After Van’s first night in “Ardis the Second” Ada asks him if he slept his fill:
They stayed on and on, quite unable to part, knowing any explanation would do if anybody wondered why their rooms had remained empty till dawn. The first ray of the morning dabbed a toolbox with fresh green paint, when, at last moved by hunger, they got up and quietly repaired to the pantry.
‘Chto, vïspalsya, Vahn (well, slept your fill, Van)’? said Ada, beautifully mimicking her mother’s voice, and she continued in her mother’s English: ‘By your appetite, I judge. And, I think, it is only the first brekfest.’
‘Okh,’ grumbled Van, ‘my kneecaps! That bench was cruel. And I am hongry.’ (1.31)
In Chekhov’s play Dyadya Vanya (“Uncle Vanya,” 1898) Dr. Astrov says that he will stay until tomorrow and sleep his fill, quantum satis:
Астров (Елене Андреевне). Я ведь к вашему мужу. Вы писали, что он очень болен, ревматизм и еще что-то, а оказывается, он здоровехонек.
Елена Андреевна. Вчера вечером он хандрил, жаловался на боли в ногах, а сегодня ничего...
Астров. А я-то сломя голову скакал тридцать верст. Ну, да ничего, не впервой. Зато уж останусь у вас до завтра и, по крайней мере, высплюсь quantum satis.
Соня. И прекрасно. Это такая редкость, что вы у нас ночуете. Вы, небось, не обедали?
Астров. Нет-с, не обедал.
Соня. Так вот кстати и пообедаете. Мы теперь обедаем в седьмом часу. (Пьёт.) Холодный чай!
Телегин. В самоваре уже значительно понизилась температура.
Елена Андреевна. Ничего, Иван Иваныч, мы и холодный выпьем.
Телегин. Виноват-с... Не Иван Иваныч, а Илья Ильич-с... Илья Ильич Телегин, или, как некоторые зовут меня по причине моего рябого лица, Вафля. Я когда-то крестил Сонечку, и его превосходительство, ваш супруг, знает меня очень хорошо. Я теперь у вас живу-с, в этом имении-с... Если изволили заметить, я каждый день с вами обедаю.
Соня. Илья Ильич наш помощник, правая рука. (Нежно.) Давайте, крёстненький, я вам еще налью.
ASTROV (to Elena Andreyena.) I came to see your husband. You wrote that he was very ill, rheumatism and whatever, but it turns out he’s as sprightly as a chicken.
ELENA ANDREYEVNA Yesterday evening he was very low, he complained of pains in his legs, but today it’s all gone...
ASTROV And I of course came here breaking my neck a full fifteen miles. Ah well, it’s nothing, it’s not the first time. At least I can stay here until tomorrow and sleep my fill, quantum satis.
SONYA Oh excellent! It’s so rare that you spend the night with us. I don’t suppose you’ve eaten.
ASTROV No Miss, I haven’t eaten.
SONYA Well that fits in nicely, you can dine with us. We have dinner at seven now. (She drinks.) This tea is cold!
TELEGIN Yes, in the samovar the temperature has dropped significantly.
ELENA ANDREYEVNA It doesn’t matter, Ivan Ivanych, we’ll drink it cold.
TELEGIN I beg pardon ma’am, it’s not Ivan Ivanych, it’s Ilya Ilyich... Ilya Ilyich Telegin, or as some people call me because of my pock marked face, Waffle. I was Sonya’s godfather, and his excellency, your husband, knows me very well. I live now in this house ma’am... Perhaps you might notice that I dine with you each evening.
SONYA Ilya Ilyich – our indispensable assistant, our right hand man. (Tenderly.) Here, dear godfather, let me pour you some more tea. (Act One)
At the end of Chekhov’s play Sonya promises to Uncle Vanya that they will see vsyo nebo v almazakh (the whole sky swarming with diamonds). Sonya's words are quoted by Van (whom Ada calls "Uncle Van"):
‘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.’
