According to the narrator of VN’s story Istreblenie tiranov (“Tyrants Destroyed,” 1936), laughter saved him:
Смех, собственно, и спас меня. Пройдя все ступени ненависти и отчаяния, я достиг той высоты, откуда видно как на ладони смешное. Расхохотавшись, я исцелился, как тот анекдотический мужчина, у которого "лопнул в горле нарыв при виде уморительных трюков пуделя". Перечитывая свои записи, я вижу, что, стараясь изобразить его страшным, я лишь сделал его смешным,-- и казнил его именно этим-- старым испытанным способом. Как ни скромен я сам в оценке своего сумбурного произведения, что-то, однако, мне говорит, что написано оно пером недюжинным. Далёкий от литературных затей, но зато полный слов, которые годами выковывались в моей яростной тишине, я взял искренностью и насыщенностью чувств там, где другой взял бы мастерством да вымыслом. Это есть заклятье, заговор, так что отныне заговорить рабство может каждый. Верю в чудо. Верю в то, что каким-то образом, мне неизвестным, эти записи дойдут до людей, не сегодня и не завтра, но в некое отдалённое время, когда у мира будет денёк досуга, чтоб заняться раскопками,-- накануне новых неприятностей, не менее забавных, чем нынешние. И вот, как знать... допускаю мысль, что мой случайный труд окажется бессмертным и будет сопутствовать векам,-- то гонимый, то восхваляемый, часто опасный и всегда полезный. Я же, "тень без костей", буду рад, если плод моих забытых бессонниц послужит на долгие времена неким тайным средством против будущих тиранов, тигроидов, полоумных мучителей человека.
Laughter, actually, saved me. Having experienced all the degrees of hatred and despair, I achieved those heights from which one obtains a bird’s-eye view of the ludicrous. A roar of hearty mirth cured me, as it did, in a children’s storybook, the gentleman “in whose throat an abscess burst at the sight of a poodle’s hilarious tricks.” Rereading my chronicle, I see that, in my efforts to make him terrifying, I have only made him ridiculous, thereby destroying him — an old, proven method. Modest as I am in evaluating my muddled composition, something nevertheless tells me that it is not the work of an ordinary pen. Far from having literary aspirations, and yet full of words formed over the years in my enraged silence, I have made my point with sincerity and fullness of feeling where another would have made it with artistry and inventiveness. This is an incantation, an exorcism, so that henceforth any man can exorcise bondage. I believe in miracles. I believe that in some way, unknown to me, this chronicle will reach other men, neither tomorrow nor the next day, but at a distant time when the world has a day or so of leisure for archeological diggings, on the eve of new annoyances, no less amusing than the present ones. And, who knows — I may be right not to rule out the thought that my chance labor may prove immortal, and may accompany the ages, now persecuted, now exalted, often dangerous, and always useful. While I, a “boneless shadow,” un fantôme sans os, will be content if the fruit of my forgotten insomnious nights serves for a long time as a kind of secret remedy against future tyrants, tigroid monsters, half-witted torturers of man. (chapter 17)
In his obituary essay “V. V. Khlebnikov” (1922) Mayakovski quotes Khlebnikov’s poem Zaklyatie smekhom (“Incantation by Laughter,” 1909):
Известнейшее стихотворение «Заклятие смехом», напечатанное в 1909 г., излюблено одинаково и поэтами, новаторами и пародистами, критиками:
О, засмейтесь, смехачи,
Что смеются смехами,
Что смеянствуют смеяльно,
О, иссмейся рассмеяльно смех
Усмейных смеячей
и т. д.
Здесь одним словом дается и «смейево», страна смеха и хитрые «смеюнчики», и «смехачи» — силачи.
Какое словесное убожество по сравнению с ним у Бальмонта, пытавшегося также построить стих на одном слове «любить»:
Любите, любите, любите, любите,
Безумно любите, любите любовь
и т. д.
