Describing the floramors (one hundred palatial brothels built by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, all over the world in memory of his grandson Eric, the author of an essay entitled "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream"), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions “some nice vstryaska (shake-up) in the genetic kaleidoscope:”
According to Eric’s plan, Councils of Elderly Noblemen were responsible for mustering the girls. Delicately fashioned phalanges, good teeth, a flawless epiderm, undyed hair, impeccable buttocks and breasts, and the unfeigned vim of avid venery were the absolute prerequisites demanded by the Elders as they had been by Eric. Intactas were tolerated only if very young. On the other hand, no woman who had ever borne a child (even in her own childhood) could be accepted, no matter how free she was of mammilary blemishes.
Their social rank had been left unspecified but the Committees were inclined, initially and theoretically, to recruit girls of more or less gentle birth. Daughters of artists were preferred, on the whole, to those of artisans. Quite an unexpected number turned out to be the children of peeved peers in cold castles or of ruined baronesses in shabby hotels. In a list of about two thousand females working in all the floramors on January 1, 1890 (the greatest year in the annals of Villa Venus), I counted as many as twenty-two directly connected with the royal families of Europe, but at least one-quarter of all the girls belonged to plebeian groups. Owing to some nice vstryaska (shake-up) in the genetic kaleidoscope, or mere poker luck, or no reason at all, the daughters of peasants and peddlers and plumbers were not seldom more stylish than their middle-middle-class or upper-upper-class companions, a curious point that will please my non-gentle readers no less than the fact that the servant-girls ‘below’ the Oriental Charmers (who assisted in various rituals of silver basins, embroidered towels and dead-end smiles the client and his clickies) not seldom descended from emblazoned princely heights.
Demon’s father (and very soon Demon himself), and Lord Erminin, and a Mr Ritcov, and Count Peter de Prey, and Mire de Mire, Esq., and Baron Azzuroscudo were all members of the first Venus Club Council; but it was bashful, obese, big-nosed Mr Ritcov’s visits that really thrilled the girls and filled the vicinity with detectives who dutifully impersonated hedge-cutters, grooms, horses, tall milkmaids, new statues, old drunks and so forth, while His Majesty dallied, in a special chair built for his weight and whims, with this or that sweet subject of the realm, white, black or brown. (2.3)
Vstryaska (“Shake-up,” 1898) is a story by Gorki about a servant boy who enjoyed the performance of a clown at the circus and attempts to imitate his tricks and mannerisms at home. His audience (the icon-painters) applauds him, but then he gets punished for a small blunder. One of the icon-painters grubs him by the hair and sends him flying (causing the boy to make a salto mortale). This cruel punishment was called vstryaska (a shake-up).
The vstryaska experienced by the boy in Gorki’s story brings to mind Fred Dobson’s flight in VN’s story Kartofel’nyi Elf (“The Potato Elf,” 1924):
Сестры мгновенно оглушили карлика своим лепетом. Они щекотали и тискали Фреда, который, весь надувшись темной кровью, смотрел исподлобья и, как шар, перекатывался между быстрых обнаженных рук, дразнивших его. И когда Арабелла, играя, притянула его к себе и упала на кушетку, Фред почувствовал, что сходит с ума и стал барахтаться и сопеть, вцепившись ей в шею. Откидывая его, она подняла голую руку, он рванулся, скользнул, присосался губами к бритой мышке, к горячей, чуть колючей впадине. Другая, Зита, помирая со смеху, старалась оттащить его за ногу; в ту же минуту со стуком отпахнулась дверь, и, в белом, как мраморе, трико, вошел француз, партнер акробаток. Молча и без злобы он цапнул карлика за шиворот,-- только щёлкнуло крахмальное крылышко, соскочившее с запонки,-- поднял на воздух и, как обезьянку, выбросил его из комнаты. Захлопнулась дверь. Фокусник, бродивший по коридору, успел заметить белый блеск сильной руки и чёрную фигурку, поджавшую лапки на лету.
