According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), by the L disaster (that happened on Antiterra in the middle of the 19th century) he does not mean Elevated:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen. (1.3)
Élévation (“Elevation”) is a poem by Baudelaire:
Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées,
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées,
Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,
Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l'onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l'immensité profonde
Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.
Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;
Va te purifier dans l'air supérieur,
Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.
Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins
Qui chargent de leur poids l'existence brumeuse,
Heureux celui qui peut d'une aile vigoureuse
S'élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;
Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
— Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!
Above the lakes, above the vales,
The mountains and the woods, the clouds, the seas,
Beyond the sun, beyond the ether,
Beyond the confines of the starry spheres,
My soul, you move with ease,
And like a strong swimmer in rapture in the wave
You wing your way blithely through boundless space
With virile joy unspeakable.
Fly far, far away from this baneful miasma
And purify yourself in the celestial air,
Drink the ethereal fire of those limpid regions
As you would the purest of heavenly nectars.
Beyond the vast sorrows and all the vexations
That weigh upon our lives and obscure our vision,
Happy is he who can with his vigorous wing
Soar up towards those fields luminous and serene
He whose thoughts, like skylarks,
Toward the morning sky take flight
— Who hovers over life and understands with ease
The language of flowers and silent things!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
The poem’s last line, Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes (the language of flowers and silent things), brings to mind Marina’s old herbarium (“a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers”) that Van and Ada discover in the attic of Ardis Hall (and that helps them to find out that they are brother and sister), Chose (Van’s English University) and three mute swans (Les Trois Cygnes, Van’s hotel in Geneva) from whom Van expects miracles of secrecy:
‘Lucien,’ said Dr Veen, peering over his spectacles, ‘I may have — as your predecessor would know — all kinds of queer visitors, magicians, masked ladies, madmen — que sais-je? and I expect miracles of secrecy from all three mute swans. Here’s a prefatory bonus.’
‘Merci infiniment,’ said the concierge, and, as usual, Van felt infinitely touched by the courteous hyperbole provoking no dearth of philosophical thought. (3.8)
Baudelaire’s poem Le Cygne (“The Swan”) is dedicated to Victor Hugo. In her memoir essay on Maximilian Voloshin, Zhivoe o zhivom ("A Living Word about a Living Man," 1932), Marina Tsvetaev (who translated into Russian Baudelaire’s Le Voyage) uses the phrase au beau milieu (right in the middle) as applied to Victor Hugo's poem Napoléon II (1832):
И внезапно au beau milieu Victor Hugo Наполеону II уже не вкрадчиво, а срочно: А нельзя ли будет пойти куда-нибудь в другое место? Можно, конечно, вниз тогда, но там семь градусов и больше не бывает.
Voloshin is the author of Lutetia Parisiorum (1915), a sonnet about Paris. On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Paris is also known as Lute:
In 1885, having completed his prep-school education, he went up to Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel). (1.28)
Describing his meeting with Greg Erminin in Paris, Van mentions the Avenue Guillaume Pitt:
On a bleak morning between the spring and summer of 1901, in Paris, as Van, black-hatted, one hand playing with the warm loose change in his topcoat pocket and the other, fawn-gloved, upswinging a furled English umbrella, strode past a particularly unattractive sidewalk café among the many lining the Avenue Guillaume Pitt, a chubby bald man in a rumpled brown suit with a watch-chained waistcoat stood up and hailed him. (3.2)
In his “Ode to Count Khvostov” (1825) Pushkin mentions lyutyi Pit (ferocious Pitt) who is trembling in Styx:
Султан ярится 1. Кровь Эллады
И резвоскачет 2, и кипит.
Открылись грекам древни клады 3,
Трепещет в Стиксе лютый Пит 4.
In footnote 4 Pushkin says: “G. Pitt, the famous English minister and notorious enemy of freedom.” On Antiterra France was annexed by England in 1815:
The novelistic theme of written communications has now really got into its stride. When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: ‘One must not berne you.’ Only a French-speaking person would use that word for ‘dupe.’ Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction — descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. To interview them all — torture the males, rape the females — would be, of course, absurd and degrading. With a puerile wrench he broke his best black butterfly on the wheel of his exasperation. The pain from the fang bite was now reaching his heart. He found another tie, finished dressing and went to look for Ada. (1.40)
In his poem Proserpina (1824) Pushkin calls Proserpina Ada gordaya tsaritsa (the proud queen of hell) and twice mentions svody tartara (the vaults of Hades) and Eliziy (the Elysium):
Плещут волны Флегетона,
Своды Тартара дрожат,
Кони бледного Плутона
Быстро к нимфам Пелиона
Из аида бога мчат.
Вдоль пустынного залива
Прозерпина вслед за ним,
Равнодушна и ревнива,
Потекла путем одним.
Пред богинею колена
Робко юноша склонил.
И богиням льстит измена:
Прозерпине смертный мил.
Ада гордая царица
Взором юношу зовёт,
Обняла — и колесница
Уж к аиду их несёт;
Мчатся, облаком одеты;
Видят вечные луга,
Элизей и томной Леты
Усыпленные брега.
Там бессмертье, там забвенье,
Там утехам нет конца.
Прозерпина в упоенье,
Без порфиры и венца,
Повинуется желаньям,
Предает его лобзаньям
Сокровенные красы,
В сладострастной неге тонет
И молчит, и томно стонет...
Но бегут любви часы;
Плещут волны Флегетона,
Своды тартара дрожат:
Кони бледного Плутона
Быстро мчат его назад.
И Кереры дочь уходит,
И счастливца за собой
Из Элизия выводит
Потаенною тропой;
И счастливец отпирает
Осторожною рукой
Дверь, откуда вылетает
Сновидений ложный рой.
Svody tartara bring to mind Tartary, a country that occupies on Antiterra the territory from Kurland to the Kuriles:
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! (1.3)
In a letter of Sept. 10, 1824, to Pushkin Delvig (the editor of Northern Flowers) says that Pushkin’s poem Proserpina is pure music, a bird of paradise's singing that one can hear for a thousand years without noticing the passage of time:
Прозерпина не стихи, а музыка: это пенье райской птички, которое слушая, не увидешь, как пройдёт тысяча лет. Эти двери давно мне знакомы. Сквозь них, ещё в Лицее, меня [иногда] часто выталкивали из Элизея. Какая искустная щеголиха у тебя истина. Подобных цветов мороз не тронет!
According to Delvig (who says that he knows well those doors through which even at the Lyceum he was often pushed away from the Elysium), the frost will spare such flowers. Baudelaire’s main book is entitled Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil,” 1857).
In VN’s French translation (1975) of Ada “Elevated” becomes “Elysée” (Elysium):
Les détails du désastre « El » (et ce n’est pas « Elysée » que j’entends), qui, au beau milieu du siècle précédent, eut l’effet singulier de déclencher aussi bien que de rendre maudite l’idée d’une « Terra », sont bien trop connus des historiens et sont bien trop obscènes du point de vue religieux pour être traités à fond dans un ouvrage qui s’adresse à de jeunes amateurs ou amants et non à des gens très posés ou trépassés. (1.3)
Et ce n’est pas « Elysée » que j’entends (and I do not mean Elevated) brings to mind the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. On Antiterra it is known as the Avenue Guillaume Pitt. The penname of Mlle Larivière (Lucette’s governess), Guillaume de Monparnasse seems to hint at Montparnasse (an area of Paris) and vashe Parnasskoe velichestvo (“your Parnassian majesty”), a phrase used by Delvig in his letter of Sept. 10, 1824, to Pushkin:
Есть еще у меня не просьба, но только спрос: не вздумаешь ли ты дать мне стихов двадцать из «Евгения Онегина»? Это хорошо бы было для толпы, которая не поймёт всей красоты твоей «Прозерпины» или «Демона», а уж про «Онегина» давно горло дерёт. Подумайте, ваше Парнасское величество!
At the end of his sonnet Sed non satiata ("Never Satisfied") Baudelaire mentions Proserpine:
Bizarre déité, brune comme les nuits,
Au parfum mélangé de musc et de havane,
Oeuvre de quelque obi, le Faust de la savane,
Sorcière au flanc d'ébène, enfant des noirs minuits,
Je préfère au constance, à l'opium, au nuits,
L'élixir de ta bouche où l'amour se pavane;
Quand vers toi mes désirs partent en caravane,
Tes yeux sont la citerne où boivent mes ennuis.
Par ces deux grands yeux noirs, soupiraux de ton âme,
Ô démon sans pitié! verse-moi moins de flamme;
Je ne suis pas le Styx pour t'embrasser neuf fois,
Hélas! et je ne puis, Mégère libertine,
Pour briser ton courage et te mettre aux abois,
Dans l'enfer de ton lit devenir Proserpine!
Singular deity, brown as the nights,
Scented with the perfume of Havana and musk,
Work of some obeah, Faust of the savanna,
Witch with ebony flanks, child of the black midnight,
I prefer to constance, to opium, to nuits,
The nectar of your mouth upon which love parades;
When toward you my desires set out in caravan,
Your eyes are the cistern that gives drink to my cares.
Through those two great black eyes, the outlets of your soul,
O pitiless demon! pour upon me less flame;
I'm not the River Styx to embrace you nine times,
Alas! and I cannot, licentious Megaera,
To break your spirit and bring you to bay
In the hell of your bed turn into Proserpine!
(tr. W. Aggeler)