‘Except,’ she said, ‘that I do not approve of your making a laughingstock of yourself by looking for pistols in souvenir shops, especially when Ardis Hall is full of old shotguns and rifles, and revolvers, and bows and arrows — you remember, we had lots of practice with them when you and I were children.’
Oh, he did, he did. Children, yes. In point of fact, how puzzling to keep seeing that recent past in nursery terms. Because nothing had changed — you are with me, aren’t you? — nothing, not counting little improvements in the grounds and the governess. (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.
A Latin phrase used in Uncle Vanya by Dr. Astrov, quantum satis brings to mind quantum satis Branda voli (quantum satis of strong-willed Brand) mentioned by Alexander Blok at the end of his poem Vozmezdie (“Retribution,” 1910-21):
Когда ты загнан и забит
Людьми, заботой, иль тоскою;
Когда под гробовой доскою
Всё, что тебя пленяло, спит;
Когда по городской пустыне,
Отчаявшийся и больной,
Ты возвращаешься домой,
И тяжелит ресницы иней,
Тогда - остановись на миг
Послушать тишину ночную:
Постигнешь слухом жизнь иную,
Которой днём ты не постиг;
По-новому окинешь взглядом
Даль снежных улиц, дым костра,
Ночь, тихо ждущую утра
Над белым запушённым садом,
И небо - книгу между книг;
Найдёшь в душе опустошённой
Вновь образ матери склонённый,
И в этот несравненный миг -
Узоры на стекле фонарном,
Мороз, оледенивший кровь,
Твоя холодная любовь -
Всё вспыхнет в сердце благодарном,
Ты всё благословишь тогда,
Поняв, что жизнь - безмерно боле,
Чем quantum satis Бранда воли,
А мир - прекрасен, как всегда.
When you are cornered and depressed
By people, dues or anguish.
When, underneath the coffin lid,
All that inspired you, perished;
When through the deserted town dome,
Hopeless and weak,
You're finally returning home,
And rime is on thy eyelashes, -
Then - come to rest for short-lifted flash
To hear the silence of night
You'll fathom other life by ears
That's hard to fathom at daylight
In new way you will do the glance
Of long snow streets and foam of fire,
Of night, quite waiting for the lance
Of morning in white garden, piled.
Of heaven - Book among the books
You'll find in the drained soul
Again your loving mother's look
And at this moment, peerless, sole
The patterns on the lamppost's glass
The frost, that chilled your blood
Your stone-hold love, already past
All will flare up in your heart.
Then everything you'll highly bless
You'll see that life is much greater
Than quantum satis of strong-willed Brand
And the world is beautiful as always. (chapter III)
The title character of a play in verse (1865) by Ibsen, Brand brings to mind Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure who, according to Kinbote, jumped or fell from the North Tower:
However, not all Russians are gloomy, and the two young experts from Moscow whom our new government engaged to locate the Zemblan crown jewels turned out to be positively rollicking. The Extremists were right in believing that Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure, had succeeded in hiding those jewels before he jumped or fell from the North Tower; but they did not know he had had a helper and were wrong in thinking the jewels must be looked for in the palace which the gentle white-haired Bland had never left except to die. I may add, with pardonable satisfaction, that they were, and still are, cached in a totally different - and quite unexpected - corner of Zembla. (note to Line 681)
In his Foreword to “Retribution” Blok mentions those infinitely high qualities that once shone like luchshie almazy v chelovecheskoy korone (the best diamonds in man’s crown), such as humanism, virtues, impeccable honesty, rectitude, etc.:
Тема заключается в том, как развиваются звенья единой цепи рода. Отдельные отпрыски всякого рода развиваются до положенного им предела и затем вновь поглощаются окружающей мировой средой; но в каждом отпрыске зреет и отлагается нечто новое и нечто более острое, ценою бесконечных потерь, личных трагедий, жизненных неудач, падений и т. д.; ценою, наконец, потери тех бесконечно высоких свойств, которые в своё время сияли, как лучшие алмазы в человеческой короне (как, например, свойства гуманные, добродетели, безупречная честность, высокая нравственность и проч.)
