Describing Chateaubriand’s mosquito, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions his bitter lifestream:
Because, perhaps, Van’s lifestream was too bitter — even in those glad days — Chateaubriand’s mosquito never cared much for him. Nowadays it seems to be getting extinct, what with the cooler climate and the moronic draining of the lovely rich marshes in the Ladore region as well as near Kaluga, Conn., and Lugano, Pa. (A short series, all females, replete with their fortunate captor’s blood, has recently been collected, I am told, in a secret habitat quite far from the above-mentioned stations. Ada’s note.) (1.17)
Culex chateaubriandi Brown brings to mind Culex (“The Gnat”), a poem ascribed to Virgil (at the beginning of his ode-parody "In Praise of the Mosquito," 1807, Derzhavin compares himself to Virgil). In his “Eclogue X” Virgil mentions Arethusa (a nymph) and the bitter stream of Doris:
Extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem:
pauca meo Gallo, sed quae legat ipsa Lycoris,
carmina sunt dicenda: neget quis carmina Gallo?
Sic tibi, cum fluctus subterlabere Sicanos,
Doris amara suam non intermisceat undam;
incipe; sollicitos Galli dicamus amores,
dum tenera attondent simae uirgulta capellae.
O Arethusa, help me once again
To string some verses for my Gallus' ear,
Fit for Lycoris fair herself to read.
To Gallus mine, who would refuse such songs?
So may the bitter stream that Doris pours
Mingle not with thy wave as thou dost flow
Into the flood that loves fair Sicily! (1-7)
According to Dr Fitzbishop (the surgeon in the Kalugano hospital where Van recovers after his duel with Captain Tapper), Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher) was poisoned with the not always lethal 'arethusoides:'
On Monday around noon he was allowed to sit in a deckchair, on the lawn, which he had avidly gazed at for some days from his window. Dr Fitzbishop had said, rubbing his hands, that the Luga laboratory said it was the not always lethal ‘arethusoides’ but it had no practical importance now, because the unfortunate music teacher, and composer, was not expected to spend another night on Demonia, and would be on Terra, ha-ha, in time for evensong. Doc Fitz was what Russians call a poshlyak (‘pretentious vulgarian’) and in some obscure counter-fashion Van was relieved not to be able to gloat over the wretched Rack’s martyrdom.
Ardis is to be found at the latitude of Sicily:
She inclined her head without looking back. In token of partial reconciliation, she showed him two sturdy hooks passed into iron rings on two tulip-tree trunks between which, before she was born, another boy, also Ivan, her mother’s brother, used to sling a hammock in which he slept in midsummer when the nights became really sultry — this was the latitude of Sicily, after all. (1.8)
In her hydrogram from Chicago Ada calls Ardis “doris:”
In mid-July, 1886, while Van was winning the table-tennis tournament on board a ‘luxury’ liner (that now took a whole week to reach in white dignity Manhattan from Dover!), Marina, both her daughters, their governess, and two maids were shivering more or less simultaneous stages of Russian influentsa at various stops on their way by train from Los Angeles to Ladore. A hydrogram from Chicago awaiting Van at his father’s house on July 21 (her dear birthday!) said: ‘dadaist impatient patient arriving between twenty-fourth and seventh call doris can meet regards vicinity.’
‘Which reminds me painfully of the golubyanki (petits bleus) Aqua used to send me,’ remarked Demon with a sigh (having mechanically opened the message). ‘Is tender Vicinity some girl I know? Because you may glare as much as you like, but this is not a wire from doctor to doctor.’
Van raised his eyes to the Boucher plafond of the breakfast room, and shaking his head in derisive admiration, commented on Demon’s acumen. Yes, that was right. He had to travel incontinently to Garders (anagram of ‘regards,’ see?) to a hamlet the opposite way from Letham (see?) to see a mad girl artist called Doris or Odris who drew only gee-gees and sugar daddies.
Van rented a room under a false name (Boucher) at the only inn of Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River, some twenty miles from Ardis. He spent the night fighting the celebrated mosquito, or its cousin, that liked him more than the Ardis beast had. The toilet on the landing was a black hole, with the traces of a fecal explosion, between a squatter’s two giant soles. At 7 a.m. on July 25 he called Ardis Hall from the Malahar post office and got connected with Bout who was connected with Blanche and mistook Van’s voice for the butler’s. (1.29)
“Sugar daddies” bring to mind Sladko! (Sweet!), Pushkin’s exclamation in relation to a different species of mosquitoes in Yukon:
The ‘pest’ appeared as suddenly as it would vanish. It settled on pretty bare arms and legs without the hint of a hum, in a kind of recueilli silence, that — by contrast — caused the sudden insertion of its absolutely hellish proboscis to resemble the brass crash of a military band. Five minutes after the attack in the crepuscule, between porch step and cricket-crazed garden, a fiery irritation would set in, which the strong and the cold ignored (confident it would last a mere hour) but which the weak, the adorable, the voluptuous took advantage of to scratch and scratch and scratch scrumptiously (canteen cant). ‘Sladko! (Sweet!)’ Pushkin used to exclaim in relation to a different species in Yukon. During the week following her birthday, Ada’s unfortunate fingernails used to stay gamet-stained and after a particularly ecstatic, lost-to-the-world session of scratching, blood literally streamed down her shins — a pity to see, mused her distressed admirer, but at the same time disgracefully fascinating — for we are visitors and investigators in a strange universe, indeed, indeed. (1.17)
Pushkin actually exclaimed "Sladko!" in May, 1828, when mosquitoes besieged him in Priyutino (the Olenins’ country place some twenty-five miles East of St. Petersburg) where the poet courted Annette Olenin. In his EO Commentary (vol. III, p. 206) VN points out that anagrams in French of “Annette Olénine” blossom here and there in the margins of Pushkin’s manuscripts. One finds it written backward in the drafts of Poltava (2371, f. 11V; first half of October, 1828): ettenna eninelo; and the earnestness of his hopes is reflected in "Annette Pouchkine" jotted among the drafts of the first canto of Poltava, apparently on the very day that the repentant letter about the Gabriel poem was written to the tsar.
In 1840 Anna Olenin (1808-1888) married Fyodor Andro (Andrault, a Frenchman in the Russian service). Andro is an anagram of narod (the people). Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov (1825) ends in the remark Narod bezmolvstvuet ("The people are silent"). In Chekhov's story Duel’ (“The Duel,” 1891) Nadezhda Fyodorovna (Laevski's mistress whose words the zoologist von Koren repeats in mocking tones to Samoylenko) mentions narod:
"Я не понимаю, как это можно серьёзно заниматься букашками и козявками, когда страдает народ."
"I don't understand how any one can seriously interest himself in small insects while the people are suffering."
Laevski shared her opinion. He was absolutely ignorant of natural science, and so could never reconcile himself to the authoritative tone and the learned and profound air of the people who devoted themselves to the whiskers of ants and the claws of beetles, and he always felt vexed that these people, relying on these whiskers, claws, and something they called protoplasm (he always imagined it in the form of an oyster), should undertake to decide questions involving the origin and life of man. But in Nadezhda Fyodorovna's words he heard a note of falsity, and simply to contradict her he said: "The point is not the small insects, but the deductions made from them." (chapter VII)
Laevski has a bad habit to bite his nails:
У Лаевского была привычка во время разговора внимательно осматривать свои розовые ладони, грызть ногти или мять пальцами манжеты. И теперь он делал то же самое.
It was Laevski's habit as he talked to gaze attentively at the pink palms of his hands, to bite his nails, or to pinch his cuffs. And he did so now. (chapter 1)
Ada's fingernails are badly bitten:
On her twelfth birthday, July 21, 1884, the child had stopped biting her fingernails (but not her toenails) in a grand act of will (as her quitting cigarettes was to be, twenty years later). True, one could list some compensations — such as a blessed lapse into delicious sin at Christmas, when Culex chateaubriandi Brown does not fly. A new and conclusive resolution was taken on New Year’s Eve after Mlle Larivière had threatened to smear poor Ada’s fingertips with French mustard and tie green, yellow, orange, red, pink riding hoods of wool around them (the yellow index was a trouvaille). (1.17)
In his essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), Lev Shestov speaks of Chekhov’s story "The Duel" and uses the phrase pervyi vstrechnyi poshlyak (the first vulgar person [she encountered]):
Неизвестно зачем, без любви, даже без влечения она отдаётся первому встречному пошляку. Потом ей кажется, что её с ног до головы облили грязью, и эта грязь так пристала к ней, что не смоешь даже целым океаном воды.
For no reason at all, without love, without even attraction she [Laevski’s mistress] gives herself to the first vulgar person [poshlyak] she met. Then she feels that mud was flung at her and this mud got stuck to her whole body so that even an ocean of water would not wash it off. (VI)
According to Van, Dr. Fitzbishop is what Russians call a poshlyak. In his essay on Mayakovski, Dekol’tirovannaya loshad’ (“The Horse in Décolleté Dress,” 1927), Hodasevich says that Mayakovski was the first who made poshlost' not a material, but the meaning of poetry and mentions grubiyan i poshlyak (a boor and a vulgarian) who began to neigh, like horses ("Here we are! We can think!"), from Mayakovski's verses:
Он первый сделал пошлость и грубость не материалом, но смыслом поэзии. Грубиян и пошляк заржали из его стихов: "Вот мы! Мы мыслим!"
In his essay Ob agitpyesakh Vladimira Mayakovskogo (“On the Propaganda Plays of Vladimir Mayakovski,” 1920) Lunacharski (the minister of education in Lenin’s government) says that Mayakovski is not pervyi vstrechnyi (just anyone) and mentions Maxim Gorki (whose penname means “bitter”) and Valeriy Bryusov:
Маяковский не первый встречный. Это один из крупнейших русских талантов, имеющий широкий круг поклонников, как в среде интеллигентской, так и в среде пролетариата (целый ряд пролетарских поэтов — его ученики и самым очевидным образом ему подражают), это человек, большинство произведений которого переведено на все европейские языки, поэт, которого очень высоко ценят такие отнюдь не футуристы, как Горький и Брюсов.
A translator of Virgil’s Aeneid, Bryusov is the author of Predsmertnyi bred Vergiliya (“The Deathbed Delirium of Virgil,” 1914, publ. 1929), an unfinished short story. In her memoir essay on Bryusov, Geroy truda (“The Hero of Toil,” 1925), Marina Tsvetaev says that Bryusov was trizhdy rimlyanin (a triple Roman):
Три слова являют нам Брюсова: воля, вол, волк. Триединство не только звуковое - смысловое: и воля - Рим, и вол - Рим, и волк - Рим. Трижды римлянином был Валерий Брюсов: волей и волом - в поэзии, волком (homo homini lupus est) в жизни.
The characters of Ada include Valerio, a ginger-haired elderly Roman:
Lucette had gone (leaving a curt note with her room number at the Winster Hotel for Young Ladies) when our two lovers, now weak-legged and decently robed, sat down to a beautiful breakfast (Ardis' crisp bacon! Ardis' translucent honey!) brought up in the lift by Valerio, a ginger-haired elderly Roman, always ill-shaven and gloomy, but a dear old boy (he it was who, having procured neat Rose last June, was being paid to keep her strictly for Veen and Dean). (2.6)
A waiter at Monaco (a restaurant in the entresol of the tall building crowned by Van’s penthouse), Valerio seems to be a cross between Gaius Valerius Catullus (a Latin poet, c. 84-54 BC) and Valeriy Byusov. After Demon had forced him to give up Ada, Van slapped Valerio’s cheek:
He had roamed in Kingston’s Cascadilla Park, in the active sweet-swarming spring dusk, so much more seraphic than that flurry of cables. The last time he had seen mummy-wizened Marina and told her he must return to America (though actually there was no hurry — only the smell in her hospital room that no breeze could dislodge), she had asked, with her new, tender, myopic, because inward, expression: ‘Can’t you wait till I’m gone?’; and his reply had been ‘I’ll be back on the twenty-fifth. I have to deliver an address on the Psychology of Suicide’; and she had said, stressing, now that everything was tripitaka (safely packed), the exact kinship: ‘Do tell them about your silly aunt Aqua,’ whereupon he had nodded, with a smirk, instead of answering: ‘Yes, mother.’ Hunched up in a last band of low sun, on the bench where he had recently fondled and fouled a favorite, lanky, awkward, black girl student, Van tortured himself with thoughts of insufficient filial affection — a long story of unconcern, amused scorn, physical repulsion, and habitual dismissal. He looked around, making wild amends, willing her spirit to give him an unequivocal, and indeed all-deciding sign, of continued being behind the veil of time, beyond the flesh of space. But no response came, not a petal fell on his bench, not a gnat touched his hand. He wondered what really kept him alive on terrible Antiterra, with Terra a myth and all art a game, when nothing mattered any more since the day he slapped Valerio's warm bristly cheek; and whence, from what deep well of hope, did he still scoop up a shivering star, when everything had an edge of agony and despair, when another man was in every bedroom with Ada. (3.1)
Tripitaka is the traditional term for the Buddhist scriptures. In his Memoirs from beyond the Tomb Chateaubriand compares his preferred Red Indian rival to those insects which, according to the definition of the Dalai Lama's entomologists, are animals whose flesh is on the inside and bones on the outside.
In Poshchyochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, 1912), the Futurist manifesto signed by D. Burlyuk, A. Kruchyonykh, V. Mayakovski and V. Khlebnikov, neboskryoby (skyscrapers) are mentioned:
Всем этим Максимам Горьким, Куприным, Блокам, Сологубам, Ремизовым, Аверченкам, Чёрным, Кузьминым, Буниным и проч. и проч. - нужна лишь дача на реке. Такую награду даёт судьба портным.
С высоты небоскрёбов мы взираем на их ничтожество!
All those Maxim Gorkys, Krupins, Bloks, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Chornys, Kuzmins, Bunins, etc. need only a dacha on the river. Such is the reward fate gives tailors.
From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at their insignificance!
Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette commits suicide jumping into the Atlantic from Admiral Tobakoff (3.5). In their manifesto the futurists propose to throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.
Van's and Ada's father Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific in the Gavaille region (Van never realizes that it was Ada who managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair). In the second line of his poem Segodnya ("Today," 1922) Bryusov mentions zelyonye sklony Gavayi (the green slopes of Hawaii):
На пёстрых площадях Занзибара,
По зелёным склонам Гавайи,
Распахиваются приветливо бары,
Звонят, предупреждая, трамваи.
The last note of Demon's wife Aqua (Marina's poor mad twin sister) begins with the word aujourd’hui ("today" in French):
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)
Aujourd’hui is the first word in Baudelaire’s sonnet Le Vin des amants (“The Wine of Lovers”):
Aujourd'hui l'espace est splendide!
Sans mors, sans éperons, sans bride,
Partons à cheval sur le vin
Pour un ciel féerique et divin!
Comme deux anges que torture
Une implacable calenture
Dans le bleu cristal du matin
Suivons le mirage lointain!
Mollement balancés sur l'aile
Du tourbillon intelligent,
Dans un délire parallèle,
Ma soeur, côte à côte nageant,
Nous fuirons sans repos ni trêves
Vers le paradis de mes rêves!
Today space is magnificent!
Without bridle or bit or spurs
Let us ride away on wine
To a divine, fairy-like heaven!
Like two angels who are tortured
By a relentless delirium,
Let us follow the far mirage
Through the crystal blue of the morning!
Gently balanced upon the wings
Of the intelligent whirlwind,
In a similar ecstasy,
My sister, floating side by side,
We'll flee without ever stopping
To the paradise of my dreams!
(tr. William Aggeler)
The poem’s second word, l’espace (the space), brings to mind l’espace meuble (furnished space) mentioned by Van when he describes Demon’s death in an airplane disaster:
Furnished Space, l'espace meuble (known to us only as furnished and full even if its contents be 'absence of substance' - which seats the mind, too), is mostly watery so far as this globe is concerned. In that form it destroyed Lucette. Another variety, more or less atmospheric, but no less gravitational and loathsome, destroyed Demon.
Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. (3.7)
Describing Chateaubriand’s mosquito, Van quotes Ada's poem in which she crosses Baudelaire (whose L'invitation au voyage begins: "Mon enfant, ma sœur, / Songe à la douceur") and Chateaubriand:
During the last week of July, there emerged, with diabolical regularity, the female of Chateaubriand’s mosquito. Chateaubriand (Charles), who had not been the first to be bitten by it… but the first to bottle the offender, and with cries of vindictive exultation to carry it to Professor Brown who wrote the rather slap-bang Original Description (‘small black palpi… hyaline wings… yellowy in certain lights… which should be extinguished if one keeps open the kasements [German printer!]…’ The Boston Entomologist for August, quick work, 1840) was not related to the great poet and memoirist born between Paris and Tagne (as he’d better, said Ada, who liked crossing orchids).
Mon enfant, ma sœur,
Songe à l’épaisseur
Du grand chêne a Tagne;
Songe à la montagne,
Songe à la douceur —
— of scraping with one’s claws or nails the spots visited by that fluffy-footed insect characterized by an insatiable and reckless appetite for Ada’s and Ardelia’s, Lucette’s and Lucile’s (multiplied by the itch) blood. (1.17)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Ada who liked crossing orchids: she crosses here two French authors, Baudelaire and Chateaubriand.
mon enfant, etc.: my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness —