Revisiting Ardis in 1888, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) meets Cordula de Prey (Ada’s schoolmate at Brownhill) wearing a yellow-blue Vass frock:
Van revisited Ardis Hall in 1888. He arrived on a cloudy June afternoon, unexpected, unbidden, unneeded; with a diamond necklace coiled loose in his pocket. As he approached from a side lawn, he saw a scene out of some new life being rehearsed for an unknown picture, without him, not for him. A big party seemed to be breaking up. Three young ladies in yellow-blue Vass frocks with fashionable rainbow sashes surrounded a stoutish, foppish, baldish young man who stood, a flute of champagne in his hand, glancing down from the drawing-room terrace at a girl in black with bare arms: an old runabout, shivering at every jerk, was being cranked up by a hoary chauffeur in front of the porch, and those bare arms, stretched wide, were holding outspread the white cape of Baroness von Skull, a grand-aunt of hers. Against the white cape Ada’s new long figure was profiled in black — the black of her smart silk dress with no sleeves, no ornaments, no memories. The slow old Baroness stood groping for something under one armpit, under the other — for what? a crutch? the dangling end of tangled bangles? — and as she half-turned to accept the cloak (now taken from her grandniece by a belated new footman) Ada also half-turned, and her yet ungemmed neck showed white as she ran up the porch steps.
Van followed her inside, in between the hall columns, and through a group of guests, toward a distant table with crystal jugs of cherry ambrozia. She wore, unmodishly, no stockings; her calves were strong and pale, and (I have a note here, for the ghost of a novel) ‘the low cut of her black dress allowed the establishment of a sharp contrast between the familiar mat whiteness of her skin and the brutal black horsetail of her new hair-do.’
Excluding each other, private swoons split him in two: the devastating certainty that as soon as he reached, in the labyrinth of a nightmare, a brightly remembered small room with a bed and a child’s washstand, she would join him there in her new smooth long beauty; and, on the shade side, the pang and panic of finding her changed, hating what he wanted, condemning it as wrong, explaining to him dreadful new circumstances — that they both were dead or existed only as extras in a house rented for a motion picture.
But hands offering him wine or almonds or their open selves, impeded his dream quest. He pressed on, notwithstanding the swoops of recognition: Uncle Dan pointed him out with a cry to a stranger who feigned amazement at the singularity of the optical trick — and, next moment, a repainted, red-wigged, very drunk and tearful Marina was gluing cherry-vodka lips to his jaw and unprotected parts, with smothered mother-sounds, half-moo, half-moan, of Russian affection.
He disentangled himself and pursued his quest. She had now moved to the drawing room, but by the expression of her back, by the tensed scapulae, Van knew she was aware of him. He wiped his wet buzzing ear and acknowledged with a nod the raised glass of the stout blond fellow (Percy de Prey? Or did Percy have an older brother?). A fourth maiden in the Canadian couturier’s corn-and-bluet summer ‘creation’ stopped Van to inform him with a pretty pout that he did not remember her, which was true. ‘I am exhausted,’ he said. ‘My horse caught a hoof in a hole in the rotting planks of Ladore Bridge and had to be shot. I have walked eight miles. I think I am dreaming. I think you are Dreaming Too.’ ‘No, I’m Cordula!’ she cried, but he was off again. (1.31)
A play on ya lyublyu vas (I love you), “yellow-blue Vass frocks” also seem to hint at Vassa Zheleznova, the title character of a play (1910) by Gorki. Gorki’s Vassa is the owner of the shipping company. Cordula’s first husband, Ivan Giovanovich Tobak is a ship-owner, descendant of Admiral Tobakoff. His name comes from tabak (Russ., tobacco). In his poem Beppo (1818), subtitled “A Venetian Story,” Byron mentions a fine polacca (sailing vessel) laden with tobacco:
But he grew rich, and with his riches grew so
Keen the desire to see his home again,
He thought himself in duty bound to do so,
And not be always thieving on the Main;
Lonely he felt at times as Robin Crusoe,
And so he hired a vessel come from Spain,
Bound for Corfu: she was a fine polacca,
Mann'd with twelve hands, and laden with tobacco. (XCV)
Polacca is feminine of polacco (It., “Polish”). After the dinner in ‘Ursus’ (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major. “Both young ladies wore the very short and open evening gowns that Vass ‘miraged’ that season — in the phrase of that season: Ada, a gauzy black, Lucette, a lustrous cantharid green”) and the debauch à trois in Van’s Manhattan flat Ada mentions “Cordula Tobacco” and Poland:
‘She’s terribly nervous, the poor kid,’ remarked Ada stretching across Van toward the Wipex. ‘You can order that breakfast now — unless… Oh, what a good sight! Orchids. I’ve never seen a man make such a speedy recovery.’
