Describing his scuffle with Percy de Prey at the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) compares Percy to a dying gladiator:
How did the scuffle start? Did all three cross the brook stepping on slimy stones? Did Percy push Greg? Did Van jog Percy? Was there something — a stick? Twisted out of a fist? A wrist gripped and freed?
‘Oho,’ said Percy, ‘you are playful, my lad!’
Greg, one bag of his plus-fours soaked, watched them helplessly — he was fond of both — as they grappled on the brink of the brook.
Percy was three years older, and a score of kilograms heavier than Van, but the latter had handled even burlier brutes with ease. Almost at once the Count’s bursting face was trapped in the crook of Van’s arm. The grunting Count toured the turf in a hunched-up stagger. He freed one scarlet ear, was retrapped, was tripped and collapsed under Van, who instantly put him ‘on his omoplates,’ na lopatki, as King Wing used to say in his carpet jargon. Percy lay panting like a dying gladiator, both shoulder blades pressed to the ground by his tormentor, whose thumbs now started to manipulate horribly that heaving thorax. Percy with a sudden bellow of pain intimated he had had enough. Van requested a more articulate expression of surrender, and got it. Greg, fearing Van had not caught the muttered plea for mercy, repeated it in the third person interpretative. Van released the unfortunate Count, whereupon he sat up, spitting, palpating his throat, rearranging the rumpled shirt around his husky torso and asking Greg in a husky voice to find a missing cufflink.
Van washed his hands in a lower shelf-pool of the brook and recognized, with amused embarrassment, the transparent, tubular thing, not unlike a sea-squirt, that had got caught in its downstream course in a fringe of forget-me-nots, good name, too.
He had started to walk back to the picnic glade when a mountain fell upon him from behind. With one violent heave he swung his attacker over his head. Percy crashed and lay supine for a moment or two. Van, his crab claws on the ready, contemplated him, hoping for a pretext to inflict a certain special device of exotic torture that he had not yet had the opportunity to use in a real fight.
‘You’ve broken my shoulder,’ grumbled Percy, half-rising and rubbing his thick arm. ‘A little more self-control, young devil.’
‘Stand up!’ said Van. ‘Come on, stand up! Would you like more of the same or shall we join the ladies? The ladies? All right. But, if you please, walk in front of me now.’
As he and his captive drew near the glade Van cursed himself for feeling rattled by that unexpected additional round; he was secretly out of breath, his every nerve twanged, he caught himself limping and correcting the limp — while Percy de Prey, in his magically immaculate white trousers and casually ruffled shirt, marched, buoyantly exercising his arms and shoulders, and seemed quite serene and in fact rather cheerful.
Presently Greg overtook them, bringing the cufflink — a little triumph of meticulous detection, and with a trite ‘Attaboy!’ Percy closed his silk cuff, thus completing his insolent restoration. (1.39)
Umirayushchiy gladiator (“The Dying Gladiator,” 1836) is a poem (a free translation of Byron’s Childe Harold, 4: CXXXIX–CCXLII) by Lermontov. In his “Song about Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Young Oprichnik, and the Valorous Merchant Kalashnikov” (1837) Lermontov describes the fisticuffs between Kiribeyevich (the tsar’s oprichnik who dies in the fight) and the merchant Stepan Kalashnikov (who wins in the fight but is beheaded by order of the tsar) and mentions the executioner’s rubakha krasnaya s yarkoy zaponkoy (red short with a bright link):
Как на площади народ собирается,
Заунывный гудит-воет колокол,
Разглашает всюду весть недобрую.
По высокому месту лобному
Во рубахе красной с яркой запонкой,
С большим топором навострённыим,
Руки голые потираючи,
Палач весело похаживает,
Удалого бойца дожидается, —
А лихой боец, молодой купец,
Со родными братьями прощается:
To the market square the good townsfolk stream,
The bell's mournful knell o'er it, booming, floats,
Throughout Moscow-town evil tidings spreads.
On high ground the wooden scaffold rears;
In his scarlet blouse with its jeweled links
Does the headsman strut in front of the crowd
And await his victim right merrily.
His axe is well honed and made keen and sharp,
And he rubs his hands in open glee....
And the stouthearted merchant Kalashnikov
Bids his brothers farewell and embraces them. (ll. 469-479)
The tsar Ivan Vasilievich (Ivan IV) was surnamed Groznyi (the Terrible). In her last note poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina) mentioned Nurse Joan the Terrible:
Aujourd’hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several ‘patients,’ in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.
[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’
iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)
Van’s and Ada’s father, Demon Veen married Aqua soon after his sword duel with Baron d’Onsky:
Upon being questioned in Demon’s dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so. Since prudent Veen preferred killing his man in Europe (decrepit but indestructible Gamaliel was said to be doing his best to forbid duels in the Western Hemisphere — a canard or an idealistic President’s instant-coffee caprice, for nothing was to come of it after all), Demon rented the fastest petroloplane available, overtook the Baron (looking very fit) in Nice, saw him enter Gunter’s Bookshop, went in after him, and in the presence of the imperturbable and rather bored English shopkeeper, back-slapped the astonished Baron across the face with a lavender glove. The challenge was accepted; two native seconds were chosen; the Baron plumped for swords; and after a certain amount of good blood (Polish and Irish — a kind of American ‘Gory Mary’ in barroom parlance) had bespattered two hairy torsoes, the whitewashed terrace, the flight of steps leading backward to the walled garden in an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement, the apron of a quite accidental milkmaid, and the shirtsleeves of both seconds, charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, the latter gentleman separated the panting combatants, and Skonky died, not ‘of his wounds’ (as it was viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston — a city where, incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of Glass Biota at the local museum. (1.2)
Demon's adversary, Baron d'Onsky seems to combine Prince Dmitri Donskoy (who defeated Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo, 1380) with Onegin's donskoy zherebets (Don stallion) in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Two: V: 1-8):
Сначала все к нему езжали;
Но так как с заднего крыльца
Обыкновенно подавали
Ему донского жеребца,
Лишь только вдоль большой дороги
Заслышит их домашни дроги, -
Поступком оскорбясь таким,
Все дружбу прекратили с ним.
At first they all would call on him,
but since to the back porch
there was habitually brought
a Don stallion for him
the moment that along the highway
one heard their homely shandrydans -
outraged by such behavior,
they all ceased to be friends with him.
The name of one of the two seconds in Demon's duel with d'Onsky, Colonel St Alin clearly hints at Stalin (who is also represented on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set, by Khan Sosso, the ruler of the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate). The characters in VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) include Roman Vissarionovich, Cincinnatus’s lawyer whose name seems to hint at the Romanovs (the Russian imperial family) and patronymic, at Stalin. Roman Vissarionovich is upset by the loss of his cuff link:
Но его ещё промучили минуты две. Вдруг дверь отворилась, и, скользя, влетел адвокат.
Он был взлохмачен, потен. Он теребил левую манжету, и глаза у него кружились.
- Запонку потерял, - воскликнул он, быстро, как пёс, дыша. - Задел обо что.. должно быть... когда с милой Эммочкой... шалунья всегда... за фалды... всякий раз как зайду... я, главное, слышал, как кто-то... но не обратил... смотрите, цепочка очевидно... очень дорожил... ну, ничего не поделаешь... может быть ещё... я обещал всем сторожам... а досадно...
- Глупая, сонная ошибка, - тихо сказал Цинциннат. - Я превратно истолковал суету. Это вредно для сердца.
- Да нет, спасибо, пустяки, - рассеянно пробормотал адвокат. При этом он глазами так и рыскал по углам камеры. Видно было, что его огорчала потеря дорогой вещицы. Это видно было. Потеря вещицы огорчала его. Вещица была дорогая. Он был огорчён потерей вещицы.
However, they tortured him for another two minutes or so. Suddenly the door opened, and, gliding, his lawyer rushed in. He was ruffled and sweaty. He was fiddling with his left cuff and his eyes were wandering around.
'I lost a cuff link,’ he exclaimed, panting rapidly like a dog. 'Must have — rushed against some — when I was with sweet little Emmie — she’s always so full of mischief — by the coat-tails — every time I drop in — and the point is that I heard something — but I didn’t pay any — look, the chain must have — I was very fond of— well, it’s too late now — maybe I can still — I promised all the guards — it’s a pity, though.’
'A foolish, sleepy error,’ said Cincinnatus quietly. 'I misinterpreted the fuss. This sort of thing is not good for the heart.’
