In a conversation with Vadim (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! 1974) Louise Adamson mentions Strelitzia:
VADIM No, darling, no. My daughter may come down any minute. Sit down.
LOUISE (examining an armchair and then settling in it) Pity. You know, I've been here many times before! In fact I was laid on that grand at eighteen. Aldy Landover was ugly, unwashed, brutal--and absolutely irresistible.
VADIM Listen, Louise. I have always found your free, frivolous style very fetching. But you will be moving into this house very soon now, and we want a little more dignity, don't we?
LOUISE We'll have to change that blue carpet. It makes the Stein look like an iceberg. And there should be a riot of flowers. So many big vases and not one Strelitzia! There was a whole shrub of lilac down there in my time. (Part Four, 5)
A genus of five species of perennial plants native to South Africa, Strelitzia is named after the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. In his essay “Adam Czartoryski in Russia” (1935) Mark Aldanov describes the three meetings of the tsar Alexander I with the Queen of Prussia Louise (Duchess Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz) that took place on June 10, 1802, in Memel, on Nov. 5, 1805 (a month before the battle of Austerlitz), in Potsdam, and in 1809 in St. Petersburg. According to Aldanov, Queen Louise fell in love with the young tsar:
Что до королевы Луизы, то немецкие её биографы сдержанно замечают, что встреча с царём была для неё большим переживанием (ein Erlebnis). Их слова надо уточнить в том смысле, что королева навсегда, на всю жизнь влюбилась в Александра Павловича. Безнадежный роман этот — и трогательный, и патетический, и порою забавный — стал, по–видимому, главным смыслом её существования. (Chapter V)
In her letters to Queen Louise the Empress Maria Fyodorovna (the mother of Alexander I) calls her sestrichka (little sister):
Роман этот продолжался до самой смерти королевы. В 1809 году она с Фридрихом Вильгельмом III посетила Петербург. Приём им был оказан необыкновенно торжественный и пышный. Остановились они в Эрмитаже; балы, парады, спектакли следовали один за другим. Не подлежит, однако, сомнению, что в то время прусская королевская чета была на положении довольно странном. Это видно и из мелочей, из подарков. Царь подарил королеве платья, великолепные шали, золотой туалетный прибор. Она также иногда посылала ему подарки, но совершенно иные, вплоть до «пяти дивных вишен». Прусский королевский дом выезжал больше на сердечности чувств. Письма же бедной королевы становились все грустнее и задушевнее. Теперь она писала не только царю, но и обеим императрицам — матери и жене Александра. Обращалась к ним: «Госпожа моя, сестра и кузина» или «Дорогая прекрасная и добрая королева». Мария Фёдоровна отвечала порою просто: «сестричка». (ibid.)
Like Iris Black and Annette Blagovo (Vadim's first two wives), Louise Adamson seems to be Vadim's half-sister. Vadim, Iris, Annette and Louise are the children of Count Starov, a retired diplomat whose name comes from staryi (old). The next paragraph of Aldanov's essay begins with phrase staraya istoriya (an old story):
Старая история, вечная история, одинаковая во все времена и в любой среде: она его любила, он её не любил. Но здесь от этого отчасти зависел ход исторических событий. Королева Луиза вмешивалась в политику, — нельзя сказать, чтобы слишком умно: так, например, в 1807 году, будучи недовольна действиями русского главнокомандующего Беннигсена, она требовала для него «кнута»; выражала также желание «плюнуть в лицо» великому князю Константину Павловичу, — что, кстати сказать, не очень вяжется с небесным обликом, который изображают в своих трудах восторженные немецкие биографы королевы. (ibid.)
“The Stein” (as Louise calls the Bechstein grand piano) brings to mind Henri Bernstein, the author of a play alluded to by Aldanov in his essay on Adam Czartoryski:
Исторического значения вопрос, слава Богу, не имеет. Но психологическое значение его огромно (только поэтому, разумеется, я на нем и останавливаюсь). Ошибались ли современники князя Адама или не ошибались, — молва была именно такова, и Чарторийский не мог о ней не знать. В первые двадцать пять и в последние тридцать лет своей долгой жизни он считался (и в значительной мере действительно был) заклятым врагом России и всего русского. Стилизовали его даже под Конрада Валленрода. Легко себе представить, как это осложнялось мыслью о русском происхождении князя! Положение, несколько напоминающее сюжет известной драмы Анри Бернстейна: глава антисемитской партии внезапно узнает, что сам он — еврей по крови. (chapter I)
Aldanov compares Adam Czartoryski (a Polish patriot whose real father was, most likely, Prince Repnin) to the hero of a well-known play by Henri Bernstein in which the leader of an anti-Semitic party suddenly finds out that he himself is a Jew.
As he speaks to Vadim, Gerry Adamson (Louise’s husband) mentions a critic who called Vadim’s novel Dr. Olga Repnin (1946) chute complète (a complete comedown):
Her husband sat in a deep armchair, reading a London weekly bought at the Shopping Center. He had not bothered to take off his horrible black
raincoat--a voluminous robe of oilskin that conjured up the image of a stagecoach driver in a lashing storm. He now removed however his formidable
spectacles. He cleared his throat with a characteristic rumble. His purple jowls wobbled as he tackled the ordeal of rational speech:
GERRY Do you ever see this paper, Vadim (accenting "Vadim" incorrectly on the first syllable)? Mister (naming a particularly lively criticule) has demolished your Olga (my novel about the professorsha; it had come out only now in the British edition).
VADIM May I give you a drink? We'll toast him and roast him.
GERRY Yet he's right, you know. It is your worst book. Chute complète, says the man. Knows French, too.
LOUISE No drinks. We've got to rush home. Now heave out of that chair. Try again. Take your glasses and paper. There. Au revoir, Vadim. I'll bring you
those pills tomorrow morning after I drive him to school. (Part Four, 1)
In his review in the Northern Bee (Mar. 22, 1830) of Chapter Seven of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin Bulgarin calls this chapter of EO “chute complète:”
Ни одной мысли в этой водянистой VII главе, ни одного чувствования, ни одной картины, достойной воззрения! Совершенное падение, chute complète…
Not one idea in this watery Chapter Seven, not one sentiment, not one picture worthy of contemplation! A complete comedown, chute complète…
In Chapter Seven of EO Tatiana leaves her dear countryside and goes to Moscow, “to the mart of brides.” Soon after Gerry Adamson's death Vadim marries his widow. As she speaks to Vadim, Louise Adamson compares the grand piano to an iceberg (see a quote above). In Ilf and Petrov’s novel Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931) Varvara (one of the inhabitants of “The Crow’s Nest,” Vasisualiy Lokhankin’s wife who leaves him for Ptiburdukov) shows to Mitrich a newspaper article Sredi torosov i aysbergov (“Amid Ice Ridges and Icebergs):
- Да вы поймите, - кипятилась Варвара, поднося к носу камергера газетный лист. - Вот статья. Видите? "Среди торосов и айсбергов".
- Айсберги! - говорил Митрич насмешливо. - Это мы понять можем. Десять лет как жизни нет. Всё Айсберги, Вайсберги, Айзенберги, всякие там Рабиновичи. Верно Пряхин говорит. Отобрать - и всё. Тем более, что вот и Люция Францевна подтверждает насчёт закона.
- А вещи на лестницу выкинуть, к чертям собачьим! - грудным голосом воскликнул бывший князь, а ныне трудящийся Востока, гражданин Гигиенишвили.
"Look here," argued Varvara, putting the newspaper right in front of the Chamberlain's nose. “Here is the article. See? Amid ice ridges and icebergs."
“Icebergs!” sneered Mitrich. “Yes, we can understand that. Ten long years of nothing but tears. Icebergs, Weisbergs, Eisenbergs, all those Rabinovichs. Pryakhin is right. Let's just take it, end of story. Especially since Lucia Franzevna here agrees about the law."