‘Hundreds of whores and scores of cuties more experienced than the future Mrs Vinelander have told me that,’
‘I may not be as bright as I used to be,’ sadly said Ada, ‘but I know somebody who is not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that’s Cordula Tobacco alias Madame Perwitsky, I read in this morning’s paper that in France ninety percent of cats die of cancer. I don’t know what the situation is in Poland.’
After a while he adored [sic! Ed.] the pancakes. No Lucette, however, turned up, and when Ada, still wearing her diamonds (in sign of at least one more caro Van and a Camel before her morning bath) looked into the guest room, she found the white valise and blue furs gone. A note scrawled in Arlen Eyelid Green was pinned to the pillow.
Would go mad if remained one more night shall ski at Verma with other poor woolly worms for three weeks or so miserable
Pour Elle (2.8)
In his essay O zhenshchine (“On Woman,” 1930) Gorki mentions Michael Arlen’s novel The Green Hat (1924):
Никто не станет отрицать, что производство предметов роскоши, потребляемых женщинами Буржуазных классов, растёт с быстротою плесени или травы на кладбище. Может быть, и не «поэтому», но всё же рядом с этим растёт и «критическое», даже враждебное отношение художественной литературы к женщине как жене и матери, как второй по её значению «главе дома». Особенно заметно это в современной английской литературе — литературе страны, которая ещё недавно гордилась «незыблемостью семейных традиций». Всё чаще появляются книги, изображающие процесс распада «семьи, опоры государства», - процесс вымирания и крушения несокрушимых Форсайтов, мастерски изображённый Джоном Голсуорси в его «Саге о Форсайтах», Гексли в его романе «Сквозь разные стёкла», в книге Майкла Арлена «Зелёная шляпа» и в ряде других книг.
Gorki’s essay on New York (the city known on Demonia – aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set – as Manhattan or simply Man) is entitled Gorod zhyoltogo d’yavola (“The City of Yellow Devil,” 1906). By “yellow devil” Gorki means gold. In a letter of April 13, 1891, to his family Chekhov (the author of two monologue scenes “On the Harm of Tobacco,” 1886, 1903) describes a casino in Monte Carlo and mentions the tables with piles of gold:
Интересны столы с кучами золота. Одним словом, чёрт знает что. Это милое Монте-Карло очень похоже на хорошенький... разбойничий вертеп. Самоубийства проигравшихся — явление заурядное.
The tables with piles of gold are interesting too. In fact it is beyond all words. This charming Monte Carlo is extremely like a fine . . . den of thieves. The suicide of losers is quite a regular thing.
In the entresol of a tall Manhattan building crowned by Van’s penthouse there is ‘Monaco,’ a good restaurant. In a lift that takes him to Van’s apartment, Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) places a piece of gold among the shining silver cupolas:
As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered) by the Monaco, where he had often lunched, it occurred to him that his son (whom he had been unable to ‘contact’) might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building. He had never been up there — or had he? For a business consultation with Van? On a sun-hazed terrace? And a clouded drink? (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.)
With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute multicolored optical sparks), Demon hastened to enter the lobby and catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two on a wiggle-wheel table and the Manhattan Times among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas. Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon, placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes. Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter.
‘Then we are fellow travelers,’ said Demon inhaling not without gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain. (2.10)
Demon’s fellow traveler is Valerio, an elderly ginger-haired Roman (waiter at ‘Monaco’). In her memoir essay on Valeriy Bryusov, Geroy truda (“The Hero of Toil,” 1925), Marina Tsvetaev calls Bryusov “a triple Roman” (trizhdy rimlyanin):
Три слова являют нам Брюсова: воля, вол, волк. Триединство не только звуковое - смысловое: и воля - Рим, и вол - Рим, и волк - Рим. Трижды римлянином был Валерий Брюсов: волей и волом - в поэзии, волком (homo homini lupus est) в жизни.
