In her last note poor mad Aqua (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina) mentioned Nurse Joan the Terrible and Ruby Black (Van’s black wet-nurse who also went mad):
Aujourd'hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several 'patients,' in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. The hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache. Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but ‘a tit of it’ as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. I, poor Princesse Lointaine, très lointaine by now, do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall. So adieu, my dear, dear son, and farewell, poor Demon, I do not know the date or the season, but it is a reasonably, and no doubt seasonably, fair day, with a lot of cute little ants queuing to get at my pretty pills.
[Signed] My sister’s sister who teper’
iz ada (‘now is out of hell’) (1.3)
The nurse's name hints at the tsar Ivan the Terrible. Nyan’ka Ivana Groznogo (“The Nanny of Ivan the Terrible,” 1880) is a painting by Konstantin Makovski, the author of Smert’ Ivana Groznogo (“The Death of Ivan the Terrible,” 1888). At the beginning of Book Ten of Istoriya Gosudarstva Rossiyskogo (“The History of the Russian State,” Chapter One: “The Reign of Fyodor Ioannovich”) Karamzin quotes the words of a Roman Historian (Tacitus? Suetonius?) who said that the first days after the death of a tyrant are the happiest for a nation:
Первые дни по смерти тирана (говорит Римский Историк) бывают счастливейшими для народов: ибо конец страдания есть живейшее из человеческих удовольствий.
Describing his journeys with his father (Demon Veen, Aqua’s husband) and his young Russian tutor, Van mentions a mountain slope above Leman Lake where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed:
After that, they tried to settle whether their ways had merged somewhere or run closely parallel for a bit that year in Europe. In the spring of 1881, Van, aged eleven, spent a few months with his Russian tutor and English valet at his grandmother’s villa near Nice, while Demon was having a much better time in Cuba than Dan was at Mocuba. In June, Van was taken to Florence, and Rome, and Capri, where his father turned up for a brief spell. They parted again, Demon sailing back to America, and Van with his tutor going first to Gardone on Lake Garda, where Aksakov reverently pointed out Goethe’s and d’Annunzio’s marble footprints, and then staying for a while in autumn at a hotel on a mountain slope above Leman Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed). Did Marina suspect that Van was somewhere in the same general area as she throughout 1881? Probably no. Both girls had scarlet fever in Cannes, while Marina was in Spain with her Grandee. After carefully matching memories, Van and Ada concluded that it was not impossible that somewhere along a winding Riviera road they passed each other in rented victorias that both remembered were green, with green-harnessed horses, or perhaps in two different trains, going perhaps the same way, the little girl at the window of one sleeping car looking at the brown sleeper of a parallel train which gradually diverged toward sparkling stretches of sea that the little boy could see on the other side of the tracks. The contingency was too mild to be romantic, nor did the possibility of their having walked or run past each other on the quay of a Swiss town afford any concrete thrill. But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years — problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space — and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. (1.24)
Describing Aqua’s torments and death, Van links his mother’s twin sister to Dolly Oblonski, Anna’s sister-in-law in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1877), and to Anna herself:
Then the anguish increased to unendurable massivity and nightmare dimensions, making her scream and vomit. She wanted (and was allowed, bless the hospital barber, Bob Bean) to have her dark curls shaved to an aquamarine prickle, because they grew into her porous skull and curled inside. Jigsaw pieces of sky or wall came apart, no matter how delicately put together, but a careless jolt or a nurse’s elbow can disturb so easily those lightweight fragments which became incomprehensible blancs of anonymous objects, or the blank backs of ‘Scrabble’ counters, which she could not turn over sunny side up, because her hands had been tied by a male nurse with Demon’s black eyes. But presently panic and pain, like a pair of children in a boisterous game, emitted one last shriek of laughter and ran away to manipulate each other behind a bush as in Count Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, a novel, and again, for a while, a little while, all was quiet in the house, and their mother had the same first name as hers had. (1.3)
In less than a week Aqua had accumulated more than two hundred tablets of different potency. She knew most of them — the jejune sedatives, and the ones that knocked you out from eight p.m. till midnight, and several varieties of superior soporifics that left you with limpid limbs and a leaden head after eight hours of non-being, and a drug which was in itself delightful but a little lethal if combined with a draught of the cleansing fluid commercially known as Morona; and a plump purple pill reminding her, she had to laugh, of those with which the little gypsy enchantress in the Spanish tale (dear to Ladore schoolgirls) puts to sleep all the sportsmen and all their bloodhounds at the opening of the hunting season. Lest some busybody resurrect her in the middle of the float-away process, Aqua reckoned she must procure for herself a maximum period of undisturbed stupor elsewhere than in a glass house, and the carrying out of that second part of the project was simplified and encouraged by another agent or double of the Isère Professor, a Dr Sig Heiler whom everybody venerated as a great guy and near-genius in the usual sense of near-beer. Such patients who proved by certain twitchings of the eyelids and other semiprivate parts under the control of medical students that Sig (a slightly deformed but not unhandsome old boy) was in the process of being dreamt of as a ‘papa Fig,’ spanker of girl bottoms and spunky spittoon-user, were assumed to be on the way to haleness and permitted, upon awakening, to participate in normal outdoor activities such as picnics. Sly Aqua twitched, simulated a yawn, opened her light-blue eyes (with those startlingly contrasty jet-black pupils that Dolly, her mother, also had), put on yellow slacks and a black bolero, walked through a little pinewood, thumbed a ride with a Mexican truck, found a suitable gulch in the chaparral and there, after writing a short note, began placidly eating from her cupped palm the multicolored contents of her handbag, like any Russian country girl lakomyashchayasya yagodami (feasting on berries) that she had just picked in the woods. She smiled, dreamily enjoying the thought (rather ‘Kareninian’ in tone) that her extinction would affect people about ‘as deeply as the abrupt, mysterious, never explained demise of a comic strip in a Sunday paper one had been taking for years. It was her last smile. She was discovered much sooner, but had also died much faster than expected, and the observant Siggy, still in his baggy khaki shorts, reported that Sister Aqua (as for some reason they all called her) lay, as if buried prehistorically, in a fetus-in-utero position, a comment that seemed relevant to his students, as it may be to mine. (ibid.)
According to Van, Aqua’s real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. The phenomenon of Terra appeared on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century. The Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In his essay on Dostoevski in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers” Ayhenvald calls the author of Dvoynik (“The Double,” 1846) and Son smeshnogo cheloveka (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” 1877) Ivan Groznyi russkoy literatury (Ivan the Terrible of Russian Literature) and zhivoy chelovecheskiy anchar (the live human upas tree):
Мучитель и мученик, Иван Грозный русской литературы, он казнит нас лютой казнью своего слова и потом, как Иван Грозный, живой человеческий анчар, ропщет и молится, и зовет Христа, и Христос приходит к этому безумцу и мудрецу, к этому юродивому, и тогда он плачет кровавыми слезами и упоённо терзает себя своими веригами, своими каторжными цепями, которые наложили на него люди и которых он уже и сам не мог сбросить со своей измученной души.
In Pushkin's poem Anchar (“The Upas Tree,” 1828) chelovek sends chelovek with an imperious look towards the upas tree:
Но человека человек
Послал к анчару властным взглядом,
И тот послушно в путь потек
И к утру возвратился с ядом.
But man sent man with one proud look
towards the tree, and he was gone,
the humble one, and there he took
the poison and returned at dawn.
