In the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) Ada drops the shoe lost by Blanche (a French maid at Ardis) in a wastepaper basket and, after joining Van on the divan, mentions a soldier who thought that ‘Tartuffe’ was a tart or a stripteaser:
As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break, that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan.
‘Can one see anything, oh, can one see?’ the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. He relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. ‘You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent,’ she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man’s hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.
‘Look, gipsies,’ she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms — two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf — circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candlelit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons as if taking pictures.
‘I stayed home on purpose, because I hoped you would too — it was a contrived coincidence,’ she said, or said later she’d said — while he continued to fondle the flow of her hair, and to massage and rumple her nightdress, not daring yet to go under and up, daring, however, to mold her nates until, with a little hiss, she sat down on his hand and her heels, as the burning castle of cards collapsed. She turned to him and next moment he was kissing her bare shoulder, and pushing against her like that soldier behind in the queue.
First time I hear about him. I thought old Mr Nymphobottomus had been my only predecessor.
Last spring. Trip to town. French theater matinée. Mademoiselle had mislaid the tickets. The poor fellow probably thought ‘Tartuffe’ was a tart or a stripteaser.
Ce qui n’est pas si bête, au fond. Which was not so dumb after all. Okay. In that scene of the Burning Barn —
Yes?
Nothing. Go on. (1.19)
Tartuffe, ou l'Imposteur (1664) is a comedy by Molière, a playwright, actor and poet mentioned in VN’s story Lik (1939):
И обо всём этом думая, Лик почему-то себе представлял, что когда он умрёт от разрыва сердца, а умрёт он скоро, то это непременно будет на сцене, как было с бедным, лающим Мольером, но что смерти он не заметит, а перейдёт в жизнь случайной пьесы, вдруг по-новому расцветшей от его впадения в неё, а его улыбающийся труп будет лежать на подмостках, высунув конец одной ноги из-под складок опустившегося занавеса.
As he thought of all this, Lik imagined for some reason that when he died of a heart failure – and he would die soon – the attack would certainly come onstage, as it had been with poor Molière barking out his dog Latin among the doctors; but that he would not notice his death, crossing over instead into the actual world of a chance play, now blooming anew because of his arrival, while his smiling corpse lay on the boards, the toe of one foot protruding from beneath the folds of the lowered curtain.
Alexander Lik is an actor who plays Igor, an émigré Russian aristocrat, in Suire’s play L'Abîme ("The Abyss"). Suire’s play begins with a nocturnal fire:
Есть пьеса "Бездна" (L'Abîme) известного французского писателя Suire. Она уже сошла со сцены, прямо в Малую Лету (т. е. в ту, которая обслуживает театр,-- речка, кстати сказать, не столь безнадежная, как главная, с менее крепким раствором забвения, так что режиссёрская удочка иное ещё вылавливает спустя много лет). В этой пьесе, по существу идиотской, даже идеально идиотской, иначе говоря -- идеально построенной на прочных условностях общепринятой драматургии, трактуется страстной путь пожилой женщины, доброй католички и землевладелицы, вдруг загоревшейся греховной страстью к молодому русскому, Igor, -- Игорю, случайно попавшему к ней в усадьбу и полюбившему её дочь Анжелику.
Яблоко раздора — обычно плод скороспелый, кислый, его нужно варить; так и с молодым человеком пьесы: он бледноват; стараясь его подкрасить, автор и сделал его русским, — со всеми очевидными последствиями такого мошенничества. По авторскому оптимистическому замыслу, это — беглый русский аристократ, недавно усыновленный богатой старухой, — русской женой соседнего шатлена. В разгар ночной грозы Игорь стучится к нам в дом, входит к нам со стеком в руке; волнуясь, докладывает, что в имении его благодетельницы горит красный лес и что наш сосняк может тоже заняться. Нас это менее поражает, чем юношеский блеск ночного гостя, и мы склонны опуститься на пуф, задумчиво играя ожерельем, когда наш друг-ханжа замечает, что отблеск огня подчас бывает опаснее самого пожара. Завязка, что и говорить, крепкая, добротная: уже ясно, что русский станет тут завсегдатаем, и действительно: второй акт — это солнечный день и белые панталоны.
