On the eve of Van’s departure from Ardis, Mlle Larivière (Lucette’s governess) reads to Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) her story about a small girl called Rockette (that corresponds to Maupassant’s La Petite Rocque):
By a kind of lyrical coincidence they found Marina and Mlle Larivière having evening tea in the seldom-used Russian-style glassed-in verandah. The novelist, who was now quite restored, but still in flowery négligé, had just finished reading her new story in its first fair copy (to be typed on the morrow) to Tokay-sipping Marina, who had le vin triste and was much affected by the suicide of the gentleman ‘au cou rouge et puissant de veuf encore plein de sève’ who, frightened by his victim’s fright, so to speak, had compressed too hard the throat of the little girl he had raped in a moment of «gloutonnerie impardonnable.» (1.24)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): (avoir le) vin triste: to be melancholy in one’s cups.
au cou rouge etc.: with the ruddy and stout neck of a widower still full of sap.
gloutonnerie: gourmandise.
In his memoirs Peterburgskie Zimy (“The St. Petersburg Winters,” 1931) G. Ivanov says that, bringing home from a ball Larisa Reysner (Gumilyov’s mistress who married Fyodor Raskolnikov), he told her that she had le vin triste:
Тут «спасительная ирония» приходит мне на помощь. Я вспоминаю снова, что Валькирия эта—просто барышня с провинциальными замашками, пишущая плохие стихи, которую я везу с «бала» у Юрия Слезкина, где подавалось много шампанского («Донского», по случаю войны). И «вспомнив», говорю с соответственным тоном:
— У вас «vin triste», Лариса Михайловна.
Но она не слушает. Она глядит широко раскрытыми, грустными серыми глазами на небо, такое же серое, такое же грустное. И, помолчав, тихо, точно про себя, говорит:
— Нет, ничего не хочу, ничего не могу. В сказке—каменное сердце. Каменное? Это еще ничего. Но если мертвое, мертвое?.. (Chapter XIV)
The memoirist mentions Donskoe shampanskoe (the Don champagne) that was served at the ball at Yuri Slyozkin’s. Describing Demon Veen’s sword duel with Baron d’Onsky (Marina’s lover), Van mentions Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel (one of the seconds):
Upon being questioned in Demon’s dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so. Since prudent Veen preferred killing his man in Europe (decrepit but indestructible Gamaliel was said to be doing his best to forbid duels in the Western Hemisphere — a canard or an idealistic President’s instant-coffee caprice, for nothing was to come of it after all), Demon rented the fastest petroloplane available, overtook the Baron (looking very fit) in Nice, saw him enter Gunter’s Bookshop, went in after him, and in the presence of the imperturbable and rather bored English shopkeeper, back-slapped the astonished Baron across the face with a lavender glove. The challenge was accepted; two native seconds were chosen; the Baron plumped for swords; and after a certain amount of good blood (Polish and Irish — a kind of American ‘Gory Mary’ in barroom parlance) had bespattered two hairy torsoes, the whitewashed terrace, the flight of steps leading backward to the walled garden in an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement, the apron of a quite accidental milkmaid, and the shirtsleeves of both seconds, charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, the latter gentlemen separated the panting combatants, and Skonky died, not ‘of his wounds’ (as it was viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston — a city where, incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of Glass Biota at the local museum.
Marina arrived in Nice a few days after the duel, and tracked Demon down in his villa Armina, and in the ecstasy of reconciliation neither remembered to dupe procreation, whereupon started the extremely interesnoe polozhenie (‘interesting condition’) without which, in fact, these anguished notes could not have been strung.
(Van, I trust your taste and your talent but are we quite sure we should keep reverting so zestfully to that wicked world which after all may have existed only oneirologically, Van? Marginal jotting in Ada’s 1965 hand; crossed out lightly in her latest wavering one.) (1.2)
Larisa Reysner’s husband, Fyodor Raskolnikov (who is mentioned by G. Ivanov in the same chapter of his memoirs) is the author of Otkrytoe pis’mo Stalinu (“An Open Letter to Stalin,” 1939). The surname Raskolnikov comes from raskol’nik (schismatic). Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van mentions "a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index:"
Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it,’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
“Guillaume de Monparnasse” is Mlle Larivière’s pseudonym. Mlle Larivière reads her story about little Rockette to Tokay-sipping Marina. In "The St. Petersburg Winters" G. Ivanov describes his and his friends' trip to Tsarskoe Selo and visit to Count Komarovski, a brilliant poet who lived mainly in a mad house and had at the time a lucid interval. Komarovski (whom the company met in the park sitting on I. Annenski's favorite bench) invited everybody to his house and treated his guests to the Tokay wine:
-- Приехали на скамейку посмотреть. Да, да -- та самая. Я здесь часто сижу... когда здоров. Здесь хорошее место, тихое, глухое. Даже и днём редко кто заходит. Недавно гимназист здесь застрелился -- только на другой день нашли. Тихое место...
-- На этой скамейке застрелился?