Quantum satis means in Latin “the amount which is enough.” At the beginning of a letter (written soon after the wake commemorating Baron Delvig's death) of Jan. 31, 1831, to Pletnyov (to whom Eugene Onegin is dedicated) Pushkin thanks Pletnyov for the Boris Godunov money and quotes the words of St. Francis Xavier "satis est, Domine, satis est:"
Сейчас получил 2000 р., мой благодетель. Satis est, domine, satis est.
Shade's full name is John Francis Shade; the full name of Charles the Beloved is Charles Xavier Vseslav. In a letter of Apr. 11, 1831, to Pletnyov Pushkin asks Pletnyov (who was slow to reply to Pushkin’s letters) if he is still alive and calls him ten’ vozlyublennaya (the beloved shade):
Воля твоя, ты несносен: ни строчки от тебя не дождёшься. Умер ты, что ли? Если тебя уже нет на свете, то, тень возлюбленная, кланяйся от меня Державину и обними моего Дельвига.
On Van’s seventh birthday Demon made himself up as Boris Godunov:
Demon spoke on: ‘I cannot disinherit you: Aqua left you enough "ridge" and real estate to annul the conventional punishment. And I cannot denounce you to the authorities without involving my daughter, whom I mean to protect at all cost. But I can do the next proper thing, I can curse you, I can make this our last, our last —’
Van, whose finger had been gliding endlessly to and fro along the mute but soothingly smooth edge of the mahogany desk, now heard with horror the sob that shook Demon’s entire frame, and then saw a deluge of tears flowing down those hollow tanned cheeks. In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity. Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? The funest gamester... the pale fatal girl, in another well-known melodrama.... In this one. Van gave him a clean handkerchief to replace the soiled rag. His own marble calm did not surprise Van. The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion. (2.11)
Van’s and Ada’s father, Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Van learns about the catastrophe from a newspaper that he reads on the terrace of Villa Armina:
Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. A list of ‘leading figures’ dead in the explosion comprised the advertising manager of a department store, the acting foreman in the sheet-metal division of a facsimile corporation, a recording firm executive, the senior partner of a law firm, an architect with heavy aviation background (a first misprint here, impossible to straighten out), the vice president of an insurance corporation, another vice president, this time of a board of adjustment whatever that might be —
‘I’m hongree,’ said a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers.
‘Use bell,’ said Van, continuing in a state of odd fascination to go through the compilation of labeled lives:
— the president of a wholesale liquor-distributing firm, the manager of a turbine equipment company, a pencil manufacturer, two professors of philosophy, two newspaper reporters (with nothing more to report), the assistant controller of a wholesome liquor distribution bank (misprinted and misplaced), the assistant controller of a trust company, a president, the secretary of a printing agency —
The names of those big shots, as well as those of some eighty other men, women, and silent children who perished in blue air, were being withheld until all relatives had been reached; but the tabulatory preview of commonplace abstractions had been thought to be too imposing not to be given at once as an appetizer; and only on the following morning did Van learn that a bank president lost in the closing garble was his father. (3.7)
“I’m hongree” brings to mind "I am hongry" (Van’s words to Ada after his first night in “Ardis the Second”). Van never finds out that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair.
At the end of his Commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote quotes a Zemblan saying Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty):
Many years ago - how many I would not care to say - I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
Zemblan for “the Devil,” Pern seems to hint at Perun (the Slavic god of thunder). Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van mentions Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder:
‘What was that?’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.
‘Sheet lightning,’ suggested Van.
‘If you ask me,’ said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.’
Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. In expectation of the rumble, Marina started to count under her breath, as if she were praying or checking the pulse of a very sick person. One heartbeat was supposed to span one mile of black night between the living heart and a doomed herdsman, felled somewhere — oh, very far — on the top of a mountain. The rumble came — but sounded rather subdued. A second flash revealed the structure of the French window. (1.38)
At the family dinner Demon asks Ada if she would like une rivière de diamants for her sixteenth birthday:
‘By the way, Demon,’ interrupted Marina, ‘where and how can I obtain the kind of old roomy limousine with an old professional chauffeur that Praskovia, for instance, has had for years?’
‘Impossible, my dear, they are all in heaven or on Terra. But what would Ada like, what would my silent love like for her birthday? It’s next Saturday, po razschyotu po moemu (by my reckoning), isn’t it? Une rivière de diamants?’
‘Protestuyu!’ cried Marina. ‘Yes, I’m speaking seriozno. I object to your giving her kvaka sesva (quoi que ce soit), Dan and I will take care of all that.’
‘Besides you’ll forget,’ said Ada laughing, and very deftly showed the tip of her tongue to Van who had been on the lookout for her conditional reaction to ‘diamonds.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): po razschyotu po moemu: an allusion to Famusov (in Griboedov’s Gore ot uma), calculating the pregnancy of a lady friend.
protestuyu: Russ., I protest.
seriozno: Russ., seriously.
quoi que ce soit: whatever it might be.
In Blok's “Retribution” the hero’s father (nicknamed Demon) sees Gore ot uma in his cold and cruel dreams:
В ком смутно брезжит память эта,
Тот странен и с людьми не схож:
Всю жизнь его — уже поэта
Священная объемлет дрожь,
Бывает глух, и слеп, и нем он,
В нём почивает некий бог,
Его опустошает Демон,
Над коим Врубель изнемог…
Его прозрения глубоки,
Но их глушит ночная тьма,
И в снах холодных и жестоких
Он видит «Горе от ума». (Chapter Three)
Blok mentions Vrubel, the author of The Demon Seated and The Demon Downcast. Describing his meetings with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in the fall of 1905 (soon after Demon's death) in Mont Roux, Van mentions Vrubel's wonderful picture of Father:
Ardis, Manhattan, Mont Roux, our little rousse is dead. Vrubel’s wonderful picture of Father, those demented diamonds staring at me, painted into me. (3.8)
According to Vadim Vadimovich (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins!, 1974), his father was portrayed by Vrubel:
My father was a gambler and a rake. His society nickname was Demon. Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, his black hair. What remained on the palette has been used by me, Vadim, son of Vadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the best of my English romaunts, Ardis (1970).
The scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars, my father resided on the idyllic outskirts of history. His politics were of the casual, reactionary sort. He had a dazzling and complicated sensual life, but his culture was patchy and commonplace. He was born in 1865, married in
1896, and died in a pistol duel with a young Frenchman on October 22, 1898, after a card-table fracas at Deauville, some resort in gray Normandy. (2.5)
On October 22, 1905, Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) leaves a message for Van telling him that her brother is seriously ill:
On Wednesday, October 22, in the early afternoon, Dorothy, ‘frantically’ trying to ‘locate’ Ada (who after her usual visit to the Three Swans was spending a couple of profitable hours at Paphia’s ‘Hair and Beauty’ Salon) left a message for Van, who got it only late at night when he returned from a trip to Sorcière, in the Valais, about one hundred miles east, where he bought a villa for himself et ma cousine, and had supper with the former owner, a banker’s widow, amiable Mme Scarlet and her blond, pimply but pretty, daughter Eveline, both of whom seemed erotically moved by the rapidity of the deal.
