The characters in VN’s novel Bend Sinister (1947) include Paduk (nicknamed "The Toad"), the dictator of Padukgrad, former schoolmate of Krug and founder of Ekwilism. The name Paduk seems to hint at Glitay abozh pauk, as in Chekhov’s story Chelovek v futlyare (“The Man in a Case,” 1898) Kovalenko calls Belikov (the man in a case):
Он даже название дал Беликову «глитай абож паук». И, понятно, мы избегали говорить с ним о том, что сестра его Варенька собирается за «абож паука». И когда однажды директорша намекнула ему, что хорошо бы пристроить его сестру за такого солидного, всеми уважаемого человека, как Беликов, то он нахмурился и проворчал:
— Не мое это дело. Пускай она выходит хоть за гадюку, а я не люблю в чужие дела мешаться.
"He even gave Belikov a nickname, 'The Spider.' And it will readily be understood that we avoided talking to him of his sister's being about to marry 'The Spider.'
"And on one occasion, when the headmaster's wife hinted to him what a good thing it would be to secure his sister's future with such a reliable, universally respected man as Belikov, he frowned and muttered:
" 'It's not my business; let her marry a reptile if she likes. I don't like meddling in other people's affairs.'
In a letter of Feb. 25, 1899, to Olga Vasiliev Chekhov explains that Glitay abozh pauk is the title of an Ukrainian play and means “Spider, or Spider” (glitay means in Ukrainian what pauk does in Russian: “spider”):
Многоуважаемая Ольга Родионовна, «Глитай, абож паук» — это название одной малороссийской пьесы. Глитай значит паук, а вся фраза значит «паук, или паук», т. е. объясняется, что значит глитай. Это непереводимо на иностранный язык.
Abozh (abo zh, “anyway”) is almost zhaba (toad) and zhopa (ass) in reverse. Paduk does not resemble a toad, but looks as if he had undergone one of those facial operations when the skin is borrowed from some other part of the body:
It is not known how the nickname “toad” originated, for there was nothing in his face suggestive of that animal. It was an odd face with all its features in their proper position but somehow diffuse and abnormal as if the little fellow had undergone one of those facial operations when the skin is borrowed from some other part of the body. The impression was due perhaps to the motionless cast of his features: he never laughed and when he happened to sneeze he had a way of doing it with a minimum of contraction and no sound at all. His small dead-white nose and neat blue galatea made him resemble en laid the wax schoolboys in the shop windows of tailors, but his hips were much plumper than those of mannikins, and he walked with a slight waddle and wore sandals which used to provoke a good deal of caustic comment. Once, when he was being badly mauled it was discovered that he had right against the skin a green undershirt, green as a billiard cloth and apparently made of the same texture. His hands were permanently clammy. He spoke in a curiously smooth nasal voice with a strong north-western accent and had an irritating trick of calling his classmates by anagrams of their names—Adam Krug for instance was Gumakrad or Dramaguk; this he did not from any sense of humour, which he totally lacked, but because, as he carefully explained to new boys, one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed. (Chapter 5)
Belikov’s favorite word, anthropos (“man” in Greek), brings to mind Paduk’s Party of the Average Man:
When young Paduk instituted the Party of the Average Man as based on Skotoma’s book, the metamorphosis of Ekwilism had only just started and the frustrated boys who conducted those dismal meetings in a malodorous classroom were still groping for the means to make the contents of the human vessel conform to an average scale. That year a corrupt politician had been assassinated by a college student called Emrald (not Amrald, as his name is usually misspelled abroad), who at the trial came out quite irrelevantly with a poem of his own composition, a piece of jagged neurotic rhetorism extolling Skotoma because he
… taught us to worship the Common Man,
and showed us that no tree
can exist without a forest,
no musician without an orchestra,
no wave without an ocean,
and no life without death.
