Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (Demon Veen’s wife, the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu:
Being unwilling to suffer another relapse after this blessed state of perfect mental repose, but knowing it could not last, she did what another patient had done in distant France, at a much less radiant and easygoing ‘home.’ A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same man, because they both came from Vienne, Isère, and were only sons (as her son was), evolved, or rather revived, the therapistic device, aimed at establishing a ‘group’ feeling, of having the finest patients help the staff if ‘thusly inclined.’ Aqua, in her turn, repeated exactly clever Eleonore Bonvard’s trick, namely, opting for the making of beds and the cleaning of glass shelves. The astorium in St Taurus, or whatever it was called (who cares — one forgets little things very fast, when afloat in infinite non-thingness) was, perhaps, more modem, with a more refined desertic view, than the Mondefroid bleakhouse horsepittle, but in both places a demented patient could outwit in one snap an imbecile pedant. (1.3)
A Dr Froid or Froit seems to hint at Sigmund Freud. Pondering the place name Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu, I came up with the following anagram:
Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu + Froit = Sigmund + Demon/monde + foie + unity + roi
monde – world
foie – liver (cf. foie gras)
roi – king
Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second," Van mentions chaudfroids and foie gras contributed by the French cuisine:
Another Price, a typical, too typical, old retainer whom Marina (and G.A. Vronsky, during their brief romance) had dubbed, for unknown reasons, ‘Grib,’ placed an onyx ashtray at the head of the table for Demon, who liked to smoke between courses — a puff of Russian ancestry. A side table supported, also in the Russian fashion, a collection of red, black, gray, beige hors-d’oeuvres, with the serviette caviar (salfetochnaya ikra) separated from the pot of Graybead (ikra svezhaya) by the succulent pomp of preserved boletes, ‘white,’ and ‘subbetuline,’ while the pink of smoked salmon vied with the incarnadine of Westphalian ham. The variously flavored vodochki glittered, on a separate tray. The French cuisine had contributed its chaudfroids and foie gras. A window was open, and the crickets were stridulating at an ominous speed in the black motionless foliage. (1.38)
In Ilf and Petrov’s novel Zolotoy telyonok (“The Golden Calf,” 1931) Ostap Bender exclaims mon Dieu! (“my God!”) and then repeats this phrase in German, mein Gott:
Гостиница «Карлсбад» была давно покинута. Все антилоповцы, за исключением Козлевича, поселились в «Вороньей слободке» у Васисуалия Лоханкина, чрезвычайно этим скандализованного. Он даже пытался протестовать, указывая на то, что сдавал комнату не трем, а одному — одинокому холостяку. «Мон дье, Васисуалий Андреевич, — отвечал Остап беззаботно, — не мучьте себя. Ведь интеллигентный-то из всех трёх я один, так что условие соблюдено!»
На дальнейшие сетования хозяина Бендер рассудительно молвил: «Майн Готт, дорогой Васисуалий! Может быть, именно в этом великая сермяжная правда! » И Лоханкин сразу успокоился, выпросив у Остапа двадцать рублей. Паниковский и Балаганов отлично ужились в «Вороньей слободке», и их голоса уверенно звучали в общем квартирном хоре. Паниковского успели даже обвинить в том, что он по ночам отливает керосин из чужих примусов. Митрич не преминул сделать Остапу какое-то ворчливое замечание, на что великий комбинатор молча толкнул его в грудь.
The Carlsbad Hotel had long been abandoned. All the Antelopeans, except Kozlevich, had moved to a Crow’s Nest to stay with Vasisualiy Lokhankin, which scandalized him to no end. He even tried to protest, pointing out that he had offered the room to one person, not three, and to a respectable bachelor at that. "Mon dieu, Vasisualiy Andreevich," said Ostap nonchalantly, "stop torturing yourself. Of the three of us, I'm the only one who's respectable, so your conditions have been met.”
As the landlord continued to lament, Bender added weightily: "Mein Gott, dear Vasisualiy! Maybe that's exactly what the Great Homespun Truth is all about.” Lokhankin promptly gave in and hit Bender up for twenty rubles. Panikovsky and Balaganov fit in very well at the Rookery, and their self-assured voices soon joined the apartment's chorus. Panikovsky was even accused of stealing kerosene from other people's Primus stoves at night. Mitrich, never one to miss an opportunity, made some nitpicking remark to Ostap. In response, the grand strategist silently shoved him in the chest. (Chapter 15 “Antlers and Hoofs”)
Vasisualiy Lokhankin’s favorite book (the only thing that he saves when A Crow’s Nest burns down) is the fat volume Muzhchina i zhenshchina (“Man and Woman”). At the end of Ada Dr. Lagosse (old Van’s and Ada’s doctor who gives them the last merciful injection of morphine) exclaims: “Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon Dieu” (“What a book, my God, my God”):
Their recently built castle in Ex was inset in a crystal winter. In the latest Who’s Who the list of his main papers included by some bizarre mistake the title of a work he had never written, though planned to write many pains: Unconsciousness and the Unconscious. There was no pain to do it now — and it was high pain for Ada to be completed. ‘Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon Dieu,’ Dr [Professor. Ed.] Lagosse exclaimed, weighing the master copy which the flat pale parents of the future Babes, in the brown-leaf Woods, a little book in the Ardis Hall nursery, could no longer prop up in the mysterious first picture: two people in one bed. (5.6)
In “The Golden Calf” Bender tells Khvorobyev (the old monarchist who is tormented by Soviet dreams) that he treated his friends using Freud’s methods:
-- Я вам помогу, - сказал Остап. - Мне приходилось лечить друзей и знакомых по Фрейду. Сон - это пустяки. Главное - это устранить причину сна. Основной причиной является самое существование советской власти. Но в данный момент я устранять ее не могу. У меня просто нет времени. Я, видите ли, турист-спортсмен, сейчас мне надо произвести небольшую починку своего автомобиля, так что разрешите закатить его к вам в сарай. А насчет причины вы не беспокойтесь. Я ее устраню на обратном пути. Дайте только пробег окончить.