There is a play of the 1920s, called L'Abîme (The Abyss), by the well-known French author Suire. It has already passed from the stage straight into the Lesser Lethe (the one, that is, that serves the theater – a stream, incidentally, not quite as hopeless as the main river, and containing a weaker solution of oblivion, so that angling producers may still fish something out many years later). This play – essentially idiotic, even ideally idiotic, or, putting it another way, ideally constructed on the solid conventions of traditional dramaturgy – deals with the torments of a middle-aged, rich, and religious French lady suddenly inflamed by a sinful passion for a young Russian named Igor, who has turned up at her château and fallen in love with her daughter Angélique.
The apple of discord is usually an early, sour fruit, and should be cooked. Thus the young man of the play threatens to be somewhat colorless, and it is in a vain attempt to touch him up a little that the author has made him a Russian, with all the obvious consequences of such trickery. According to Suire’s optimistic intention, he is an émigré Russian aristocrat, recently adopted by an old lady, the Russian wife of a neighboring landowner. One night, at the height of a thunderstorm, Igor comes knocking at our door, enters, riding crop in hand, and announces in agitation that the pinewood is burning on his benefactress’s estate, and that our pinery is also in danger. This affects us less strongly than the visitor’s youthful glamour, and we are inclined to sink onto a hassock, toying pensively with our necklace, whereupon our bigot friend observes that the reflection of flames is at times more dangerous than the conflagration itself. A solid, high-quality plot, as you can see, for it is clear at once that the Russian will become a regular caller and, in fact, Act Two is all sunny weather and bright summer clothes.
At the end of the story Lik forgets at Koldunov’s the carton box containing his new shoes and, dying of a heart failure at the sea side, imagines a trip in a taxi to Koldunov’s to fetch his shoes:
Прошло минут десять, не более. Часики шли, стараясь из деликатности на него не смотреть. Мысль о смерти необыкновенно точно совпадала с мыслью о том, что через полчаса он выйдет на освещенную сцену, скажет первые слова роли: "Je vous prie d'excuser, Madame, cette invasion nocturne" -- и эти слова, чётко и изящно выгравированные в памяти, казались гораздо более настоящими, чем шлепоток и хлебет утомленных волн или звуки двух счастливых женских голосов, доносившиеся из-за стены ближней виллы, или недавние речи Колдунова, или даже стук собственного сердца. Ему вдруг стало так панически плохо, что он встал и пошел вдоль парапета, растерянно гладя его и косясь на цветные чернила вечернего моря. "Была не была,-- сказал Лик вслух,-- нужно освежиться... как рукой... либо умру, либо снимет..." Он сполз по наклону панели и захрустел на гальке. Никого на берегу не было, кроме случайного господина в серых штанах, который навзничь лежал около скалы, раскинув широко ноги, и что-то в очертании этих ног и плеч почему-то напомнило ему фигуру Колдунова. Пошатываясь и уже наклоняясь. Лик стыдливо подошел к краю воды, хотел было зачерпнуть в ладони и обмыть голову, но вода жила, двигалась, грозила омочить ему ноги,-- может быть, хватит ловкости разуться?-- и в ту же секунду Лик вспомнил картонку с новыми туфлями: забыл их у Колдунова!
И странно: как только вспомнилось, образ оказался столь живительным, что сразу все опростилось, и это Лика спасло, как иногда положение спасает его формулировка. Надо их тотчас достать, и можно успеть достать, и как только это будет сделано, он в них выйдет на сцену — все совершенно отчетливо и логично, придраться не к чему, — и забыв про сжатие в груди, туман, тошноту, Лик поднялся опять на набережную, граммофонным голосом кликнул такси, как раз отъезжавшее порожняком от виллы напротив... Тормоза ответили раздирающим стоном. Шоферу он дал адрес из записной книжки и велел ехать как можно шибче, причем было ясно, что вся поездка — туда и оттуда в театр — займет не больше пяти минут.
