Before the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) tells Demon (Van’s and Ada’s father) pozhalsta bez glupostey (“please, no silly things”):
She’s a jeune fille fatale, a pale, heart-breaking beauty,’ Demon confided to his former mistress without bothering to discover whether the subject of his praise could hear him (she did) from the other end of the room where she was helping Van to corner the dog — and showing much too much leg in the process. Our old friend, being quite as excited as the rest of the reunited family, had scampered in after Marina with an old miniver-furred slipper in his merry mouth. The slipper belonged to Blanche, who had been told to whisk Dack to her room but, as usual, had not incarcerated him properly. Both children experienced a chill of déjà-vu (a twofold déjà-vu, in fact, when contemplated in artistic retrospect).
‘Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant les gens,’ said deeply flattered Marina (sounding the final ‘s’ as her granddams had done); and when the slow fish-mouthed footman had gone carrying away, supine, high-chested Dack and his poor plaything, she continued: ‘Really, in comparison to the local girls, to Grace Erminin, for example, or Cordula de Prey, Ada is a Turgenevian maiden or even a Jane Austen miss.’
‘I’m Fanny Price, actually,’ commented Ada.
‘In the staircase scene,’ added Van.
‘Let’s not bother about their private jokes,’ said Marina to Demon. ‘I never can understand their games and little secrets. Mlle Larivière, however, has written a wonderful screenplay about mysterious children doing strange things in old parks — but don’t let her start talking of her literary successes tonight, that would be fatal.’
‘I hope your husband won’t be too late,’ said Demon. ‘He is not at his best after eight p.m., summertime, you know. By the way, how’s Lucette?’
At this moment both battants of the door were flung open by Bouteillan in the grand manner, and Demon offered kalachikom (in the form of a Russian crescent loaf) his arm to Marina. Van, who in his father’s presence was prone to lapse into a rather dismal sort of playfulness, proposed taking Ada in, but she slapped his wrist away with a sisterly sans-gêne, of which Fanny Price might not have approved. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): devant les gens: in front of the servants.
Fanny Price: the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
In VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) M’sieur Pierre (the executioner) asks Cincinnatus not to faint and uses the phrase pozhaluysta, bez glupostey (come on, no foolishness):
От статуи капитана Сонного оставались только ноги до бёдер, окруженные розами, - очевидно, ее тоже хватила гроза.
Где-то впереди духовой оркестр нажаривал марш "Голубчик". Через всё небо подвигались толчками белые облака, - по-моему, они повторяются, по-моему, их только три типа, по-моему, все это сетчато и с подозрительной прозеленью...
- Но, но, пожалуйста, без глупостей, - сказал м-сье Пьер. - Не сметь падать в обморок. Это недостойно мужчины.
All that remained of the statue of Captain Somnus was the legs up to the hips, surrounded by roses — it too must have been struck by lightning. Somewhere ahead a brass band was scorching away at the march Golubchik. White clouds moved jerkily across the whole sky — I think the same ones pass over and over again, I think there are only three kinds, I think it is all stage-setting, with a suspicious green tinge . . .
‘Now, now, come on, no foolishness,’ said M’sieur Pierre. ‘Don’t you dare start fainting. It’s unworthy of a man.’ (Chapter Twenty)
Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van mentions Marina’s feigned faint:
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). How strange that when one met after a long separation a chum or fat aunt whom one had been fond of as a child the unimpaired human warmth of the friendship was rediscovered at once, but with an old mistress this never happened — the human part of one’s affection seemed to be swept away with the dust of the inhuman passion, in a wholesale operation of demolishment. He looked at her and acknowledged the perfection of the potage, but she, this rather thick-set woman, goodhearted, no doubt, but restive and sour-faced, glazed over, nose, forehead and all, with a sort of brownish oil that she considered to be more ‘juvenizing’ than powder, was more of a stranger to him than Bouteillan who had once carried her in his arms, in a feigned faint, out of a Ladore villa and into a cab, after a final, quite final row, on the eve of her wedding. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Persty: Evidently Pushkin’s vinograd:
as elongated and transparent
as are the fingers of a girl.
(devï molodoy, jeune fille)
ciel-étoilé: starry sky.
According to Van, Demon (who had a sword duel with Baron d’Onsky) beats him at fencing, but he is the better shot:
'Tell me, Bouteillan,’ asked Marina, ‘what other good white wine do we have — what can you recommend?’ The butler smiled and whispered a fabulous name.