Bryusov is the author of Sem’ tsvetov radugi (“Seven Colors of the Rainbow,” 1916) and My vse – Robinzony (“We all are the Robinsons,” 1921). In the above-quoted stanza of “Beppo” Byron compares his hero to Robinson Crusoe (the main character of Daniel Defoe’s famous novel). Among Van’s and Lucette’s fellow travelers on Admiral Tobakoff is the Robinson couple, Robert and Rachel, whose son died in a car accident soon after Demon paid his gambling debts:
He espied their half-sister on the forecastle deck, looking perilously pretty in a low-cut, brightly flowered, wind-worried frock, talking to the bronzed but greatly aged Robinsons. She turned toward him, brushing back the flying hair from her face with a mixture of triumph and embarrassment in her expression, and presently they took leave of Rachel and Robert who beamed after them, waving similarly raised hands to her, to him, to life, to death, to the happy old days when Demon paid all the gambling debts of their son, just before he was killed in a head-on car collision. (3.5)
In a conversation with Van Demon mentions the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols:
Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette —
‘— no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is — I mean, Vinelander is — the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols — or whoever they were — who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders — before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.’
I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,’ said Van, ‘what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.’
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’ (2.10)
Describing his life with Cordula on Alexis Avenue, Van mentions her indigo-black thick lashes:
Van spent a medicinal month in Cordula’s Manhattan flat on Alexis Avenue. She dutifully visited her mother at their Malbrook castle two or three times a week, unescorted by Van either there or to the numerous social ‘flits’ she attended in town, being a frivolous fun-loving little thing; but some parties she canceled, and resolutely avoided seeing her latest lover (the fashionable psychotechnician Dr F.S. Fraser, a cousin of the late P. de P.’s fortunate fellow soldier). Several times Van talked on the dorophone with his father (who pursued an extensive study of Mexican spas and spices) and did several errands for him in town. He often took Cordula to French restaurants, English movies, and Varangian tragedies, all of which was most satisfying, for she relished every morsel, every sip, every jest, every sob, and he found ravishing the velvety rose of her cheeks, and the azure-pure iris of her festively painted eyes to which indigo-black thick lashes, lengthening and upcurving at the outer canthus, added what fashion called the ‘harlequin slant.’ (1.43)
Of the spectrum’s seven colors we have cited five: yellow, blue, green, red and indigo. The two remaining colors are mentioned by Ada in a dialogue with Van in "Ardis the First:"
They walked through a grove and past a grotto.
Ada said: ‘Officially we are maternal cousins, and cousins can marry by special decree, if they promise to sterilize their first five children. But, moreover, the father-in-law of my mother was the brother of your grandfather. Right?’
‘That’s what I’m told,’ said Van serenely.
‘Not sufficiently distant,’ she mused, ‘or is it?’
‘Far enough, fair enough.’
‘Funny — I saw that verse in small violet letters before you put it into orange ones — just one second before you spoke. Spoke, smoke. Like the puff preceding a distant cannon shot.’
‘Physically,’ she continued, ‘we are more like twins than cousins, and twins or even siblings can’t marry, of course, or will be jailed and "altered," if they persevere.’
‘Unless,’ said Van, ‘they are specially decreed cousins.’ (1.24)
After Van’s and Ada’s death, Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary) marries Violet Knox (old Van’s typist):
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with us in 1957. She was (and still is — ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump […..]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has been responsible for typing out this memoir — the solace of what are, no doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother’s children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her [generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her ‘Fialochka’ and allowed herself the luxury of admiring ‘little Violet’ ‘s cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner, lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4)
In the first part of his autobiographic trilogy, Detstvo ("Childhood," 1914), Gorki describes his life in Nizhniy Novgorod with his maternal grandparents. One wonders if Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox are not the grandchildren of Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) and Ada. Nox being Latin for “night,” the name of Van’s typist seems to hint at Blok’s poem Nochnaya Fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906) subtitled “A Dream.” At the beginning of his "Autobiography" (1915) Alexander Blok tells about his maternal grandfather Andrey Beketov, the celebrated botanist, rector of the St. Petersburg University:
Семья моей матери причастна к литературе и к науке.
Дед мой, Андрей Николаевич Бекетов, ботаник, был ректором Петербургского университета в его лучшие годы (я и родился в "ректорском доме"). Петербургские Высшие женские курсы, называемые "Бестужевскими" (по имени К.Н. Бестужева-Рюмина), обязаны существованием своим главным образом моему деду.
Van and Ada discover that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina's old herbarium found in the attic of Ardis Hall. Van's and Ada's ancestor, Prince Vseslav Zemski (1699-1797) was a friend of Linneus.
The third part of Gorki's memoirs is entitled Moi universitety ("My Universities," 1923). Describing a game of poker that he played at Chose (Van's English University) with Dick C. (a cardsharp) and the French twins, Van mentions the "rainbow ivory:"
He now constatait avec plaisir, as he told his victims, that only a few hundred pounds separated him from the shoreline of the minimal sum he needed to appease his most ruthless creditor. whereupon he went on fleecing poor Jean and Jacques with reckless haste, and then found himself with three honest aces (dealt to him lovingly by Van) against Van’s nimbly mustered four nines. This was followed by a good bluff against a better one; and with Van’s generously slipping the desperately flashing and twinkling young lord good but not good enough hands, the latter’s martyrdom came to a sudden end (London tailors wringing their hands in the fog, and a moneylender, the famous St Priest of Chose, asking for an appointment with Dick’s father). After the heaviest betting Van had yet seen, Jacques showed a forlorn couleur (as he called it in a dying man’s whisper) and Dick surrendered with a straight flush to his tormentor’s royal one. Van, who up to then had had no trouble whatever in concealing his delicate maneuvers from Dick’s silly lens, now had the pleasure of seeing him glimpse the second joker palmed in his, Van’s, hand as he swept up and clasped to his bosom the ‘rainbow ivory’ — Plunkett was full of poetry. The twins put on their ties and coats and said they had to quit.
Same here, Dick,’ said Van. ‘Pity you had to rely on your crystal balls. I have often wondered why the Russian for it — I think we have a Russian ancestor in common — is the same as the German for "schoolboy," minus the umlaut’ — and while prattling thus, Van refunded with a rapidly written check the ecstatically astonished Frenchmen. Then he collected a handful of cards and chips and hurled them into Dick’s face. The missiles were still in flight when he regretted that cruel and commonplace bewgest, for the wretched fellow could not respond in any conceivable fashion, and just sat there covering one eye and examining his damaged spectacles with the other — it was also bleeding a little — while the French twins were pressing upon him two handkerchiefs which he kept good-naturedly pushing away. Rosy aurora was shivering in green Serenity Court. Laborious old Chose. (1.28)
The characters in Gorki's play Na dne ("At the Bottom," 1902) include the shuler (cardsharp) Satin.
Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox seem to hint at Ronald Knox (1888-1957), an English Catholic priest, theologian and author of detective stories. As he talks to Samgin, Berdnikov (a character in Gorki’s “The Life of Klim Samgin,” 1925-36) mentions angliyskie popy (the English priests):
“Даже и меня в это вовлекли, но мне показалось, что попы английские, кроме портвейна, как раз ничего не понимают, а о боге говорят - по должности, приличия ради.”
“I had the impression that the English priests do not know what they are talking about, unless it is port, and speak of God only in the lines of duty, in order to keep decorum." (Part Four)
In the same conversation with Samgin Berdnikov rejects the Bénédictine and demands the Cointreau (orange-flavored liqueur, Violet’s “Koo-Ahn-Trow”):
Бердников командовал по-французски: - Уберите бенедиктин, дайте куантро... (ibid.)
After the dinner with Berdnikov and his son-in-law in the Bois de Boulogne Samgin looks at the variegated crowd of smart courtesans and rich satisfied men and recalls Bosch's paintings that he saw in Berlin:
"Нужен дважды гениальный Босх, чтоб превратить вот такую действительность в кошмарный гротеск" - подумал Самгин, споря с кем-то, кто ещё не успел сказать ничего, что требовало бы возражения.