Poor Skotoma, of course, had done nothing of the kind, but this poem was now sung to the tune of “Ustra mara, donjet domra” (a popular ditty lauding the intoxicating properties of gooseberry wine) by Paduk and his friends and later became an Ekwilist classic. In those days a blatantly bourgeois paper happened to be publishing a cartoon sequence depicting the home life of Mr. and Mrs. Etermon (Everyman). With conventional humour and sympathy bordering upon the obscene, Mr. Etermon and the little woman were followed from parlour to kitchen and from garden to garret through all the mentionable stages of their daily existence, which, despite the presence of cosy armchairs and all sorts of electric thingumbobs and one thing-in-itself (a car), did not differ essentially from the life of a Neanderthal couple. Mr. Etermon taking a z-nap on the divan or stealing into the kitchen to sniff with erotic avidity the sizzling stew, represented quite unconsciously a living refutation of individual immortality, since his whole habitus was a dead-end with nothing in it capable or worthy of transcending the mortal condition. Neither, however, could one imagine Etermon actually dying, not only because the rules of gentle humour forbade his being shown on his deathbed, but also because not a single detail of the setting (not even his playing poker with life-insurance salesmen) suggested the fact of absolutely inevitable death; so that in one sense Etermon, while personifying a refutation of immortality, was immortal himself, and in another sense he could not hope to enjoy any kind of afterlife simply because he was denied the elementary comfort of a death chamber in his otherwise well planned home. Within the limits of this airtight existence, the young couple were as happy as any young couple ought to be: a visit to the movies, a raise in one’s salary, a yum-yum something for dinner—life was positively crammed with these and similar delights, whereas the worst that might befall one was hitting a traditional thumb with a traditional hammer or mistaking the date of the boss’s birthday. Poster pictures of Etermon showed him smoking the brand that millions smoke, and millions could not be wrong, and every Etermon was supposed to imagine every other Etermon, up to the President of the State, who had just replaced dull, stolid Theodore the Last, returning at the close of the office day to the (rich) culinary and (meagre) connubial felicities of the Etermon home. Skotoma, quite apart from the senile divagations of his Ekwilism (and even they implied some kind of drastic change, some kind of dissatisfaction with given conditions), had viewed what he called “the petty bourgeois” with the wrath of orthodox anarchism and would have been appalled, just as Emrald the terrorist would have been, to know that a group of youths was worshiping Ekwilism in the guise of a cartoon-engendered Mr. Etermon. Skotoma, however, had been the victim of a common delusion: his “petty bourgeois” existed only as a printed label on an empty filing box (the iconoclast, like most of his kind, relied entirely upon generalizations and was quite incapable of noting, say, the wallpaper in a chance room or talking intelligently to a child). Actually, with a little perspicacity, one might learn many curious things about Etermons, things that made them so different from one another that Etermon, except as a cartoonist’s transient character, could not be said to exist. All of a sudden transfigured, his eyes narrowly glowing, Mr. Etermon (whom we have just seen mildly pottering about the house) locks himself up in the bathroom with his prize—a prize we prefer not to name; another Etermon, straight from his shabby office, slips into the silence of a great library to gloat over certain old maps of which he will not speak at home; a third Etermon with a fourth Etermon’s wife anxiously discusses the future of a child she has managed to bear him in secret during the time her husband (now back in his armchair at home) was fighting in a remote jungle land where, in his turn, he has seen moths the size of a spread fan, and trees at night pulsating rhythmically with countless fireflies. No, the average vessels are not as simple as they appear: it is a conjuror’s set and nobody, not even the enchanter himself, really knows what and how much they hold. (ibid.)
The intoxicating properties of gooseberry wine remind one of Chekhov’s story Kryzhovnik (“The Gooseberries,” 1898). In a letter of Nov. 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov modestly compares his story “Ward Six” (1892) to a lemonade and complains of the lack of alcohol in the works of modern artists that would intoxicate the reader/viewer:
Вас нетрудно понять, и Вы напрасно браните себя за то, что неясно выражаетесь. Вы горький пьяница, а я угостил Вас сладким лимонадом, и Вы, отдавая должное лимонаду, справедливо замечаете, что в нём нет спирта. В наших произведениях нет именно алкоголя, который бы пьянил и порабощал, и это Вы хорошо даете понять. Отчего нет? Оставляя в стороне "Палату № 6" и меня самого, будем говорить вообще, ибо это интересней. Будем говорить об общих причинах, коли Вам не скучно, и давайте захватим целую эпоху. Скажите по совести, кто из моих сверстников, т. е. людей в возрасте 30 — 45 лет дал миру хотя одну каплю алкоголя? Разве Короленко, Надсон и все нынешние драматурги не лимонад? Разве картины Репина или Шишкина кружили Вам голову? Мило, талантливо, Вы восхищаетесь и в то же время никак не можете забыть, что Вам хочется курить. Наука и техника переживают теперь великое время, для нашего же брата это время рыхлое, кислое, скучное, сами мы кислы и скучны, умеем рождать только гуттаперчевых мальчиков, и не видит этого только Стасов, которому природа дала редкую способность пьянеть даже от помоев. Причины тут не в глупости нашей, не в бездарности и не в наглости, как думает Буренин, а в болезни, которая для художника хуже сифилиса и полового истощения. У нас нет "чего-то", это справедливо, и это значит, что поднимите подол нашей музе, и Вы увидите там плоское место. Вспомните, что писатели, которых мы называем вечными или просто хорошими и которые пьянят нас, имеют один общий и весьма важный признак: они куда-то идут и Вас зовут туда же, и Вы чувствуете не умом, а всем своим существом, что у них есть какая-то цель, как у тени отца Гамлета, которая недаром приходила и тревожила воображение. У одних, смотря по калибру, цели ближайшие - крепостное право, освобождение родины, политика, красота или просто водка, как у Дениса Давыдова, у других цели отдаленные - бог, загробная жизнь, счастье человечества и т. п. Лучшие из них реальны и пишут жизнь такою, какая она есть, но оттого, что каждая строчка пропитана, как соком, сознанием цели, Вы, кроме жизни, какая есть, чувствуете еще ту жизнь, какая должна быть, и это пленяет Вас.