‘Yes, oh, yes,’ said Demon. ‘Ah, my dear, you should not think up dinners all by yourself. Now about rowing — you mentioned rowing... Do you know that moi, qui vous parle, was a Rowing Blue in 1858? Van prefers football, but he’s only a College Blue, aren’t you Van? I’m also better than he at tennis — not lawn tennis, of course, a game for parsons, but "court tennis" as they say in Manhattan. What else, Van?’
‘You still beat me at fencing, but I’m the better shot. That’s not real sudak, papa, though it’s tops, I assure you.’
(Marina, having failed to obtain the European product in time for the dinner, had chosen the nearest thing, wall-eyed pike, or ‘dory,’ with Tartar sauce and boiled young potatoes.)
‘Ah!’ said Demon, tasting Lord Byron’s Hock. ‘This redeems Our Lady’s Tears.’ (ibid.)
At the dinner in ‘Ursus’ (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) Lucette mentions the scar on Van's body left after his pistol duel with Captain Tapper:
The uha, the shashlik, the Ai were facile and familiar successes; but the old songs had a peculiar poignancy owing to the participation of a Lyaskan contralto and a Banff bass, renowned performers of Russian ‘romances,’ with a touch of heart-wringing tsiganshchina vibrating through Grigoriev and Glinka. And there was Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian? Romany? Ramseyan?) whose ravishing services Van had availed himself of several times in the fall of that year. As a ‘man of the world,’ Van glanced with bland (perhaps too bland) unconcern at her talented charms, but they certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred and placed in the colored blaze of the feast before him; and that thrill was somehow augmented by his awareness (carefully profiled, diaphanely blinkered) of the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference. Presently, the long sobs of the violins began to affect and almost choke Van and Ada: a juvenile conditioning of romantic appeal, which at one moment forced tearful Ada to go and ‘powder her nose’ while Van stood up with a spasmodic sob, which he cursed but could not control. He went back to whatever he was eating, and cruelly stroked Lucette’s apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian ‘I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, please, don’t let me swill (hlestat’) champagne any more, not only because I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you, and not only because of the physical red thing — your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen’ka (‘darling,’ more than ‘darling’), it looked to me at least eight inches long —’
‘Seven and a half,’ murmured modest Van, whose hearing the music impaired.
‘— but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life, Van, Van, Van.’ (2.8)
After the dinner in ‘Ursus’ and the debauch à trois with Ada and Lucette in his Manhattan flat Van mentions his fencing master, Pierre Legrand:
‘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.’ (ibid.)
Pierre Legrand seems to blend M’sieur Pierre, the executioner in “Invitation to a Beheading,” with the tsar Peter I ("Peter the Great"). In a letter of Oct. 19, 1836, to Chaadaev Pushkin says that Pierre le Grand alone is a world history:
Et Pierre le Grand qui à lui seul est une histoire universelle! Et Catherine II qui a placé la Russie sur le seuil de l’Europe? et Alexandre qui vous a mené à Paris? et (la main sur le coeur) ne trouvez-vous pas quelque chose d’imposant dans la situation actuelle de la Russie, quelque chose qui frappera le futur historien? Croyez vous qu’il nous mettra hors l’Europe? Quoique personnellement attaché de coeur à l’Empereur, je suis loin d’admirer tout ce que je vois autour de moi; comme homme de lettre, je suis aigri; comme homme à préjugés, je suis froissé — mais je vous jure sur mon honneur, que pour rien au monde je n’aurais voulu changer de patrie, ni avoir d’autre histoire que celle de nos ancêtres, telle que Dieu nous l’a donnée.
A phrase repeated by Pushkin twice, quelque chose (something) brings to mind Chose, Demon's and Van's English University. As a Chose student Van performs in variety shows as Mascodagama, dancing tango on his hands. At the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon mentions Van's stage name:
The roast hazel-hen (or rather its New World representative, locally called ‘mountain grouse’) was accompanied by preserved lingonberries (locally called ‘mountain cranberries’). An especially succulent morsel of one of those brown little fowls yielded a globule of birdshot between Demon’s red tongue and strong canine: ‘La fève de Diane,’ he remarked, placing it carefully on the edge of his plate. ‘How is the car situation, Van?’
‘Vague. I ordered a Roseley like yours but it won’t be delivered before Christmas. I tried to find a Silentium with a side car and could not, because of the war, though what connection exists between wars and motorcycles is a mystery. But we manage, Ada and I, we manage, we ride, we bike, we even jikker.’
‘I wonder,’ said sly Demon, ‘why I’m reminded all at once of our great Canadian’s lovely lines about blushing Irène:
‘Le feu si délicat de la virginité
Qui something sur son front…
‘All right. You can ship mine to England, provided —’
‘By the way, Demon,’ interrupted Marina, ‘where and how can I obtain the kind of old roomy limousine with an old professional chauffeur that Praskovia, for instance, has had for years?’