It would take a genius twice as great as Bosch to transform such a reality into a nightmarish grotesque. (ibid.)
Demon discovers that Van and Ada are lovers, because of Uncle Dan's Boschean death:
According to Bess (which is ‘fiend’ in Russian), Dan’s buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of ‘play-zero’ (as the old whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada’s sudden departure, that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. To Dr Nikulin Dan described his rider as black, pale-bellied, with a black dorsal buckler shining like a dung beetle’s back and with a knife in his raised forelimb. On a very cold morning in late January Dan had somehow escaped, through a basement maze and a toolroom, into the brown shrubbery of Ardis; he was naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump like a kind of caparison, and, despite the rough going, had crawled on all fours, like a crippled steed under an invisible rider, deep into the wooded landscape. On the other hand, had he attempted to warn her she might have made her big Ada yawn and uttered something irrevocably cozy at the moment he opened the thick protective door.
‘I beg you, sir,’ said Van, ‘go down, and I’ll join you in the bar as soon as I’m dressed. I’m in a delicate situation.’
‘Come, come,’ retorted Demon, dropping and replacing his monocle. ‘Cordula won’t mind.’
‘It’s another, much more impressionable girl’ — (yet another awful fumble!). ‘Damn Cordula! Cordula is now Mrs Tobak.’
‘Oh, of course!’ cried Demon. ‘How stupid of me! I remember Ada’s fiancé telling me — he and young Tobak worked for a while in the same Phoenix bank. Of course. Splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap. Backbay Tobakovich!’
‘I don’t care,’ said clenched Van, ‘if he looks like a crippled, crucified, albino toad. Please, Dad, I really must —’
‘Funny your saying that. I’ve dropped in only to tell you poor cousin Dan has died an odd Boschean death. He thought a fantastic rodent sort of rode him out of the house. They found him too late, he expired in Nikulin’s clinic, raving about that detail of the picture. I’m having the deuce of a time rounding up the family. The picture is now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art.’
‘Father, I’m sorry — but I’m trying to tell you —’
‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower — mark the "as if," for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice — but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast! A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’ (2.10)
The name of Dan’s nurse seems to hint at Dostoevski’s novel Besy (“The Possessed,” 1872). The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. Telling about the free use of electricity (banned on Demonia after the L disaster) on Terra (Antiterra's twin planet), Van mentions the red-shirted Yukonets and the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka:
The unmentionable magnetic power denounced by evil lawmakers in this our shabby country — oh, everywhere, in Estoty and Canady, in ‘German’ Mark Kennensie, as well as in ‘Swedish’ Manitobogan, in the workshop of the red-shirted Yukonets as well as in the kitchen of the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka, and in ‘French’ Estoty, from Bras d’Or to Ladore — and very soon throughout both our Americas, and all over the other stunned continents — was used on Terra as freely as water and air, as bibles and brooms. (1.3)
At the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday Marina shows to Van and Lucette the exact pine and the exact spot on its rugged red trunk where in old, very old days a Dorophone nested and mentions vibrational vibgyors:
Marina’s contribution was more modest, but it too had its charm. She showed Van and Lucette (the others knew all about it) the exact pine and the exact spot on its rugged red trunk where in old, very old days a magnetic telephone nested, communicating with Ardis Hall. After the banning of ‘currents and circuits,’ she said (rapidly but freely, with an actress’s désinvolture pronouncing those not quite proper words — while puzzled Lucette tugged at the sleeve of Van, of Vanichka, who could explain everything), her husband’s grandmother, an engineer of great genius, ‘tubed’ the Redmount rill (running just below the glade from a hill above Ardis). She made it carry vibrational vibgyors (prismatic pulsations) through a system of platinum segments. These produced, of course, only one-way messages, and the installation and upkeep of the ‘drums’ (cylinders) cost, she said, a Jew’s eye, so that the idea was dropped, however tempting the possibility of informing a picnicking Veen that his house was on fire. (1.13)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): vibgyor: violet-indigo-blue-green-yellow-orange-red.