It is easy to understand you, and there is no need for you to abuse yourself for obscurity of expression. You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade, and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is lacking in our productions — the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state that very well. Why not? Putting aside “Ward No. 6” and myself, let us discuss the matter in general, for that is more interesting. Let ms discuss the general causes, if that won’t bore you, and let us include the whole age. Tell me honestly, who of my contemporaries — that is, men between thirty and forty-five — have given the world one single drop of alcohol? Are not Korolenko, Nadson, and all the playwrights of to-day, lemonade? Have Repin’s or Shishkin’s pictures turned your head? Charming, talented, you are enthusiastic; but at the same time you can’t forget that you want to smoke. Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, and dull time. We are stale and dull ourselves, we can only beget gutta-percha boys, and the only person who does not see that is Stasov, to whom nature has given a rare faculty for getting drunk on slops. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, as Burenin imagines, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack “something,” that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects — the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects — God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.
A thinker who has laid the philosophical foundations of the Party of the Average Man, Skotoma ("the enfant terrible of the nineteen sixties") brings to mind mertsayushchaya skotoma (scintillating scotoma, a common visual aura that was first described by 19th-century physician Hubert Airy) mentioned by Chekhov in a letter of Feb. 25, 1895, to Suvorin:
У меня стали часто повторяться головные боли с мерцанием в глазах. Болезнь эта называется так: мерцающая скотома. Не скотина, а скотома. И теперь вот, то лежу, то брожу и не знаю, что делать со своей особой. Лечиться же нечем. По-прежнему всюду преследует меня звон и по-прежнему мне никто никогда не дарит ни подушек, ни брелок, ни галстуков. Вероятно, и не женат я до сих пор только по той причине, что жены имеют привычку дарить мужьям туфли. Но жениться я не прочь, хотя бы на рябой вдове. Становится скучно.
Chekhov asks Suvorin not to confuse skotoma with skotina (brute). In a letter of March 11, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov mentions Pisarev (a radical critic of the 1860s), criticizes his attitude to Tatiana's letter to Onegin and uses the word oskotinit'sya (to become a brute):
Прочел опять критику Писарева на Пушкина. Ужасно наивно. Человек развенчивает Онегина и Татьяну, а Пушкин остается целехонек. Писарев дедушка и папенька всех нынешних критиков, в том числе и Буренина. Та же мелочность в развенчивании, то же холодное и себялюбивое остроумие и та же грубость и неделикатность по отношению к людям. Оскотиниться можно не от идей Писарева, которых нет, а от его грубого тона. Отношение к Татьяне, в частности к ее милому письму, которое я люблю нежно, кажется мне просто омерзительным. Воняет от критики назойливым, придирчивым прокурором.
I have read again Pisarev’s “Criticism of Pushkin.” Awfully naive. The man pulls Onegin and Tatiana down from their pedestals, but Pushkin remains unhurt. Pisarev is the grandfather and father of all the critics of to-day, including Burenin—the same pettiness in disparagement, the same cold and conceited wit, and the same coarseness and indelicacy in their attitude to people. It is not Pisarev's ideas that are brutalizing, for he has none, but his coarse tone. His attitude to Tatiana, especially to her charming letter, which I love tenderly, seems to me simply abominable. His criticism has the foul aroma of an insolent captious procurator.
