In VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Other Books by the Narrator include Vadim’s collection of short stories Exile from Mayda (1947):
"I shall call this close friend of mine, whose case we are about to examine, Mr. Twidower, a name with certain connotations, as those of you who remember the title story in my Exile from Mayda will note."
(Three people, the Kings and Audace, raised three hands, looking at one another in shared smugness.)
"This person, who is in the mighty middle of life, thinks of marrying a third time. He is deeply in love with a young woman. Before proposing to her, however, honesty demands that he confess he is suffering from a certain ailment. I wish they would stop jolting my chair every time they run by. ‘Ailment' is perhaps too strong a term. Let's put it this way: there are certain flaws, he says, in the mechanism of his mind. The one he told me about is harmless in itself but very distressing and unusual, and may be a symptom of some imminent, more serious disorder. So here goes. When this person is lying in bed and imagining a familiar stretch of street, say, the right-hand sidewalk from the Library to, say--"
"The Liquor Store," put in King, a relentless wag.
"All right, Recht's Liquor Store. It is about three hundred yards away--"
I was again interrupted, this time by Louise (whom, in fact, I was solely addressing). She turned to Audace and informed him that she could never visualize any distance in yards unless she could divide it by the length of a bed or a balcony.
"Romantic," said Mrs. King. "Go on, Vadim." (4.4)
Mayda (variously known as Maida, Mayd, Mayde, Brazir, Mam, Asmaida, Asmayda, Bentusle, Las Maidas Bolunda and Vlaanderen) is a non-existent island in the North Atlantic that has been shown on several published maps at various points in history. It was most often represented as being crescent-shaped and its position has varied widely over time. Early maps drew the island west of Brittany and southwest of Ireland, but it later moved towards the Americas (Newfoundland, Bermuda, West Indies).
The Maybe of Mayda. No Longer on the Map (1972), by Raymond Ramsay, brings to mind Rabelais’s “great Maybe” mentioned by John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) at the beginning of Canto Three of his poem:
L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato.
I.P.H., a lay
Institute (I) of Preparation (P)
For the Hereafter (H), or If, as we
Called it--big if!--engaged me for one term
To speak on death ("to lecture on the Worm,"
Wrote President McAber).
You and I,
And she, then a mere tot, moved from New Wye
To Yewshade, in another, higher state. (ll. 500-509)
Vadim (who is going to propose to Louise Adamson and calls himself “Mr. Twidower”) has lost two wives: Iris Black and Annette Blagovo (Bel's mother). Describing IPH, Shade mentions a widower who has been married twice:
We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives; both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another. Time means growth,
And growth means nothing in Elysian life.
Fondling a changeless child, the flax-haired wife
Grieves on the brink of a remembered pond
Full of a dreamy sky. And, also blond,
But with a touch of tawny in the shade,
Feet up, knees clasped, on a stone balustrade
The other sits and raises a moist gaze
Toward the blue impenetrable haze.
How to begin? Which first to kiss? What toy
To give the babe? Does that small solemn boy
Know of the head-on crash which on a wild
March night killed both the mother and the child?
And she, the second love, with instep bare
In ballerina black, why does she wear
The earrings from the other's jewels case?
And why does she avert her fierce young face? (ll. 569-588)
In their old age (in fact, in the last day of their long lives) Van and Ada (the two main characters in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) translate this passage into Russian:
She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed — a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern. They had spent most of the morning reworking their translation of a passage (lines 569-572) in John Shade’s famous poem:
...Sovetï mï dayom
Kak bït’ vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;
On ih vstrechaet — lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,
Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke...
(...We give advice
To widower. He has been married twice:
He meets his wives, both loved, both loving, both
Jealous of one another...)
Van pointed out that here was the rub — one is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy is handicapped — to a quite hopeless extent — by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends along — or your enemies for that matter — to the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvelous mortality. Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.
