According to Ada, she saw the phrase "far enough, fair enough" in small violet letters before Van (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) put it into orange ones:
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.' (1.24)
In his poem Peterburg ("St. Petersburg," 1923) written in blank verse VN mentions the cannon on a bastion of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress that shoots at noon:
Мне чудится в Рождественское утро
мой лёгкий, мой воздушный Петербург...
Я странствую по набережной... Солнце
взошло туманной розой. Пухлым слоем
снег тянется по выпуклым перилам.
И рысаки под сетками цветными
проносятся, как сказочные птицы;
а вдалеке, за ширью снежной, тают
в лазури сизой розовые струи
над кровлями; как призрак золотистый,
мерцает крепость (в полдень бухнет пушка:
сперва дымок, потом раскат звенящий);
и на снегу зелёной бирюзою
горят квадраты вырезанных льдин.
"At noon the cannon thunders:
First comes the smoke, then there's a ringing peal."
In his old age general Ivan Nabokov (the elder brother of VN's great-grandfather) was a commander of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress:
The youngest of his sons, my great-grandfather Nikolay Aleksandrovich Nabokov, was a young naval officer in 1817, when he participated, with the future admirals Baron von Wrangel and Count Litke, under the leadership of Captain (later Vice-Admiral) Vasiliy Mihaylovich Golovnin, in an expedition to map Nova Zembla (of all places) where "Nabokov's River" is named after my ancestor. The memory of the leader of the expedition is preserved in quite a number of place names, one of them being Golovnin's Lagoon, Seward Peninsula, W. Alaska, from where a butterfly, Parnassius phoebus golovinus (rating a big sic), has been described by Dr. Holland; but my great-grandfather has nothing to show except that very blue, almost indigo blue, even indignantly blue, little river winding between wet rocks; for he soon left the navy, n'ayant pas le pied marin (as says my cousin Sergey Sergeevich who informed me about him), and switched to the Moscow Guards. He married Anna Aleksandrovna Nazimov (sister of the Decembrist). I know nothing about his military career; whatever it was, he could not have competed with his brother, Ivan Aleksandrovich Nabokov (1787-1852), one of the heroes of the anti-Napoleon wars and, in his old age, commander of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where (in 1849) one of his prisoners was the writer Dostoevski, author of The Double, etc., to whom the kind general lent books. Considerably more interesting, however, is the fact that he was married to Ekaterina Pushchin, sister of Ivan Pushchin, Pushkin's schoolmate and close friend. Careful, printers: two "chin" 's and one "kin." (Speak, Memory, Chapter Three, 1)
Van, Ada and their half-sister Lucette are the grandchildren of General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentleman:
Van’s maternal grandmother Daria (‘Dolly’) Durmanov was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d’Or, an American province in the Northeast of our great and variegated country, who had married, in 1824, Mary O’Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion. Dolly, an only child, born in Bras, married in 1840, at the tender and wayward age of fifteen, General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentleman, with lands in the Severn Tories (Severnïya Territorii), that tesselated protectorate still lovingly called ‘Russian’ Estoty, which commingles, granoblastically and organically, with ‘Russian’ Canady, otherwise ‘French’ Estoty, where not only French, but Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under our Stars and Stripes.
The Durmanovs' favorite domain, however, was Raduga near the burg of that name, beyond Estotiland proper, in the Atlantic panel of the continent between elegant Kaluga, New Cheshire, U.S.A., and no less elegant Ladoga, Mayne, where they had their town house and where their three children were born: a son, who died young and famous, and a pair of difficult female twins. Dolly had inherited her mother’s beauty and temper but also an older ancestral strain of whimsical, and not seldom deplorable, taste, well reflected, for instance, in the names she gave her daughters: Aqua and Marina (‘Why not Tofana?’ wondered the good and sur-royally antlered general with a controlled belly laugh, followed by a small closing cough of feigned detachment — he dreaded his wife’s flares).
On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.
