Offering Ada a ride in the park, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions two horses, Pardus and Peg:
‘Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,’ suggested Van. ‘I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.’
‘Last night two men recognized me,’ she said. ‘Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow — with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other, with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.’
‘We shall now go for a ride in the park,’ said Van firmly, and rang, first of all, for a Sunday messenger to take the letter to Lucette’s hotel — or to the Verma resort, if she had already left.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’ observed Ada.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘You are breaking her heart,’ said Ada.
‘Ada girl, adored girl,’ cried Van, ‘I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.’
‘Au fond,’ said Ada, ‘first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want. After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day,’
She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.
‘Tower,’ she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: ‘And you?’
‘A regular ziggurat.’ (2.8)
Peg seems to hint at Pegasus (the winged horse of inspiration). As to Pardus, in Satire VIII (ll. 32-37) Juvenal mentions canibus pigris (lazy hounds) that bear the names Pardus, Tigris, Leo:
Nanum cujusdam Atlanta vocamus:
Aethiopem Cygnum, pravam extortamque puellam
Europen. Canibus pigris scabieque vetusta
Levibus et siccae lambentibus ora lucernae
Nomen erit Pardus, Tigris, Leo; si quid adhuc est
Quod fremat in terris violentius: ergo cauebis
et metues ne tu sic Creticus aut Camerinus.
We call some one's dwarf an "Atlas," his blackamoor "a swan"; an ill-favoured, misshapen girl we call "Europa"; lazy hounds that are bald with chronic mange, and who lick the edges of a dry lamp, will bear the names of "Pard," "Tiger," "Lion," or of any other animal in the world that roars more fiercely: take you care that it be not on that principle that you are a Creticus or a Camerinus! (transl. G. G. Ramsay)
According to Ada, when they made love on the eve, Van hurt her like a Tiger Turk:
He heard Ada Vinelander’s voice calling for her Glass bed slippers (which, as in Cordulenka’s princessdom too, he found hard to distinguish from dance footwear), and a minute later, without the least interruption in the established tension, Van found himself, in a drunken dream, making violent love to Rose — no, to Ada, but in the rosacean fashion, on a kind of lowboy. She complained he hurt her ‘like a Tiger Turk.’ He went to bed and was about to doze off for good when she left his side. Where was she going? Pet wanted to see the album. (2.8)
Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van mentions respectable people in the Tigris-Euphrates valley who make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor:
Demon popped into his mouth a last morsel of black bread with elastic samlet, gulped down a last pony of vodka and took his place at the table with Marina facing him across its oblong length, beyond the great bronze bowl with carved-looking Calville apples and elongated Persty grapes. The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina’s pretentious ciel-étoilé hairdress and tried to realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a fact by forcing it into the sensuous center, that here was a woman whom he had intolerably loved, who had loved him hysterically and skittishly, who insisted they make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor (‘as respectable people do in the Tigris-Euphrates valley’), who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a bobsleigh a fortnight after parturition, or arrive by the Orient Express with five trunks, Dack’s grandsire, and a maid, to Dr Stella Ospenko’s ospedale where he was recovering from a scratch received in a sword duel (and still visible as a white weal under his eighth rib after a lapse of nearly seventeen years). (1.38)
In VN’s story Usta k ustam (“Lips to Lips,” 1931) one of Euphratski’s pseudonyms is Tigrin (Tigris):
Вернувшись домой, он бережно разрезал книжку. В ней он нашёл малопонятную вещь Галатова, два-три рассказа смутно-знакомых авторов, какие-то туманные стихи и весьма дельную статью о немецкой индустрии, подписанную "Тигрин". "Никогда не возьмут,-- с тоской подумал Илья Борисович.-- Тут своя компания".
Upon coming home, he took an ivory paperknife and neatly cut the magazine's pages. Therein he found an unintelligible piece of prose by Galatov, two or three short stories by vaguely familiar authors, a mist of poems, and an extremely capable article about German industrial problems signed Tigris.
Oh, they'll never accept it, reflected Ilya Borisovich with anguish. They all belong to one crew.
VN’s story is a satire on the editors of the Paris émigré review Chisla (“Numbers”). Its first issue contained an offensive article on Sirin (VN’s Russian nom de plume) by G. Ivanov. In Vivian Calmbrood’s poem “The Night Journey” (1931), another satire on G. Ivanov and G. Adamovich (Vivian Calmbrood is an imperfect anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), Chenstone (the fictitious poet to whom Pushkin attributed his little tragedy “The Covetous Knight") says that the days of Juvenal are gone and mentions Johnson whom they have beaten with a candlestick for a marked article:
Дни Ювенала отлетели.
Не воспевать же, в самом деле,
как за краплёную статью
побили Джонсона шандалом?
Shandal (a candlestick) with which they have beaten Johnson brings to mind two flambeaux mentioned by Van when he describes the family dinner in "Ardis the Second:"
It was now Marina’s turn to make her entrée, which she did in excellent chiaroscuro circumstances, wearing a spangled dress, her face in the soft focus sought by ripe stars, holding out both arms and followed by Jones, who carried two flambeaux and kept trying to keep within the limits of decorum the odd little go-away kicks he was aiming backwards at a brown flurry in the shadows.
‘Marina!’ cried Demon with perfunctory enthusiasm, and patted her hand as he joined her on a settee.
Puffing rhythmically, Jones set one of his beautiful dragon-entwined flambeaux on the low-boy with the gleaming drinks and was about to bring over its fellow to the spot where Demon and Marina were winding up affable preliminaries but was quickly motioned by Marina to a pedestal near the striped fish. Puffing, he drew the curtains, for nothing but picturesque ruins remained of the day. Jones was new, very efficient, solemn and slow, and one had to get used gradually to his ways and wheeze. Years later he rendered me a service that I will never forget. (1.38)
Jones helped Van to track down Kim Beauharnais (the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Van blinds for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada, 2.11). In Kim's album there is a photograph of Dr Krolik's brother (who was Ada's first lover):
Knickerbockered, panama-hatted, lusting for his babochka (Russian for ‘lepidopteron’). A passion, a sickness. What could Diana know about that chase?
‘How curious — in the state Kim mounted him here, he looks much less furry and fat than I imagined. In fact, darling, he’s a big, strong, handsome old March Hare! Explain!’
‘There’s nothing to explain. I asked Kim one day to help me carry some boxes there and back, and here’s the visual proof. Besides, that’s not my Krolik but his brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik. A doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey.’
‘I love the way your eyes narrow when you tell a lie. The remote mirage in Effrontery Minor.’
‘I’m not lying!’ — (with lovely dignity): ‘He is a doctor of philosophy.’
‘Van ist auch one,’ murmured Van, sounding the last word as ‘wann.’ (2.7)
Karapars means in Turkish “black panther.” In “Lips to Lips” Galatov mentions Chyornaya pantera (“The Black Panther”), a play:
Он был счастлив. Он выписал ещё пять экземпляров. Он был счастлив. Умалчивание объяснялось косностью, придирки -- недоброжелательством. Он был счастлив. Продолжение следует. И вот, как-то в воскресенье, позвонил Евфратский:
-- Угадайте,-- сказал он,-- кто хочет с вами говорить? Галатов! Да, он приехал на пару дней.
Зазвучал незнакомый, играющий, напористый, сладкоодуряющий голос. Условились.
-- Завтра в пять часов у меня. Жалко, что не сегодня. -- Не могу,-- отвечал играющий голос.-- Меня тащат на "Чёрную Пантеру". Я кстати давно не видался с Евгенией Дмитриевной...
He was happy. He purchased six more copies. He was happy. Silence was readily explained by inertia, detraction by enmity. He was happy. "To be continued." And then, one Sunday, came a telephone call from Euphratski: "Guess," he said, "who wants to speak to you? Galatov! Yes, he's in Berlin for a couple of days. I pass the receiver."
A voice never yet heard took over. A shimmering, urgeful, mellow, narcotic voice. A meeting was settled.
"Tomorrow at five at my place," said Ilya Borisovich, "what a pity you can't come tonight!"
"Very regrettable," rejoined the shimmering voice; "you see, I'm being dragged by friends to attend The Black Panther – terrible play – but it's such a long time since I've seen dear Elena Dmitrievna."
Before the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Van prefaces Ada's (or rather his own) version of a poem by Coppée by a snatch of Pushkin:
‘Old storytelling devices,’ said Van, ‘may be parodied only by very great and inhuman artists, but only close relatives can be forgiven for paraphrasing illustrious poems. Let me preface the effort of a cousin — anybody’s cousin — by a snatch of Pushkin, for the sake of rhyme —’
‘For the snake of rhyme!’ cried Ada. ‘A paraphrase, even my paraphrase, is like the corruption of "snakeroot" into "snagrel" — all that remains of a delicate little birthwort.’
‘Which is amply sufficient,’ said Demon, ‘for my little needs, and those of my little friends.’
‘So here goes,’ continued Van (ignoring what he felt was an indecent allusion, since the unfortunate plant used to be considered by the ancient inhabitants of the Ladore region not so much as a remedy for the bite of a reptile, as the token of a very young woman’s easy delivery; but no matter). ‘By chance preserved has been the poem. In fact, I have it. Here it is: Leur chute est lente and one can know ‘em…’
‘Oh, I know ‘em,’ interrupted Demon:
‘Leur chute est lente. On peut les suivre
Du regard en reconnaissant
Le chêne à sa feuille de cuivre
L’érable à sa feuille de sang
‘Grand stuff!’
‘Yes, that was Coppée and now comes the cousin,’ said Van, and he recited:
‘Their fall is gentle. The leavesdropper
Can follow each of them and know
The oak tree by its leaf of copper,
The maple by its blood-red glow.’
‘Pah!’ uttered the versionist.
‘Not at all!’ cried Demon. ‘That "leavesdropper" is a splendid trouvaille, girl.’ He pulled the girl to him, she landing on the arm of his Klubsessel, and he glued himself with thick moist lips to her hot red ear through the rich black strands. Van felt a shiver of delight. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): By chance preserved: The verses are by chance preserved
I have them, here they are:
(Eugene Onegin, Six: XXI: 1–2)
In Chapter One (VI: 5) of EO Pushkin mentions Juvenal:
Латынь из моды вышла ныне:
Так, если правду вам сказать,
Он знал довольно по-латыне,
Чтоб эпиграфы разбирать,
Потолковать об Ювенале,
В конце письма поставить vale,
Да помнил, хоть не без греха,
Из Энеиды два стиха.
Он рыться не имел охоты
В хронологической пыли
Бытописания земли:
Но дней минувших анекдоты
От Ромула до наших дней
Хранил он в памяти своей.
Latin has gone at present out of fashion;
still, to tell you the truth,
he had enough knowledge of Latin
to make out epigraphs,
expatiate on Juvenal,
put at the bottom of a letter vale,
and he remembered, though not without fault,
two lines from the Aeneid.
He had no inclination
to rummage in the chronological
dust of the earth's historiography,
but anecdotes of days gone by,
from Romulus to our days,
he did keep in his memory.
Van does not put vale at the bottom of his letter to Lucette, but he uses the word apollo in the sense "apologize:"
Poor L.
We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. Pilots of tremendous airships and even coarse, smelly coachmen are known to have been driven insane by a pair of green eyes and a copper curl. We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene. These are times of emotional stress and reconditioning. Destroy and forget.
Tenderly yours A & V.
(in alphabetic order).
‘I call this pompous, puritanical rot,’ said Ada upon scanning Van’s letter. ‘Why should we apollo for her having experienced a delicious spazmochka? I love her and would never allow you to harm her. It’s curious — you know, something in the tone of your note makes me really jealous for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for "life." Ed.] Van, Van, somewhere, some day, after a sunbath or dance, you will sleep with her, Van!’
‘Unless you run out of love potions. Do you allow me to send her these lines?’
‘I do, but want to add a few words.’
Her P.S. read:
The above declaration is Van’s composition which I sign reluctantly. It is pompous and puritanical. I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly. When you’re sick of Queen, why not fly over to Holland or Italy?
A. (2.8)
As he leaves Ardis forever, Van recalls Ada excusing for her Latin:
Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall! (1.41)
In his imaginary dialogue with Koncheyev Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the main character in VN's novel Dar, "The Gift," 1937) mentions Tolstoy and points out that Leskov had a Latin feeling for blueness: lividus:
"Ну, а все-таки. Галилейский призрак, прохладный и тихий, в длинной одежде цвета зреющей сливы? Или пасть пса с синеватым, точно напомаженным, зевом? Или молния, ночью освещающая подробно комнату, - вплоть до магнезии, осевшей на серебряной ложке?"
"Отмечаю, что у него латинское чувство синевы: lividus. Лев Толстой, тот, был больше насчет лиловаго, - и какое блаженство пройтись с грачами по пашне босиком! Я, конечно, не должен был их покупать".
“And yet… how about his image of Jesus ‘the ghostly Galilean, cool and gentle, in a robe the color of ripening plum’? Or his description of a yawning dog’s mouth with ‘its bluish palate as if smeared with pomade’? Or that lightning of his that at night illumines the room in detail, even to the magnesium oxide left on a silver spoon?”
“Yes, I grant you he has a Latin feeling for blueness: lividus. Lyov Tolstoy, on the other hand, preferred violet shades and the bliss of stepping barefoot with the rooks upon the rich dark soil of plowed fields! Of course, I should never have bought them.” (Chapter One)
In the same dialogue Koncheyev says that our Pegasus is peg (piebald):
"Да, я мечтаю когда-нибудь произвести такую прозу, где бы "мысль и музыка сошлись, как во сне складки жизни".
"Благодарю за учтивую цитату. Вы как - по-настоящему любите литературу?"
"Полагаю, что да. Видите-ли, по-моему, есть только два рода книг: настольный и подстольный. Либо я люблю писателя истово, либо выбрасываю его целиком".
"Э, да вы строги. Не опасно ли это? Не забудьте, что как-никак вся русская литература, литература одного века, занимает - после самого снисходительного отбора - не более трёх-трёх с половиной тысяч печатных листов, а из этого числа едва ли половина достойна не только полки, но и стола. При такой количественной скудости, нужно мириться с тем, что наш пегас пег, что не всё в дурном писателе дурно, а в добром не всё добро".
“Yes, some day I’m going to produce prose in which ‘thought and music are conjoined as are the folds of life in sleep.’“
“Thanks for the courteous quotation. You have a genuine love of literature, don’t you?”
“I believe so. You see, the way I look at it, there are only two kinds of books: bedside and wastebasket. Either I love a writer fervently, or throw him out entirely.”
“A bit severe, isn’t it? And a bit dangerous. Don’t forget that the whole of Russian literature is the literature of one century and, after the most lenient eliminations, takes up no more than three to three and a half thousand printed sheets, and scarcely one-half of this is worthy of the bookshelf, to say nothing of the bedside table. With such quantitative scantiness we must resign ourselves to the fact that our Pegasus is piebald, that not everything about a bad writer is bad, and not all about a good one good.” (ibid.)
Lividus brings to mind "the riverhouses of Ranta or Livida" visited by young Van:
Amorously, now, in her otherwise dolorous and irresolute adolescence, Ada was even more aggressive and responsive than in her abnormally passionate childhood. A diligent student of case histories, Dr Van Veen never quite managed to match ardent twelve-year-old Ada with a non-delinquent, non-nymphomaniac, mentally highly developed, spiritually happy and normal English child in his files, although many similar little girls had bloomed — and run to seed — in the old châteaux of France and Estotiland as portrayed in extravagant romances and senile memoirs. His own passion for her Van found even harder to study and analyze. When he recollected caress by caress his Venus Villa sessions, or earlier visits to the riverhouses of Ranta or Livida, he satisfied himself that his reactions to Ada remained beyond all that, since the merest touch of her finger or mouth following a swollen vein produced not only a more potent but essentially different delicia than the slowest ‘winslow’ of the most sophisticated young harlot. What, then, was it that raised the animal act to a level higher than even that of the most exact arts or the wildest flights of pure science? It would not be sufficient to say that in his love-making with Ada he discovered the pang, the ogon’, the agony of supreme ‘reality.’ Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws — in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness). For one spasm or two, he was safe. The new naked reality needed no tentacle or anchor; it lasted a moment, but could be repeated as often as he and she were physically able to make love. The color and fire of that instant reality depended solely on Ada’s identity as perceived by him. It had nothing to do with virtue or the vanity of virtue in a large sense — in fact it seemed to Van later that during the ardencies of that summer he knew all along that she had been, and still was, atrociously untrue to him — just as she knew long before he told her that he had used off and on, during their separation, the live mechanisms tense males could rent for a few minutes as described, with profuse woodcuts and photographs, in a three-volume History of Prostitution which she had read at the age of ten or eleven, between Hamlet and Captain Grant’s Microgalaxies. (1.35)
As pointed out by Boyd, "Ranta" at Chose is a version of the Granta in Cambridge, England, and "Livida" seems to hint at River Liffey that flows through Dublin (and through Joyce's Ulysses). In "Lips to Lips" Euphratski calls Galatov russkiy Dzhoys (“the Russian Joyce”):
- Пошлите вашу вещь,- Евфратский прищурился и вполголоса докончил: - "Ариону".
- "Ариону"? - переспросил Илья Борисович, нервно погладив рукопись.
- Ничего страшного. Название журнала. Неужели не знаете? Ай-я-яй! Первая книжка вышла весной, осенью выйдет вторая. Нужно немножко следить за литературой, Илья Борисович.
- Как же так - просто послать?
- Ну да, в Париж, редактору. Уж имя-то Галатова вы, небось, знаете?
Илья Борисович виновато пожал толстым плечом. Евфратский, морщась, объяснил: беллетрист, новые формы, мастерство, сложная конструкция, русский Джойс...
- Джойс,- смиренно повторил Илья Борисович.
"Send your thing" (Euphratski narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice) "to Arion."
"Arion? What's that?" said I.B., nervously patting his manuscript.
"Nothing very frightening. It's the name of the best émigré review. You don't know it? Ay-ya-yay! The first number came out this spring, the second is expected in the fall. You should keep up with literature a bit closer, Ilya Borisovich!"
"But how to contact them? Just mail it?"
"That's right. Straight to the editor. It's published in Paris. Now don't tell me you've never heard Galatov's name?"
Guiltily Ilya Borisovich shrugged one fat shoulder. Euphratski, his face working wryly, explained: a writer, a master, new form of the novel, intricate construction, Galatov the Russian Joyce.
"Djoys," meekly repeated Ilya Borisovich after him.
In Chapter Four ("The Life of Chernyshevski") of "The Gift" Pushkin's poem Arion (1827) is mentioned:
Пушкина нет в списке книг, доставленных Чернышевскому в крепость, да и немудрено: несмотря на заслуги Пушкина ("изобрел русскую поэзию и приучил общество ее читать"), это всё-таки был прежде всего сочинитель остреньких стишков о ножках (причем "ножки" в интонации шестидесятых годов - когда вся природа омещанилась, превратившись в "травку" и "пичужек" - уже значило не то, что разумел Пушкин, - а скорее немецкое "фюсхен"). Особенно возмутительным казалось ему (как и Белинскому), что Пушкин стал так "бесстрастен" к концу жизни. "Прекратились те приятельские отношения, памятником которых осталось стихотворение "Арион", вскользь поясняет Чернышевский, но как полно было священного значения это вскользь для читателя "Современника" (которого мы вдруг представили себе рассеянно и жадно кусающим яблоко, - переносящим на яблоко жадность чтения и опять глазами рвущим строки). Поэтому Николая Гавриловича немало должно быть раздражала, как лукавый намек, как посягательство на гражданские лавры, которых производитель "пошлой болтовни" (его отзыв о "Стамбул гяуры нынче славят") был недостоин, авторская ремарка в предпоследней сцене "Бориса Годунова": "Пушкин идет, окруженный народом".
Pushkin does not figure in the list of books sent to Chernyshevski at the fortress, and no wonder: despite Pushkin’s services (“he invented Russian poetry and taught society to read it”—two statements completely untrue), he was nevertheless above all a writer of witty little verses about women’s little feet—and “little feet” in the intonation of the sixties—when the whole of nature had been Philistinized into travka (diminutive of “grass”) and pichuzhki (diminutive of “birds”)—already meant something quite different from Pushkin’s “petits pieds” something that had now become closer to the mawkish “Füsschen” It seemed particularly astonishing to him (as it did also to Belinski) that Pushkin became so “aloof” toward the end of his life. “An end was put to those friendly relations whose monument has remained the poem ‘Arion,’ ” explains Chernyshevski in passing, but how full of sacred meaning was this casual reference to the forbidden subject of Decembrism for the reader of The Contemporary (whom we suddenly imagine as absentmindedly and hungrily biting into an apple—transferring the hunger of his reading to the apple, and again eating the words with his eyes). Therefore Nikolay Gavrilovich must have been more than a little irritated by a stage direction in the penultimate scene of Boris Godunov, a stage direction resembling a sly hint and an encroachment upon civic laurels hardly deserved by the author of “vulgar driver" (see Chernyshevski’s remarks on the poem “Stamboul is by the giaours now lauded”): “Pushkin comes surrounded by the people.”
Let me also draw your attention to the updated version of my previous post, "Horosho, L-shaped bathroom & L disaster in Ada" (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35728).