According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), in the last game of Flavita (the Russian Scrabble) that he played at Ardis with Ada and Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) Lucette’s letters formed the word Kremlin:
Soon after that, as so often occurs with games, and toys, and vacational friendships, that seem to promise an eternal future of fun, Flavita followed the bronze and blood-red trees into the autumn mists; then the black box was mislaid, was forgotten — and accidentally rediscovered (among boxes of table silver) four years later, shortly before Lucette’s visit to town where she spent a few days with her father in mid-July, 1888. It so happened that this was to be the last game of Flavita that the three young Veens were ever to play together. Either because it happened to end in a memorable record for Ada, or because Van took some notes in the hope — not quite unfulfilled — of ‘catching sight of the lining of time’ (which, as he was later to write, is ‘the best informal definition of portents and prophecies’), but the last round of that particular game remained vividly clear in his mind.
‘Je ne peux rien faire,’ wailed Lucette, ‘mais rien — with my idiotic Buchstaben, REMNILK, LINKREM...’
‘Look,’ whispered Van, ‘c’est tout simple, shift those two syllables and you get a fortress in ancient Muscovy.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Ada, wagging her finger at the height of her temple in a way she had. ‘Oh, no. That pretty word does not exist in Russian. A Frenchman invented it. There is no second syllable.’
‘Ruth for a little child?’ interposed Van.
‘Ruthless!’ cried Ada.
‘Well,’ said Van, ‘you can always make a little cream, KREM or KREME — or even better — there’s KREMLI, which means Yukon prisons. Go through her ORHIDEYA.’
‘Through her silly orchid,’ said Lucette. (1.36)
In Tolstoy’s novel Voyna i mir (“War and Peace,” 1869) General Murat (the King of Naples who invaded Moscow with Napoleon’s army) expects the news about the city fortress, le Kremlin:
В четвёртом часу пополудни войска Мюрата вступали в Москву. Впереди ехал отряд виртембергских гусар, позади верхом, с большой свитой, ехал сам неаполитанский король.
Около середины Арбата, близ Николы Явленного, Мюрат остановился, ожидая известия от передового отряда о том, в каком положении находилась городская крепость «le Kremlin».
Toward four o'clock in the afternoon Murat's troops were entering Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Würtemberg hussars and behind them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.
About the middle of the Arbat Street, near the Church of the Miraculous Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le Kremlin. (Book Eleven: 1812, chapter XXVI)
Describing his stay in the West with his father, Van mentions a motor court in Utah where Tolstoy had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard:
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. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper. (1.28)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid's title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy's hero, Haji Murad, (a Caucasian chieftain) is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
Before the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) calls the cream that he refused to have his hair-dresser put on his bald spot “Crêmlin:”
‘I don’t know if you know,’ said Van, resuming his perch on the fat arm of his father’s chair. ‘Uncle Dan will be here with the lawyer and Lucette only after dinner.’
‘Capital,’ said Demon.
‘Marina and Ada should be down in a minute — ce sera un dîner à quatre.’
‘Capital,’ he repeated. ‘You look splendid, my dear, dear fellow — and I don’t have to exaggerate compliments as some do in regard to an aging man with shoe-shined hair. Your dinner jacket is very nice — or, rather it’s very nice recognizing one’s old tailor in one’s son’s clothes — like catching oneself repeating an ancestral mannerism — for example, this (wagging his left forefinger three times at the height of his temple), which my mother did in casual, pacific denial; that gene missed you, but I’ve seen it in my hairdresser’s looking-glass when refusing to have him put Crêmlin on my bald spot; and you know who had it too — my aunt Kitty, who married the Banker Bolenski after divorcing that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer.’
Demon preferred Walter Scott to Dickens, and did not think highly of Russian novelists. As usual, Van considered it fit to make a corrective comment:
‘A fantastically artistic writer, Dad.’ (1.38)
Describing Ada’s meeting with Demon, Van mentions Lermontov:
Here Ada herself came running into the room. Yes-yes-yes-yes, here I come. Beaming!