The ‘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)
At the end of his poem “St. Petersburg” VN mentions radugi (rainbows) that appeared on the windows of Pushkin’s carriage when the poet was on his way home from the palace balls:
Но иногда во сне я слышу звуки
далёкие, я слышу, как в раю
о Петербурге Пушкин ясноглазый
беседует с другим поэтом, поздно
пришедшим в мир и скорбно отошедшим,
любившим город свой непостижимый
рыдающей и реющей любовью...
И слышу я, как Пушкин вспоминает
все мелочи крылатые, оттенки
и отзвуки: "Я помню, -- говорит, --
летучий снег, и Летний сад, и лепет
Олениной... Я помню, как, женатый,
я возвращался с медленных балов
в карете дребезжащей по Мильонной,
и радуги по стёклам проходили;
но, веришь ли, всего живее помню
тот лёгкий мост, где встретил я Данзаса
в январский день, пред самою дуэлью..."
According to VN, in his dream he can hear how in paradise clear-eyed Pushkin speaks of St. Petersburg with another poet who came late into this world and left it mournfully, who loved his incomprehensive city with sobbing and soaring love. In VN's poem Pushkin’s interlocutor is Alexander Blok (1880-1921). In his poem Na smert’ A. Bloka (“On the Death of Alexander Blok,” 1921) VN compares Pushkin (one of the four poets who meet in paradise the soul of Alexander Blok) to raduga po vsey zemle (a rainbow over the whole Earth):
Пушкин - радуга по всей земле,
Лермонтов - путь млечный над горами,
Тютчев - ключ, струящийся во мгле,
Фет - румяный луч во храме.
Pushkin is a rainbow over the whole Earth,
Lermontov is the Milky Way over the mountains,
Tyutchev is a spring flowing in the dark,
Fet is a ruddy ray in the temple. (II)
Lermontov is the author of Demon (“The Demon,” 1829-40). Demon is the society nickname of Van’s and Ada’s father. At the age of ten Van puzzled out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper. (1.28)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad (a Caucasian chieftain), is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
1880 was the hardest year in the life of Ivan Ilyich Golovin, the main character in Tolstoy’s story Smert’ Ivana Ilyicha (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 1886):
Это было в 1880 году. Этот год был самый тяжёлый в жизни Ивана Ильича.
This was in 1880, the hardest year of Ivan Ilyich's life. (chapter III)
The surname Golovin comes from golova (head) and brings to mind Parnassius phoebus golovinus (a butterfly rating a big sic). The surname Golovnin (of the Captain who led the expedition to map Nova Zembla) comes from golovnya (charred log).
Invited by Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) for a talk in her bedroom, Van sits down on the ivanilich:
'Sit down, have a spot of chayku,' she said. 'The cow is in the smaller jug, I think. Yes, it is.' And when Van, having kissed her freckled hand, lowered himself on the ivanilich (a kind of sighing old hassock upholstered in leather): 'Van, dear, I wish to say something to you, because I know I shall never have to repeat it again. Belle, with her usual flair for the right phrase, has cited to me the cousinage-dangereux-voisinage adage – I mean "adage," I always fluff that word – and complained qu'on s'embrassait dans tous les coins. Is that true?' (1.37)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Ivanilich: a pouf plays a marvelous part in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where it sighs deeply under a friend of the widow's.
As she speaks to Van, Marina quotes the words of Chatski in Griboedov's play Gore ot uma (“Woe from Wit,” 1824):
'A propos de coins: in Griboedov's Gore ot uma, "How stupid to be so clever," a play in verse, written, I think, in Pushkin's time, the hero reminds Sophie of their childhood games, and says:
How oft we sat together in a corner
And what harm might there be in that?
but in Russian it is a little ambiguous, have another spot, Van?' (he shook his head, simultaneously lifting his hand, like his father), 'because, you see, - no, there is none left anyway - the second line, i kazhetsya chto v etom, can be also construed as "And in that one, meseems," pointing with his finger at a corner of the room. Imagine — when I was rehearsing that scene with Kachalov at the Seagull Theater, in Yukonsk, Stanislavski, Konstantin Sergeevich, actually wanted him to make that cosy little gesture (uyutnen’kiy zhest).' (1.37)
At the end of Griboedov's play Chatski uses the word ugolok (a diminutive of ugol, “corner”) again:
Бегу, не оглянусь, пойду искать по свету,
Где оскорблённому есть чувству уголок! -
Карету мне, карету!
