According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), he got Ada’s cable in the Engadine:
‘When I was a kid,’ said Van, ‘and stayed for the first — or rather, second — time in Switzerland, I thought that "Verglas" on roadway signs stood for some magical town, always around the corner, at the bottom of every snowy slope, never seen, but biding its time. I got your cable in the Engadine where there are real magical places, such as Alraun or Alruna — which means a tiny Arabian demon in a German wizard’s mirror. By the way, we have the old apartment upstairs with an additional bedroom, number five-zero-eight.’
‘Oh dear. I’m afraid you must cancel poor 508. If I stayed for the night, 510 would do for both of us, but I’ve got bad news for you. I can’t stay. I must go back to Geneva directly after dinner to retrieve my things and maids, whom the authorities have apparently put in a Home for Stray Females because they could not pay the absolutely medieval new droits de douane — isn’t Switzerland in Washington State, sort of, après tout? Look, don’t scowl’ — (patting his brown blotched hand on which their shared birthmark had got lost among the freckles of age, like a babe in autumn woods, on peut les suivre en reconnaissant only Mascodagama’s disfigured thumb and the beautiful almond-shaped nails) — ‘I promise to get in touch with you in a day or two, and then we’ll go on a cruise to Greece with the Baynards — they have a yacht and three adorable daughters who still swim in the tan, okay?’
‘I don’t know what I loathe more,’ he replied, ‘yachts or Baynards; but can I help you in Geneva?’
He could not. Baynard had married his Cordula, after a sensational divorce — Scotch veterinaries had had to saw off her husband’s antlers (last call for that joke). (Part Four)
In the penultimate story of his book Les Plaisirs et les Jours (“Pleasures and Days,” 1896), Les regrets, rêveries couleur du temps (“Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time”), Proust mentions a forgotten village of the Engadine:
Nous nous sommes aimés dans un village perdu d’Engadine au nom deux fois doux : le rêve des sonorités allemandes s’y mourait dans la volupté des syllabes italiennes, À l’entour, trois lacs d’un vert inconnu baignaient des forêts de sapins. Des glaciers et des pics fermaient l’horizon. Le soir, la diversité des plans multipliait la douceur des éclairages. Oublierons-nous jamais les promenades au bord du lac de Sils-Maria, quand l’après-midi finissait, à six heures ? Les mélèzes d’une si noire sérénité quand ils avoisinent la neige éblouissante tendaient vers l’eau bleu pâle, presque mauve, leurs branches d’un vert suave et brillant. Un soir l’heure nous fut particulièrement propice ; en quelques instants, le soleil baissant, fit passer l’eau par toutes les nuances et notre âme par toutes les voluptés, Tout à coup nous rimes un mouvement, nous venions de voir un petit papillon rose, puis deux, puis cinq, quitter les fleurs de notre rive et voltiger au-dessus du lac. Bientôt ils semblaient une impalpable poussière de rose emportée, puis ils abordaient aux fleurs de l’autre rive, revenaient et doucement recommençaient l’aventureuse traversée, s’arrêtant parfois comme tentés au-dessus de ce lac précieusement nuancé alors comme une grande fleur qui se fane. C’en était trop et nos yeux s’emplissaient de larmes. Ces petits papillons, en traversant le lac, passaient et repassaient sur notre âme, – sur notre âme toute tendue d’émotion devant tant de beautés, prête à vibrer, – passaient et repassaient comme un archet voluptueux. (Chapter XXII – PRÉSENCE RÉELLE)
The title of the last story in Les Plaisirs et les Jours, La fin de la jalousie (“The End of Jealousy”), brings to mind Paul Alexis’s story La fin de Lucie Pelegrin (1880). In La mort de Baldassare Silvande vicomte Sylvandie (“The Death of Baldassare Silvande”), another story in Proust's Les Plaisirs et les Jours, Alexis is the name of Baldassare’s nephew. After escaping from the Kalugano hospital (where he recovered from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge), Van spends a medicinal month in Cordula’s Manhattan flat on Alexis Avenue:
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.’