The two girls instantly deafened Fred with their chatter. They tickled and squeezed the dwarf, who, glowering and empurpled with lust, rolled like a ball in the embrace of the bare-armed teases. Finally, when frolicsome Arabella drew him to her and fell backward upon the couch, Fred lost his head and began to wriggle against her, snorting and clasping her neck. In attempting to push him away, she raised her arm and, slipping under it, he lunged and glued his lips to the hot pricklish hollow of her shaven axilla. The other girl, weak with laughter, tried in vain to drag him off by his legs. At that moment the door banged open, and the French partner of the two aerialists came into the room wearing marble-white tights. Silently, without any resentment, he grabbed the dwarf by the scruff of the neck (all you heard was the snap of Fred's wing collar as one side broke loose from the stud), lifted him in the air, and threw him out like a monkey. The door slammed. Shock, who happened to be wandering past, managed to catch a glimpse of the marble-bright arm and of a black little figure with feet retracted in flight. (2)
The characters in VN’s story include the conjuror Shock and his wife Nora whose name rhymes with Adora, the girl in Van’s last floramor:
Van never regretted his last visit to one last Villa Venus. A cauliflowered candle was messily burning in its tin cup on the window ledge next to the guitar-shaped paper-wrapped bunch of long roses for which nobody had troubled to find, or could have found, a vase. On a bed, some way off, lay a pregnant woman, smoking, looking up at the smoke mingling its volutes with the shadows on the ceiling, one knee raised, one hand dreamily scratching her brown groin. Far beyond her, a door standing ajar gave on what appeared to be a moonlit gallery but was really an abandoned, half-demolished, vast reception room with a broken outer wall, zigzag fissures in the floor, and the black ghost of a gaping grand piano, emitting, as if all by itself, spooky glissando twangs in the middle of the night. Through a great rip in the marbleized brick and plaster, the naked sea, not seen but heard as a panting space separated from time, dully boomed, dully withdrew its platter of pebbles, and, with the crumbling sounds, indolent gusts of warm wind reached the unwalled rooms, disturbing the volutes of shadow above the woman, and a bit of dirty fluff that had drifted down onto her pale belly, and even the reflection of the candle in a cracked pane of the bluish casement. Beneath it, on a rump-tickling coarse couch, Van reclined, pouting pensively, pensively caressing the pretty head on his chest, flooded by the black hair of a much younger sister or cousin of the wretched florinda on the tumbled bed. The child’s eyes were closed, and whenever he kissed their moist convex lids the rhythmic motion of her blind breasts changed or stopped altogether, and was presently resumed.
He was thirsty, but the champagne he had bought, with the softly rustling roses, remained sealed and he had not the heart to remove the silky dear head from his breast so as to begin working on the explosive bottle. He had fondled and fouled her many times in the course of the last ten days, but was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained — she, and the other girl, and a third one (a maidservant, Princess Kachurin), who seemed to have been born in the faded bathing suit she never changed and would die in, no doubt, before reaching majority or the first really cold winter on the beach mattress which she was moaning on now in her drugged daze. And if the child really was called Adora, then what was she? — not Rumanian, not Dalmatian, not Sicilian, not Irish, though an echo of brogue could be discerned in her broken but not too foreign English. Was she eleven or fourteen, almost fifteen perhaps? Was it really her birthday — this twenty-first of July, nineteen-four or eight or even several years later, on a rocky Mediterranean peninsula? (2.3)
At the end of his memoir essay “A. A. Blok” (1923) Gorki describes his meeting in a restaurant with a prostitute who fell asleep in Blok’s lap:
- Это у вас книжечка того Блока, известного? Я его тоже знала, впрочем - только один раз. Как-то осенью, очень поздно и, знаете, слякоть, туман, уже на думских часах около полуночи, я страшно устала и собиралась идти домой, - вдруг на углу Итальянской меня пригласил прилично одетый, красивый такой, очень гордое лицо, я даже подумала: иностранец. Пошли пешком, - тут, недалеко, по Караванной, десять, комнаты для свиданий. Иду я, разговариваю, а он - молчит, и мне было неприятно даже, необыкновенно как-то, я не люблю невежливых. Пришли, я попросила чаю; позвонил он, а слуга - нейдет, тогда он сам пошел в коридор, а я так, знаете, устала, озябла и уснула, сидя на диване. Потом вдруг проснулась, вижу: он сидит напротив, держит голову в руках, облокотясь на стол, и смотрит на меня так строго - ужасные глаза! Но мне - от стыда - даже не страшно было, только подумала: "Ах, Боже мой, должно быть, музыкант!" Он - кудрявый. "Ах, извините, говорю, я сейчас разденусь".