Old Demon, iridescent wings humped, half rose but sank back again, enveloping Ada with one arm, holding his glass in the other hand, kissing the girl in the neck, in the hair, burrowing in her sweetness with more than an uncle’s fervor. ‘Gosh,’ she exclaimed (with an outbreak of nursery slang that affected Van with even more umilenie, attendrissement, melting ravishment, than his father seemed to experience). ‘How lovely to see you! Clawing your way through the clouds! Swooping down on Tamara’s castle!’
(Lermontov paraphrased by Lowden). (ibid.)
In his essay Panorama Moskvy (“The Panorama of Moscow,” 1834) Lermontov calls the Kremlin altar’ Rossii (“the altar of Russia”) and compares it to phoenix:
Что сравнить с этим Кремлём, который, окружась зубчатыми стенами, красуясь золотыми главами соборов, возлежит на высокой горе, как державный венец на челе грозного владыки?..
Он алтарь России, на нём должны совершаться и уже совершались многие жертвы, достойные отечества... Давно ли, как баснословный феникс, он возродился из пылающего своего праха?..
Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van mentions Altar and Palermontovia:
Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth — say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia — as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua’s bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health (‘just a little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black’) in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive... But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (1.3)
Palermontovia blends Palermo (the biggest city in and the capital of Sicily) with Lermontov. The Latin name of Palermo is Panormus (cf. panorama).
In the first line of his poem Priblizhaetsya zvuk... (“A sound approaches...” 1912) Alexander Blok mentions shchemyashchiy zvuk (a heart-rending sound):
Приближается звук. И, покорна щемящему звуку,
Молодеет душа.
И во сне прижимаю к губам твою прежнюю руку,
Не дыша.
In his poem Vsyo eto bylo, bylo, bylo… (“All that was, all that was, all that was,” 1909) Blok mentions the walls of the Moscow Kremlin:
Всё это было, было, было,
Свершился дней круговорот.
Какая ложь, какая сила
Тебя, прошедшее, вернёт?
В час утра, чистый и хрустальный,
У стен Московского Кремля,
Восторг души первоначальный
Вернёт ли мне моя земля?
Иль в ночь на Пасху, над Невою,
Под ветром, в стужу, в ледоход —
Старуха нищая клюкою
Мой труп спокойный шевельнёт?
Иль на возлюбленной поляне
Под шелест осени седой
Мне тело в дождевом тумане
Расклю́ет коршун молодой?
Иль просто в час тоски беззвездной,
В каких-то четырёх стенах,
С необходимостью железной
Усну на белых простынях?
И в новой жизни, непохожей,
Забуду прежнюю мечту,
И буду так же помнить дожей,
Как нынче помню Калиту?
Но верю — не пройдёт бесследно
Всё, что так страстно я любил,
Весь трепет этой жизни бедной,
Весь этот непонятный пыл!
Alexander Blok is the author of Na pole Kulikovom (“In the Field of Kulikovo,” 1908), a cycle of five poems, and Novaya Amerika (“The New Ameica,” 1912). It seems that on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) where Tartary spreads from Kurland to the Kurils (1.3) the Russians were defeated by Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo (1380) and migrated, across "the ha-ha of a doubled ocean," to America. Demon’s rival and adversary in a sword duel (1.2), Baron d’Onsky seems to blend Prince Dmitri Donskoy (who opposed Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo) with Onegin’s donskoy zherebets (Don stallion) in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Two: V: 4). In Chapter Seven (XXXVII) of EO Pushkin describes Tatiana's arrival in Moscow and mentions the keys of the old Kremlin:
Вот, окружен своей дубравой,
Петровский замок. Мрачно он
Недавнею гордится славой.
Напрасно ждал Наполеон,
Последним счастьем упоенный,
Москвы коленопреклоненной
С ключами старого Кремля:
Нет, не пошла Москва моя
К нему с повинной головою.