-- На этой. Это уже второй случай. Почему-то выбирают все эту. За уединённость, должно быть:
Он в течение нашего короткого разговора несколько раз повторяет "моя болезнь", "когда я здоров", "тогда я был болен". Что это за болезнь у этого широкоплечего и краснощекого?
... -- Болезнь вернётся? -- повторяю я машинально конец его фразы.
-- Да, -- говорит он, -- болезнь. Сумасшествие. Вот Николай Степанович знает. Сейчас у меня "просветление", вот я и гуляю. А вообще я больше в больнице живу.
И, не меняя голоса, продолжает:
-- Если вы, господа, не торопитесь, -- вот мой дом, выпьем чаю, -- почитаем стихи.
...В большой столовой, под сияющей люстрой, мы пьём токайское из тонких желтоватых рюмок.
Gloutonnerie impardonnable brings to mind not only the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters,’ but also obzhora (the glutton) who stole the watermelon from the chest of a drum major in a humorous poem composed by Mandelshtam in 1915 and cited by G. Ivanov in Kitayskie teni (“The Chinese Shadows,” 1924-29):
Вуйажор арбуз украл
Из сундука тамбур-мажора.
— Обжора! — закричал капрал. —
Ужо расправа будет скоро. (Chapter II, 3)
Larisa Reysner is a namesake of Larissa, Alexis Pan’s wife in VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). In Manhattan (also known as Man on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Van lives (at first with Cordula de Prey and then with Ada) in a penthouse apartment on Alexis Avenue. Describing Demon's affair with Marina, Van mentions 'Eugene and Lara,' a trashy American ephemeron in which Marina played the heroine:
They reveled, and traveled, and they quarreled, and flew back to each other again. By the following winter he began to suspect she was being unfaithful to him, but could not determine his rival. In mid-March, at a business meal with an art expert, an easy-going, lanky, likeable fellow in an old-fashioned dress-coat, Demon screwed in his monocle, unclicked out of its special flat case a small pen-and-wash and said he thought (did not doubt, in fact, but wished his certitude to be admired) that it was an unknown product of Parmigianino’s tender art. It showed a naked girl with a peach-like apple cupped in her half-raised hand sitting sideways on a convolvulus-garlanded support, and had for its discoverer the additional appeal of recalling Marina when, rung out of a hotel bathroom by the phone, and perched on the arm of a chair, she muffled the receiver while asking her lover something that he could not make out because the bath’s voice drowned her whisper. Baron d’Onsky had only to cast one glance at that raised shoulder and at certain vermiculated effects of delicate vegetation to confirm Demon’s guess. D’Onsky had the reputation of not showing one sign of esthetic emotion in the presence of the loveliest masterpiece; this time, nonetheless, he laid his magnifier aside as he would a mask, and allowed his undisguised gaze to caress the velvety apple and the nude’s dimpled and mossed parts with a smile of bemused pleasure. Would Mr Veen consider selling it to him there and then, Mr Veen, please? Mr Veen would not. Skonky (a oneway nickname) must content himself with the proud thought that, as of today, he and the lucky owner were the sole people to have ever admired it en connaissance de cause. Back it went into its special integument; but after finishing his fourth cup of cognac, d’O. pleaded for one last peep. Both men were a little drunk, and Demon secretly wondered if the rather banal resemblance of that Edenic girl to a young actress, whom his visitor had no doubt seen on the stage in ‘Eugene and Lara’ or ‘Lenore Raven’ (both painfully panned by a ‘disgustingly incorruptible’ young critic), should be, or would be, commented upon. It was not: such nymphs were really very much alike because of their elemental limpidity since the similarities of young bodies of water are but murmurs of natural innocence and double-talk mirrors, that’s my hat, his is older, but we have the same London hatter. (1.2)
Lara in 'Eugene and Lara' seems to be a cross between Tatiana Larin, a character in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Lara Antipov, a character in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957), the novel known on Antiterra as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor (1.8), and Mertvago Forever (2.5). While zhiv means in Russian "alive," mertv means "dead." At the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Van uses the words "dead" and "alive:"
‘Marina,’ murmured Demon at the close of the first course. ‘Marina,’ he repeated louder. ‘Far from me’ (a locution he favored) ‘to criticize Dan’s taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I’m above all that rot, I’m...’ (gesture); ‘but, my dear,’ he continued, switching to Russian, ‘the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki — the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) —’
‘Everybody has eyes,’ remarked Marina drily.
‘Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that’s not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odïshka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It’s depressing. It’s a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.’
‘Look, Dad,’ said Van, ‘Dr Krolik can’t do much, because, as you know quite well, he’s dead, and Marina can’t tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they’re alive.’
‘The Veen wit, the Veen wit,’ murmured Demon. (1.38)
In his poem Neznakomka ("The Unknown Woman," 1906) Alexander Blok mentions p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of rabbits) who cry out: "In vino veritas!" (in wine is truth).
Describing his meeting with Lucette in Paris, Van compares Lucette to Blok's Incognita:
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye — all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s ‘gem bulbs’ plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarly postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman. (3.3)
See also the updated version of my previous post, “Great Good Man, Colonel St. Alin & dream volcano in Ada.”