotes Cavalcanti:

 

She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether. (1.3)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255–1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’

 

In her last note Aqua mentions the neighboring bor (piney wood):

 

Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. (1.3)

 

There is bor in Borodino (the site of a battle fought on Sept. 7, 1812, during the French invasion of Russia). At the beginning of his poem Borodino (1837) Lermontov twice repeats the word ved’:

 

Скажи-ка, дядя, ведь не даром
Москва, спалённая пожаром,
Французу отдана?

Ведь были ж схватки боевые,
Да, говорят, ещё какие!
Недаром помнит вся Россия
Про день Бородина!

– HEY tell, old man, had we a cause
When Moscow, razed by fire, once was
Given up to Frenchman's blow?
Old-timers talk about some frays,
And they remember well those days!
With cause all Russia fashions lays
About the day of Borodino!

 

In his essay on Mayakovski (VN's "late namesake" whose style is parodied in "On Rulers"), Dekol’tirovannaya loshad’ (“The Horse in a Décolleté Dress,” 1927), Hodasevich says that Mayakovski’s blood-thirsty verses “Let’s wipe our bayonets on the knickers of Viennese cocottes” is a shameful inadvertent parody of the lines in Lermontov’s Borodino: “Daren't the commanders rip foreign uniforms on Russian bayonets?":

 

"Маяковский -- поэт рабочего класса". Вздор. Был и остался поэтом подонков, бездельников, босяков просто и "босяков духовных". Был таким перед войной, когда восхищал и " пужал" подонки интеллигенции и буржуазии, выкрикивая брань и похабщину с эстрады Политехнического музея. И когда, в начале войны, сочинял подписи к немцеедским лубкам, вроде знаменитого:

С криком: "Дейчланд юбер аллес!" -
Немцы с поля убирались.

И когда, бия себя в грудь, патриотически ораторствовал у памятника Скобелеву, перед генерал-губернаторским домом, там, где теперь памятник Октябрю и московский совдеп! И когда читал кровожадные стихи:

О панталоны венских кокоток
Вытрем наши штыки! --

эту позорную нечаянную пародию на Лермонтова:

Не смеют, что ли, командиры
Чужие изорвать мундиры
О русские штыки?

И певцом погромщиков был он, когда водил орду хулиганов героическим приступом брать немецкие магазины. И остался им, когда, после Октября, писал знаменитый марш: "Левой, левой!" (музыка А. Лурье).
Пафос погрома и мордобоя -- вот истинный пафос Маяковского. А на что обрушивается погром, ему было и есть всё равно: венская ли кокотка, витрина ли немецкого магазина в Москве, схваченный ли за горло буржуй -- только бы тот, кого надо громить.

 

Vitrina nemetskogo magazina (the shop window of a German shop) mentioned by Hodasevich in his essay on Mayakovski brings to mind Victor Vitry, the director who made a film of Van’s novel Letters from Terra:

 

Ada, who resented the insufficiency of her brother’s fame, felt soothed and elated by the success of The Texture of Time (1924). That work, she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park. She said she had been somehow responsible for the metamorphoses of the lovely larvae that had woven the silk of ‘Veen’s Time’ (as the concept was now termed in one breath, one breeze, with ‘Bergson’s Duration,’ or ‘Whitehead’s Bright Fringe’). But a considerably earlier and weaker work, the poor little Letters from Terra, of which only half a dozen copies existed — two in Villa Armina and the rest in the stacks of university libraries — was even closer to her heart because of its nonliterary associations with their 1892-93 sojourn in Manhattan. Sixty-year-old Van crustily and contemptuously dismissed her meek suggestion to the effect that it should be republished, together with the Sidra reflections and a very amusing anti-Signy pamphlet on Time in Dreams. Seventy-year-old Van regretted his disdain when Victor Vitry, a brilliant French director, based a completely unauthorized picture on Letters from Terra written by ‘Voltemand’ half a century before.

Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940 by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you remember that horses wore hats — yes, hats — when heat waves swept Manhattan?) and gave the impression — which physics-fiction literature had much exploited — of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time. Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers.

In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies. In an impressive historical survey of Terra rigged up by Vitry — certainly the greatest cinematic genius ever to direct a picture of such scope or use such a vast number of extras (some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors) — kingdoms fell and dictatordoms rose, and republics, half-sat, half-lay in various attitudes of discomfort. The conception was controversial, the execution flawless. Look at all those tiny soldiers scuttling along very fast across the trench-scarred wilderness, with explosions of mud and things going pouf-pouf in silent French now here, now there!