"And his stuff can go into the stairwell, to the devil!" exclaimed the former Prince, lately a proletarian from the East, Citizen Hygienishvili, in his throaty voice. (chapter XIII: “Vasisualiy Lokhankin and his Role in the Russian Revolution”)
In VN’s novel Ada (1969) the phrase k chertyam sobach’im (to the devil) used by Hygienishvili is repeated at least three times. The former Prince’s name suggests hygiene. Aldy Landover (Louise’s lover who possessed her on the Bechstein) was unwashed. On the next day Vadim has the piano carried out of the house:
The grand was the first to go--it was carried out by a gang of staggering iceberg movers and donated by me to Bel's school, which I had reasons to pamper: I am not an easily frightened man but when I am frightened I am very much frightened, and at a second interview that I had had with the schoolmistress, my impersonation of an indignant Charles Dodgson was only saved from failure by the sensational news of my being about to marry an irreproachable socialite, the widow of our most pious philosopher. Louise, per contra, regarded the throwing out of a symbol of luxury as a personal affront and a crime: a concert piano of that kind costs, she said, as least as much as her old Hecate convertible, and she was not quite as wealthy as, no doubt, I thought she was, a statement representing that knot in Logic: the double-hitch lie which does not make one truth. I appeased her by gradually overcrowding the Music Room (if a time series be transformed into sudden space) with the modish gadgets she loved, singing furniture, miniature TV sets, stereorphics, portable orchestras, better and better video sets, remote-control instruments for turning those things on or off, and an automatic telephone dialer. For Bel's birthday she gave her a Rain Sound machine to promote sleep; and to celebrate my birthday she murdered a neurotic's night by getting me a thousand-dollar bedside Pantomime clock with twelve yellow radii on its black face instead of figures, which made it look blind to me or feigning blindness like some repulsive beggar in a hideous tropical town; in compensation that terrible object possessed a secret beam that projected Arabic numerals (2:00, 2:05, 2:10, 2:15, and so forth) on the ceiling of my new sleeping quarters, thus demolishing the sacred, complete, agonizingly achieved occlusion of its oval window. I said I'd buy a gun and shoot it in the mug, if she did not send it back to the fiend who sold it to her. She replaced it by "something especially made for people who like originality," namely a silver-plated umbrella stand in the shape of a giant jackboot--there was "something about rain strangely attractive to her" as her "analyst" wrote me in one of the silliest letters that man ever wrote to man. She was also fond of small expensive animals, but here I stood firm, and she never got the long-coated Chihuahua she coldly craved.
I did not expect much of Louise the Intellectual. The only time I saw her shed big tears, with interesting little howls of real grief, was when on the first Sunday of our marriage all the newspapers carried photographs of the two Albanian authors (a bald-domed old epicist and a longhaired woman compiler of childrens' books) who shared out between them the Prestigious Prize that she had told everybody I was sure to win that year. On the other hand she had only flipped through my novels (she was to read more attentively, though, A Kingdom by the Sea, which I began slowly to pull out of myself in 1957 like a long brain worm, hoping it would not break), while consuming all the "serious" bestsellers discussed by sister consumers belonging to the Literary Group in which she liked to assert herself as a writer's wife. (Part Four, 6)
In “The Golden Calf” Panikovski feigns blindness. The characters in Ilf and Petrov’s novel include Adam Kozlevich, the driver of the Antelope Gnu car whose name and patronymic, Adam Kazimirovich, brings to mind Adam-Kasimir, Adam Czartoryski’s official father.
The long-coated Chihuahua craved by Louise may hint at k chertyam sobach’im (“to the hell curs,” as Van renders this phrase in Ada). The smallest breed of dog, Chihuahua is named after the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. In Ilf and Petrov’s Dvenadtsat’ stuliev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928) Ellochka the Cannibal (cf. Louise the Intellectual) calls her "chic" fur meksikanskiy tushkan (Mexican jerboa).