К дому, где жили Колдуновы, автомобиль подъехал со стороны площади. Там собралась толпа, и только с помощью упорных трубных угроз автомобилю удалось протиснуться. Около фонтана, на стуле, сидела жена Колдунова, весь лоб и левая часть лица были в блестящей крови, слиплись волосы, она сидела совершенно прямо и неподвижно, окруженная любопытными, а рядом с ней, тоже неподвижно, стоял ее мальчик в окровавленной рубашке, прикрывая лицо кулаком, — такая, что ли, картина. Полицейский, принявший Лика за врача, провел его в комнату. Среди осколков, на полу навзничь лежал обезображенный выстрелом в рот, широко раскинув ноги в новых белых...
— Это мои, — сказал Лик по-французски.
About ten minutes passed, no more. His watch ticked on, trying tactfully not to look at him. The thought of death coincided precisely with the thought that in half an hour he would walk out onto the bright stage and say the first words of his part, “Je vous prie d’excuser, Madame, cette invasion nocturne.” And these words, clearly and elegantly engraved in his memory, seemed far more real than the lapping and splashing of the weary waves, or the sound of two gay female voices coming from behind the stone wall of a nearby villa, or the recent talk of Koldunov, or even the pounding of his own heart. His feeling of sickness suddenly reached such a panicky pitch that he got up and walked along the parapet, dazedly stroking it and peering at the colored inks of the evening sea. “In any case,” Lik said aloud, “I have to cool off.… Instant cure.… Either I’ll die or it’ll help.” He slid down the sloping edge of the sidewalk, where the parapet stopped, and crunched across the pebbly beach. There was nobody on the shore except for a shabbily dressed man, who happened to be lying supine near a boulder, his feet spread wide apart. Something about the outline of his legs and shoulders for some reason reminded Lik of Koldunov. Swaying a little and already stooping, Lik walked self-consciously to the edge of the water, and was about to scoop some up in his hands and douse his head; but the water was alive, moving, and threatening to soak his feet. Perhaps I have enough coordination left to take off my shoes and socks, he thought, and in the same instant remembered the carton box containing his new shoes. He had forgotten it at Koldunov’s!
And as soon as he remembered it, this image proved so stimulating that immediately everything was simplified, and this saved Lik, in the same way as a situation is sometimes saved by its rational formulation. He must get those shoes at once, there was just time enough to get them, and as soon as this was accomplished, he would step onstage in them. (All perfectly clear and logical.) Forgetting the pressure in his chest, the foggy feeling, the nausea, Lik climbed back up to the promenade, and in a sonorously recorded voice hailed the empty taxi that was just leaving the curb by the villa across the way. Its brakes responded with a lacerating moan. He gave the chauffeur the address from his notebook, telling him to go as fast as possible, even though the entire trip—there and from there to the theater—would not take more than five minutes.
The taxi approached Koldunov’s place from the direction of the square. A crowd had gathered, and it was only by dint of persistent threats with its horn that the driver managed to squeeze through. Koldunov’s wife was sitting on a chair by the public fountain. Her forehead and left cheek glistened with blood, her hair was matted, and she sat quite straight and motionless, surrounded by the curious, while, next to her, also motionless, stood her boy, in a bloodstained shirt, covering his face with his fist, a kind of tableau. A policeman, mistaking Lik for a doctor, escorted him into the room. The dead man lay on the floor amid broken crockery, his face blasted by a gunshot in the mouth, his widespread feet in new, white—
“Those are mine,” said Lik in French.
Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set), Van mentions deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) that accepted Terra in support and token of their own irrationality and Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, the philosophers whose names bring to mind a pair of shoes left behind by Lik:
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed ‘a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.) (1.3)
Lik’s new shoes bring to mind Akakiy Akakievich’s new overcoat in Gogol’s story Shinel’ (“The Carrick,” 1842). Akakiy Akakievich’s surname, Bashmachkin, comes from bashmak (shoe). In his memoir essay Moyo znakomstvo s Gogolem (“My Acquaintance with Gogol,” 1862) L. I. Arnoldi compares Gogol to Molière who read his comedies, before they were staged, to his kukharka (female cook):
Слушая Гоголя, я невольно вспомнил о кухарке Мольера.
Blanche (whom Mlle Larivière, Lucette’s governess, calls ‘Cendrillon’) is the cook’s niece:
But the shag of the couch was as tickly as the star-dusted sky. Before anything new happened, Ada went on all fours to rearrange the lap robe and cushions. Native girl imitating rabbit. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy’s sandcastle-molding position; but she turned over, naïvely ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo. She was right. For the first time in their love story, the blessing, the genius of lyrical speech descended upon the rough lad, he murmured and moaned, kissing her face with voluble tenderness, crying out in three languages — the three greatest in all the world — pet words upon which a dictionary of secret diminutives was to be based and go through many revisions till the definitive edition of 1967. When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him as if she had been love-making for years in all our dreams — but impatient young passion (brimming like Van’s overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird uttered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well pleased with the night treat, the cook’s niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas) — and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress, and giving the couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent bedrooms. (1.19)
A child or dwarf who decamps walking à reculons as if taking pictures is Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Ada has bribed to set the barn on fire.
The name Suire (of the author of L'Abîme) seems to hint at the French phrase à suivre (to be continued) used by Vladimir Solovyov at the end of his poem “To M. M. Stasyulevich” (1896). Solovyov’s poem Nil’ska delta (“The Nile Delta,” 1897) brings to mind the blue Nile mentioned by Van in the Night of the Burning Barn:
He caressed and parted with his fleshy folds, parties très charnues, in the case of our passionate siblings, her lank loose, nearly lumbus-length (when she threw back her head as now) black silks as he tried to get at her bed-warm splenius. (It is not necessary, here or elsewhere, there was another similar passage, to blotch a reasonably pure style with vague anatomical terms that a psychiatrist remembers from his student days. In Ada’s later hand.)
‘I wannask,’ she repeated as he greedily reached his hot pale goal.
‘I want to ask you,’ she said quite distinctly, but also quite beside herself because his ramping palm had now worked its way through at the armpit, and his thumb on a nipplet made her palate tingle: ringing for the maid in Georgian novels — inconceivable without the presence of elettricità —
(I protest. You cannot. It is banned even in Lithuanian and Latin. Ada’s note.)
‘— to ask you...’
‘Ask,’ cried Van, ‘but don’t spoil everything’ (such as feeding upon you, writhing against you).
‘Well, why,’ she asked (demanded, challenged, one flame crepitated, one cushion was on the floor), ‘why do you get so fat and hard there when you —’
‘Get where? When I what?’
In order to explain, tactfully, tactually, she belly-danced against him, still more or less kneeling, her long hair getting in the way, one eye staring into his ear (their reciprocal positions had become rather muddled by then).
‘Repeat!’ he cried as if she were far away, a reflection in a dark window.
‘You will show me at once,’ said Ada firmly.
He discarded his makeshift kilt, and her tone of voice changed immediately.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said as one child to another. ‘It’s all skinned and raw. Does it hurt? Does it hurt horribly?’
‘Touch it quick,’ he implored.
‘Van, poor Van,’ she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies, ‘yes, I’m sure it smarts, would it help if I’d touch, are you sure?’
‘You bet,’ said Van, ‘on n’est pas bête à ce point’ (‘there are limits to stupidity,’ colloquial and rude).
‘Relief map,’ said the primrose prig, ‘the rivers of Africa.’ Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. ‘Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact’ (positively chattering), ‘I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom.’
‘God, we all are,’ said Van.
‘Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!’
‘Squeeze, you goose, can’t you see I’m dying.’
But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly — and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.
She looked down in dismay.
‘Not what you think,’ remarked Van calmly. ‘This is not number one. Actually it’s as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Speke.’ (1.19)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): The Nile is settled: a famous telegram sent by an African explorer.
In his essay "The Texture of Time" (1922) Van mentions the dream-delta decay of a mental uranium and uses the word ‘eureka:”
Is there any mental uranium whose dream-delta decay might be used to measure the age of a recollection? The main difficulty, I hasten to explain, consists in the experimenter not being able to use the same object at different times (say, the Dutch stove with its little blue sailing boats in the nursery of Ardis Manor in 1884 and 1888) because of the two or more impressions borrowing from one another and forming a compound image in the mind; but if different objects are to be chosen (say, the faces of two memorable coachmen: Ben Wright, 1884, and Trofim Fartukov, 1888), it is impossible, insofar as my own research goes, to avoid the intrusion not only of different characteristics but of different emotional circumstances, that do not allow the two objects to be considered essentially equal before, so to speak, their being exposed to the action of Time. I am not sure, that such objects cannot be discovered. In my professional work, in the laboratories of psychology, I have devised myself many a subtle test (one of which, the method of determining female virginity without physical examination, today bears my name). Therefore we can assume that the experiment can be performed — and how tantalizing, then, the discovery of certain exact levels of decreasing saturation or deepening brilliance — so exact that the ‘something’ which I vaguely perceive in the image of a remembered but unidentifiable person, and which assigns it ‘somehow’ to my early boyhood rather than to my adolescence, can be labeled if not with a name, at least with a definite date, e.g., January 1, 1908 (eureka, the ‘e.g.’ worked — he was my father’s former house tutor, who brought me Alice in the Camera Obscura for my eighth birthday). (Part Four)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): dream-delta: allusion to the disintegration of an imaginary element.
As he speaks to Lik, Koldunov twice repeats the word “eureka” and calls Lik barin (mister):
-- У меня,-- сказал Лик,-- у меня случайно оказался... ну, я не знаю,-- небольшой сценический талант, что ли...
-- Талант? -- закричал Колдунов.-- Я тебе покажу талант! Я тебе такие таланты покажу, что ты в штанах компот варить станешь! Сволочь ты, брат. Вот твой талант. Нет, это мне даже нравится (Колдунов затрясся, будто хохоча, с очень примитивной мимикой). Значит, я, по-твоему, последняя хамская тварь, которая и должна погибнуть? Ну, прекрасно, прекрасно. Всё, значит, и объяснилось, эврика, эврика, карта бита, гвоздь вбит, хребет перебит...
-- Олег Петрович расстроен, вы, может быть, теперь пойдете,-- вдруг из угла сказала жена Колдунова с сильным эстонским произношением. В голосе её не было ни малейшего оттенка чувства, и оттого её замечание прозвучало как-то деревянно-бессмысленно. Колдунов медленно повернулся на стуле, не меняя положения руки, лежащей как мёртвая на столе, и уставился на жену восхищенным взглядом.
-- Я никого не задерживаю,-- проговорит он тихо и весело.-- Но и меня попрошу не задерживать. И не учить. Прощай, барин,-- добавил он, не глядя на Лика, который почему-то счел нужным сказать: -- Из Парижа напишу, непременно...
-- Пускай пишет, а?-- вкрадчиво произнес Колдунов, продолжая, по-видимому, обращаться к жене. Лик, сложно отделившись от стула, пошёл было по направлению к ней, но его отнесло в сторону, и он наткнулся на кровать.
Lik said, “I turned out to have—I happened to have … Oh, I don’t know … a modest dramatic talent, I suppose you could say.”
“Talent?” shouted Koldunov. “I’ll show you talent! I’ll show you such talent that you’ll start cooking applesauce in your pants! You’re a dirty rat, chum. That’s your only talent. I must say that’s a good one!” (Koldunov started shaking in very primitive mimicry of side-splitting laughter.) “So, according to you, I’m the lowest, filthiest vermin and deserve my rotten end? Splendid, simply splendid. Everything is explained—eureka, eureka! The card is trumped, the nail is in, the beast is butchered!”
“Oleg Petrovich is upset—maybe you ought to be going now,” Koldunov’s wife suddenly said from her corner, with a strong Estonian accent. There was not the least trace of emotion in her voice, causing her remark to sound wooden and senseless. Koldunov slowly turned in his chair, without altering the position of his hand, which lay as if lifeless on the table, and fixed his wife with an enraptured gaze.
“I am not detaining anyone,” he spoke softly and cheerfully. “And I’ll be thankful not to be detained by others. Or told what to do. So long, mister,” he added, not looking at Lik, who for some reason found it necessary to say: “I’ll write from Paris, without fail.…”
“So he’s going to write, is he?” said Koldunov softly, apparently still addressing his wife. With some trouble Lik extricated himself from the chair and started in her direction, but swerved and bumped into the bed.