In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive émotion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933, Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914–1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement, and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one). (5.5)

 

"Three goals to one" bring to mind Milord Goal, Governor of Lute (the Antiterran name of Paris). On the other hand, Gaul was was a historical region of Western Europe during the Iron Age that was inhabited by Celtic tribes, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland, parts of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine.

 

...Van and Ada saw the film nine times, in seven different languages, and eventually acquired a copy for home use. They found the historical background absurdly farfetched and considered starting legal proceedings against Vitry — not for having stolen the L.F.T. idea, but for having distorted Terrestrial politics as obtained by Van with such diligence and skill from extrasensorial sources and manic dreams. But fifty years had elapsed, and the novella had not been copyrighted; in fact, Van could not even prove that ‘Voltemand’ was he. Reporters, however, ferreted out his authorship, and in a magnanimous gesture, he allowed it to be publicized.

Three circumstances contributed to the picture’s exceptional success. One factor was, of course, that organized religion, disapproving of Terra’s appeal to sensation-avid sects, attempted to have the thing banned. A second attraction came from a little scene that canny Vitry had not cut out: in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position. Finally, the third, and even more human reason, was that the lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry, after titillating the spectators with her skimpy skirts and sexy rags in the existential sequences, came out of her capsule on Antiterra stark naked, though, of course, in miniature, a millimeter of maddening femininity dancing in ‘the charmed circle of the microscope’ like some lewd elf, and revealing, in certain attitudes, I’ll be damned, a pinpoint glint of pubic floss, gold-powered!

L.F.T. tiny dolls, L.F.T. breloques of coral and ivory, appeared in souvenir shops, from Agony, Patagonia, to Wrinkleballs, Le Bras d’Or. L.F.T. clubs sprouted. L.F.T. girlies minced with mini-menus out of roadside snackettes shaped like spaceships. From the tremendous correspondence that piled up on Van’s desk during a few years of world fame, one gathered that thousands of more or less unbalanced people believed (so striking was the visual impact of the Vitry-Veen film) in the secret Government-concealed identity of Terra and Antiterra. Demonian reality dwindled to a casual illusion. Actually, we had passed through all that. Politicians, dubbed Old Felt and Uncle Joe in forgotten comics, had really existed. Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago — they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general. (ibid.)

 

Chose is Van's English University (1.28 et passim). In his Universitetskaya poema ("The University Poem," 1927) VN mentions Charlie Chaplin:

 

За этой площадью щербатой
кинематограф, и туда-то
по вечерам мы в глубину
туманной дали заходили,--
где мчались кони в клубах пыли
по световому полотну,
волшебно зрителя волнуя;
где силуэтом поцелуя
всё завершалось в должный срок;
где добродетельный урок
всегда в трагедию был вкраплен;
где семенил, носками врозь,
смешной и трогательный Чаплин;
где и зевать нам довелось.

 

Behind this square’s uneven outlines
there is a cinema, and thither
into the foggy depths we wandered,
where steeds midst swirls of dust rushed past
across the canvas screen of light,
the viewer magically alarming,
where, with a kiss’s silhouette,
all ended at the proper time;
where tragedy was always sprinkled
with a beneficial lesson;
where droll and touching Charlie Chaplin
came mincing with his toes thrust out,
where, now and then, we chanced to yawn.

 

In his Ballada (“The Ballad,” 1925) Hodasevich mentions bezrukiy (an armless man) who goes to the movies with his pregnant wife and who enjoys the foolish tricks of Charlot (as Chaplin was called in France):

 

Мне невозможно быть собой,
Мне хочется сойти с ума,
Когда с беременной женой
Идёт безрукий в синема.

Мне лиру ангел подаёт,
Мне мир прозрачен, как стекло, -
А он сейчас разинет рот
Пред идиотствами Шарло.

 

I cannot be myself,

I want to go mad,

When an armless man

goes to the movies with his pregnant wife..

 

An angel gives me a lyre,

the world is to me transparent as glass,

and he will now open his mouth

before the foolery of Charlot.

 

The cripple in Hodasevich’s poem lost his arms in the World War I. In Hodasevich’s poem John Bottom (1926) the hero is buried (as the unknown soldier in a London abbey) with the arm of another casualty. At Marina's funeral Ada meets d'Onsky's son, a person with only one arm:

 

‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’

‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’ (3.8)

 

Athaulf Hindler is also known as Mittler (from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate).