According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), the merest touch of Ada’s finger or mouth produced not only a more potent but essentially different delicia than the slowest ‘winslow’ of the most sophisticated young harlot:
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)
In De Vita Caesarum Suetonius calls Titus Flavius (Roman Emperor in 79-81 AD) amor ac deliciae generis humani (“the delight and darling of the human race”):
Titus, cognomine paterno, amor ac deliciae generis humani - tantum illi ad promerendam omnium voluntatem vel ingenii vel artis vel fortunae superfuit et, quod difficillimum est, in imperio; quando privatus atque etiam sub patre principe ne odio quidem nedum vituperatione publica cariut - natus est III Kal. Ian. insigni anno Gaiana nece, prope Septizonium, sordidis aedibus, cubiculo vero perparvo et obscuro; nam manet adhuc et ostenditur.
Titus, of the same surname as his father, was the delight and darling of the human race; such surpassing ability had he, by nature, art, or good fortune, to win the affections of all men, and that, too, which is no easy task, while he was emperor; for as a private citizen, and even during his father's rule, he did not escape hatred, much less public criticism.
He was born on the third day before the Kalends of January, in the year memorable for the death of Gaius, in a mean house near the Septizonium and in a very small dark room besides; for it still remains and is on exhibition.
A seven storey tower, the Septizonium brings to mind “a regular ziggurat” mentioned by Van:
‘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)
In Tayna Tryokh. Egipet i Vavilon (“The Secret of Three: Egypt and Babylon,” 1925) Merezhkovski says that, instead of the Eleusinian temple, we have a brothel:
Как глубоко наше скопчество, видно из того, что в нём согласны все индивидуалисты и социалисты, буржуа и пролетарии, верующие в Бога и безбожники. Как нам понять, что такое божественный Эрос, когда вместо Афродиты Урании – у нас «Елена Прекрасная», а вместо Елевзинского храма – публичный дом?
and mentions the play of divine numbers crystallized by the Egyptians in a pyramid and by the Babylonians in a seven storey Ziggurat tower:
Не эту ли игру божественных чисел кристаллизируют и египтяне в пирамиде, соединяя в одной точке неба четыре исходящих из земли треугольника, и вавилоняне – в башне Zikkurat, семиярусной: 3 + 4 = 7? (“The Divine Trefoil,” XI)
The name of Van’s fencing master hints at Peter I (“Peter the Great”), the tsar who founded St. Petersburg (VN’s home city) and who sentenced his son Alexey to death. Merezhkovski is the author of Antikhrist. Pyotr i Aleksey (“The Antichrist. Peter and Alexey,” 1904), a novel whose title brings to mind Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set).
Describing his travels, Van mentions the pyramids of Ladorah:
He traveled, he studied, he taught.
He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly because of its name) under a full moon that silvered the sands inlaid with pointed black shadows. (3.1)
In the same chapter Van mentions his obsession with numbers:
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (ibid.)
In his narrative poem Francis of Assisi: a Legend (1891) Merezhkovski mentions earth, air, fire and water:
И зовёт, зовёт он всю природу,
Бездны, горы, тучи, небеса,
Землю, воздух и огонь, и воду —
Слить в одну молитву голоса.
And he summons the whole nature:
the abysses, mountains, clouds, heavens,
earth, air, and fire, and water
to merge voices into one prayer.
(Part Two, VI)
In his poem on the death of Lesbia's sparrow Catullus calls the dead bird deliciae meae puellae (the delight of my girl):
Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque,
et quantum est hominum venustiorum:
passer mortuus est meae puellae,
passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quem plus illa oculis suis amabat.
nam mellitus erat suamque norat
ipsam tam bene quam puella matrem,
nec sese a gremio illius movebat,
sed circumsiliens modo huc modo illuc
ad solam dominam usque pipiabat.
qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
illuc, unde negant redire quemquam.
at vobis male sit, malae tenebrae
Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis:
tam bellum mihi passerem abstulistis
o factum male! o miselle passer!
tua nunc opera meae puellae
flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli.
Mourn, O you Loves and Cupids
and such of you as love beauty:
my girl’s sparrow is dead,
sparrow, the girl’s delight,
whom she loved more than her eyes.
For he was sweet as honey, and knew her
as well as the girl her own mother,
he never moved from her lap,
but, hopping about here and there,
chirped to his mistress alone.
Now he goes down the shadowy road
from which they say no one returns.
Now let evil be yours, evil shadows of Orcus,
that devour everything of beauty:
you’ve stolen lovely sparrow from me.
O evil deed! O poor little sparrow!
Now, by your efforts, my girl’s eyes
are swollen and red with weeping.
In his poem Pamyati kota Murra ("In Memory of of the Tomcat Murr," 1934) Hodasevich says that his dead cat is now in those gardens beyond the river of fire where Catullus is with the sparrow and Derzhavin with the swallow:
В забавах был так мудр и в мудрости забавен -
Друг утешительный и вдохновитель мой!
Теперь он в тех садах, за огненной рекой,
Где с воробьём Катулл и с ласточкой Державин.
О, хороши сады за огненной рекой,
Где черни подлой нет, где в благодатной лени
Вкушают вечности заслуженный покой
Поэтов и зверей возлюбленные тени!
Когда ж и я туда? Ускорить не хочу
Мой срок, положенный земному лихолетью,
Но к тем, кто выловлен таинственною сетью,
Всё чаще я мечтой приверженной лечу.
In his poem Hodasevich mentions poetov i zverey vozlyublennye teni (the beloved shades of poets and animals). In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions his landlord's black cat. Kinbote's landlord, Judge Goldsworth is an authority on Roman Law. Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Roman poet and Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a Roman historian. When Demon Veen visits Van in Mahhattan, his fellow traveler in the lift is Valerio, an elderly Roman:
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)
The river of fire in Hodasevich’s poem "In Memory of the Tomcat Murr" is the Phlegethon (one of the five rivers that surround Hades). At the beginning of his poem Proserpina (1824) Pushkin mentions volny Flegetona (the waves of the Phlegeton) and svody tartara (the vaults of Tartarus):
Плещут волны Флегетона,
Своды Тартара дрожат,
Кони бледного Плутона
Быстро к нимфам Пелиона
Из аида бога мчат.
The waves of the Phlegethon splash,
The vaults of Tartarus tremble,
Pale Pluto’s horses
Quickly to the nymphs of Pelion
Rush the god from Hades.
The vaults of Tartarus bring to mind Tartary, a land on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) that occupies the territory “from Kurland to the Kurils” (1.3). Pluto is the name of the first black cat in E. A. Poe’s story The Black Cat (1845).
In his poem Pushkin calls Proserpina Ada gordaya tsaritsa (“the proud queen of Hell”):
Ада гордая царица
Взором юношу зовёт,
Обняла — и колесница
Уж к аиду их несёт;
Мчатся, облаком одеты;
Видят вечные луга,
Элизей и томной Леты
Усыпленные брега.
I also recommend you the updated version of my previous post, "Pardus & Peg in Ada" (https://thenabokovian.org/node/35730).