Scotoma comes from scotos (Gr., darkness). As to skotina, it brings to mind Skotoprigonievsk (the setting of Dostoevski's "Brothers Karamazov," 1880), Scotty (Marina's impressario in Ada) and Scoto-Scandinavia, a country mentioned by Van Veen in VN’s novel Ada (1969):
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)
When Van revisits Ardis in 1888, Ada calls him “sinister insister” and Van mentions “your Chekhov:”
What had she actually done with the poor worms, after Krolik’s untimely end?
‘Oh, set them free’ (big vague gesture), ‘turned them out, put them back onto suitable plants, buried them in the pupal state, told them to run along, while the birds were not looking — or alas, feigning not to be looking.
“Well, to mop up that parable, because you have the knack of interrupting and diverting my thoughts, I’m in a sense also torn between three private tortures, the main torture being ambition, of course. I know I shall never be a biologist, my passion for creeping creatures is great, but not all-consuming. I know I shall always adore orchids and mushrooms and violets, and you will still see me going out alone, to wander alone in the woods and return alone with a little lone lily; but flowers, no matter how irresistible, must be given up, too, as soon as I have the strength. Remains the great ambition and the greatest terror: the dream of the bluest, remotest, hardest dramatic climbs—probably ending as one of a hundred old spider spinsters teaching drama students, knowing, that, as you insist, sinister insister, we can’t marry, and having always before me the awful example of pathetic, second-rate, brave Marina.”
“Well, that bit about spinsters is rot,” said Van, “we’ll pull it off somehow, we’ll become more and more distant relations in artistically forged papers and finally dwindle to mere namesakes, or at the worst we shall live quietly, you as my housekeeper, I as your epileptic, and then, as in your Chekhov, ‘we shall see the whole sky swarm with diamonds.’ ”
‘Did you find them all, Uncle Van?’ she inquired, sighing, laying her dolent head on his shoulder. She had told him everything.
‘More or less,’ he replied, not realizing she had. ‘Anyway, I made the best study of the dustiest floor ever accomplished by a romantic character. One bright little bugger rolled under the bed where there grows a virgin forest of fluff and fungi. I’ll have them reassembled in Ladore when I motor there one of these days. I have lots of things to buy — a gorgeous bathrobe in honor of your new swimming pool, a cream called Chrysanthemum, a brace of dueling pistols, a folding beach mattress, preferably black — to bring you out not on the beach but on that bench, and on our isle de Ladore.’ (1.31)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Uncle Van: allusion to a line in Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya: We shall see the sky swarming with diamonds.
The action in Ada takes place on Earth’s twin planet, Demonia or Antiterra. VN gives his reader a whole world. In Chekhov’s story “The Gooseberries” Ivan Ivanovich says that a man needs not six feet of land, not a farm, but ves' zemnoy shar (the whole globe):
Принято говорить, что человеку нужно только три аршина земли. Но ведь три аршина нужны трупу, а не человеку. И говорят также теперь, что если наша интеллигенция имеет тяготение к земле и стремится в усадьбы, то это хорошо. Но ведь эти усадьбы те же три аршина земли. Уходить из города, от борьбы, от житейского шума, уходить и прятаться у себя в усадьбе — это не жизнь, это эгоизм, лень, это своего рода монашество, но монашество без подвига. Человеку нужно не три аршина земли, не усадьба, а весь земной шар, вся природа, где на просторе он мог бы проявить все свойства и особенности for своего свободного духа.
It's the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm, it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm -- it's not life, it's egoism, laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A ms an does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit.
Ardis is Greek for "arrowhead." Paduk brings to mind Padu li ya, streloy pronzyonnyi (Whether I fall, struck by an arrow), a line in Lenski's last poem in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Six: XXI: 9-14):
Паду ли я, стрелой пронзенный,
Иль мимо пролетит она,
Всё благо: бдения и сна
Приходит час определенный;
Благословен и день забот,
Благословен и тьмы приход!
Whether I fall, or death wings by,
All is well: our moments fly,
Sleep and waking have their hour,
Blessed the day of toil and care,
Blessed the tomb’s darkness there.
Like Pushkin’s Lenski, Cincinnatus C. (the main character in VN's novel "Invitation to a Beheading," 1935) writes obscurely and limply:
Всё-таки боюсь! Так просто не отпишешься. Да и нехорошо, что мою мысль всё время засасывает дыра в будущем, - хочу я о другом, хочу другое пояснить... но пишу я темно и вяло, как у Пушкина поэтический дуэлянт.