Не праздник, не приемный дар,
Она готовила пожар
Нетерпеливому герою.
Отселе, в думу погружен,
Глядел на грозный пламень он.
Here is, surrounded by its park,
Petrovskiy Castle. Somberly
it prides itself on recent glory.
In vain Napoleon, intoxicated
with his last fortune, waited
for kneeling Moscow with the keys
of the old Kremlin: no,
to him my Moscow did not go
with craven brow;
not revelry, not gifts of bienvenue —
a conflagration she prepared
for the impatient hero.
From here, in meditation sunk,
he watched the formidable flame.
The Great Moscow Fire of 1812 brings to mind the apotheosis of "Ardis the First," the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time). It seems that Ada has bribed Kim Beauharnais (the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis) to set the barn on fire. Josephine Beauharnais (known on Demonia as Queen Josephine) was Napoleon's first wife.
A legendary bird that is reborn from ashes, phoenix brings to mind old issues of Golos Feniksa (“The Phoenix Voice,” a Russian-language newspaper in Arizona) that Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) reads to her ill brother:
Much to Van’s amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed to visit him ‘because of the constant necessity of routine tests’ — or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront disaster in manly solitude. (3.8)
Golos iz khora (“A Voice from Choir,” 1910-14) is a poem by Alexander Blok, the author of Sirin i Alkonost, ptitsy radosti i pechali (“Sirin and Alkonost, the Birds of Joy and Sorrow,” 1899). Sirin was VN’s Russian nom de plume. Like Sirin, Feniks (Russ., Phoenix) is a fairy-tale bird. In her essay Nabokov i ego
Lolita (“Nabokov and his Lolita,” 1959) and in her memoirs The Italics are Mine (1969) Nina Berberova compares VN to Phoenix.
Ada’s sister-in-law, Dorothy Vinelander marries a Mr. Brod or Bred:
After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada's choosing the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband's endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin's select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the 'Lyaskan Herculanum'); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another question. (3.8)
In “War and Peace” Tolstoy mentions Krymskiy Brod (the Crimean Ford Bridge across the Moskva river):
Войска Даву, к которым принадлежали пленные, шли через Крымский брод и уже отчасти вступали в Калужскую улицу. Но обозы так растянулись, что последние обозы Богарне ещё не вышли из Москвы в Калужскую улицу, а голова войск Нея уже выходила из Большой Ордынки.
Davoust's troops, in whose charge the prisoners were, had crossed the Krymskyi Brod, or Crimean Ford Bridge, and already some of the divisions we're debouching into Kaluga Street. But the teams stretched out so endlessly that the last ones belonging to Beauharnais's division had not yet left Moscow to enter Kaluga Street, while the head of Ney's troops had already left Bolshaya Ordynka. (Part IV, chapter XIV)
Bred ("Delirium," 1905) is a poem by Blok. In Chapter Two (XV: 13-14) of Pushkin's EO Onegin willingly forgives the fever of Lenski's young years its yunyi zhar i yunyi bred (young ardor and young ravings):
Он слушал Ленского с улыбкой.
Поэта пылкий разговор,
И ум, еще в сужденьях зыбкой,
И вечно вдохновенный взор, —
Онегину все было ново;
Он охладительное слово
В устах старался удержать
И думал: глупо мне мешать
Его минутному блаженству;
И без меня пора придет;
Пускай покамест он живет
Да верит мира совершенству;
Простим горячке юных лет
И юный жар и юный бред.
He listened with a smile to Lenski:
the poet's fervid conversation,
and mind still vacillant in judgments,
and gaze eternally inspired —
all this was novel to Onegin;
the chilling word
on his lips he tried to restrain,
and thought: foolish of me
to interfere with his brief rapture;
without me just as well that time will come;
meanwhile let him live and believe
in the perfection of the world;
let us forgive the fever of young years
both its young ardor and young ravings.
Let me also draw your attention to the updated version of my recent post “Adorno, star of Hate in Ada.”