‘Impossible, my dear, they are all in heaven or on Terra. But what would Ada like, what would my silent love like for her birthday? It’s next Saturday, po razschyotu po moemu (by my reckoning), isn’t it? Une rivière de diamants?’
‘Protestuyu!’ cried Marina. ‘Yes, I’m speaking seriozno. I object to your giving her kvaka sesva (quoi que ce soit), Dan and I will take care of all that.’
‘Besides you’ll forget,’ said Ada laughing, and very deftly showed the tip of her tongue to Van who had been on the lookout for her conditional reaction to ‘diamonds.’
Van asked: ‘Provided what?’
‘Provided you don’t have one waiting already for you in George’s Garage, Ranta Road.’
‘Ada, you’ll be jikkering alone soon,’ he continued, ‘I’m going to have Mascodagama round out his vacation in Paris. Qui something sur son front, en accuse la beauté!’ (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): le feu etc.: the so delicate fire of virginity
that on her brow…
po razschyotu po moemu: an allusion to Famusov (in Griboedov’s Gore ot uma), calculating the pregnancy of a lady friend.
protestuyu: Russ., I protest.
seriozno: Russ., seriously.
quoi que ce soit: whatever it might be.
en accuse etc.:…brings out its beauty.
In his poem Rossiya (“Russia,” 1924) Voloshin says that Peter the Great was the first Bolshevik:
Великий Пётр был первый большевик,
Замысливший Россию перебросить,
Склонениям и нравам вопреки,
За сотни лет к её грядущим далям. (4)
In Canto Three (ll. 180-187) of his poem Poltava (1829) Pushkin describes the battle of Poltava and compares the tsar Peter I to bozhiya groza (God’s thunderstorm):
Тогда-то свыше вдохновенный
Раздался звучный глас Петра:
«За дело, с богом!» Из шатра,
Толпой любимцев окруженный,
Выходит Петр. Его глаза
Сияют. Лик его ужасен.
Движенья быстры. Он прекрасен,
Он весь, как божия гроза.
Then Peter’s sonorous, inspired
Voice somehow rose above the din:
“To battle! God is with us!” Peter
Emerged, surrounded by a crowd
Of favorites, from his tent. His eyes
185 Ablaze, his face inspiring awe,
He quickly moves, magnificent,
Like bolts of lightning cast by God.
(tr. I. Eubanks)
After the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century electricity was banned on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set). The Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world; but it also seems to hint at the Lenin coup in October, 1917. In his poem “Russia” (written soon after Lenin's death) Voloshin speaks of the tragic destiny of Russian writers and mentions pale Dostoevski who ascends the scaffold:
Пять виселиц на Кронверкской куртине
Рифмуют на Семёновском плацу;
Волы в Тифлис волочат «Грибоеда»,
Отправленного на смерть в Тегеран;
Гроб Пушкина ссылают под конвоем
На розвальнях в опальный монастырь;
Над трупом Лермонтова царь: «Собаке —
Собачья смерть» — придворным говорит;
Промозглым утром бледный Достоевский
Горит свечой, всходя на эшафот…
И всё тесней, всё гуще этот список… (3)
During Van's first tea party at Ardis Marina says that she used to love history and mentions Dostoevski:
They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada's black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van's teacher of history, 'Jeejee' Jones.
'He resembles my teacher of history,' said Van when the man had gone.
'I used to love history,' said Marina, 'I loved to identify myself with famous women. There's a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties - Lincoln's second wife or Queen Josephine.'
'Yes, I've noticed - it's beautifully done. We've got a similar set at home.'
'Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?' Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.
'Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),' replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis' (with a slight smile). 'Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.'
'Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.'
'Pah,' uttered Ada. (1.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.
"Queen Josephine" seems to be the Antiterran counterpart of Josephine Beauharnais (the Empress of France, Napoleon’s first wife). When Napoleon told Josephine that he was going to divorce her, she collapsed on the floor in a feigned faint and Napoleon and another man had to carry her to her apartments.
At the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" the Veens are photographed on the sly by Kim Beauharnais (a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis):
‘What was that?’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.
‘Sheet lightning,’ suggested Van.
‘If you ask me,’ said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.’
Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. In expectation of the rumble, Marina started to count under her breath, as if she were praying or checking the pulse of a very sick person. One heartbeat was supposed to span one mile of black night between the living heart and a doomed herdsman, felled somewhere — oh, very far — on the top of a mountain. The rumble came — but sounded rather subdued. A second flash revealed the structure of the French window. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): certicle: anagram of ‘electric’.