‘Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right — I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!’ (5.6)
“The one sitting feet up, in ballerina black,” is Van’s and Ada’s half-sister Lucette who committed suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic. Like Iris Black and Annette Blagovo, Louise Adamson (who longed to be a ballerina and was Blanc’s little favorite) seems to be Vadim’s half-sister (Vadim and his first three wives are the children of Count Starov, a retired diplomat who spends the last years of his life in exile).
Describing Lucette’s suicide, Van mentions Oceanus Nox:
The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes — telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression — that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. (3.5)
Van spells out ‘Nox’ for the benefit of his typist, Violet Knox, a young English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump whom Ada calls Fialochka (little Violet):
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with us in 1957. She was (and still is — ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump [.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has been responsible for typing out this memoir — the solace of what are, no doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother’s children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her [generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her ‘Fialochka’ and allowed herself the luxury of admiring ‘little Violet’ ‘s cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner, lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4)
Van never realizes that Mr. Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary and the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox seem to be the grandchildren of Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband) and Ada.
Mayda is an Arabian name that means “Beautiful.” In the epilogue of Ada Van mentions the Film Festival in Sindbad:
How horribly and gratuitously it might hurt her, he foreglimpsed one day in 1926 or ‘27 when he caught the look of proud despair she cast on nothing in particular before walking away to the car that was to take her on a trip in which, at the last moment, he had declined to join her. He had declined — and had simulated the grimace and the limp of podagra — because he had just realized, what she, too, had realized — that the beautiful native girl smoking on the back porch would offer her mangoes to Master as soon as Master’s housekeeper had left for the Film Festival in Sindbad. The chauffeur had already opened the car door, when, with a great bellow, Van overtook Ada and they rode off together, tearful, voluble, joking about his foolishness. (5.3)
Sinbad the Sailor is a character in the Arabic collection of fairy tales A Thousand and One Nights. Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla, Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade's almost finished poem needs but one line (Line 1000 identical to Line 1: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain"). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: "By its own double in the windowpane"). Describing his arrival in America, Vadim mentions an old Russian doctor who visited him in New York and compares this visit to a most artistic coda:
The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing, in a charming New York apartment (it was leant to Annette and me by a generous relative of mine and faced the sunset flaming beyond Central Park). The neuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid black headache that no pill could pierce. Annette rang up James Lodge, and he, out of the misdirected kindness of his heart, had an old little physician of Russian extraction examine me. The poor fellow drove me even crazier than I was by not only insisting on discussing my symptoms in an execrable version of the language I was trying to shed, but on translating into it various irrelevant terms used by the Viennese Quack and his apostles (simbolizirovanie, mortidnik). Yet his visit, I must confess, strikes me in retrospect as a most artistic coda. (2.10)
Dvoynik ("The Double") is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Alexander Blok (a symbolist poet). Vadim’s last Russian novel Podarok otchizne (The Dare, 1950) includes a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoevski. Blok is the author of Nochnaya Fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906), a poem in blank verse subtitled Son ("A Dream"). At the beginning of Blok’s drama Roza i krest (“The Rose and the Cross,” 1912) Bertrand mentions yabloni staryi stvol (the old trunk of an apple-tree):
Яблони старый ствол,
Расшатанный бурей февральской!
Жадно ждёшь ты весны...
Тёплый ветер дохнёт, и нежной травою
Зазеленеет замковый вал...
Чем ты, старый, ответишь тогда
Ручьям и птицам певучим?
Лишь две-три бледно-розовых ветви протянешь
В воздух, омытый дождями,
Чёрный, бурей измученный ствол!
Vadim Vadimovich’s princely surname (that he forgets after a stroke, but then remembers again) seems to be Yablonski. The characters of Blok’s play Balaganchik (“The Puppet Show,” 1906) include Arlekin (the Harlequin).