He was still calm and confident; after carefully studying Dorothy’s hysterical report, he still believed that nothing threatened their destiny; that at best Andrey would die right now, sparing Ada the bother of a divorce; and that at worst the man would be packed off to a mountain sanatorium in a novel to linger there through a few last pages of epilogical mopping up far away from the reality of their united lives. Friday morning, at nine o’clock — as bespoken on the eve — he drove over to the Bellevue, with the pleasant plan of motoring to Sorcière to show her the house. (3.8)
In our world October 22, 1905, was Sunday. But the action in Ada takes place on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet), and the Antiterran calendar does not coincide with ours. Describing his meetings with Ada in Mont Roux, Van mentios Desdemonia:
That meeting, and the nine that followed, constituted the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age. The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white 'Nuremberg Virgin'-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor – in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. (3.8)
Desdemonia hints at Desdemona, Othello’s wife in Shakespeare’s Othello. In his essay Taynyi smysl tragedii “Otello” (“The Secret Meaning of the Tragedy Othello,” 1919) Blok says that Desdemona is a harmony, Desdemona is a soul, and the soul can not but saves from the chaos:
Дездемона - это гармония, Дездемона - это душа, а душа не может не спасать от хаоса.
In his Pushkin speech, O naznachenii poeta (“On a Poet’s Destination,” 1921), Blok says that a poet is a son of harmony and quotes Mozart’s words (attributing them to Salieri) in Pushkin's little tragedy "Mozart and Salieri" (1830):
Что такое поэт? Человек, который пишет стихами? Нет, конечно. Он называется поэтом не потому, что он пишет стихами; но он пишет стихами, то есть приводит в гармонию слова и звуки, потому что он - сын гармонии, поэт.
What is a poet? A man who writes in verse? Of course, not. He is called a poet not because he writes in verse; but he writes in verse, that is he brings into harmony words and sounds, because he is a son of harmony, a poet.
Нельзя сопротивляться могуществу гармонии, внесённой в мир поэтом; борьба с нею превышает и личные и соединённые человеческие силы. "Когда бы все так чувствовали силу гармонии!" - томится одинокий Сальери. Но её чувствуют все, только смертные - иначе, чем бог - Моцарт. От знака, которым поэзия отмечает на лету, от имени, которое она даёт, когда это нужно, - никто не может уклониться, так же как от смерти. Это имя даётся безошибочно.
According to Blok, everybody feels the power of harmony, but mortals feel it differently than god (Mozart) does. On Desdemonia artists are the only gods.
The last day of Shade's life has passed in a sustained low hum of harmony:
Gently the day has passed in a sustained
Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life. I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line. (ll. 963-976)
Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to blend Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with Shakespeare’s Desdemona. Duchess of Payn brings to mind time-and-pain mentioned by Van at the end of Ada:
Was it time for the morphine? No, not yet. Time-and-pain had not been mentioned in the Texture. Pity, since an element of pure time enters into pain, into the thick, steady, solid duration of I-can’t-bear-it pain; nothing gray-gauzy about it, solid as a black bole, I can’t, oh, call Lagosse.
Van found him reading in the serene garden. The doctor followed Ada into the house. The Veens had believed for a whole summer of misery (or made each other believe) that it was a touch of neuralgia.
Touch? A giant, with an effort-contorted face, clamping and twisting an engine of agony. Rather humiliating that physical pain makes one supremely indifferent to such moral issues as Lucette’s fate, and rather amusing, if that is the right word, to constate that one bothers about problems of style even at those atrocious moments. The Swiss doctor, who had been told everything (and had even turned out to have known at medical school a nephew of Dr Lapiner) displayed an intense interest in the almost completed but only partly corrected book and drolly said it was not a person or persons but le bouquin which he wanted to see guéri de tous ces accrocs before it was too late. It was. What everybody thought would be Violet’s supreme achievement, ideally clean, produced on special Atticus paper in a special cursive type (the glorified version of Van’s hand), with the master copy bound in purple calf for Van’s ninety-seventh birthday, had been immediately blotted out by a regular inferno of alterations in red ink and blue pencil. One can even surmise that if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever intended to die they would die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb.