In his essay on Dostoevski (in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers”) Ayhenvald mentions volny i vibratsii (waves and vibrations) that the world is sending to Dostoevski:
Мир посылает ему все свои волны и вибрации, мучит его обнажённые нервы, мир раздражает его. Порог раздражения лежит для него очень низко.
In his essay on Garshin (in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers”) Ayhenvald compares Garshin to Dostoevski and points out that the most red flower is a flower of evil:
У Гаршина - та же стихия, что и у Достоевского; только, помимо размеров дарования, между ними есть и та разница, что первый, как писатель, - вне своего безумия, а последний - значительно во власти своего чёрного недуга.
Самый красный цветок – это цветок зла. Ничто не требует такой душевной силы, такого напряжения и действенности, как именно убийство.
In March 1888 Garshin committed suicide by jumping off the building stairs from the fifth floor. The characters of Ada include Mr Arshin, an acrophobe:
Van had satisfied himself that it had nothing to do with clocks or calendars, or any measurements or contents of time, while he suspected and hoped (as only a discoverer, pure and passionate and profoundly inhuman, can hope) that the dread of heights would be found by his colleagues to depend mainly on the misestimation of distances and that Mr Arshin, their best acrophobe, who could not step down from a footstool, could be made to step down into space from the top of a tower if persuaded by some optical trick that the fire net spread fifty yards below was a mat one inch beneath him. (2.6)
Arshin is an old Russian measure of length (28 inches). According to Tyutchev, umom Rossiyu ne ponyat', arshinom obshchim ne izmerit' ("Russia is a thing of which the intellect cannot conceive. Hers is no common yardstick"). In his poem Dva edinstva (“Two Unities,” 1870) Tyutchev mentions zhelezo (iron), krov’ (blood) and lyubov’ (love):
Из переполненной господним гневом чаши
Кровь льётся через край, и Запад тонет в ней.
Кровь хлынет и на вас, друзья и братья наши! –
Славянский мир, сомкнись тесней...
"Единство, – возвестил оракул наших дней, –
Быть может спаяно железом лишь и кровью..."
Но мы попробуем спаять его любовью, –
А там увидим, что прочней...
Blood's pouring over the brim of the cup
filled to overflowing by the wrath of God,
and the West is drowning in it.
The blood is spattering you, my friends, my brothers!
Slavonic world, pull closer together!
"Unity", an oracle of our century has said,
"can only be welded by iron and blood."
Well, we'll try welding it with love.
Let's see which lasts the longer.
(tr. F. Jude)
The surname Zheleznova comes from zhelezo or zheleznyi (adj., iron). Stalin (Dzhugashvili's pseudonym) comes from stal' (steel). One of the seconds in Demon's duel with Baron d'Onsky is Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel:
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).
Tyutchev is the author of Raduga (“Rainbow,” 1865):
Как неожиданно и ярко,
На влажной неба синеве,
Воздушная воздвиглась арка
В своём минутном торжестве!
Один конец в леса вонзила,
Другим за облака ушла —
Она полнеба обхватила
И в высоте изнемогла.
О, в этом радужном виденье
Какая нега для очей!
Оно дано нам на мгновенье,
Лови его — лови скорей!
Смотри — оно уж побледнело,
Ещё минута, две — и что ж?
Ушло, как то уйдёт всецело,
Чем ты и дышишь и живёшь.
Unexpectedly and brightly,
moist across the blueness of the sky,
an airy arc has been erected.
Triumphant, it will soon pass by.
One arm has plunged into the forest.
Beyond the clouds the other sweeps.
Half the sky it has encompassed.
It's reached its highest point and sleeps.
This iridescent vision
is pure delight for human eyes.
It's given us for just a moment,
so catch it. In your grasp it lies!
Look again. It's paling.
One second more its colors glow.
It's gone. It's vanished just as surely
as what you breathe and live by goes.
(transl. F. Jude)
At the beginning of Ada Van mentions the Durmanovs' favorite domain, Raduga:
Poor Dan's erotic life was neither complicated nor beautiful, but somehow or other (he soon forgot the exact circumstances as one forgets the measurements and price of a fondly made topcoat worn on and off for at least a couple of seasons) he fell comfortably in love with Marina, whose family he had known when they still had their Raduga place (later sold to Mr Eliot, a Jewish businessman). (1.1)
In Paris Van tells Cordula that paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl’s sash:
A moment later, as happens so often in farces and foreign cities, Van ran into another friend. With a surge of delight he saw Cordula in a tight scarlet skirt bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop. Van stroked her with his fingertips, and as she straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition), he quoted the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them:
The Veens speak only to Tobaks
But Tobaks speak only to dogs.