Тавтология. Убожество слова. И это для сложнейших определений любви! Однажды Хлебников сдал в печать шесть страниц производных от корня «люб». Напечатать нельзя было, т. к. в провинциальной типографии не хватило «Л».
VN’s “late namesake,” Mayakovski contrasts Khlebnikov’s poem with Balmont’s attempt to build a poem on one word lyubit’ (to love) and says that Khlebnikov once sent to press six pages of words that exclusively came from the root lyub (lov). A provincial typography could not print them, because there were too many L’s in the text. In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert asks the printer to repeat the name Lolita till the page is full:
This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head – everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer. (1.26)
Humbert Humbert repeats the name Lolita ten times. At the end of the novel Humbert Humbert compares the melody of children at play to an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter:
I was soon to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow)and was, indeed, looking forward to surrender myself to many hands, without doing anything to cooperate, while they moved and carried me, relaxed, comfortable, surrendering myself lazily, like a patient, and deriving an eerie enjoyment from my limpness and the absolutely reliable support given me by the police and the ambulance people. And while I was waiting for them to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked a last mirage of wonder and hopelessness. One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors - for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company - both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. (2.26)
Humbert Humbert finds out Clare Quilty's address from his uncle Ivor (the Ramsdale dentist). According to Mayakovski, the whole world is bardak (a brothel) and all people, except his uncle, are whores:
Все люди бляди,
Весь мир бардак!
Один мой дядя
И тот мудак.
All people are whores,
The whole world is a brothel!
My uncle alone:
But even he is a cretin.
There is Bard in Barda and Barda in bardak. Shakespeare (the Bard) said: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." In an attempt to save his life Quilty tries to seduce Humbert Humbert with his collection of erotica and mentions the Bard and the Barda Sea:
“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing face is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything - sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre , sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere - is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégé to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables . You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next play - I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa - curious name - who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing - you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies - drop that gun - and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow” (2.35)
General Bagration was felled in the battle of Borodino. Borodino (1837) is a poem by Lermontov. In his essay on Mayakovski, Dekoltirovannaya loshad’ (“The Horse in a Décolleté Dress,” 1927), Hodasevich says that one of Mayakovski’s anti-German poems (written after the outbreak of World War I) is an unintentional parody of Lermontov’s Borodino:
Маяковский -- поэт рабочего класса". Вздор. Был и остался поэтом подонков, бездельников, босяков просто и "босяков духовных". Был таким перед войной, когда восхищал и "пужал" подонки интеллигенции и буржуазии, выкрикивая брань и похабщину с эстрады Политехнического музея. И когда, в начале войны, сочинял подписи к немцеедским лубкам, вроде знаменитого:
С криком: "Дейчланд юбер аллес!" -
Немцы с поля убирались.
И когда, бия себя в грудь, патриотически ораторствовал у памятника Скобелеву, перед генерал-губернаторским домом, там, где теперь памятник Октябрю и московский совдеп! И когда читал кровожадные стихи:
О панталоны венских кокоток
Вытрем наши штыки! --
эту позорную нечаянную пародию на Лермонтова:
Не смеют, что ли, командиры
Чужие изорвать мундиры
О русские штыки?
At the beginning of Borodino Lermontov twice repeats the word ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’):
Скажи-ка, дядя, ведь не даром
Москва, спалённая пожаром,
Французу отдана?
Ведь были ж схватки боевые,
Да, говорят, ещё какие!
Недаром помнит вся Россия
Про день Бородина!
– HEY tell, old man, had we a cause
When Moscow, razed by fire, once was
Given up to Frenchman's blow?
Old-timers talk about some frays,
And they remember well those days!
With cause all Russia fashions lays
About the day of Borodino!
Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra (aka Demonia, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the L disaster that happened on Demonia in the beau milieu of the 19th century and uses the word ved’:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality. (1.3)
Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Marina, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Van mentions Palermontovia (a country that blends Palermo with Lermontov):
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)
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.