One Sunday, while Cordula was still lolling in her perfumed bath (a lovely, oddly unfamiliar sight, which he delighted in twice a day), Van ‘in the nude’ (as his new sweetheart drolly genteelized ‘naked’), attempted for the first time after a month’s abstinence to walk on his hands. He felt strong, and fit, and blithely turned over to the ‘first position’ in the middle of the sun-drenched terrace. Next moment he was sprawling on his back. He tried again and lost his balance at once. He had the terrifying, albeit illusionary, feeling that his left arm was now shorter than his right, and Van wondered wrily if he ever would be able to dance on his hands again. King Wing had warned him that two or three months without practice might result in an irretrievable loss of the rare art. On the same day (the two nasty little incidents thus remained linked up in his mind forever) Van happened to answer the ‘phone — a deep hollow voice which he thought was a man’s wanted Cordula, but the caller turned out to be an old schoolmate, and Cordula feigned limpid delight, while making big eyes at Van over the receiver, and invented a number of unconvincing engagements.
‘It’s a gruesome girl!’ she cried after the melodious adieux. ‘Her name is Vanda Broom, and I learned only recently what I never suspected at school — she’s a regular tribadka — poor Grace Erminin tells me Vanda used to make constant passes at her and at — at another girl. There’s her picture here,’ continued Cordula with a quick change of tone, producing a daintily bound and prettily printed graduation album of Spring, 1887, which Van had seen at Ardis, but in which he had not noticed the somber beetle-browed unhappy face of that particular girl, and now it did not matter any more, and Cordula quickly popped the book back into a drawer; but he remembered very well that among the various more or less coy contributions it contained a clever pastiche by Ada Veen mimicking Tolstoy’s paragraph rhythm and chapter closings; he saw clearly in mind her prim photo under which she had added one of her characteristic jingles:
In the old manor, I’ve parodied
Every veranda and room,
And jacarandas at Arrowhead
In supernatural bloom. (1.43)
After his duel with Tapper Van (who performed in variety shows dancing on his hands as Mascodagama) loses his rare art.
The name Vanda Broom (of Ada’s lesbian schoolmate at Brownhill) is secretly present in Ada's poem. In Proust’s Sodom et Gomorrhe Marcel mentions Françoise clutching her broom (le balai) like a scepter, playing her role for tragedy:
Mais il faut savoir aussi ne pas rester insensibles, malgré la banalité solennelle et menaçante des choses qu’elle dit, son héritage maternel et la dignité du «clos», devant une vieille cuisinière drapée dans une vie et une ascendance d’honneur, tenant le balai comme un sceptre, poussant son rôle au tragique, l’entrecoupant de pleurs, se redressant avec majesté. Ce jour-là je me rappelai ou j’imaginai de telles scènes, je les rapportai à notre vieille servante, et, depuis lors, malgré tout le mal qu’elle put faire à Albertine, j’aimai Françoise d’une affection, intermittente il est vrai, mais du genre le plus fort, celui qui a pour base la pitié.
Describing his childhood romance with Annabel, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) calls his male organ “the scepter of my passion:”
She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I have her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. (1.4)
According to Humbert, his paper “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it (1.5). In VN's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) the narrator (Sebastian's half-brother V.) mentions the futurist poet Alexis Pan who translated into Russian Keats's poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci:
It appears that Sebastian had developed a friendship with the futurist poet Alexis Pan and his wife Larissa, a weird couple who rented a cottage close to our country estate near Luga. He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the 'submental grunt' as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career - one of these at least being a very miracle of verbal transfusion: his Russian rendering of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'. (Chapter 3)
The inscription on Keats's tombstone reads: "Here lies one whose name was writ on water." In Khlebnikov's poem Pen pan ("Master of Foams," 1915) the author's name is whispered by air:
Моё восклицалося имя -
Шепча, изрицал его воздух.
"A cretin of genius," Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) was a Russian futurist poet. His surname comes from khlebnik (obs., baker), a word that comes from khleb (bread). The name Alexis Pan seems to hint at Khlebnikov not only through panis ("bread" in Latin), but - Pen pan being a poem by Khlebnikov - also through penis. At least once Alexis Avenue loses its ending and becomes “Alex Avenue:”
He judged it would take him as much time to find a taxi at this hour of the day as to walk, with his ordinary swift swing, the ten blocks to Alex Avenue. He was coatless, tieless, hatless; a strong sharp wind dimmed his sight with salty frost and played Medusaean havoc with his black locks. Upon letting himself in for the last time into his idiotically cheerful apartment, he forthwith sat down at that really magnificent desk and wrote the following note:
Do what he tells you. His logic sounds preposterous, prepsupposing [sic] a vague kind of ‘Victorian’ era, as they have on Terra according to ‘my mad’ [?], but in a paroxysm of [illegible] I suddenly realized he was right. Yes, right, here and there, not neither here, nor there, as most things are. You see, girl, how it is and must be. In the last window we shared we both saw a man painting [us?] but your second-floor level of vision probably prevented your seeing that he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared. Good-bye, girl.
Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened — or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. (2.11)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) VN’s Lolita is known as The Gitanilla by the Spanish writer Osberg (1.13). As she speaks to Van, Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) compares herself to Dolores (apparently, the girl's name in Osberg's novel) who says that she is only a picture painted on air:
I'm like Dolores - when she says she's "only a picture painted on air."'
'Never could finish that novel - much too pretentious.'
'Pretentious but true. It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can't we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?'
'It's safer and faster by plane,' said Van. 'And for Log's sake, speak Russian.' (3.3)
Just before Lucette’s suicide, Van, Lucette and the Robinsons (an elderly couple) watch Don Juan’s Last Fling (Yuzlik’s movie roughly based on Osberg’s novel) in the Tobakoff cinema hall (3.5). My vse - Robinzony ("We All are the Robinsons," 1921) is a poem by Bryusov. In his poem Segodnya ("Today," 1922) Bryusov mentions Mandragory (the Mandrakes) that plyashut po stranam (are dancing all over the countries) and in a footnote explains that Mandragory is a hint at the novel popular in the post-war Germany. Alraune (German for "mandrake") is a novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers published in 1911 (it is also the name of the female lead character). According to Van, he received Ada’s cable at the Alraun Palace in Alvena:
Late on Sunday, July 13, in nearby Alvena, the concierge of the Alraun Palace handed him a cable that had waited for him since Friday:
ARRIVING MONT ROUX TROIS CYGNES MONDAY DINNERTIME I WANT YOU TO WIRE ME FRANKLY IF THE DATE AND THE WHOLE TRALALA ARE INCONVENIENT. (Part Four)
Part Four of Ada is Van’s essay The Texture of Time. In his poem Printsip otnositel'nosty ("The Principle of Relativity," 1921) Bryusov says that in our days Time is kanatnyi plyasun (a rope-dancer):
И на сцену — венецианских дожей ли,
Если молнии скачут в лесу!
До чего, современники, мы дожили:
Самое Время - канатный плясун!
In The Texture of Time Van (who says that time itself is motionless and changeless) criticizes Relativity:
At this point, I suspect, I should say something about my attitude to 'Relativity.' It is not sympathetic. What many cosmogonists tend to accept as an objective truth is really the flaw inherent in mathematics which parades as truth. The body of the astonished person moving in Space is shortened in the direction of motion and shrinks catastrophically as the velocity nears the speed beyond which, by the fiat of a fishy formula, no speed can be. That is his bad luck, not mine - but I sweep away the business of his clock's slowing down. Time, which requires the utmost purity of consciousness to be properly apprehended, is the most rational element of life, and my reason feels insulted by those flights of Technology Fiction. One especially grotesque inference, drawn (I think by Engelwein) from Relativity Theory - and destroying it, if drawn correctly - is that the galactonaut and his domestic animals, after touring the speed spas of Space, would return younger than if they had stayed at home all the time. Imagine them filing out of their airark - rather like those 'Lions,' juvenilified by romp suits, exuding from one of those huge chartered buses that stop, horribly blinking, in front of a man's impatient sedan just where the highway wizens to squeeze through the narrows of a mountain village.
In À la recherche du temps perdu Proust several time mentions un grand tralala:
« Vous n’étiez pas invité hier chez Salomon ? disait-on dans la famille. — Non, je n’étais pas des élus ! — Qu’est-ce qu’il y avait ? — Un grand tralala, le stéréoscope, toute la boutique. — Ah ! s’il y avait le stéréoscope, je regrette, car il paraît que Salomon est extraordinaire quand il le montre. — Que veux-tu, dit M. Bloch à son fils, il ne faut pas lui donner tout à la fois, comme cela il lui restera quelque chose à désirer. » (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)
Brichot m’apprit qu’il y avait ce soir, au « Quai Conti » (c’est ainsi que les fidèles disaient en parlant du salon Verdurin depuis qu’il s’était transporté là), grand « tra la la » musical, organisé par M. de Charlus. (La Prisonnière)