After Van’s and Ada’s death Mr. Ronald Oranger (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, old Van’s secretary and the editor of Ada) marries Violet Knox, old Van’s typist whom Ada called ‘Fialochka’ (little Violet):
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with us in 1957. She was (and still is – ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump [.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has been responsible for typing out this memoir – the solace of what are, no doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother's children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her [generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her 'Fialochka' and allowed herself the luxury of admiring 'little Violet' 's cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner, lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4)
Fialochka (little violet) is the flower in Dmitriev's fable Repeynik i Fialka (“The Burdock and The Violet,” 1824). In his essay Dmitriev (1937), written for the centenary of the poet’s death (almost forty years his senior, Dmitriev outlived Pushkin by eight months), Hodasevich quotes this fable as a good sample of Dmitriev's poetry:
РЕПЕЙНИК И ФИАЛКА
Между репейником и розовым кустом
Фиялочка себя от зависти скрывала;
Безвестною была, но горести не знала:
Тот счастлив, кто своим доволен уголком.
Between a burdock and a rose bush
the little violet hid herself from envy;
she was obscure, but knew no grief:
happy is he who is pleased with his corner.
In his Epistle to Dmitriev (1794) Karamzin famously uses the phrase bez strakha i nadezhdy (without fear and hope):
А мы, любя дышать свободно,
Себе построим тихий кров
За мрачной сению лесов,
Куда бы злые и невежды
Вовек дороги не нашли
И где б, без страха и надежды,
Мы в мире жить с собой могли…
In his fragment Nadezhda (“Hope,” 1792) Karamzin says that life is obman (a deception) and hope is obmanshchitsa (a deceiver):
«Жизнь есть обман — счастлив тот, кто обманывается приятнейшим образом. Надежда! Ты дщерь неба? сопутница горестных? утешительница несчастных? Нет! ты обманщица!»
Van calls Ada (who told the driver to turn somewhere near Morzhey and returned to Van) obmanshchitsa:
He left the balcony and ran down a short spiral staircase to the fourth floor. In the pit of his stomach there sat the suspicion that it might not be room 410, as he conjectured, but 412 or even 414, What would happen if she had not understood, was not on the lookout? She had, she was.
When, ‘a little later,’ Van, kneeling and clearing his throat, was kissing her dear cold hands, gratefully, gratefully, in full defiance of death, with bad fate routed and her dreamy afterglow bending over him, she asked:
‘Did you really think I had gone?’
‘Obmanshchitsa (deceiver), obmanshchitsa,’ Van kept repeating with the fervor and gloat of blissful satiety,
‘I told him to turn,’ she said, ‘somewhere near Morzhey (‘morses’ or ‘walruses,’ a Russian pun on ‘Morges’ — maybe a mermaid’s message). And you slept, you could sleep!’
‘I worked,’ he replied, ‘my first draft is done.’
She confessed that on coming back in the middle of the night she had taken to her room from the hotel bookcase (the night porter, an avid reader, had the key) the British Encyclopedia volume, here it was, with this article on Space-time: ‘"Space" (it says here, rather suggestively) "denotes the property, you are my property, in virtue of which, you are my virtue, rigid bodies can occupy different positions" Nice? Nice.’
‘Don’t laugh, my Ada, at our philosophic prose,’ remonstrated her lover. ‘All that matters just now is that I have given new life to Time by cutting off Siamese Space and the false future. My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction.’
‘I wonder,’ said Ada, ‘I wonder if the attempt to discover those things is worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it. It is like —’ (Part Four)
In his Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika (“The Letters of a Russian Traveler,” 1791) Karamzin says that among the towns on Lake Geneva he liked Morzh (Morges) best:
От Лозанны до Женевы ехал я по берегу озера, между виноградных садов и полей, которые, впрочем, не так хорошо обработаны, как в Немецкой Швейцарии, и поселения в Pays-de-Vaud гораздо беднее, нежели в Бернском и Цирихском кантонах. - Из городков, лежащих на берегу озера, лучше всех полюбился мне Морж. (Oct. 2, 1789)
Describing his travels in childhood, Van mentions Leman Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed):
After that, they tried to settle whether their ways had merged somewhere or run closely parallel for a bit that year in Europe. In the spring of 1881, Van, aged eleven, spent a few months with his Russian tutor and English valet at his grandmother’s villa near Nice, while Demon was having a much better time in Cuba than Dan was at Mocuba. In June, Van was taken to Florence, and Rome, and Capri, where his father turned up for a brief spell. They parted again, Demon sailing back to America, and Van with his tutor going first to Gardone on Lake Garda, where Aksakov reverently pointed out Goethe’s and d’Annunzio’s marble footprints, and then staying for a while in autumn at a hotel on a mountain slope above Leman Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed). Did Marina suspect that Van was somewhere in the same general area as she throughout 1881? Probably no. Both girls had scarlet fever in Cannes, while Marina was in Spain with her Grandee. After carefully matching memories, Van and Ada concluded that it was not impossible that somewhere along a winding Riviera road they passed each other in rented victorias that both remembered were green, with green-harnessed horses, or perhaps in two different trains, going perhaps the same way, the little girl at the window of one sleeping car looking at the brown sleeper of a parallel train which gradually diverged toward sparkling stretches of sea that the little boy could see on the other side of the tracks. The contingency was too mild to be romantic, nor did the possibility of their having walked or run past each other on the quay of a Swiss town afford any concrete thrill. But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years — problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space — and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. (1.24)
According to Van, nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of Ada:
Ardis Hall — the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis — this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America — for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? The protagonist, a scion of one of our most illustrious and opulent families, is Dr Van Veen, son of Baron ‘Demon’ Veen, that memorable Manhattan and Reno figure. The end of an extraordinary epoch coincides with Van’s no less extraordinary boyhood. Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of the book. On the fabulous country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine, daughter of Marina, Daniel’s stage-struck wife. That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages.
In spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer’s magic carpet has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen, Marina’s younger daughter, has also been swept off her feet by Van, the irresistible rake. Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book.
The rest of Van’s story turns frankly and colorfully upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country. After her husband’s death our lovers are reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere.
Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more. (5.6)
The last words of VN’s Family Chronicle, “much, much more,” seem to hint at “much of a muchness” mentioned by the Dormouse in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
'They were learning to draw,' the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; 'and they drew all manner of things — everything that begins with an M — '
'Why with an M?' said Alice.
'Why not?' said the March Hare.
Alice was silent.
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: ' — that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness — you know you say things are "much of a muchness" — did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?' (chapter 7: “A Mad Tea-Party”)
Morzhey also seems to hint at umorzhenie, a neologism used by VN in Anya v strane chudes (1923), VN’s Russian translation of Lewis Carroll’s book:
- Чему же вы учились? - полюбопытствовала Аня.
- Сперва, конечно, - чесать и питать. Затем были четыре правила арифметики: служенье, выметанье, уморженье и пиленье.
- Я никогда не слышала об уморженьи, - робко сказала Аня. - Что это такое?
Гриф удивленно поднял лапы к небу. "Крота можно укротить? - спросил он.
- Да... как будто можно, - ответила Аня неуверенно.
- Ну так, значит, и моржа можно уморжить, - продолжал Гриф.
- Если вы этого не понимаете, вы просто дурочка.
“I couldn’t afford to learn it.” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took the regular course.”
“What was that?” inquired Alice.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”
The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”
“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.” (Chapter IX: “The Mock Turtle’s Story”)
Krota mozhno ukrotit’? (“Can one tame a mole?”), a question the Gryphon asks Anya in VN’s Russian version, brings to mind the moles massacred by Bagrov’s grandson (a neighbor’s boy who accompanied little Van in his walks in the woods):
Of course, of course, because that was the first time, Ada recalled, she had glimpsed him. In his little white sailor suit and blue sailor cap. (Un régulier angelochek, commented Van in the Raduga jargon.) He was eight, she was six. Uncle Dan had unexpectedly expressed the desire to revisit the old estate. At the last moment Marina had said she’d come too, despite Dan’s protests, and had lifted little Ada, hopla, with her hoop, into the calèche. They took, she imagined, the train from Ladoga to Raduga, for she remembered the way the station man with the whistle around his neck went along the platform, past the coaches of the stopped local, banging shut door after door, all six doors of every carriage, each of which consisted of six one-window carrosses of pumpkin origin, fused together. It was, Van suggested, a ‘tower in the mist’ (as she called any good recollection), and then a conductor walked on the running board of every coach with the train also running and opened doors all over again to give, punch, collect tickets, and lick his thumb, and change money, a hell of a job, but another ‘mauve tower.’ Did they hire a motor landaulet to Radugalet? Ten miles, she guessed. Ten versts, said Van. She stood corrected. He was out, he imagined, na progulke (promenading) in the gloomy firwood with Aksakov, his tutor, and Bagrov’s grandson, a neighbor’s boy, whom he teased and pinched and made horrible fun of, a nice quiet little fellow who quietly massacred moles and anything else with fur on, probably pathological. However, when they arrived, it became instantly clear that Demon had not expected ladies. He was on the terrace drinking goldwine (sweet whisky) with an orphan he had adopted, he said, a lovely Irish wild rose in whom Marina at once recognized an impudent scullery maid who had briefly worked at Ardis Hall, and had been ravished by an unknown gentleman — who was now well-known. In those days Uncle Dan wore a monocle in gay-dog copy of his cousin, and this he screwed in to view Rose, whom perhaps he had also been promised (here Van interrupted his interlocutor telling her to mind her vocabulary). The party was a disaster. The orphan languidly took off her pearl earrings for Marina’s appraisal. Grandpa Bagrov hobbled in from a nap in the boudoir and mistook Marina for a grande cocotte as the enraged lady conjectured later when she had a chance to get at poor Dan. Instead of staying for the night, Marina stalked off and called Ada who, having been told to ‘play in the garden,’ was mumbling and numbering in raw-flesh red the white trunks of a row of young birches with Rose’s purloined lipstick in the preamble to a game she now could not remember — what a pity, said Van — when her mother swept her back straight to Ardis in the same taxi leaving Dan — to his devices and vices, inserted Van — and arriving home at sunrise. But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach’im, to hell’s hounds — and it did remind one of Rose’s terrier that had kept trying to hug Dan’s leg) the charming glimpse was granted her of tiny Van, with another sweet boy, and blond-bearded, white-bloused Aksakov, walking up to the house, and, oh yes, she had forgotten her hoop — no, it was still in the taxi. But, personally, Van had not the slightest recollection of that visit or indeed of that particular summer, because his father’s life, anyway, was a rose garden all the time, and he had been caressed by ungloved lovely hands more than once himself, which did not interest Ada. (1.24)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Bagrov’s grandson: allusion to Childhood Years of Bagrov’s Grandson by the minor writer Sergey Aksakov (A.D. 1791-1859).