Снится - снова я мальчик, и снова любовник,
И овраг, и бурьян,
И в бурьяне - колючий шиповник,
И вечерний туман.
Сквозь цветы, и листы, и колючие ветки, я знаю,
Старый дом глянет в сердце моё,
Глянет небо опять, розовея от краю до краю,
И окошко твоё.
Этот голос - он твой, и его непонятному звуку
Жизнь и горе отдам,
Хоть во сне твою прежнюю милую руку
Прижимая к губам.
In his poem O vesna bez kontsa i bez krayu (“O spring without end or edge”) from the cycle Zaklyatie ognyom i mrakom (“Incantation by Fire and Darkness,” 1907) Blok mentions tayna smekha (a secret of laughter):
Принимаю тебя, неудача,
И удача, тебе мой привет!
В заколдованной области плача,
В тайне смеха - позорного нет!
In the Russian version of Lolita (1967) the name of Clare Quilty’s co-author, Vivian Darkbloom (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), becomes Vivian Damor-Blok.
In a conversation with Van at Kingston (Van’s American University) Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) mentions Bergson:
At this point, as in a well-constructed play larded with comic relief, the brass campophone buzzed and not only did the radiators start to cluck but the uncapped soda water fizzed in sympathy.
Van (crossly): ‘I don’t understand the first word… What’s that? L’adorée? Wait a second’ (to Lucette). ‘Please, stay where you are.’ (Lucette whispers a French child-word with two ‘p’s.). ‘Okay’ (pointing toward the corridor). ‘Sorry, Polly. Well, is it l’adorée? No? Give me the context. Ah — la durée. La durée is not… sin on what? Synonymous with duration. Aha. Sorry again, I must stopper that orgiastic soda. Hold the line.’ (Yells down the ‘cory door,’ as they called the long second-floor passage at Ardis.) ‘Lucette, let it run over, who cares!’
He poured himself another glass of brandy and for a ridiculous moment could not remember what the hell he had been — yes, the polliphone.
It had died, but buzzed as soon as he recradled the receiver, and Lucette knocked discreetly at the same time.
‘La durée… For goodness sake, come in without knocking… No, Polly, knocking does not concern you — it’s my little cousin. All right. La durée is not synonymous with duration, being saturated — yes, as in Saturday — with that particular philosopher’s thought. What’s wrong now? You don’t know if it’s dorée or durée? D, U, R. I thought you knew French. Oh, I see. So long.
‘My typist, a trivial but always available blonde, could not make out durée in my quite legible hand because, she says, she knows French, but not scientific French.’
‘Actually,’ observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained, ‘Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.’
‘Spotting Bergson,’ said the assistant lecher, ‘rates a B minus dans ton petit cas, hardly more. Or shall I reward you with a kiss on your krestik — whatever that is?’ (2.5)
Henri Bergson is the author of Le Rire (“Laughter,” 1900). Berg is German for “mountain,” son is Russian for “sleep, dream.” According to V. (Sebastian Knight’s half-brother in VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941), Sebastian’s story The Funny Mountain always makes him think of a child laughing in its sleep:
Also some of my father's favourite quips seem to have broken into fantastic flower in such typical Knight stories as Albinos in Black or The Funny Mountain, his best one perhaps, that beautifully queer tale which always makes me think of a child laughing in its sleep. (Chapter 1)
Describing Sebastian's youth, V. mentions the futurist poet Alexis Pan. Pen Pan ("The Master of Foams," 1915) is a poem by Khlebnikov. In Manhattan (or Man, as New York is known on Antiterra) Van lives on Alexis Avenue.