When Van leaves Ardis forever, Trofim Fartukov (the Russian coachman in “Ardis the Second”) calls him barin and says that even through a leathern apron he would not think of touching Blanche:
‘The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?’
‘I’ll take you five versts across the bog,’ said Trofim, ‘the nearest is Volosyanka.’
His vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.
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!
‘Barin, a barin,’ said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his passenger.
‘Da?’
‘Dazhe skvoz’ kozhanïy fartuk ne stal-bï ya trogat’ etu frantsuzskuyu devku.’
Barin: master. Dázhe skvoz’ kózhanïy fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bï ya trógat’: I would not think of touching. Étu: this (that). Frantsúzskuyu: French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. Úzhas, otcháyanie: horror, despair. Zhálost’: pity, Kóncheno, zagázheno, rastérzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds. (1.41)
Ada’s lover who goes to the Crimean war and dies on the second day of the invasion, Percy de Prey is “a stoutish, foppish, baldish young man” (1.31). Gogol’s Akakiy Akakievich is neskol'ko ryabovat, neskol'ko ryzhevat, neskol'ko na vid dazhe podslepovat, s nebol'shoy lysinoy na lbu (somewhat pock-marked, somewhat red-haired, even somewhat short-sighted in appearance, with a little bald spot on the forehead).
The maiden name of Percy’s mother was Praskovia Lanskoy. Pyotr Lanskoy was the second husband of Natalia Nikolaevna Pushkin (the poet’s widow). In his poem Mednyi vsadnik (“The Bronze Horseman,” 1833) Pushkin describes Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter I and mentions bezdna (the abyss) and lik derzhavtsa polumira (the face of the half-planet’s ruler):
О мощный властелин судьбы!
Не так ли ты над самой бездной
На высоте, уздой железной
Россию поднял на дыбы?
Кругом подножия кумира
Безумец бедный обошёл
И взоры дикие навёл
На лик державца полумира.
Oh, mighty sovereign of destiny!
Haven’t you similarly reared Russia
With an iron bridle on the eminence
Before the abyss?
The poor madman walked around
The idol’s pedestal
And looked wildly at the face
Of the half-planet’s ruler. (Part Two)
On Antiterra Pushkin’s poem is known as ‘The Headless Horseman:’
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. (1.28)
In Tolstoy’s story Smert’ Ivana Ilyicha (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 1886) 1880 was the hardest year in the life of Ivan Ilyich Golovin. According to Van Veen, he was born on Jan. 1, 1870, in Ex. But it is not unlikely that Van's "real" name is Ivan Golovin and that he was born on Jan. 1, 1900, in St. Petersburg. In a letter of June 23, 1905, to G. Chulkov Alexander Blok says that in the last years of his life Vladimir Solovyov began prekrasno dvoit'sya (to appear beautifully double) in his (Blok's) assumption and impression:
Последние годы Соловьёв в моём предположении и впечатлении начинал прекрасно двоиться, но совершенно не было запаха "трагического разлада" и "чёрной смерти". Скорее, по-моему, это пахло деятельным весельем наконец освобождающегося духа, потому что цитированное Вами о "днях печали", "гробнице бесплодной любви" и подобное в стих. Соловьёва насквозь перегорало в Купине Несказанности, о которой теперь часто (или всегда) говорит А. Белый. Соловьёв постиг тогда, в период своих главных познаний и главных несказанных веселий, ту тайну игры с тоскою смертной, которую, мне сейчас кажется, тщетно взваливает на свои плечики Мережковский... Он так хохотал, играючи, что могло (и может) казаться, что львенок рычит или филин рыдает (о филине как-то выкрикнул Соловьёв в большом обществе, помните, это у глупейшего Велички). А ведь филин вовсе и вовсе не тоскует, когда кричит, я думаю - ему весело.
Old Van's typist, Violet Knox (Ada's granddaughter whom Ada calls Fialochka and who marries Ronald Oranger, old Van's secretary and editor of Ada who seems to be Ada's grandson, after Van's and Ada's death) brings to mind Blok's poem Nochnaya Fialka ("The Night Violet," 1906).
In Suire's play L'Abîme Igor is yabloko razdora (the apple of discord). In yabloko (apple) there is Blok.