Describing Lucette’s visit to Kingston, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions baby serpents and Lucette’s pretty viper tongue:
She unclicked her black-silk handbag, fished out a handkerchief and, leaving the gaping bag on the edge of the sideboard, went to the farthest window and stood there, her fragile shoulders shaking unbearably.
Van noticed a long, blue, violet-sealed envelope protruding from the bag.
‘Lucette, don’t cry. That’s too easy.’
She walked back, dabbing her nose, curbing her childishly humid sniffs, still hoping for the decisive embrace.
‘Here’s some brandy,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Where’s the rest of the family?’
She returned the balled handkerchief of many an old romance to her bag, which, however, remained unclosed. Chows, too, have blue tongues.
‘Mamma dwells in her private Samsara. Dad has had another stroke. Sis is revisiting Ardis.’
‘Sis! Cesse, Lucette! We don’t want any baby serpents around.’
‘This baby serpent does not quite know what tone to take with Dr V.V. Sector. You have not changed one bit, my pale darling, except that you look like a ghost in need of a shave without your summer Glanz.’
And summer Mädel. He noticed that the letter, in its long blue envelope, lay now on the mahogany sideboard. He stood in the middle of the parlor, rubbing his forehead, not daring, not daring, because it was Ada’s notepaper.
‘Like some tea?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t stay long. Besides, you said something about a busy day over the phone. One can’t help being dreadfully busy after four absolutely blank years’ (he would start sobbing too if she did not stop).
‘Yes. I don’t know. I have an appointment around six.’
Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was’ We-have-so-much-to say’; the other was ‘We have absolutely nothing to say.’ But that sort of thing can change in one instant.
‘Yes, I have to see Rattner at six-thirty,’ murmured Van, consulting a calendar he did not see.
‘Rattner on Terra!’ ejaculated Lucette. ‘Van is reading Rattner on Terra. Pet must never, never disturb him and me when we are reading Rattner!’
‘I implore, my dear, no impersonations. Let us not transform a pleasant reunion into mutual torture.’
What was she doing at Queenston? She had told him before. Of course. Tough course? No. Oh. From time to time both kept glancing askance at the letter to see if it was behaving itself — not dangling its legs, not picking its nose.
Return it sealed?
‘Tell Rattner,’ she said, gulping down her third brandy as simply as if it were technicolored water. ‘Tell him’ (the liquor was loosening her pretty viper tongue) —
(Viper? Lucette? My dead dear darling?)
— ‘Tell him that when in the old days you and Ada —’
The name yawned like a black doorway, then the door banged.
‘— left me for him, and then came back, I knew every time that you vsyo sdelali (had appeased your lust, had allayed your fire).’
‘One remembers those little things much too clearly, Lucette. Please, stop.’
‘One remembers, Van, those little things much more clearly than the big fatal ones. As for example the clothes you wore at any given moment, at a generously given moment, with the sun on the chairs and the floor. I was practically naked, of course, being a neutral pure little child. But she wore a boy’s shirt and a short skirt, and all you had on were those wrinkled, soiled shorts, shorter because wrinkled, and they smelled as they always did after you’d been on Terra with Ada, with Rattner on Ada, with Ada on Antiterra in Ardis Forest — oh, they positively stank, you know, your little shorts of lavendered Ada, and her catfood, and your caked algarroba!’ (2.5)
At the end of his sonnet L'Avertisseur (“The Warner”) Baudelaire mentions l'insupportable Vipère (the unbearable Viper):
Tout homme digne de ce nom
A dans le coeur un Serpent jaune,
Installé comme sur un trône,
Qui, s'il dit: «Je veux,» répond: «Non!»
Plonge tes yeux dans les yeux fixes
Des Satyresses ou des Nixes,
La Dent dit: «Pense à ton devoir!»
Fais des enfants, plante des arbres,
Polis des vers, sculpte des marbres,
La Dent dit: «Vivras-tu ce soir?»
Quoi qu'il ébauche ou qu'il espère,
L'homme ne vit pas un moment
Sans subir l'avertissement
De l'insupportable Vipère.
Every man worthy of the name
Has in his heart a yellow Snake
Installed as if upon a throne,
Who, if he says: "I will!" answers: "No!"
Plunge your eyes into the fixed gaze
Of Satyresses or Nixies,
The Fang says: "Think of your duty!"
Beget children, set out trees,
Polish verses, sculpture marble,
The Fang says: "Will you be alive tonight?
Whatever he may plan or hope,
Man does not live for an instant
Without enduring the warning
Of the unbearable Viper.
(tr. W. Aggeler)
La Dent (the Fang) brings to mind the fangs of serpents mentioned by Van as he describes the phenomenon of Terra:
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.
Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.) (1.3)
Baudelaire translated E. A. Poe’s story Mesmeric Revelation (1844) as Révélation magnétique (1856). Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set), Van calls electricity (banned on Demonia after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century) “the unmentionable magnetic power:”
Poor Aqua, whose fancies were apt to fall for all the fangles of cranks and Christians, envisaged vividly a minor hymnist’s paradise, a future America of alabaster buildings one hundred stories high, resembling a beautiful furniture store crammed with tall white-washed wardrobes and shorter fridges; she saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or Wark. She heard magic-music boxes talking and singing, drowning the terror of thought, uplifting the lift girl, riding down with the miner, praising beauty and godliness, the Virgin and Venus in the dwellings of the lonely and the poor. The unmentionable magnetic power denounced by evil lawmakers in this our shabby country — oh, everywhere, in Estoty and Canady, in ‘German’ Mark Kennensie, as well as in ‘Swedish’ Manitobogan, in the workshop of the red-shirted Yukonets as well as in the kitchen of the red-kerchiefed Lyaskanka, and in ‘French’ Estoty, from Bras d’Or to Ladore — and very soon throughout both our Americas, and all over the other stunned continents — was used on Terra as freely as water and air, as bibles and brooms. Two or three centuries earlier she might have been just another consumable witch. (ibid.)
The Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians that happened on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. January 3, 1876, is Lucette’s birthday. In Vlast’ idey (“The Power of Ideas,” 1905), a review of the second volume of Merezhkovski’s book “Tolstoy and Dostoevski,” Lev Shestov quotes in full Zinaida Hippius’ poem Elektrichestvo (“Electricity,” 1901):
А теперь спросим, наконец, в чём же последний синтез г. Мережковского? У него на этот вопрос есть очень определённый ответ: в чём другом, а в неясности его упрекнуть нельзя. Уже с начала 5-й главы он приводит стихотворение З.Н. Гиппиус - "Электричество", стихотворение, которое ему кажется до такой степени полно и удачно выражающим его основную мысль, что он заключительные его строки цитирует до десяти раз. Стихотворение небольшое, и я его приведу целиком ввиду той значительной роли, которую оно играет в книге г. Мережковского.
Две нити вместе свиты,
Концы обнажены.
То "да" и "нет" не слиты,
Не слиты - сплетены.
Их тёмное сплетенье
И тесно и мертво;
Но ждёт их воскресенье,
И ждут они его:
Концы соприкоснутся,
Проснутся "да" и "нет".
И "да", и "нет" сольются,
И смерть их будет свет.
Two wires are wrapped together,
The loose ends naked, exposed
A yes and no, not united,
Not united, but juxtaposed.
A dark, dark juxtaposition --
So close together, dead.
But resurrection awaits them;
And they await what waits ahead.
End will meet end in touching
Yes -- no, left and right,
The yes and no awakening,
Inseparably uniting
And their death will be - Light.
In Opravdanie svobody (“Justification of Freedom,” 1924), a review of Berdyaev’s book Filosofiya neravenstva (“The Philosophy of Inequality,” 1924), Zinaida Hippius mentions Bergson’s la durée and says that Revolution does not have dlenye (as Hippius renders la durée):
Революция не имеет дленья (la durée, по Бергсону), и когда мы говорим о революции, мы говорим, в сущности, о временах, окружающих этот миг; о времени послереволюционном, о революционных эпохах… Отсюда и споры, когда именно, какая революция кончилась. Споры неразрешимые, ибо революция есть реальное, но неуследимое мгновенье.
Describing his dialogue over the dorophone (hydraulic telephone) with his typist, Van mentions la durée and praises Lucette for spotting Bergson:
At this point, as in a well-constructed play larded with comic relief, the brass campophone buzzed and not only did the radiators start to cluck but the uncapped soda water fizzed in sympathy.
Van (crossly): ‘I don’t understand the first word… What’s that? L’adorée? Wait a second’ (to Lucette). ‘Please, stay where you are.’ (Lucette whispers a French child-word with two ‘p’s.). ‘Okay’ (pointing toward the corridor). ‘Sorry, Polly. Well, is it l’adorée? No? Give me the context. Ah — la durée. La durée is not… sin on what? Synonymous with duration. Aha. Sorry again, I must stopper that orgiastic soda. Hold the line.’ (Yells down the ‘cory door,’ as they called the long second-floor passage at Ardis.) ‘Lucette, let it run over, who cares!’
He poured himself another glass of brandy and for a ridiculous moment could not remember what the hell he had been — yes, the polliphone.
It had died, but buzzed as soon as he recradled the receiver, and Lucette knocked discreetly at the same time.
‘La durée… For goodness sake, come in without knocking… No, Polly, knocking does not concern you — it’s my little cousin. All right. La durée is not synonymous with duration, being saturated — yes, as in Saturday — with that particular philosopher’s thought. What’s wrong now? You don’t know if it’s dorée or durée? D, U, R. I thought you knew French. Oh, I see. So long.
‘My typist, a trivial but always available blonde, could not make out durée in my quite legible hand because, she says, she knows French, but not scientific French.’
‘Actually,’ observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained, ‘Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.’
‘Spotting Bergson,’ said the assistant lecher, ‘rates a B minus dans ton petit cas, hardly more. Or shall I reward you with a kiss on your krestik — whatever that is?’ (2.5)
At Kingston Lucette calls Van “Dr. V. V. Sector.” In his review of Chekhov's story Muzhiki (“Peasants,” 1897), Uzhasnye muzhiki (“Terrible Peasants,” 1897), N. Ladozhski (penname of V. K. Peterson) mentions Chekhov’s "absolute composure of a vivisector:"
Сам автор как личность вполне отсутствует, изображая "полнейшее спокойствие вивисектора."
The author’s person is completely absent [from the story], demonstrating "the absolute composure of a vivisector."
In his story V ovrage (“In the Ravine,” 1900) Chekhov compares Aksinya (Stepan Tsybukin's wife) to gadyuka (a viper) that looks out of the young rye in the spring at the passers-by:
У Аксиньи были серые наивные глаза, которые редко мигали, и на лице постоянно играла наивная улыбка. И в этих немигающих глазах, и в маленькой голове на длинной шее, и в её стройности было что-то змеиное; зелёная, с жёлтой грудью, с улыбкой, она глядела, как весной из молодой ржи глядит на прохожего гадюка, вытянувшись и подняв голову.
Aksinya had naïve grey eyes which rarely blinked, and a naïve smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snake-like; all in green but for the yellow on her bosom, she looked with a smile on her face as a viper looks out of the young rye in the spring at the passers-by, stretching itself and lifting its head. (chapter III)
Lev Shestov’s essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego (“Creation from Nothing,” 1905), has for the epigraph and ends in a line from Baudelaire’s poem Le Goût du néant (“The Taste for Nothingness”):
Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute.
Resign yourself, my heart; sleep your brutish sleep.
In a letter of Sept. 30, 1899, to Olga Knipper Chekhov says that never called her zmeyonysh (a baby serpent), because she is gromadnaya zmeya (a huge snake):
Я пишу Вам, а сам поглядываю в громадное окно: там широчайший вид, такой вид, что просто описать нельзя. Фотографии своей не пришлю, пока не получу Вашей, о змея! Я вовсе не называл Вас «змеёнышем», как Вы пишете. Вы змея, а не змеёныш, громадная змея. Разве это не лестно?