А он улыбнулся вежливо и отвечает: "Не надо, не беспокойтесь". Пересел на диван ко мне, посадил меня на колени и говорит, гладя волосы: "Ну, подремлите еще". И - представьте ж себе - я опять заснула, - скандал! Понимаю, конечно, что это нехорошо, но - не могу. Он так нежно покачивает меня и так уютно с ним, открою глаза, улыбнусь, и он улыбнется. Кажется, я даже и совсем спала, "когда он встряхнул меня осторожно и сказал:
"Ну, прощайте, мне надо идти". И кладет на стол двадцать пять рублей. "Послушайте, говорю, как же это?"
Конечно, очень сконфузилась, извиняюсь, - так смешно все это вышло, необыкновенно как-то. А он засмеялся тихонько, пожал мне руку и - даже поцеловал. Ушёл, а когда я уходила, слуга говорит: "Знаешь, кто с тобой был? Блок, поэт - смотри!" И показал мне портрет в журнале, - вижу: верно - это он самый. "Боже мой, думаю, как глупо вышло".
И действительно, на ее курносом, задорном лице, в плутоватых глазах бездомной собачонки мелькнуло отражение сердечной печали и обиды. Отдал барышне все деньги, какие были со мной, и с того часа почувствовал Блока очень понятным и близким.
Нравится мне его строгое лицо и голова флорентийца эпохи Возрождения.
“Is that little book you have by Blok, the notorious one? I’ve met him too, although just one time. Once in the autumn, very late, and, you know, slush, fog, already about midnight on the city council clock, I was awfully tired and about to go home, when suddenly on the corner of Italyanskaya street I was hailed by a well-dressed, handsome type, very proud face, I even thought: a foreigner. We went on foot—it was near 10 Karavannaia Street, rooms for rendezvous. I talked while walking, but he kept silent, and I felt uneasy, somehow unusual—I don’t like rude men. We went in and I asked for tea; he rang, but no servant came, so he went himself into the corridor, and I was, you know, so tired, so chilly, and I fell asleep sitting on the divan. Then I suddenly woke up and saw him sitting opposite me holding his head in his hands, elbows on the table, and looking at me so sternly—horrible eyes! But I was too ashamed to feel fear, I only thought: “Oh, my God, he must be a musician!” He had curly hair. “Oh, excuse me, I said, I’ll get undressed now.”
And he smiled politely and said: “Not necessary, don’t bother.” He seated himself next to me on the divan, took me onto his lap and said, stroking my hair: “Do doze a little more!” And just imagine!—I fell asleep again—scandalous! I understand, of course, that this was bad, but there was nothing I could do! He was rocking me so softly and I felt so comfortable with him; I would open my eyes and smile, and he would smile. It seems I had actually fallen asleep when he shook me gently and said: “Well, good-bye. I must be going.” And he placed twenty-five rubles on the table. “Listen,” I said, “how that can be?” Of course I felt dreadfully embarrassed, apologized. It was all so funny, so unusual. And he laughed softly, shook my hand and even kissed it. He left, and as I was leaving, the servant said: “Do you know who that was with you? Blok, the poet – look!” And he showed me a portrait in a magazine, and I saw that it was indeed he. “My God,” I thought, “how foolishly that went!”
And across her animated, snub-nosed face, in the mischievous eyes of a little stray dog, there flashed a reflection of the heartache and the mortification. I gave the young lady all the money I had with me and from that moment felt that Blok was very clear and dear to me.
I like his stern face and the head of a Renaissance Florentine.”
In the Foreword to his poem Vozmezdie (“Retribution,” 1910-21) Alexander Blok says that in the winter 1911 he saw wrestling matches at the St. Petersburg circuses:
Неразрывно со всем этим для меня связан расцвет французской борьбы в петербургских цирках; тысячная толпа проявляла исключительный интерес к ней; среди борцов были истинные художники; я никогда не забуду борьбы безобразного русского тяжеловеса с голландцем, мускульная система которого представляла из себя совершеннейший музыкальный инструмент редкой красоты.
Bezobraznyi russkiy tyazheloves (the ugly Russian heavyweight) whose wrestling match with a Dutchman (whose muscular system Blok compares to a perfect musical instrument of rare beauty) Blok would never forget brings to mind a Russian weightlifter who conducted a Villa Venus at Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa:
In 1905 a glancing blow was dealt Villa Venus from another quarter. The personage we have called Ritcov or Vrotic had been induced by the ailings of age to withdraw his patronage. However, one night he suddenly arrived, looking again as ruddy as the proverbial fiddle; but after the entire staff of his favorite floramor near Bath had worked in vain on him till an ironic Hesperus rose in a milkman’s humdrum sky, the wretched sovereign of one-half of the globe called for the Shell Pink Book, wrote in it a line that Seneca had once composed:
subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt,
— and departed, weeping. About the same time a respectable Lesbian who conducted a Villa Venus at Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa, throttled with her own hands (she had been a Russian weightlifter) two of her most beautiful and valuable charges. It was all rather sad. (2.3)
Skripka being Russian for “fiddle,” the proverbial fiddle brings to mind Mr. Alexander Screepatch, the new president of the United Americas who visits Villa Venus in the company of King Victor:
Members usually had their chauffeurs park in a special enclosure near the guardhouse, where there was a pleasant canteen for servants, with nonalcoholic drinks and a few inexpensive and homely whores. But that night several huge police cars occupied the garage boxes and overflowed into an adjacent arbor. Telling Kingsley to wait a moment under the oaks, Van donned his bautta and went to investigate. His favorite walled walk soon took him to one of the spacious lawns velveting the approach to the manor. The grounds were lividly illuminated and as populous as Park Avenue — an association that came very readily, since the disguises of the astute sleuths belonged to a type which reminded Van of his native land. Some of those men he even knew by sight — they used to patrol his father’s club in Manhattan whenever good Gamaliel (not reelected after his fourth term) happened to dine there in his informal gagality. They mimed what they were accustomed to mime — grapefruit vendors, black hawkers of bananas and banjoes, obsolete, or at least untimely, ‘copying clerks’ who hurried in circles to unlikely offices, and peripatetic Russian newspaper readers slowing down to a trance stop and then strolling again behind their wide open Estotskiya Vesti. Van remembered that Mr Alexander Screepatch, the new president of the United Americas, a plethoric Russian, had flown over to see King Victor; and he correctly concluded that both were now sunk in mollitude. The comic side of the detectives’ display (befitting, perhaps, their dated notion of an American sidewalk, but hardly suiting a weirdly illuminated maze of English hedges) tempered his disappointment as he shuddered squeamishly at the thought of sharing the frolics of historical personages or contenting himself with the brave-faced girlies they had started to use and rejected. (3.4)
Sashka being a diminutive of Alexander, Mr Alexander Screepatch seems to hint at Sashka the fiddler, the main character in Kuprin’s story Gambrinus (1907). In Kuprin’s story V tsirke (“At the Circus,” 1901) the main character is the wrestler Arbuzov. Kuprin’s story Nartsis (“The Daffodil,” 1913) was initially entitled “Victoria” (after the name of the main female character).
The beautiful Missouri spa, Souvenir brings to mind the beginning of Verlaine's sonnet Nevermore (1866):
Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu?
Remembrance, remembrance, what do you want from me?
Verlaine's poem Art Poétique (1885) begins: De la musique avant toute chose (Of music before everything). Chose is Van's English University. As a Chose student, Van performs in variety shows dancing on his hands as Mascodagama (Van's stage name). It is Dick C. (Van's fellow student at Chose) who offers Van an introduction to the Venus Villa Club:
Van fumed and fretted the rest of the morning, and after a long soak in a hot bath (the best adviser, and prompter and inspirer in the world, except, of course, the W.C. seat) decided to pen — pen is the word — a note of apology to the cheated cheater. As he was dressing, a messenger brought him a note from Lord C. (he was a cousin of one of Van’s Riverlane schoolmates), in which generous Dick proposed to substitute for his debt an introduction to the Venus Villa Club to which his whole clan belonged. Such a bounty no boy of eighteen could hope to obtain. It was a ticket to paradise. Van tussled with his slightly overweight conscience (both grinning like old pals in their old gymnasium) — and accepted Dick’s offer. (1.28)
Van was taught to walk on his hands by King Wing, Demon's wrestling master. A former circus artist, King Wing is Chinese. In his Vospominaniya o Gor'kom ("Reminiscences of Gorki," 1938) Hodasevich describes his first meeting with Gorki in the fall 1918 and says that in his silk red dressing gown, motley cap, with big glasses on the tip of his nose and a book in his hands Gorki looked like a learned Chinese:
Осенью 1918 года, когда Горький организовал известное издательство "Всемирная Литература", меня вызвали в Петербург и предложили заведовать московским отделением этого предприятия. Приняв предложение, я счёл нужным познакомиться с Горьким. Он вышел ко мне, похожий на учёного китайца: в шёлковом красном халате, в пёстрой шапочке, скуластый, с большими очками на конце носа, с книгой в руках. К моему удивлению, разговор об издательстве был ему явно неинтересен. Я понял, что в этом деле его имя служит лишь вывеской.