'Oh, thanks, don’t worry about it, it’s nothing,’ absent-mindedly muttered the lawyer. And with his eyes he literally scoured the comers of the cell. It was plain that he was upset by the loss of that precious object. It was plain. The loss of the object upset him. The object was precious. He was upset by the loss of the object. (Chapter III)
In Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel Gospoda Golovlyovy ("The Golovlyov Family," 1880) Iudushka Golovlyov is upset by the loss of his dead brother’s golden cuff links:
Все эти неизбежные сцены будущего так и метались перед глазами Арины Петровны. И как живой звенел в её ушах маслянисто-пронзительный голос Иудушки, обращённый к ней:
— А помните, маменька, у брата золотенькие запоночки были… хорошенькие такие, ещё он их по праздникам надевал… и куда только эти запоночки девались — ума приложить не могу!
"Do you remember, mother, brother had the cute golden cufflinks that he wore on holidays?... where those cufflinks can be, it's beyond me!"
Iudushka ("little Judas") is a negative, as it were, of Khristosik ("little Christ"), as G. A. Vronsky called all pretty starlets:
Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 — her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband’s unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: ‘Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld’) she took advantage of his being massaged in the solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom — and experienced a delicious shock: her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along — ever since Shakespeare’s birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G.A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. Marina had spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with him at Kitezh but when she smugly divulged her intentions (just before Aqua’s arrival) he threw her out of the house. (1.3)
In "Invitation to a Beheading" Emmie (the director's little daughter who promises to save Cincinnatus and is linked to the heroine of Lermontov’s poem Sosedka, “Neighbor,” 1840) finds Roman Vissarionovich's cuff link:
Ну, а нонче как наш симпатичный смертник, - пошутил элегантный, представительный директор, пожимая в своих мясистых лиловых лапах маленькую холодную руку Цинцинната. - Всё хорошо? Ничего не болит? Всё болтаете с нашим неутомимым Романом Виссарионовичем? Да, кстати, голубчик Роман Виссарионович... могу вас порадовать, - озорница моя только что нашла на лестнице вашу запонку. La voici. Это ведь французское золото, не правда ли? Весьма изящно. Комплиментов я обычно не делаю, но должен сказать...
‘Well, and how is our doomed friend today?’ quipped the elegant, dignified director, compressing in his meaty purple paws the cold little hand of Cincinnatus. ‘Is everything all right? No aches or pains? Still gossiping with our indefatigable Roman Vissarionovich? Oh, by the way, dear Roman Vissarionovich, I have some good news for you — my little romp just found your cuff link on the stairs. La voiсi. This is French gold, isn’t it? Very, very dainty. I usually do not make compliments, but I must say…’ (Chapter III)
“Our doomed friend” brings to mind The Young and and the Doomed, the movie G. A. Vronski made of Mlle Larivière novel Les Enfants Maudits:
After some exploration, they tracked down a rerun of The Young and the Doomed (1890) to a tiny theater that specialized in Painted Westerns (as those deserts of nonart used to be called). Thus had Mlle Larivière’s Enfants Maudits (1887) finally degenerated! She had had two adolescents, in a French castle, poison their widowed mother who had seduced a young neighbor, the lover of one of her twins. The author had made many concessions to the freedom of the times, and the foul fancy of scriptwriters; but both she and the leading lady disavowed the final result of multiple tamperings with the plot that had now become the story of a murder in Arizona, the victim being a widower about to marry an alcoholic prostitute, whom Marina, quite sensibly, refused to impersonate. But poor little Ada had clung to her bit part, a two-minute scene in a traktir (roadside tavern). During the rehearsals she felt she was doing not badly as a serpentine barmaid — until the director blamed her for moving like an angular ‘backfish.’ She had not deigned to see the final product and was not overeager to have Van see it now, but he reminded her that the same director, G.A. Vronsky, had told her she was always pretty enough to serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline, who at twenty had been as attractively gauche as she, raising and tensing forward her shoulders in the same way, when crossing a room. Having sat through a preliminary P.W. short, they finally got to The Young and the Doomed only to discover that the barmaid scene of the barroom sequence had been cut out — except for a perfectly distinct shadow of Ada’s elbow, as Van kindly maintained. (2.9)
According to Ada, we are all doomed, but some are more doomed than others:
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ drawled dreamy Van. ‘I’ll tell you why. From a humble but reliable sauce, I mean source, excuse my accent, I have just learned qu’on vous culbute behind every hedge. Where can I find your tumbler?’
‘Nowhere,’ she answered quite calmly, ignoring or not even perceiving his rudeness, for she had always known that disaster would come today or tomorrow, a question of time or rather timing on the part of fate.