VN’s Ada corresponds to Vadim’s Ardis (1970), a novel in which Vadim wants to get even with Louise:
My thoughts reverted to Ardis. I knew that the bizarre mental flaw you were now reading about would pain you; I also knew that its display was a mere formality on my part and could not obstruct the natural flow of our common fate. A gentlemanly gesture. In fact, it might compensate for what you did not yet know, what I would have to tell you too, what I suspected you would call the not quite savory little method (gnusnovaten'kiy sposob) of my "getting even" with Louise. All right--but what about Ardis? Apart from my warped mind, did you like it or loathe it? (Part Six, 2)
Gnusnovaten'kiy sposob reminds one of the Antelope Gnu car and four hundred comparatively honest sposobov (means) of expropriation known to Ostap Bender (the main character in "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf"). Vadim fondly calls his new white car “Caracal:”
Learning to drive that "Caracal" (as I fondly called my new white coupé) had its comic as well as dramatic side, but after two flunks and a few little repairs, I found myself legally and physically fit at last to spin off West on a protracted tour. There was, true, a moment of acute distress, as the first distant mountains disowned suddenly any likeness to lilac clouds, when I recalled the trips Iris and I used to make to the Riviera in our old Icarus. If she did occasionally allow me to take the wheel, it was only in a spirit of fun, for she was such a sportive girl. With what sobs I now remembered the time when I managed to hit the postman's bicycle which had been left leaning against a pink wall at the entrance of Carnavaux, and how my Iris doubled up in beautiful mirth as the thing slithered off in front of us! (Part Four, 1)
Vadim’s first wife, Iris Black was shot dead by her lover, Wladimir Blagidze, alias Starov. Like Hygienishvili, Blagidze is a Georgian name.
At the beginning of 1822 Pushkin had a pistol duel with Colonel Starov (commander of the Chasseur Regiment in Kishinev). Vadim (1822) is an unfinished long poem by Pushkin. In the last line of his poem K byustu zavoevatelya ("To the Bust of the Conqueror," 1829) Pushkin calls the tsar Alexander I v litse i v zhizni arlekin (an harlequin in his face and in his life):
Напрасно видишь тут ошибку:
Рука искусства навела
На мрамор этих уст улыбку,
А гнев на хладный лоск чела.
Недаром лик сей двуязычен.
Таков и был сей властелин:
К противочувствиям привычен,
В лице и в жизни арлекин.
It's wrong to see a clumsy style
The hand of art has truly wrought
Both marble lips that seem to smile
And brows that frown in angry thought.
This two-faced look he never shed,
For so he was, this potentate:
On inner conflicts he was fed,
A harlequin in face and fate.
In Pushkin's poem arlekin (harlequin) rhymes with vlastelin (ruler). In Canto Three of Poltava (1829) Pushkin mentions, among other "fledglings of Peter's nest," Anikita Repnin (a general who participated in the battle of Poltava) and calls Prince Menshikov schast'ya baloven' bezrodnyi, poluderzhavnyi vlastelin (fortune’s humble favorite, the half-sovereign ruler):
И он промчался пред полками,
Могущ и радостен как бой.
Он поле пожирал очами.
За ним вослед неслись толпой
Сии птенцы гнезда Петрова —
В пременах жребия земного
В трудах державства и войны
Его товарищи, сыны:
И Шереметев благородный,
И Брюс, и Боур, и Репнин,
И, счастья баловень безродный,
Полудержавный властелин.
He tore ahead of all the ranks,
Enraptured, mighty as the battle.
His eyes devoured the martial field.
The fledglings of the Petrine nest
Surged after him, a loyal throng—
Through all the shifts of worldly fate,
In trials of policy and war,
These men, these comrades, were like sons:
The noble Sheremetev,
And Bryus, and Bour, and Repnin,
And, fortune’s humble favorite,
The mighty, quasi-sovereign.
(tr. I. Eubanks)