The Antiterran L disaster brings to mind the L-shaped bathroom at Ardis:
The two elder children, having locked the door of the L-shaped bathroom from the inside, now retired to the seclusion of its lateral part, in a corner between a chest of drawers and an old unused mangle, which the sea-green eye of the bathroom looking-glass could not reach; but barely had they finished their violent and uncomfortable exertions in that hidden nook, with an empty medicine bottle idiotically beating time on a shelf, when Lucette was already calling resonantly from the tub and the maid knocking on the door: Mlle Larivière wanted some hot water too. (1.23)
Permitting Ada to give a bath to Lucette, Marina uses the word horosho (all right):
On the following day Ada informed her mother that Lucette badly needed a bath and that she would give it to her, whether her governess liked it or not. 'Horosho,' said Marina (while getting ready to receive a neighbor and his protégé, a young actor, in her best Dame Marina style), 'but the temperature should be kept at exactly twenty-eight (as it had been since the eighteenth century) and don't let her stay in it longer than ten or twelve minutes.' (ibid.)
Horosho! ("Good!" 1927) is a poem by Mayakovski written for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The Mayakovski pastiche in "Tyrants Destroyed" begins with the word horosho-s (now then):
Хорошо-с,-- а помните, граждане,
Как хирел наш край без отца?
Так без хмеля сильнейшая жажда
Не создаст ни пивца, ни певца.
Вообразите, ни реп нет,
Ни баклажанов, ни брюкв...
Так и песня, что днесь у нас крепнет,
Задыхалась в луковках букв.
Шли мы тропиной исторенной,
Горькие ели грибы,
Пока ворота истории
Не дрогнули от колотьбы!
Пока, белизною кительной
Сияя верным сынам,
С улыбкой своей удивительной
Правитель не вышел к нам.
Now then, citizens,
You remember how long
Our land wilted without a Father?...
Thus, without hops, no matter how strong
One’s thirst, it is rather
Difficult, isn’t it,
To make both the beer and the drinking song!
Just imagine, we lacked potatoes,
No turnips, no beets could we get:
Thus the poem, now blooming, wasted
In the bulbs of the alphabet!
A well-trodded road we had taken,
Bitter toadstools we ate.
Until by great thumps was shaking
History’s gate!
Until in his trim white tunic
Which upon us its radiance cast,
With his wonderful smile the Ruler
Came before his subjects at last! (chapter 16)
Horosho-s also brings to mind gospoda boga-s (from God, the Lord), a phrase used by Mayakovski in his poem Pyatyi Internatsional ("The Fifth International," 1922):
Мистики пишут: «Логос,
Это всемогущество. От господа бога-с».
The mystics write: "Logos
is omnipotence. From God, the Lord."
The Supreme Being on Antiterra, Log seems to hint at Logos (the rational principle that governs and develops the universe). In Ward Five of the Kalugano hospital (where Van recovers from a wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper and where he visits Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie) male nurse Dorofey is reading the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos):
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)
Vo ves' golos ("At the Top of my Voice," 1930) is an unfinished poem by Mayakovski. Alexander Blok's poem Golos iz khora ("Voice from Choir", 1914) ends in the lines:
Будьте ж довольны жизнью своей,
Тише воды, ниже травы!
О, если б знали, дети, вы,
Холод и мрак грядущих дней!
Quieter than water, lower than grass,
Be glad now with your life!
Oh, if you could foresee, children,
The cold and dark of days to come!
The proverbial phrase tishe vody, nizhe travy ("quieter than water, lower than grass") was used by Dostoevski in his first novel Bednye lyudi ("Poor Folk," 1846):
Маменька его очень любила. Но старик ненавидел Анну Фёдоровну, хотя был пред нею тише воды, ниже травы.
Mama was very fond of him. But the old man hated Anna Fyodorovna, though he was as quiet as a mouse and humbler than dust in her presence.
In the old Russian alphabet the letter L was called lyudi. The Antiterran L disaster in the very middle of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. After the L disaster electricity was banned on Antiterra. Elektrichestvo - vid energii ("Electricity is a Form of Energy," 1928) and Elevator ("The Grain Elevator," 1923) are poems by Mayakovski, whose book Dlya golosa ("For the Voice," 1923) designed by El Lissitzky begins with Levyi marsh ("Left March," 1918). According to Van, by the L disaster he does not mean Elevated.