Still I am afraid! One cannot write it off so easily. Neither is it good that my thoughts keep getting sucked into the cavity of the future — I want to think about something else, clarify other things . . . but I write obscurely and limply, like Pushkin’s lyrical duelist. (Chapter Eight)
In Cincinnatus's cell in the fortress there is pauk (the spider), an official friend of the jailed. The jailer Rodion who feeds the spider brings to mind Arina Rodionovna (Pushkin's nurse) and Olga Rodionovna Vasiliev, Chekhov's translator who asked the writer about Glitay abozh pauk. Krug's wife Olga (who dies because of an unsuccessful surgery right before the novel begins) is a namesake of Chekhov's wife Olga Knipper (a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater). As to the name Krug, it seems to hint at kogda by zhizn' domashnim krugom (if life by the domestic circle), a phrase used by Onegin as he speaks to Tatiana (Olga Larin's elder sister):
Когда бы жизнь домашним кругом
Я ограничить захотел;
Когда б мне быть отцом, супругом
Приятный жребий повелел;
Когда б семейственной картиной
Пленился я хоть миг единый, —
То верно б, кроме вас одной,
Невесты не искал иной.
Скажу без блесток мадригальных:
Нашед мой прежний идеал,
Я верно б вас одну избрал
В подруги дней моих печальных,
Всего прекрасного в залог,
И был бы счастлив… сколько мог!
“If I by the domestic circle
had wanted to bound life;
if to be father, husband,
a pleasant lot had ordered me;
if with the familistic picture
I were but for one moment captivated;
then, doubtlessly, save you alone
no other bride I'd seek.
I'll say without madrigal spangles:
my past ideal having found,
I'd doubtlessly have chosen you alone
for mate of my sad days, in gage
of all that's beautiful, and would have been
happy — in so far as I could! (EO, Four: XIII)
Adam Krug has the same first name as Adam Smith, Onegin's favorite author:
Высокой страсти не имея
Для звуков жизни не щадить,
Не мог он ямба от хорея,
Как мы ни бились, отличить.
Бранил Гомера, Феокрита;
Зато читал Адама Смита
И был глубокий эконом,
То есть умел судить о том,
Как государство богатеет,
И чем живёт, и почему
Не нужно золота ему,
Когда простой продукт имеет.
Отец понять его не мог
И земли отдавал в залог.
Lacking the lofty passion not to spare
life for the sake of sounds,
an iamb from a trochee —
no matter how we strove — he could not tell apart.
Theocritus and Homer he disparaged,
but read, in compensation, Adam Smith,
and was a deep economist:
that is, he could assess the way
a state grows rich,
what it subsists upon, and why
it needs not gold
when it has got the simple product.
His father could not understand him,
and mortgaged his lands. (One: VII)
I notice that in Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (a novel alluded to by Pushkin in his notes to EO) the term bend-sinister is mentioned several times:
We'll go in the coach, said my father—Prithee, have the arms been altered, Obadiah?—It would have made my story much better to have begun with telling you, that at the time my mother's arms were added to the Shandy's, when the coach was re-painted upon my father's marriage, it had so fallen out that the coach-painter, whether by performing all his works with the left hand, like Turpilius the Roman, or Hans Holbein of Basil—or whether 'twas more from the blunder of his head than hand—or whether, lastly, it was from the sinister turn which every thing relating to our family was apt to take—it so fell out, however, to our reproach, that instead of the bend-dexter, which since Harry the Eighth's reign was honestly our due—a bend-sinister, by some of these fatalities, had been drawn quite across the field of the Shandy arms. 'Tis scarce credible that the mind of so wise a man as my father was, could be so much incommoded with so small a matter. The word coach—let it be whose it would—or coach-man, or coach-horse, or coach-hire, could never be named in the family, but he constantly complained of carrying this vile mark of illegitimacy upon the door of his own; he never once was able to step into the coach, or out of it, without turning round to take a view of the arms, and making a vow at the same time, that it was the last time he would ever set his foot in it again, till the bend-sinister was taken out—but like the affair of the hinge, it was one of the many things which the Destinies had set down in their books ever to be grumbled at (and in wiser families than ours)—but never to be mended.