‘But he exists, he exists,’ muttered Van, looking down at a rainbow web on the turf.
‘I suppose so,’ said the haughty child, ‘however, he left yesterday for some Greek or Turkish port. Moreover, he was going to do everything to get killed, if that information helps. Now listen, listen! Those walks in the woods meant nothing. Wait, Van! I was weak only twice when you had hurt him so hideously, or perhaps three times in all. Please! I can’t explain in one gush, but eventually you will understand. Not everybody is as happy as we are. He’s a poor, lost, clumsy boy. We are all doomed, but some are more doomed than others. He is nothing to me. I shall never see him again. He is nothing, I swear. He adores me to the point of insanity.’
‘I think,’ said Van, ‘we’ve got hold of the wrong lover. I was asking about Herr Rack, who has such delectable gums and also adores you to the point of insanity.’
He turned, as they say, on his heel, and walked toward the house. (1.41)
One of Ada’s lovers, Percy de Prey goes to the Crimean War and dies on the second day of the invasion. Thirteen years later, when Van meets Greg Erminin in Paris (also known as Lute on Antiterra), Greg recalls the picnic in “Ardis the Second:”
‘I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony — no, a black Silentium. Bozhe moy!’
‘Yes — Bozhe moy, you can well say that. Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!’
‘You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long —’
‘Neither did she. I was terribly —’
‘How long are you staying —’
‘— terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.’
Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors. The noble reticence of our bed makers.
‘How long will you be staying in Lute? No, Greg, I ordered it. You pay for the next bottle. Tell me —’
‘So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can’t understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius — dead, dead, all dead!’
‘Oh, that would be terrible, I declare — to switch on the dorotelly, and suddenly see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund. She must have been terribly affected by her mother’s terrible death.’
Likes the word ‘terrible,’ I declare. A terrible suit of clothes, a terrible tumor. Why must I stand it? Revolting — and yet fascinating in a weird way: my babbling shadow, my burlesque double.
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform’ my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.
‘Aha,’ said Van, ‘I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.’
‘Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me — yes, Tobak! — that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good health?’ (Van bowed,) ‘And how is the guvernantka belletristka?’
‘Her last novel is called L'ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.’
They parted laughing. (3.2)
While the word 'terrible' that Greg likes brings to mind the tsar Ivan the Terrible, Colonel Erminin (Greg's father who preferred to pass for a Chekhovian Colonel) reminds one of Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel (a second in Demon's duel with d'Onsky).
Describing the beginning of his parents' romance, Van mentions the tickle of Demon's moustache:
Even before the old Eskimo had shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last dance on New Year’s Eve. Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in, the penetrative sense of her own beauty, the ardent pulses of the imagined maiden, and the gallant applause of an almost full house made her especially vulnerable to the tickle of Demon’s moustache. She had ample time, too, to change for the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed — the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat. (1.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).
Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).
In his poem My zhivyom, pod soboyu ne chuya strany... ("We live not feeling land beneath us," 1934) Mandelshtam mentions Stalin's mustache and says that every execution is to him [Stalin] a raspberry.
In her last note Aqua compared the dial of a clock to a white face with a trick mustache. According to Van, the false mustache makes him look like Pierre Legrand, his fencing master:
‘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)
Van's fencing master, Pierre Legrand seems to combine the tsar Peter I ("Peter the Great") with M'sieur Pierre, the executioner in "Invitation to a Beheading." The clock in the fortress where Cincinnatus is imprisoned is painted by the watchman:
Оба молчали, не глядя друг на друга, между тем как с бессмысленной гулкостью били часы.
- Вы обратите внимание, когда выйдете, - сказал Цинциннат, - на часы в коридоре. Это - пустой циферблат, но зато каждые полчаса сторож смывает старую стрелку и малюет новую, - вот так и живёшь по крашенному времени, а звон производит часовой, почему он так и зовётся.