Their recently built castle in Ex was inset in a crystal winter. In the latest Who’s Who the list of his main papers included by some bizarre mistake the title of a work he had never written, though planned to write many pains: Unconsciousness and the Unconscious. There was no pain to do it now — and it was high pain for Ada to be completed. ‘Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon Dieu,’ Dr [Professor. Ed.] Lagosse exclaimed, weighing the master copy which the flat pale parents of the future Babes, in the brown-leaf Woods, a little book in the Ardis Hall nursery, could no longer prop up in the mysterious first picture: two people in one bed. (5.6)
Van calls pain "a giant." In his Foreword (written after the Commentary and Index) to Shade’s poem Kinbote compares himself to a soft, clumsy giant:
Imagine a soft, clumsy giant; imagine a historical personage whose knowledge of money is limited to the abstract billions of a national debt; imagine an exiled prince who is unaware of the Golconda in his cuff links! This is to say - oh, hyperbolically - that I am the most impractical fellow in the world. Between such a person and an old fox in the book publishing business, relations are at first touchingly carefree and chummy, with expansive banterings and all sorts of amiable tokens. I have no reason to suppose that anything will ever happen to prevent this initial relationship with good old Frank, my present publisher, from remaining a permanent fixture.
In his note to Line 1000 Kinbote compares his feelings toward Shade’s poem to the feeling “one has for a fickle, young creature who has been stolen and brutally enjoyed by a black giant:”
Gradually I regained my usual composure. I reread Pale Fire more carefully. I liked it better when expecting less. And what was that? What was that dim distant music, those vestiges of color in the air? Here and there I discovered in it and especially, especially in the invaluable variants, echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewake of my glory. I now felt a new, pitiful tenderness toward the poem as one has for a fickle young creature who has been stolen and brutally enjoyed by a black giant but now again is safe in our hall and park, whistling with the stableboys, swimming with the tame seal. The spot still hurts, it must hurt, but with strange gratitude we kiss those heavy wet eyelids and caress that polluted flesh. (note to Line 1000)
In the second poem of his cycle Venetsiya ("Venice") included in "Italian Verses" (1909) Blok mentions giganty (the giants) on St Mark's Clocktower:
Холодный ветер от лагуны.
Гондол безмолвные гроба.
Я в эту ночь - больной и юный -
Простёрт у львиного столба.
На башне, с песнию чугунной,
Гиганты бьют полночный час.
Марк утопил в лагуне лунной
Узорный свой иконостас.
В тени дворцовой галлереи,
Чуть озаренная луной,
Таясь, проходит Саломея
С моей кровавой головой.
Всё спит - дворцы, каналы, люди,
Лишь призрака скользящий шаг,
Лишь голова на чёрном блюде
Глядит с тоской в окрестный мрак.
Describing Flavita (the Russian Scrabble), Van mentions Venezia Rossa:
The set our three children received in 1884 from an old friend of the family (as Marina’s former lovers were known), Baron Klim Avidov, consisted of a large folding board of saffian and a boxful of weighty rectangles of ebony inlaid with platinum letters, only one of which was a Roman one, namely the letter J on the two joker blocks (as thrilling to get as a blank check signed by Jupiter or Jurojin). It was, incidentally, the same kindly but touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa. (1.36)
Baron Klim Avidov is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. The Gritz seems to hint at Mme Gritsatsuev, "a passionate woman, a poet's dream," in Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs," 1928). Dvenadtsat' ("The Twelve," 1918) is a poem by Blok. In Ilf and Petrov's "The 12 Chairs" Bender calls Vorob'yaninov gigant mysli, otets russkoy demokratii (a giant of thought, the father of Russian democracy). In a conversation with Kinbote Shade mentioned those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense adeof humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
The "real" name of Shade, Kinbote and Gradus (the poet's murderer) seems to be Botkin. Botkin is nikto b ("none would," a phrase used by Mozart in Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri") in reverse.
See also the updated version of my previous post, “soft, clumsy giant in Pale Fire; Oldmanhattan slang for ‘money’ in Ada.”