"I’ll help you,” Ostap said. “I've treated several friends and acquaintances using Freud's methods. Dreams are not the issue. The main thing is to remove the cause of the dream. The principal cause of your dreams is the very existence of the Soviet regime. But I can’t remove right now. I’m in a hurry. I'm on a sports tour, you see, and my car needs a few small repairs. Would you mind if I put it in your shed? As for the cause of your dreams, don't worry, I'll take care of it on the way back. Just let me finish the rally.” (Chapter 8 “The Artistic Crisis”)
The characters of “The Golden Calf” include the geography teacher who went mad because one day he looked at the map of the two hemispheres and did not find on it the Bering Strait:
Географ сошёл с ума совершенно неожиданно: однажды он взглянул на карту обоих полушарий и не нашёл на ней Берингова пролива. Весь день старый учитель шарил по карте. Всё было на месте: и Нью-Фаундленд, и Суэцкий канал, и Мадагаскар, и Сандвичевы острова с главным городом Гонолулу, и даже вулкан Попокатепетль, а Берингов пролив отсутствовал. И тут же, у карты, старик тронулся.
The geographer went mad quite unexpectedly: one day he looked at the map of the two hemispheres and couldn't find the Bering Strait. The old teacher spent the whole day studying the map. Everything was where it was supposed to be: Newfoundland; the Suez Canal; Madagascar; the Sandwich Islands with their capital city, Honolulu; even the Popocatepetl volcano. But the Bering Strait was missing. The old man lost his mind right then and there, in front of the map. (chapter XVI: “Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytik”)
Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set), Van mentions “the ha-ha of a doubled ocean” separating America from Russia:
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! (1.3)
In his poem Otyezzhayshchemu (“To a Departing Person,” 1913) Gumilyov twice repeats the word ved’ and mentions Muza Dal’nikh Stranstviy (the Muse of Distant Travels):
Нет, я не в том тебе завидую
С такой мучительной обидою,
Что уезжаешь ты и вскоре
На Средиземном будешь море.
И Рим увидишь, и Сицилию,
Места любезные Виргилию,
В благоухающей, лимонной
Трущобе сложишь стих влюблённый.
Я это сам не раз испытывал,
Я солью моря грудь пропитывал,
Над Арно, Данта чтя обычай,
Слагал сонеты Беатриче.
Что до природы мне, до древности,
Когда я полон жгучей ревности,
Ведь ты во всём её убранстве
Увидел Музу Дальних Странствий.
Ведь для тебя в руках изменницы
В хрустальном кубке нектар пенится,
И огнедышащей беседы
Ты знаешь молнии и бреды.
А я, как некими гигантами,
Торжественными фолиантами
От вольной жизни заперт в нишу,
Её не вижу и не слышу.
In Ilf and Petrov’s novel Dvenadtsat’ stulyev (“The Twelve Chairs,” 1928) one of the chapters is entitled Muza Dal’nikh Stranstviy (“The Muse of Distant Travels”). Another chapter, Alfavit – zerkalo zhizni (“The Mirror of Life Index”), brings to mind Flavita (anagram of alfavit, “alphabet”), the Russian Scrabble mentioned by Van:
The set [of Flavita] our three children received in 1884 from an old friend of the family (as Marina’s former lovers were known), Baron Klim Avidov, consisted of a large folding board of saffian and a boxful of weighty rectangles of ebony inlaid with platinum letters, only one of which was a Roman one, namely the letter J on the two joker blocks (as thrilling to get as a blank check signed by Jupiter or Jurojin). It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa. (1.36)
The Gritz blends the Ritz hotels with Mme Gritsatsuev (in “The 12 Chairs” a passionate woman, a poet’s dream, whom Ostap Bender marries in Stargorod). Baron Klim Avidov = Vladimir Nabokov.
In a letter of April 21-22, 1877, to Strakhov Leo Tolstoy quotes V. Hugo’s poem L’Abîme (“The Abyss”) in which Man (L’Homme) tells Earth (La Terre): Je suis ton roi (“I am your king”) and Earth (in Russian, Zemlya) replies: Tu n’es que ma vermine (you are my worm):
А всё ругают V. Hugo. А он там говорит в разговоре земли с человеком.
Человек: Je suis ton roi.
Земля: Tu n’es que ma vermine.
Ну-ка, отчего они не сказали так?
A character of Ada, King Victor (who frequents floramors, a hundred palatial brothels built by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, in memory of his grandson Eric, the author of an essay "Villa Venus: an Organized Dream") seems to be a cross between Queen Victoria and Victor Hugo (the author of Le roi s'amuse and L'Art d'être grand-père).
Hugo’s poem L’Abîme ends as follows:
L’INFINI: L’être multiple vit dans mon unité sombre.
DIEU: Je n’aurais qu’à souffler, et tout serait de l’ombre.
According to Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad Commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), after line 274 of Shade’s poem there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...
In PF Shade is murdered by Gradus. Describing mad Aqua's torments, Van mentions "the gradual, gradual shade:"
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta… tu, voce sbigottita… spigotty e diavoletta… de lo cor dolente… con ballatetta va… va… della strutta, destruttamente… mente… mente… stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them…). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether. (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255–1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’
Guido Cavalcanti is the main character in Gumilyov’s story Radosti zemnoy lyubvi ("The Joys of Earthly Love," 1908) in which the inhabitants of the wild Tartary are mentioned:
В то время вся Флоренция говорила о заезжем венецианском синьоре и о его скорее влюблённом, чем почтительном, преклонении перед красотой Примаверы. Этот венецианец одевался в костюмы, напоминающие цветом попугаев; ломаясь, пел песни, пригодные разве только для таверн или грубых солдатских попоек; и хвастливо рассказывал о путешествиях своего соотечественника Марко Поло, в которых сам и не думал участвовать. И как-то Кавальканти видел, что Примавера приняла предложенный ей сонет этого высокомерного глупца, где воспевалась её красота в выражениях напыщенных и смешных: её груди сравнивались со снеговыми вершинами Гималайских гор, взгляды с отравленными стрелами обитателей дикой Тартарии, а любовь, возбуждаемая ею, с чудовищным зверем Симлой, который живёт во владениях Великого Могола, ежедневно пожирая тысячи людей; вдобавок размер часто пропадал, и рифмы были расставлены неверно.
In Ilf and Petrov’s “The Golden Calf” Hygienishvili (one of the inhabitants of “A Crow’s Nest”) proposes to throw out the things of the airman Sevryugov (who discovered a foreign expedition that disappeared beyond the Arctic Circle) to the landing, k chertyam sobach’im:
-- Да вы поймите, -- кипятилась Варвара, поднося к носу камергера газетный лист. - Вот статья. Видите? "Среди торосов и айсбергов".
-- Айсберги! - говорил Митрич насмешливо. - Это мы понять можем. Десять лет как жизни нет. Все Айсберги, Вайсберги, Айзенберги, всякие там Рабиновичи. Верно Пряхин говорит. Отобрать -- и всё. Тем более, что вот и Люция Францевна подтверждает насчет закона.
-- А вещи на лестницу выкинуть, к чертям собачьим! -- грудным голосом воскликнул бывший князь, а ныне трудящийся Востока, гражданин Гигиенишвили.
"Look here," argued Varvara, putting the newspaper right in front of the Chamberlain's nose.
“Here is the article. See? Amid ice ridges and icebergs."
“Icebergs!” sneered Mitrich. “Yes, we can understand that. Ten long years of nothing but tears. Icebergs, Weisbergs, Eisenbergs, all those Rabinovichs. Pryakhin is right. Let's just take it, end of story. Especially since Lucia Franzevna here agrees about the law."
"And his stuff can go into the stairwell, to the devil!" exclaimed the former Prince, lately a proletarian from the East, Citizen Hygienishvili, in his throaty voice. (chapter XIII: “Vasisualiy Lokhankin and his Role in the Russian Revolution”)
The inhabitants of “A Crow’s Nest” include nich'ya babushka (nobody’s grandma) who is afraid of electricity and uses a kerosene lamp in her entresol apartment. At the beginning of a game of Flavita Ada’s letters form the word kerosin (kerosene):
Lots had been cast, Ada had won the right to begin, and was in the act of collecting one by one, mechanically and unthinkingly, her seven ‘luckies’ from the open case where the blocks lay face down, showing nothing but their anonymous black backs, each in its own cell of flavid velvet. She was speaking at the same time, saying casually: ‘I would much prefer the Benten lamp here but it is out of kerosin. Pet (addressing Lucette), be a good scout, call her — Good Heavens!’
The seven letters she had taken, S,R,E,N,O,K,I, and was sorting out in her spektrik (the little trough of japanned wood each player had before him) now formed in quick and, as it were, self-impulsed rearrangement the key word of the chance sentence that had attended their random assemblage. (1.36)
Please note that my previous post, "Van's bitter lifestream in Ada," has been updated.