They both remained silent, not looking at each other, while the clock struck with nonsensical resonance. ‘When you go out,’ said Cincinnatus, ‘note the clock in the corridor. The dial is blank; however, every hour the watchman washes off the old hand and daubs on a new one — and that’s how we live, by tarbrush time, and the ringing is the work of the watchman, which is why he is called a “watch” man.’ (Chapter Twelve)
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN compares time to a prison:
Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison. In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one’s eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold. I had learned numbers and speech more or less simultaneously at a very early date, but the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established only later, when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine. Judging by the strong sunlight that, when I think of that revelation, immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns of greenery, the occasion may have been my mother’s birthday, in late summer, in the country, and I had asked questions and had assessed the answers I received. All this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time. (Chapter One, 1)
In his essay "The Texture of Time" (1922) Van Veen mentions the horn of abundance whose stucco pineapple just missed his head:
My first recollection goes back to mid-July, 1870, i.e., my seventh month of life (with most people, of course, retentive consciousness starts somewhat later, at three or four years of age) when, one morning, in our Riviera villa, a chunk of green plaster ornament, dislodged from the ceiling by an earthquake, crashed into my cradle. The 195 days preceding that event being indistinguishable from infinite unconsciousness, are not to be included in perceptual time, so that, insofar as my mind and my pride of mind are concerned, I am today (mid-July, 1922) quite exactly fifty-two, et trêve de mon style plafond peint.
In the same sense of individual, perceptual time, I can put my Past in reverse gear, enjoy this moment of recollection as much as I did the horn of abundance whose stucco pineapple just missed my head, and postulate that next moment a cosmic or corporeal cataclysm might — not kill me, but plunge me into a permanent state of stupor, of a type sensationally new to science, thus depriving natural dissolution of any logical or chronal sense. (Part Four)
and ananas, pineapple juice:
‘What I’m telling you,’ he said harshly, ‘has nothing to do with timepieces.’ The waiter brought them their coffee. She smiled, and he realized that her smile was prompted by a conversation at the next table, at which a newcomer, a stout sad Englishman, had begun a discussion of the menu with the maître d’hôtel.
‘I’ll start,’ said the Englishman, ‘with the bananas.’
‘That’s not bananas, sir. That’s ananas, pineapple juice.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, give me some clear soup.’ (ibid.)
In his memoir essay on Loris-Melikov, Diktator na pokoe (“The Retired Dictator”), included in his book Na kladbishchakh (“At Cemeteries,” 1921) Vasiliy Nemirovich-Danchenko calls Alexander III (the tsar who in the Manifesto issued two months after the assassination of his father used the phrase a na nas lezhit obyazannost’, “and on us lies the responsibility”) Ananas the Third and the Last:
Настоящее царство самоуверенной и варварской никчеми началось с его сына и преемника на прародительском троне, Ананаса III и последнего. Вы помните его знаменитый манифест, отменявший даже канунные призрачные упования: "А на нас лежит обязанность"? Ананас III и последний разогнал всех деятелей предшествовавшего царствования, всё-таки кое-что делавших для своей страны и народа.
Там же ведь ждут во блаженном успении архангельской трубы многочисленные письма и записки М. Д. Скобелева. По повелению Александра III их отбирали у всех друзей и знакомых гениального полководца, может быть, для того, чтобы окутать непроницаемой тайной все обстоятельства его убийства спадассинами "священной дружины", убийства, совершенного по приговору, подписанному без ведома царя, -- на это бы Ананас не пошёл -- одним из великих князей и "Боби" Шуваловым, считавшими этого будущего Суворова опасным для всероссийского самодержавия.
Spadassiny (Russo-Italian, “swordsmen”), as Nemirovich calls the people who killed General Skobelev, bring to mind "smart little Vatican, Roman spa" (Baron d'Onsky's real destination).
In his essay Nemirovich quotes the words of Pobedonostsev (a reactionary statesman) who said that Russia needed a new Ivan the Terrible:
Злобная, ехидная судорога свела его бескровные сухие губы.
-- Не велика тяжесть -- выдержит. Есть от чего устать -- от нескольких повешенных негодяев. России сейчас нужны не виселицы, а настоящий правеж черных сотен. Как при Рюриковичах: любо ли? -- и бросай сверху на ножи и топоры. Иоанну Грозному, вот кому пора вернуться! Иоанну Грозному.
Он неслышно, на мягких подошвах, подошел к столу и ударил в него желтым кулачком, похожим на сморщенный гриб.
-- Да-с, трижды Иоанну Грозному. Неву трупами запрудить! Брюхами вверх! Не время сентиментальничать... Политическая власть синоду, а в синод -- если нет, так выдумать Торквемаду.
In the same essay Nemirovich describes an earthquake in Nice:
В Ницце было сильное землетрясение.
-- Наш дом ходуном, -- рассказывали мне на place Grimaldi. -- Ждали, вот-вот рухнет. Все бежали, кого в чем застало (дело было ночью) -- на улицу, на площадь, к берегу.
Денщик (при нем остался такой) будит графа.
-- Вставайте, ваше сиятельство!
-- Зачем?
-- Земля трясется! Сейчас все провалится!
-- Что провалится?
-- Земля!
-- Куда?
-- Скрось землю!
Как раз в это время глухой удар и судорога кабинета, где спал на диване Михаил Тариелович.
-- Что ж, ты думаешь, если я встану, земля успокоится? Ступай, не мешай мне спать.
Перевернулся и заснул.
А кругом росла паника, обезумевшие ниццарды чуть не кидались в море. Перепуганные иностранцы в костюмах, не поддававшихся описанию, сослепу носились по улицам, а великолепный Мамонт Дальский, как был в постели, так и влез на фонарный столб, весьма основательно сообразив, что дома, пожалуй, и не уцелеют, а столб во всяком случае устоит.
Nemirovich's memoir essay on D. I. Milyutin (also included in his book "At Cemeteries") is entitled Otechestvennyi Tsintsinnat ("The Russian Cincinnatus").
One of the memoir essays in Nemirovich’s book, Rytsar’ na chas (“Knight for an Hour”), is dedicated to Gumilyov. In his poem Zabludivshiysya tramvay ("The Lost Tram," 1921) Gumilyov mentions the executioner in a red shirt:
Вывеска… кровью налитые буквы
Гласят — зеленная, — знаю, тут
Вместо капусты и вместо брюквы
Мертвые головы продают.
В красной рубашке, с лицом, как вымя,
Голову срезал палач и мне,
Она лежала вместе с другими
Здесь, в ящике скользком, на самом дне.
A sign...Blood-filled letters
Announce: "Zelennaya,"-I know that here
Instead of cabbages and rutabagas
The heads of the dead are for sale.
In a red shirt, with a face like an udder,
The executioner cuts my head off, too,
It lies together with the others
Here, in a slippery box, at the very bottom.
In his poem Shekspir (“Shakespeare,” 1924) VN compares Falstaff’s face to an udder with pasted-on mustache:
Надменно-чужд тревоге театральной,
ты отстранил легко и беспечально
в сухой венок свивающийся лавр
и скрыл навек чудовищный свой гений
под маскою, но гул твоих видений
остался нам: венецианский мавр
и скорбь его; лицо Фальстафа - вымя
с наклеенными усиками; Лир
бушующий...
Haughty, aloof from theatre’s alarums,
you easily, regretlessly relinquished
the laurels twinning into a dry wreath,
concealing for all time your monstrous genius
beneath a mask; and yet, your phantasm’s echoes
still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor,
his anguish; Falstaff’s visage, like an udder
with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear…
When Van meets Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in Mont Roux, the first thing Ada tells him is Sbrit’ usï! (that mustache must go):
He stopped on the threshold of the main lounge, but hardly had he begun to scan the distribution of its scattered human contents, than an abrupt flurry occurred in a distant group. Ada, spurning decorum, was hurrying toward him. Her solitary and precipitate advance consumed in reverse all the years of their separation as she changed from a dark-glittering stranger with the high hair-do in fashion to the pale-armed girl in black who had always belonged to him. At that particular twist of time they happened to be the only people conspicuously erect and active in the huge room, and heads turned and eyes peered when the two met in the middle of it as on a stage; but what should have been, in culmination of her headlong motion, of the ecstasy in her eyes and fiery jewels, a great explosion of voluble love, was marked by incongruous silence; he raised to his unbending lips and kissed her cygneous hand, and then they stood still, staring at each other, he playing with coins in his trouser pockets under his ‘humped’ jacket, she fingering her necklace, each reflecting, as it were, the uncertain light to which all that radiance of mutual welcome had catastrophically decreased. She was more Ada than ever, but a dash of new elegancy had been added to her shy, wild charm. Her still blacker hair was drawn back and up into a glossy chignon, and the Lucette line of her exposed neck, slender and straight, came as a heartrending surprise. He was trying to form a succinct sentence (to warn her about the device he planned for securing a rendezvous), but she interrupted his throat clearing with a muttered injunction: Sbrit’ usï! (that mustache must go) and turned away to lead him to the far corner from which she had taken so many years to reach him. (3.8)