Before she met Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father), Marina’s twin sister Aqua had had an affair with a married man in Belokonsk (the Antiterran twin of Canadian Whitehorse):
In her erratic student years Aqua had left fashionable Brown Hill College, founded by one of her less reputable ancestors, to participate (as was also fashionable) in some Social Improvement project or another in the Severnïya Territorii. She organized with Milton Abraham’s invaluable help a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk, and fell grievously in love there with a married man, who after one summer of parvenu passion dispensed to her in his Camping Ford garçonnière preferred to give her up rather than run the risk of endangering his social situation in a philistine town where businessmen played ‘golf’ on Sundays and belonged to ‘lodges.’ The dreadful sickness, roughly diagnosed in her case, and in that of other unfortunate people, as an ‘extreme form of mystical mania combined with existalienation’ (otherwise plain madness), crept over her by degrees, with intervals of ecstatic peace, with skipped areas of precarious sanity, with sudden dreams of eternity-certainty, which grew ever rarer and briefer. (1.3)
Camping Ford garçonnière brings to mind a recent poem (“The Image of Desire,” a sonnet) by Edsel Ford and camping tourists mentioned by Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in his Commentary to Shade’s poem:
Line 603: Listen to distant cocks crow
One will recall the admirable image in a recent poem by Edsel Ford:
And often when the cock crew, shaking fire
Out of the morning and the misty mow
A mow (in Zemblan muwan) is the field next to a barn.
Lines 609-614: Nor can one help, etc.
This passage is different in the draft:
609 Nor can one help the exile caught by death
In a chance inn exposed to the hot breath
Of this America, this humid night:
Through slatted blinds the stripes of colored light
Grope for his bed - magicians from the past
With philtered gems - and life is ebbing fast.
This describes rather well the "chance inn," a log cabin, with a tiled bathroom, where I am trying to coordinate these notes. At first I was greatly bothered by the blare of diabolical radio music from what I thought was some kind of amusement park across the road - it turned out to be camping tourists - and I was thinking of moving to another place, when they forestalled me. Now it is quieter, except for an irritating wind rattling through the withered aspens, and Cedarn is again a ghost town, and there are no summer fools or spies to stare at me, and my little blue-jeaned fisherman no longer stands on his stone in the stream, and perhaps it is better so.
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 Ada) mentions the Amerussia of Abraham Milton:
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.
A name that “mirrors” Milton Abraham (with whose invaluable help Aqua organized a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk), Abraham Milton seems to blend Abraham Lincoln with John Milton (the author of Paradise Lost). During Van’s first tea party at Ardis Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) mentions Lincoln’s second wife:
They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada’s black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van’s teacher of history, ‘Jeejee’ Jones.
‘He resembles my teacher of history,’ said Van when the man had gone.
‘I used to love history,’ said Marina, ‘I loved to identify myself with famous women. There’s a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties — Lincoln’s second wife or Queen Josephine.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed — it’s beautifully done. We’ve got a similar set at home.’
‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.
‘Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),’ replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis’ (with a slight smile). ‘Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.’
‘Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.’
‘Pah,’ uttered Ada. (1.5)
Describing the first lap of his road trip with Lolita across the USA, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) mentions the log cabin where Lincoln was born:
The present log cabin boldly simulating the past log cabin where Lincoln was born. (2.2)
In the Russian version (1967) of Lolita VN renders “log cabin” as izba:
вполне современная изба, смело подделывающаяся под былую избу, где родился Линкольн.
But in her Russian version of Pale Fire Vera Nabokov renders “log cabin” as khizhina – presumably, an allusion to Khizhina dyadi Toma (the Russian title of H. Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland), Humbert Humbert calls the porter who carries the bags to the hotel room “Uncle Tom:”
The two pink pigs were now among my best friends. In the slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale. A key (342!) was half-shown to me (magician showing object he is about to palm) and handed over to Uncle Tom. Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose from her haunches; a raindrop fell on Charlotte’s grave; a handsome young Negress slipped open the elevator door, and the doomed child went in followed by her throat-clearing father and crayfish Tom with the bags. (1.27)
In The Enchanted Hunters Humbert Humbert puts to sleep Lolita with Papa's Purple Pills:
When the dessert was plunked down - a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pieI produced a small vial containing Papa’s Purple Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself that the last diner had left, removed the stopped, and with the utmost deliberation tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial with its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty’s Sleep.
“Blue!” she exclaimed. “Violet blue. What are they made of?”
“Summer skies,” I said, “and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of emperors.”
“No, seriously - please.”
“Oh, just purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?”
Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously. (ibid.)
Describing poor mad Aqua’s suicide, Van mentions a plump purple pill that reminded Aqua of those with which the little gypsy enchantress in the Spanish tale puts to sleep all the sportsmen and all their bloodhounds at the opening of the hunting season:
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. (1.3)
Immediately after finishing his work on Shade’s poem (on Oct. 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum), Kinbote commits suicide. It seems that Kinbote writes his Commentary, Index and Foreword (in that order) to Shade’s poem not in “Cedarn, Utana,” but in a madhouse – perhaps, in the same sanatorium in Quebec where Humbert Humbert writes his poem “Wanted” after Lolita was abducted from him.
Aqua’s last note was signed: “My sister’s sister who teper’ iz ada (‘now is out of hell’)” (1.3). In Chekhov’s story Zhenshchina s tochki zreniya p’yanitsy ("Woman as Seen by a Drunkard," 1885) signed Brat moego brata (My brother's brother) girls under sixteen are compared to aqua distillata (distilled water). Lolita is only twelve when Humbert Humbert meets her in Ramsdale and falls in love with her.
Telling Van about Uncle Dan's death, Demon mentions the Bishop of Belokonsk with whom Marina is flirting in Tsitsikar:
A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’ (2.10)
In Chekhov’s play Tri sestry (“The Three Sisters,” 1901) known on Antiterra as Four Sisters, Dr Chebutykin mentions Tsitsikar (the Russian spelling of Qiqihar, a city in NE China):
ЧЕБУТЫКИН (читает газету). Цицикар. Здесь свирепствует оспа.
CHEBUTYKIN [reads from the newspaper]. Tsitsikar. Smallpox is raging here. (Act Two)
Chekhov is the author of Aptekarsha ("A Chemist's Wife," 1886).
The Bishop of Belokonsk brings to mind Georgiy Konisky (1717-95), the Archbishop of Belorussia whose Collected Works Pushkin reviewed in the first issue of Sovremennik (Contemporary, 1836). Demon Veen married Aqua on St. George's Day:
The modest narrator has to remind the rereader of all this, because in April (my favorite month), 1869 (by no means a mirabilic year), on St George’s Day (according to Mlle Larivière’s maudlin memoirs) Demon Veen married Aqua Veen — out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend. (1.3)
“A mirabilic year” hints at the Latin phrase annus mirabilis (miraculous year). Annus Mirabilis (1667) is a poem by John Dryden. Byron is the author of The Age of Bronze: or, Carmen Seculare et Annus haud Mirabilis (1823). Haud means in Latin “by no means” (and in Estonian “grave”). Estonian is one of the languages mentioned by Kinbote in his next note:
Line 615: two tongues
English and Zemblan, English and Russian, English and Lettish, English and Estonian, English and Lithuanian, English and Russian, English and Ukranian, English and Polish, English and Czech, English and Russian, English and Hungarian, English and Rumanian, English and Albanian, English and Bulgarian, English and Serbo-Croatian, English and Russian, American and European.