The passage of years had but polished her prettiness and though many fashions had come and gone since 1889, he happened upon her at a season when hairdos and skirtlines had reverted briefly (another much more elegant lady was already ahead of her) to the style of a dozen years ago, abolishing the interruption of remembered approval and pleasure. She plunged into a torrent of polite questions — but he had a more important matter to settle at once — while the flame still flickered.
‘Let’s not squander,’ he said, ‘the tumescence of retrieved time on the gush of small talk. I’m bursting with energy, if that’s what you want to know. Now look; it may sound silly and insolent but I have an urgent request. Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It’s a must!’
‘Really, Van!’ exclaimed angry Cordula. ‘You go a bit far. I’m a happy wife. My Tobachok adores me. We’d have ten children by now if I’d not been careful with him and others.’
‘You’ll be glad to learn that this other has been found utterly sterile.’
‘Well, I’m anything but. I guess I’d cause a mule to foal by just looking on. Moreover, I’m lunching today with the Goals.’
‘C’est bizarre, an exciting little girl like you who can be so tender with poodles and yet turns down a poor paunchy stiff old Veen.’
‘The Veens are much too gay as dogs go.’
‘Since you collect adages,’ persisted Van, ‘let me quote an Arabian one. Paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl’s sash. Eh bien?’
‘You are impossible. Where and when?’
‘Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I’ve never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that’s what tout confort promises — and not much else.’
Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five. Very pleased with himself, Van walked with her for a stretch through the brown and green Bois de Belleau in the direction of her osobnyachyok (small mansion).
‘That reminds me,’ he said, ‘I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I’ve had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years — the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan’s place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore. I want to relinquish that flat. Would you like to accept it as a belated wedding present from an admirer? Good. We shall do it again some day. Tomorrow I have to be in London and on the third my favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff, will take me to Manhattan. Au revoir. Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new. Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?’
‘That’s right. And where’s the other?’
‘I think we’ll part here. It’s twenty minutes to twelve. You’d better toddle along.’
‘Au revoir. You’re a very bad boy and I’m a very bad girl. But it was fun — even though you’ve been speaking to me not as you would to a lady friend but as you probably do to little whores. Wait. Here’s a top secret address where you can always’ — (fumbling in her handbag) — ‘reach me’ — (finding a card with her husband’s crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph) — ‘at Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August.’
She looked around, rose on her toes like a ballerina, and kissed him on the mouth. Sweet Cordula! (3.2)
There is "sash" in Sashka (a diminutive of Alexander). In his poem Sashka (1836) Lermontov mentions dvoynoy kurgan (the twin hill) of a sleeping courtesan:
Он руку протянул, — его рука
Попала в стену; протянул другую, —
Ощупал тихо кончик башмачка.
Схватил потом и ножку, но какую?!..
Так миньятюрна, так нежна, мягка
Казалась эта ножка, что невольно
Подумал он, не сделал ли ей больно.
Меж тем рука всё далее ползёт,
Вот круглая коленочка... и вот,
Вот — для чего смеётесь вы заране? —
Вот очутилась на двойном кургане...
"The twin hill" (as Lermontov calls the girl's mons pubis) brings to mind Brownhill (Ada's and Cordula's school for girls) and its headmistress, Miss Cleft. According to Van, Ada called her first separation with Van "our black rainbow:"
For their correspondence in the first period of separation, Van and Ada had invented a code which they kept perfecting during the next fifteen months
after Van left Ardis. The entire period of that separation was to span almost four years (‘our black rainbow,’ Ada termed it), from September, 1884 to June, 1888, with two brief interludes of intolerable bliss (in August, 1885 and June, 1886) and a couple of chance meetings (‘through a grille of rain’). (1.26)
In Kuprin's story Chyornaya molniya ("The Black Lightning," 1913) the forestry officer mentions multiple rainbows ("the fairy tale seven-colored corridor") that appeared in the sky on the day of the terrible Messina earthquake (Dec. 28, 1908):
Глубокой зимою, в день ужасного мессинского землетрясения, утром, я был с гончими у себя на Бильдине. И вот часов в десять - одиннадцать на совершенно безоблачном небе вдруг расцвела радуга. Она обоими концами касалась горизонта, была необыкновенно ярка и имела в ширину градусов сорок пять, а в высоту двадцать - двадцать пять. Под ней, такой же яркой, изгибалась другая радуга, но несколько слабее цветом, а дальше третья, четвертая, пятая, и всё бледнее и бледнее - какой-то сказочный семицветный коридор. Это продолжалось минут пятнадцать. Потом радуги растаяли, набежали мгновенно, бог знает, откуда тучи и повалил сплошной снежище.
The main character in Kuprin's story Gambrinus (1906), Sashka skripach (Sashka the fiddler) 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)
Describing King Victor's last visit to Villa Venus, Van mentions the proverbial fiddle:
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)
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 mentions vyshibala (a bouncer):
Cunningly distributed spotlights followed the wandering of the masked and caped grandees through dark mazes of coppices; for one of the stipulations imagined by Eric was that ‘every establishment should open only at nightfall and close at sunrise.’ A system of bells that Eric may have thought up all by himself (it was really as old as the bautta and the vyshibala) prevented visitors from running into each other on the premises, so that no matter how many noblemen were waiting or wenching in any part of the floramor, each felt he was the only cock in the coop, because the bouncer, a silent and courteous person resembling a Manhattan shopwalker, did not count, of course: you sometimes saw him when a hitch occurred in connection with your credentials or credit but he was seldom obliged to apply vulgar force or call in an assistant. (ibid.)
The main character in Gorki's story Vas'ka Krasnyi ("Red Vas'ka," 1900) is the unbelievably cruel red-haired vyshibala in a Volgan brothel. Van's and Ada's uncle Dan is known in society as Red Veen or Durak Walter:
‘D’ in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon’s twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns. (1.1)
Durak meens "fool." Describing his visit to Brownhill, Van mentions dura Cordula:
As Ada reached for the cream, he caught and inspected her dead-shamming hand. We remember the Camberwell Beauty that lay tightly closed for an instant upon our palm, and suddenly our hand was empty. He saw, with satisfaction, that her fingernails were now long and sharp.
‘Not too sharp, are they, my dear,’ he asked for the benefit of dura Cordula, who should have gone to the ‘powder room’ — a forlorn hope.
‘Why, no,’ said Ada.
‘You don’t,’ he went on, unable to stop, ‘you don’t scratch little people when you stroke little people? Look at your little girl friend’s hand’ (taking it), ‘look at those dainty short nails (cold innocent, docile little paw!). She could not catch them in the fanciest satin, oh, no, could you, Ardula — I mean, Cordula?’
Both girls giggled, and Cordula kissed Ada’s cheek. Van hardly knew what reaction he had expected, but found that simple kiss disarming and disappointing. The sound of the rain was lost in a growing rumble of wheels. He glanced at his watch; glanced up at the clock on the wall. He said he was sorry — that was his train.
‘Not at all,’ wrote Ada (paraphrased here) in reply to his abject apologies, ‘we just thought you were drunk; but I’ll never invite you to Brownhill again, my love.’ (1.27)
In "Ardis the First" Ada's fingernails are badly bitten. Ada stops biting them after Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess) threatened to smear them with French mustard and tie green, yellow, orange, red, pink riding hoods of wool around them:
On her twelfth birthday, July 21, 1884, the child had stopped biting her fingernails (but not her toenails) in a grand act of will (as her quitting cigarettes was to be, twenty years later). True, one could list some compensations — such as a blessed lapse into delicious sin at Christmas, when Culex chateaubriandi Brown does not fly. A new and conclusive resolution was taken on New Year’s Eve after Mlle Larivière had threatened to smear poor Ada’s fingertips with French mustard and tie green, yellow, orange, red, pink riding hoods of wool around them (the yellow index was a trouvaille). (1.17)
See also the updated version of my previous post, “Arlen Eyelid Green, gin & bitter in Ada” (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35713).