In his memoir essay "Viktor Gofman" (1925) Hodasevich points out that the two poets, Bryusov and Gofman, were almost neighbors who lived in Moscow opposite the Salamonski circus:
Перед Брюсовым Гофман благоговел, как мы все когда-то благоговели. Брюсов, несмотря на то, что был на одиннадцать лет старше, дарил его дружбой, которая, разумеется, была для Гофмана драгоценна. Дома их стояли почти рядом на Цветном бульваре, против цирка Саламонского. Брюсов, признанный мэтр и вождь, нередко заходил к Гофману, держался с ним на равной ноге, писал ему дружеские стихотворные послания, в которых (честь величайшая по тому времени!) ставил его в один ряд с собой и с Бальмонтом. Наконец, как я уже говорил, Брюсов печатал стихи Гофмана в альманахе "Скорпиона".
In his memoir essay on Viktor Gofman Hodasevich describes Bryusov's philosophical system and mentions nepreryvnyi kaleydoskop sobytiy (the uninterrupted kaleidoscope of events):
Злой рок столкнул его с Брюсовым. Очень впечатлительный и доверчивый по природе, семнадцатилетний Гофман тотчас подпал под влияние неистового и безжалостного учителя, от которого перенял его несложную, но едкую философию "мигов".
Это слово, так часто встречающееся в поэзии Брюсова, надобно пояснить. По Брюсову, жизнь состояла из "мигов", то есть из непрерывного калейдоскопа событий. Дело поэта - "брать" эти миги и "губить" их, то есть переживать с предельною остротой, чтобы затем, исчерпав их лирический заряд, переходить к следующим. Чем больше мигов пережито и чем острее - тем лучше.
In VN's play Sobytie ("The Event," 1938) the portrait painter Aleksey Maksimovich Troshcheykin (a namesake of Gorki) mentions an old clown in civilian clothes:
Любовь. Алёша сегодня в милом, шутливом настроении. Что, мамочка, что ты хочешь до завтрака делать? Хочешь, пойдём погулять? К озеру? Или зверей посмотрим?
Антонина Павловна. Каких зверей?
Любовь. На пустыре цирк остановился.
Трощейкин. И я бы пошёл с вами. Люблю. Принесу домой какой-нибудь круп или старого клоуна в партикулярном платье. (Act One)
Describing to his wife the idea of a new painting, Troshcheykin mentions his former loves, including Ada and Margarita Gofman:
Трощейкин (на авансцене). Слушай, малютка, я тебе расскажу, что я ночью задумал... По-моему, довольно гениально. Написать такую штуку, - вот представь себе... Этой стены как бы нет, а темный провал... и как бы, значит, публика в туманном театре, ряды, ряды... сидят и смотрят на меня. Причём всё это лица людей, которых я знаю или прежде знал и которые теперь смотрят на мою жизнь. Кто с любопытством, кто с досадой, кто с удовольствием. А тот с завистью, а эта с сожалением. Вот так сидят передо мной - такие бледновато-чудные в полутьме. Тут и мои покойные родители, и старые враги, и твой этот тип с револьвером, и друзья детства, конечно, и женщины, женщины - все те, о которых я рассказывал тебе - Нина, Ада, Катюша, другая Нина, Маргарита Гофман, бедная Оленька, - все... Тебе нравится? (ibid.)
In Bryusov's Stansy ("Stances," 1896) the prostitute mentions kaleydoskop lyudey i lits i potseluev i ob'yatiy (the kaleidoscope of people and faces and of kisses and embraces) that she watches from her bed:
Одна из осуждённых жриц,
Я наблюдаю из кровати
Калейдоскоп людей и лиц
И поцелуев и объятий.
Bryusov's uninterrupted kaleidoscope of events and the kaleidoscope of people and faces and of kisses and embraces watched by the prostitute bring to mind the genetic kaleidoscope mentioned by Van.
Ada + Nora + end = Adora + Na dne
Na dne ("At the Bottom," 1902) is a play by Gorki. Its characters include Satin, a cardsharp. Dick C. (who offers Van an introduction to the Villa Venus Club) is a cardsharp.