On the other hand, May being a spring month, Vadim's Exile from Mayda seems to correspond to the title story of VN's collection Vesna v Fial'te i drugie rasskazy ("Spring in Fialta and Other Short Stories," 1938). Describing the first day of his journey with Lucette on Admiral Tobakoff, Van mentions spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island:
Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her [Lucette's] limbs, which looked lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom as the breeze dried her skin. (3.5)
The name Fialta blends fialka (violet) with Yalta (a lovely Crimean town):
Я этот городок люблю; потому ли, что во впадине его названия мне слышится сахаристо-сырой запах мелкого, тёмного, самого мятого из цветов, и не в тон, хотя внятное, звучание Ялты; потому ли, что его сонная весна особенно умащивает душу, не знаю; но как я был рад очнуться в нём, и вот шлёпать вверх, навстречу ручьям, без шапки, с мокрой головой, в макинтоше, надетом прямо на рубашку!
I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola; and also because there is something in the very somnolence of its
humid Lent that especially anoints one's soul. So I was happy to be there again, to trudge uphill in inverse direction to the rivulet of the gutter, hatless, my head wet, my skin already suffused with warmth although I wore only a light mackintosh over my shirt.
According to Louise Adamson, she could never visualize any distance in yards unless she could divide it by the length of a bed or a balcony. Describing his meeting with Nina in Paris, Vasiliy (in the English version of "Spring in Fialta," Victor) mentions a balcony:
А еще через год или два был я по делу в Париже, и у поворота лестницы в гостинице, где я ловил нужного мне актера, мы опять без сговору столкнулись с ней: собираясь вниз, держала ключ в руке, "Фердинанд фехтовать уехал",-- сказала она непринужденно, и посмотрев на нижнюю часть моего лица, и про себя что-то быстро обдумав (любовная сообразительность была у нее бесподобна), повернулась и меня повела, виляя на тонких лодыжках, по голубому бобрику, и на стуле у двери ее номера стоял вынесенный поднос с остатками первого завтрака, следами меда на ноже и множеством крошек на сером фарфоре посуды, но комната была уже убрана, и от нашего сквозняка всосался и застрял волан белыми далиями вышитой кисеи промеж оживших половинок дверного окна, выходившего на узенький чугунный балкон, и лишь тогда, когда мы заперлись, они с блаженным выдохом отпустили складку занавески; а немного позже я шагнул на этот балкончик, и пахнуло с утренней пустой и пасмурной улицы сиреневатой сизостью, бензином, осенним кленовым листом: да, все случилось так просто, те несколько восклицаний и смешков, которые были нами произведены, так не соответствовали романтической терминологии, что уже негде было разложить парчовое слово: измена; и так как я еще не умел чувствовать ту болезненную жалость, которая отравляла мои встречи с Ниной, я был, вероятно, совершенно весел (уж она-то наверное была весела), когда мы оттуда поехали в какое-то бюро разыскивать какой-то ею утерянный чемодан, а потом отправились в кафе, где был со своей тогдашней свитой ее муж.
And another year or two later, I was in Paris on business; and one morning on the landing of a hotel, where I had been looking up a film actor fellow, there she was again, clad in a gray tailored suit, waiting for the elevator to take her down, a key dangling from her fingers. “Ferdinand has gone fencing,” she said conversationally; her eyes rested on the lower part of my face as if she were lip reading, and after a moment of reflection (her amatory comprehension was matchless), she turned and rapidly swaying on slender ankles led me along the sea-blue carpeted passage. A chair at the door of her room supported a tray with the remains of breakfast—a honey-stained knife, crumbs on the gray porcelain; but the room had already been done, and because of our sudden draft a wave of muslin embroidered with white dahlias got sucked in, with a shudder and knock, between the responsive halves of the French window, and only when the door had been locked did they let go that curtain with something like a blissful sigh; and a little later I stepped out on the diminutive cast-iron balcony beyond to inhale a combined smell of dry maple leaves and gasoline—the dregs of the hazy blue morning street; and as I did not yet realize the presence of that growing morbid pathos which was to embitter so my subsequent meetings with Nina, I was probably quite as collected and carefree as she was, when from the hotel I accompanied her to some office or other to trace a suitcase she had lost, and thence to the café where her husband was holding session with his court of the moment.