—Has the bend-sinister been brush'd out, I say? said my father.—There has been nothing brush'd out, Sir, answered Obadiah, but the lining. We'll go o'horseback, said my father, turning to Yorick—Of all things in the world, except politicks, the clergy know the least of heraldry, said Yorick.—No matter for that, cried my father—I should be sorry to appear with a blot in my escutcheon before them.—Never mind the bend-sinister, said my uncle Toby, putting on his tye-wig.—No, indeed, said my father—you may go with my aunt Dinah to a visitation with a bend-sinister, if you think fit—My poor uncle Toby blush'd. My father was vexed at himself.—No—my dear brother Toby, said my father, changing his tone—but the damp of the coach-lining about my loins, may give me the sciatica again, as it did December, January, and February last winter—so if you please you shall ride my wife's pad—and as you are to preach, Yorick, you had better make the best of your way before—and leave me to take care of my brother Toby, and to follow at our own rates. (Chapter 2.LX.)
In his poem "Wanted" composed in a madhouse Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) quotes the starling's words in Sterne's Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768):
Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?
Why are you hiding, darling?
(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling). (2.25)
The poem's last word is stardust:
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.
Stern is German for "star." Describing his nights at Ardis, Van Veen mentions the starling and the stardust:
He would fall asleep at the moment he thought he would never sleep again, and his dreams were young. As the first flame of day reached his hammock, he woke up another man — and very much of a man indeed. ‘Ada, our ardors and arbors’ — a dactylic trimeter that was to remain Van Veen’s only contribution to Anglo-American poetry — sang through his brain. Bless the starling and damn the stardust! He was fourteen and a half; he was burning and bold; he would have her fiercely some day! (1.12)
Describing Ada's dramatic career, Van mentions John Starling, one of Ada's lovers who played Skvortsov in the Yakima stage version of Four Sisters (as Chekhov's play The Three Sisters, 1901, is known on Antiterra):
Van glanced through the list of players and D.P.’s and noticed two amusing details: the role of Fedotik, an artillery officer (whose comedy organ consists of a constantly clicking camera)’, had been assigned to a ‘Kim (short for Yakim) Eskimossoff’ and somebody called ‘John Starling’ had been cast as Skvortsov (a sekundant in the rather amateurish duel of the last act) whose name comes from skvorets, starling. When he communicated the latter observation to Ada, she blushed as was her Old World wont.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he was quite a lovely lad and I sort of flirted with him, but the strain and the split were too much for him — he had been, since pubescence, the puerulus of a fat ballet master, Dangleleaf, and he finally committed suicide. You see ("the blush now replaced by a matovaya pallor") I’m not hiding one stain of what rhymes with Perm.’
‘I see. And Yakim —’
‘Oh, he was nothing.’
‘No, I mean, Yakim, at least, did not, as his rhymesake did, take a picture of your brother embracing his girl. Played by Dawn de Laire.’ (2.9)
A merchant's son Eskimosov, "a parvenu and mauvais genre, ill-bread, a swine in a skull-cup," is a fiance in Chekhov's story Tapyor ("The Dance Pianist," 1885). The title of Chekhov's story brings to mind Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge (a member of the Do-Re-La country club), with whom Van fights a pistol duel in the Kalugano Forest. In Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital Van visits Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie. In his essay on Chekhov, Tvorchestvo iz nichego ("Creation from Nothing," 1905), Lev Shestov calls Chekhov (the author of "Ward Six") pevets beznadyozhnosti (a poet of hopelessness). In the Kalugano hospital Van meets Tatiana (a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse who wrote Van a letter) and Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse:
For half a minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the general ward of Lakeview (Lakeview!) Hospital, between two series of variously bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. When he understood this, his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic. His next request was that he be told how seriously he was hurt and how long he was expected to remain incapacitated. His third action was to resume what constituted the sole reason of his having to visit Kalugano (visit Kalugano!). His new quarters, where heartbroken kings had tossed in transit, proved to be a replica in white of his hotel apartment — white furniture, white carpet, white sparver. Inset, so to speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes — and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed. with the sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed more aptly than she thought ‘that soft dangle.’ An exhibition of his state with a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened, and he never met her again). His suitcase promptly arrived from the hotel; the stick, however, could not be located (it must be climbing nowadays Wellington Mountain, or perhaps, helping a lady to go ‘brambling’ in Oregon); so the hospital supplied him with the Third Cane, a rather nice, knotty, cherry-dark thing with a crook and a solid black-rubber heel. Dr Fitzbishop congratulated him on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus. Doc Fitz commented on Van’s wonderful recuperational power which was already in evidence, and promised to have him out of disinfectants and bandages in ten days or so if for the first three he remained as motionless as a felled tree-trunk. Did Van like music? Sportsmen usually did, didn’t they? Would he care to have a Sonorola by his bed? No, he disliked music, but did the doctor, being a concert-goer, know perhaps where a musician called Rack could be found? ‘Ward Five,’ answered the doctor promptly. Van misunderstood this as the title of some piece of music and repeated his question. Would he find Rack’s address at Harper’s music shop? Well, they used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest, but now some other people had moved in. Ward Five was where hopeless cases were kept. The poor guy had always had a bad liver and a very indifferent heart, but on top of that a poison had seeped into his system; the local ‘lab’ could not identify it and they were now waiting for a report, on those curiously frog-green faeces, from the Luga people. If Rack had administered it to himself by his own hand, he kept ‘mum’; it was more likely the work of his wife who dabbled in Hindu-Andean voodoo stuff and had just had a complicated miscarriage in the maternity ward. Yes, triplets — how did he guess? Anyway, if Van was so eager to visit his old pal it would have to be as soon as he could be rolled to Ward Five in a wheelchair by Dorofey, so he’d better apply a bit of voodoo, ha-ha, on his own flesh and blood.
That day came soon enough. After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin’s coachman, said priehali (‘we have arrived’) and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos). (1.42)
In Chekhov's story O zhenshchinakh (On Women, 1886) the eloquent misogynist mentions the department watchman Dorofey:
Логика женщины вошла в поговорку. Когда какой-нибудь надворный советник Анафемский или департаментский сторож Дорофей заводят речь о Бисмарке или о пользе наук, то любо послушать их: приятно и умилительно; когда же чья-нибудь супруга, за неимением других тем, начинает говорить о детях или пьянстве мужа, то какой супруг воздержится, чтобы не воскликнуть: «Затарантила таранта! Ну, да и логика же, господи, прости ты меня грешного!»
In Rodoslovnaya moego geroya (“The Pedigree of my Hero,” 1836), Pushkin’s poem written in the Onegin stanza, Dorofey is the hero’s ancestor who fathered twelve sons:
Начнём ab ovo: мой Езерский
Происходил от тех вождей,
Чей в древни веки парус дерзкий
Поработил брега морей.
Одульф, его начальник рода,
Вельми бе грозен воевода
(Гласит Софийский Хронограф).
При Ольге сын его Варлаф
Приял крещенье в Цареграде
С приданым греческой княжны.
От них два сына рождены,
Якуб и Дорофей. В засаде
Убит Якуб, а Дорофей
Родил двенадцать сыновей.
Let’s start ab ovo: my Ezerski
was a descendant of those chiefs
whose spirit bellicose and savage
was once the terror of the seas.
The generator of the family,
Odulf “was a most awesome warlord”
-so says the Sophian chronograph.
In Olga’s reign his son Varlaf
embraced the Gospel in Constantinople
together with a dot of a Greek princess.
Two sons were born to them, Yakub
and Dorofey; of these, in ambush
Yakub was slain; while Dorofey
Fathered twelve sons.
The name Ezerski comes from ezero (an obsolete form of ozero, “lake”). In Chekhov's play Chayka ("The Seagull," 1896) the action takes place at Sorin's lakeside estate. Chekhov is the author of "The Duel" (1891). Van recovers from the wound that he received in his duel with Tapper in the Lakeview Hospital. The name of Van’s adversary also brings to mind the Ardis tap water mentioned by Van in his conversation with Demon (Van's and Ada's father):
‘Van…,’ began Demon, but stopped — as he had begun and stopped a number of times before in the course of the last years. Some day it would have to be said, but this was not the right moment. He inserted his monocle and examined the bottles: ‘By the way, son, do you crave any of these aperitifs? My father allowed me Lilletovka and that Illinois Brat — awful bilge, antranou svadi, as Marina would say. I suspect your uncle has a cache behind the solanders in his study and keeps there a finer whisky than this usque ad Russkum. Well, let us have the cognac, as planned, unless you are a filius aquae?’
(No pun intended, but one gets carried away and goofs.)
‘Oh, I prefer claret. I’ll concentrate (nalyagu) on the Latour later on. No, I’m certainly no T-totaler, and besides the Ardis tap water is not recommended!’ (1.38)