I run away, without looking back. I shall go looking for a place in the world
where there is a corner for the insulted feeling!
A carriage for me, a carriage!
Ugolkom (Instr., ugolok) is the last word in Dmitriev’s fable Repeynik i Fialka (“The Burdock and the Violet,” 1824) cited by Hodasevich in his essay Dmitriev (1937) as a good sample of Dmitriev's poetry:
Между репейником и розовым кустом
Фиялочка себя от зависти скрывала;
Безвестною была, но горести не знала:
Тот счастлив, кто своим доволен уголком.
Between a burdock and a rose bush
the little violet hid herself from envy;
she was obscure, but knew no grief:
happy is he who is pleased with his corner.
Fiyalochka (little violet) in Dmitriev’s fable brings to mind Fialochka, as old Ada calls Violet Knox, old Van’s typist who marries Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary) after Van’s and Ada’s death:
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)
Nox being Latin for “night,” the name of Van’s typist seems also to hint at Blok’s poem in blank verse Nochnaya Fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906) subtitled “A Dream.” Van (who is sterile and cannot hope to have children) does not realize how complicated the situation is (because Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox seem to be Ada’s grandchildren). In Pushkin’s drama Boris Godunov (1825) Otrepiev quotes the saying Vot tebe, babushka, Yuriev den’! (“Here's a pretty mess!”; literally: “That’s all of St. George’s day for you, grandma!”):
ГРИГОРИЙ (хозяйке) Куда ведёт эта дорога?
ХОЗЯЙКА В Литву, мой кормилец, к Луёвым горам.
ГРИГОРИЙ А далече ли до Луёвых гор?
ХОЗЯЙКА Недалече, к вечеру можно бы туда поспеть, кабы не заставы царские да сторожевые приставы.
ГРИГОРИЙ Как, заставы! что это значит?
ХОЗЯЙКА Кто-то бежал из Москвы, а велено всех задерживать да осматривать.
ГРИГОРИЙ (про себя) Вот тебе, бабушка, Юрьев день.
GRIGORIY. (To HOSTESS.) Whither leads this road?
HOSTESS. To Lithuania, my dear, to the Luyov mountains.
GRIGORIY. And is it far to the Luyov mountains?
HOSTESS. Not far; you might get there by evening, but for the tsar's
frontier barriers, and the captains of the guard.
GRIGORIY. What say you? Barriers! What means this?
HOSTESS. Someone has escaped from Moscow, and orders have been given to detain and search everyone.
GRIGORIY. (Aside.) Here's a pretty mess! (TAVERN ON THE LITHUANIAN FRONTIER)
Demon Veen married Marina’s twin sister Aqua on St. George’s day:
The modest narrator has to remind the rereader of all this, because in April (my favorite month), 1869 (by no means a mirabilic year), on St George’s Day (according to Mlle Larivière’s maudlin memoirs) Demon Veen married Aqua Veen — out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend. (1.3)
On Van’s seventh birthday (Jan. 1, 1877) Demon made himself up as Boris Godunov:
Demon spoke on: ‘I cannot disinherit you: Aqua left you enough "ridge" and real estate to annul the conventional punishment. And I cannot denounce you to the authorities without involving my daughter, whom I mean to protect at all cost. But I can do the next proper thing, I can curse you, I can make this our last, our last —’
Van, whose finger had been gliding endlessly to and fro along the mute but soothingly smooth edge of the mahogany desk, now heard with horror the sob that shook Demon’s entire frame, and then saw a deluge of tears flowing down those hollow tanned cheeks. In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity. Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? The funest gamester… the pale fatal girl, in another well-known melodrama…. In this one. Van gave him a clean handkerchief to replace the soiled rag. His own marble calm did not surprise Van. The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion. (2.11)
Haud being Latin for “by no means,” “by no means a mirabilic year” seems to hint at Byron’s poem The Age of Bronze: or, Carmen Seculare et Annus haud Mirabilis (1823). In a letter of May 6, 1914, to Lyubov Delmas (an opera singer to whom Blok’s cycle Carmen, 1914, is dedicated) Blok mentions vse perelivy sveta, vsya raduga (all tints of light, the whole rainbow):
Перед тем, как Вас встретить, я знал давно о зияющей в моей жизни пустоте. За этот месяц с небольшим я постепенно вижу все новые и нежданные возможности – вот почему прошли точно годы и годы жизни; и вижу, что, несмотря на всё различие наших миров, понятий, вкусов, жизни, – я мог бы увидеть все переливы света, всю радугу, потому что Вы – та жемчужная раковина, полная жемчугов, которая находится в бездне моря, находится недаром, находится за что-то, как награда, или как упрёк, или как предостережение, или как весть о гибели, может быть.