Pushkin's poem Nyane ("To my Nurse," 1826) is addressed to his nurse Arina Rodionovna, Pushkin’s poem K vel'mozhe ("To a Grandee," 1830) is addressed to Prince Nikolay Yusupov. In his "Memoirs" (1953) Prince Felix Yusupov (one of Rasputin’s murderers, a great-grandson of the addressee of Pushkin's epistle) points out that the Yusupovs' Moscow palace once belonged to Ivan the Terrible and mentions "the black ruby" that an extravagant lady from Los Angeles desired to see among the trinkets exhibited by Yusupov and his wife Irina (the niece of Nicholas II) in Elsie's shop in New York:
На мою выставку устремился весь Нью-Йорк. Элсин магазин вошёл в моду. Но и только. Люди приходили поболтать и поглазеть на сокровища, а вернее - на нас с Ириной. И разглядывали безделушки, и нас, и жалели нас, и от души пожимали нам руки, и уходили, ничего не купив. Одна растрёпанная экстравагантная дама пришла в магазин и потребовала показать ей the black ruby (чёрный рубин).Она, дескать, для того приехала из Лос-Анджелеса и не уедет, пока не увидит. Еле отделались мы от любознательной гостьи. (Book Two, chapter 6)
Yusupov’s “Memoirs” appeared in the year of Stalin’s death. On Antiterra Stalin is represented by Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel (Demon’s second in his sword duel with Baron d’Onsky, 1.2), and Khan Sosso, the ruler of the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate:
On Terra, Theresa had been a Roving Reporter for an American magazine, thus giving Van the opportunity to describe the sibling planet’s political aspect. This aspect gave him the least trouble, presenting as it did a mosaic of painstakingly collated notes from his own reports on the ‘transcendental delirium’ of his patients. Its acoustics were poor, proper names often came out garbled, a chaotic calendar messed up the order of events but, on the whole, the colored dots did form a geomantic picture of sorts. As earlier experimentators had conjectured, our annals lagged by about half a century behind Terra’s along the bridges of time, but overtook some of its underwater currents. At the moment of our sorry story, the king of Terra’s England, yet another George (there had been, apparently, at least half-a-dozen bearing that name before him) ruled, or had just ceased to rule, over an empire that was somewhat patchier (with alien blanks and blots between the British Islands and South Africa) than the solidly conglomerated one on our Antiterra. Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)
A fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, Athaulf the Future (a cross between Adolf Hitler and Athaulf, the king of the Visigoths from 411 to 415) brings to mind Sig Heiler. According to Van, he derived the anagram-looking name of the main character of his novel Letters from Terra from the name of Aqua's last doctor:
Poor Van! In his struggle to keep the writer of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality. This Theresa maddened with her messages a scientist on our easily maddened planet; his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua’s last doctor. When Leymanski’s obsession turned into love, and one’s sympathy got focused on his enchanting, melancholy, betrayed wife (née Antilia Glems), our author found himself confronted with the distressful task of now stamping out in Antilia, a born brunette, all traces of Ada, thus reducing yet another character to a dummy with bleached hair. (ibid.)
In the first poem of his cycle Ital’yanskie stikhi (“Italian Verses,” 1909), Ravenna, Alexander Blok (who in jest called himself "Alexander Klok") mentions Galla Placida, Athaulf’s wife who ruled the Western Roman Empire from 425 to 437 AD and who, like Dante, was buried in Ravenna:
Всё, что минутно, всё, что бренно,
Похоронила ты в веках.
Ты, как младенец, спишь, Равенна,
У сонной вечности в руках.
Рабы сквозь римские ворота
Уже не ввозят мозаик.
И догорает позолота
В стенах прохладных базилик.
От медленных лобзаний влаги
Нежнее грубый свод гробниц,
Где зеленеют саркофаги
Святых монахов и цариц.
Безмолвны гробовые залы,
Тенист и хладен их порог,
Чтоб черный взор блаженной Галлы,
Проснувшись, камня не прожёг.
Военной брани и обиды
Забыт и стёрт кровавый след,
Чтобы воскресший глас Плакиды
Не пел страстей протекших лет.
Далёко отступило море,
И розы оцепили вал,
Чтоб спящий в гробе Теодорих
О буре жизни не мечтал.
А виноградные пустыни,
Дома и люди - всё гроба.
Лишь медь торжественной латыни
Поёт на плитах, как труба.
Лишь в пристальном и тихом взоре
Равеннских девушек, порой,
Печаль о невозвратном море
Проходит робкой чередой.
Лишь по ночам, склонясь к долинам,
Ведя векам грядущим счёт,
Тень Данта с профилем орлиным
О Новой Жизни мне поёт.
All things ephemeral, fast-fading
In time's dark vaults, hid by you, lie.
A babe, you sleep, Ravenna, cradled
By slumberous eternity.
Through Rome's old gates the slaves no longer,
Bright slabs of marble bearing, pass.
The gilt looks charred, seems but to smoulder,
Not flame in the basilicas.
The moisture's indolent caresses
Have smoothed the stone of tombs where green
With age the coffins of the blessed,
Of holy monks stand and of queens.
The silent crypts, by all forsaken,
Cold shades invite that o'er them roam
So that the gaze of Galla, wakened,
Might not burn through the mass of stone.
The bloody trace of war's dark horrors
Has been forgot and wiped away
So that she might not sing the sorrows
And passions of a bygone day.
The sea's withdrawn, and o'er the ramparts
The roses climb and form a screen
So that Theodoric might never
Awake or of life's tempests dream.
A realm of death. Men, vineyards, houses
Are all as sepulchres. Alone
The brass of Latin, ageless, rousing,
Blares like a trumpet on the stones.
But in the gaze intent and peaceful
Of the Ravenna girls the sea
Is glimpsed at times, reminder wistful
Of something that no more will be.
And deep at night, the ages counting,
Those meant to come by fate's decree,
The eagle-profiled shade of Dante
Of Vita Nuova sings to me.
Vedya vekam gryadushchim schyot (counting the centuries to come), a line in the poem’s last stanza, brings to mind Ataulf Gryadushchiy (Athaulf the Future). Blok's poem Golos iz khora ("A Voice from the Choir," 1914) ends in the lines: O esli b znali, deti, vy, / Kholod i mrak gryadushchikh dney! ("If you only knew, children, / the cold and murk of the days to come!"). Describing the first day of his journey with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) on Admiral Tobakoff, Van mentions konskie deti, children of the Sun Horse:
With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she [Lucette] evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse. (3.5)
Konskiy means "of a horse." In her memoir essay Dom u starogo Pimena ("The House at Old Pimen," 1934) Marina Tsvetaev says that there is something umilitelno-konskoe (touchingly horsey) about the historian Ilovayski's wedlock with his second wife (A. A. Kovrayski, 1852-1929):
Ест мало - приучена. (Вот только - овса нет! Точно они с Д. И. только для того и соединили свои жизни, чтобы вместе есть овёс. Есть в этой ассоциации что-то умилительно-конское...)
The characters in Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov (1825) include the chronicler Pimen. The tsar Boris Godunov ruled after Fyodor Ioannovich (a meek son of Ivan the Terrible). On Van's seventh birthday Demon in an amateur parody made himself up as Boris Godunov:
Demon spoke on: ‘I cannot disinherit you: Aqua left you enough "ridge" and real estate to annul the conventional punishment. And I cannot denounce you to the authorities without involving my daughter, whom I mean to protect at all cost. But I can do the next proper thing, I can curse you, I can make this our last, our last —’
Van, whose finger had been gliding endlessly to and fro along the mute but soothingly smooth edge of the mahogany desk, now heard with horror the sob that shook Demon’s entire frame, and then saw a deluge of tears flowing down those hollow tanned cheeks. In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity. Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? The funest gamester… the pale fatal girl, in another well-known melodrama…. In this one. Van gave him a clean handkerchief to replace the soiled rag. His own marble calm did not surprise Van. The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion. (2.11)