The name Delmas brings to mind Delvig (Pushkin’s Lyceum friend), Dansas (Pushkin’s second who is mentioned at the end of VN’s poem “St. Petersburg”), d'Anthès (Pushkin’s adversary in his fatal duel) and school-day Delia in VN's poem "Tolstoy" (1928):
Картина в хрестоматии: босой
старик. Я поворачивал страницу,
моё воображенье оставалось
холодным. То ли дело - Пушкин: плащ,
cкала, морская пена... Слово "Пушкин"
стихами обрастает, как плющом,
и муза повторяет имена,
вокруг него бряцающие: Дельвиг,
Данзас, Дантес, - и сладостно-звучна
вся жизнь его, - от Делии лицейской
до выстрела в морозный день дуэли.
A picture in a school anthology:
an old man, barefoot. As I turned the page,
unkindled still was my imagination.
With Pushkin things are different: there’s the cloak,
the cliff, the foaming surf … The surname “Pushkin”
grows over, ivylike, with poetry,
and repetitiously the muse cites names
that echo noisily around him: Delvig,
Danzas, d’Anthès—and his whole life has a
romantic ring, from school-day Delia to
the pistol shot, that chill day of the duel.
Van struggled to keep back his tears when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy. Van and Ada are barefooted when they discover Marina's old herbarium in the attic of Ardis hall and find out the truth about their birth:
The two young discoverers of that strange and sickening treasure commented upon it as follows:
‘I deduce,’ said the boy, ‘three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her. married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.’
‘I can add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s — an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this’ (American finger-snap). ‘You will be grateful,’ she continued, embracing him, ‘for my not mentioning its scientific name. Incidentally the other foot — the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand — possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College.’
‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?
‘Right,’ answered Ada. ‘Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea.’ (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): ‘Bear-Foot’, not ‘bare foot’: both children are naked.
Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called ‘Spring’) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.
At the beginning of his "Autobiography" (1915) Alexander Blok (a grandson of Andrey Beketov, the celebrated botanist, rector of the St. Petersburg University) says that he was born in the Rector's Wing of the University:
Дед мой, Андрей Николаевич Бекетов, ботаник, был ректором Петербургского университета в его лучшие годы (я и родился в "ректорском доме").
In Blok's poem Neznakomka ("The Unknown Woman," 1906) p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of rabbits) cry out: "In vino veritas!" At the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Demon mentions Dr Krolik and uses the phrase s glazami (with the eyes):
‘Marina,’ murmured Demon at the close of the first course. ‘Marina,’ he repeated louder. ‘Far from me’ (a locution he favored) ‘to criticize Dan’s taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I’m above all that rot, I’m…’ (gesture); ‘but, my dear,’ he continued, switching to Russian, ‘the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki — the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) —’
‘Everybody has eyes,’ remarked Marina drily.
‘Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that’s not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odïshka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It’s depressing. It’s a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.’
‘Look, Dad,’ said Van, ‘Dr Krolik can’t do much, because, as you know quite well, he’s dead, and Marina can’t tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they’re alive.’
‘The Veen wit, the Veen wit,’ murmured Demon. (1.38)
Veen means in Dutch what Neva (the river that flows in St. Petersburg) means in Finnish: "peat bog."