According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), in her tight rubber cap Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) evokes the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect is said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse:
To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts, and the wash of an old-fashioned swimming pool rhythmically flushed the green tiles, but Lucette was a hardy girl used to bracing winds no less than to the detestable sun. Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs, which looked lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom as the breeze dried her skin. With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse. (3.5)
"The Sun Horse" seems to hint at Hors, the Slavic sun god mentioned in Slovo o Polku Igoreve ("The Song of Igor's Campaign"):
Всеславъ князь людемъ судяше, княземъ грады рядяше,
а самъ въ ночь влъкомъ рыскаше; из Кыева дорискаше
до куръ Тмутороканя, великому Хръсови влъкомъ путь прерыскаше.
Тому въ ПолотскЪ позвониша заутренюю рано у святыя Софеи
в колоколы, а онъ въ КыевЪ звонъ слыша.
Аще и вЪща душа в дръзЪ тЪлЪ, но часто бЪды страдаше.
Тому вЪщей Боян и пръвое припЪвку, смысленый, рече:
"Ни хытру, ни горазду, ни птицю горазду суда божиа не минути".
In his English translation of Slovo VN renders this as follows:
Vseslav the prince judged men;
as prince, he ruled towns;
but at night he prowled
in the guise of a wolf.
From Kiev, prowling, he reached,
before the cocks [crew], Tmutorokan.
The path of Great Hors,
as a wolf, prowling, he crossed.
For him in Polotsk
they rang for matins early
at St. Sophia the bells;
but he heard the ringing in Kiev.
Although, indeed, he had
a vatic soul in a doughty body,
he often suffered calamities.
Of him vatic Boyan
Once said, with sense, in the tag:
"Neither the guileful nor the skillful,
neither bird [nor bard],
can escape God's judgment." (ll. 665-687)
One of the poets who translated Slovo into modern Russian was Balmont. In his translation (1930) Balmont mentions Solntse-Khors (the Sun-Hors):
Князь Всеслав - людей судил он, города князьям рядил он,
Сам же в ночь он рыскал волком, волк от Киева несется,
До утра - в Тьмуторокани, Солнце-Хорса перерыщет.
До заутрени звонили для него в Святой Софии,
В граде Полоцке, а звоны в стольном Киеве он слышал.
Хоть и вещею душою он владел в несмирном теле,
Но от бед страдал он часто. Для таких Баян-провидец
Спел мудреную припевку: "Будь ты хитрым, будь гораздым,
Будь ты птицею гораздой, не уйдешь суда господня".
The author of Slovo calls the Kuman chieftains deti besovi (the Fiend’s children):
СЪ ветри, Стрибожи внуци, вЪют съ моря стрЪлами на храбрыя плъкы Игоревы.
Земля тутнетъ, рЪкы мутно текуть, пороси поля прикрываютЪ, стязи глаголютъ:
"Половци идуть"; отъ Дона, и отъ моря, и отъ всЪхъ странъ рускыя плъкы оступиша.
ДЪти бЪсови кликомъ поля прегородиша, а храбрии Русици преградиша чрълеными щиты.
Balmont:
Вот Стрибожьи внуки, ветры,
Веют с моря, мечут стрелы на полки, где храбрый Игорь.
Земь гремит, и реки мутны, пыль поля запорошила,
Шум знамен: идет от Дона и от моря ворог сильный,
Половецкие дружины. Обступили силу русских.
Дети бесовы пресекли поле битвы зычным кликом,
И червлеными щитами Русь поля прегородила.
Now the winds, Stribog's grandsons,
in [the guise of] arrows waft from the sea
against the brave troops of Igor!
The earth rumbles, the rivers run sludgily,
dust covers the fields.
The banners speak: "The Kumans are coming
from the Don and from the sea and from all sides!"
The Russian troops retreat.
The Fiend's children bar the field with their war cries;
the brave sons of Rus bar it with their vermilion shields. (ll. 200-210)
In his Commentary VN links deti besovi (the Fiend’s children) to busovi vrani (Demon ravens) mentioned by the author of Slovo:
А Святъславь мутенъ сонъ видЪ в КиевЪ на горахъ.
"Синочи, съ вечера, одЪвахуть мя, - рече - чръною паполомою на кроваты тисовЪ;
чръпахуть ми синее вино, съ трудомь смЪшено;
сыпахуть ми тъщими тулы поганыхъ тлъковинъ великый женчюгь на лоно и нЪгують мя.
Уже дсъкы без кнЪса в моемъ теремЪ златовръсЪм.
Всю нощь съ вечера бусови врани възграяху у ПлЪснеска на болони,
бЪша дебрь Кисаню и не сошлю къ синему морю".
And Svyatoslav saw a troubled dream in Kiev upon the hills:
"This night, from eventide, they dressed me,
"he said, "with a black pall on a bedstead of yew.
They ladled out for me blue wine mixed with bane.
From the empty quivers of pagan tulks
they rolled great pearls onto my breast, and caressed me.
Already the traves lacked the master-girder
in my gold-crested tower!
All night, from eventide, demon ravens croaked.
On the outskirts of Plesensk there was a logging sleigh,
and it was carried to the blue sea!" (ll. 391-409)
Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) is known in society as Raven Veen:
On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.
The ‘D’ in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon’s twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns. (1.1)
April 23 is VN’s birthday. On the other hand, Igor’s campaign began on April 23, 1185:
According to the annals of Kievan Russia, four territorial princes with throne towns on the rivers Desna and Seim, east of Chernigov, set out on Tuesday, April 23, 1185, for the prairies beyond the river Donets to fight the Kumans. The four princes were: Igor, the leader of the expedition; his brother Vsevolod; their nephew, Svyatoslav; and Igor’s young son, Vladimir. The Kumans, nomads of obscure Turco-Mongolian origin, who had been assailing the southeastern steppes for the last hundred years, had been soundly trounced in 1183 by Igor’s cousin, Svyatoslav III. Igor was moved by the spirit of rash emulation in undertaking his own expedition without consulting the senior prince. (VN’s Foreword to his English translation of Slovo)
Several mistakes in my previous posts, “cobalt sailing boats & cobalt skies in Ada; Kobaltana in Pale Fire,” have been corrected. Let me also add here that in his memoirs Nachalo veka (“The Beginning of the Century”) Andrey Bely compares the blue eyes of Lyubov Dmitrievna Blok (Alexander Blok’s wife with whom Bely was in love) to cobalt:
Но слушала пристально, ширясь синими, как кобальт, глазами из щура ресниц, как из ширмы, — разглядывая, она «старшей» держалась; и Блок называл ее строгой; была всех моложе, но силилась «дамой» держаться, с огромною муфтой входила в дома, где была не «своя», точно тупясь над муфтой, которую мяла в коленях.
Lyubov Dmitrievna Blok was a daughter of Dmitri Mendeleev, a chemist and inventor who formulated the Periodic Law and created a farsighted version of the periodic table of elements. Cobalt (in Russian, kobal't) is a chemical element. For Andrey Bely Blok's wife was zhena, oblechyonnaya v solntse (the woman clothed with the sun).
In her review of Blok’s first collection, Stikhi o Prekrasnoy Dame (“Verses about the Beautiful Lady,” 1904), Zinaida Hippius says that the Knight of the pale Beautiful Lady managed to grow only the faintly glimmering wings of a butterfly:
Нежный, слабый, паутинный, влюбленный столько же в смерть, сколько в жизнь, рыцарь бледной Прекрасной Дамы — сумел вырастить себе лишь слабо мерцающие крылья бабочки. Он неверными и короткими взлетами поднимается над пропастью; но пропасть широка; крылья бабочки не осилят её. Крылья бабочки скоро устают, быстро слабеют. (I)
In her review Hippius quotes the first (and last) stanza of Blok’s poem Ya vyshel v noch’ (“I came out into the night,” 1902) in which mnimyi konskiy topot (the imaginary clatter of a horse’s hooves) is mentioned:
Не будем же требовать от этой милой книжки более того, что она может дать; она и так даёт нам много, освежает и утешает нас, посылает лёгкий, мгновенный отдых. Мы устаём от трезвого серого дня и его несомненностей. И мы рады, что поэт говорит нам:
Я вышел в ночь -- узнать, понять
Далёкий шорох, близкий ропот,
Несуществующих принять,
Поверить в мнимый конский топот…
Let’s not ask of this nice little book more than it can give; in fact, it gives us a lot, refreshing and consoling us, sending to us a light, instantaneous rest. We get tired of the sober gray day and its undoubtednesses. And we are happy that the poet tells us:
I came out into the night – to learn, understand
a distant rustle, a near murmur,
to accept the inexistent creatures,
to believe in the imaginary clatter of a horse’s hooves.
In the poem’s penultimate stanza Blok mentions belyi kon’ (a white horse):
И вот, слышнее звон копыт,
И белый конь ко мне несётся...
И стало ясно, кто молчит
И на пустом седле смеётся.
Describing the beginning of Demon’s affair with Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Van mentions Belokonsk:
Even before the old Eskimo had shuffled off with the message, Demon Veen had left his pink velvet chair and proceeded to win the wager, the success of his enterprise being assured by the fact that Marina, a kissing virgin, had been in love with him since their last dance on New Year’s Eve. Moreover, the tropical moonlight she had just bathed in, the penetrative sense of her own beauty, the ardent pulses of the imagined maiden, and the gallant applause of an almost full house made her especially vulnerable to the tickle of Demon’s moustache. She had ample time, too, to change for the next scene, which started with a longish intermezzo staged by a ballet company whose services Scotty had engaged, bringing the Russians all the way in two sleeping cars from Belokonsk, Western Estoty. In a splendid orchard several merry young gardeners wearing for some reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their mouths, while several equally implausible servant girls in sharovars (somebody had goofed — the word ‘samovars’ may have got garbled in the agent’s aerocable) were busy plucking marshmallows and peanuts from the branches of fruit trees. At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Belokonsk: the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada).
Marina's impressario, Scotty brings to mind Skotoprigonievsk ("Cattlebringington"), the city in which the action in Dostoevski's novel Brothers Karamazov (1880) takes place, and Sir Walter Scott. In his Commentary to his translation of Slovo (ll. 665-670) VN quotes Walter Scott's "The Last Minstrel:"
This passage [in which the path of Great Hors is mentioned] somehow always reminds me of the charming lines in Walter Scott's "The Last Minstrel," 1805, Canto Two, Stanza XIII:
In these far climes it was my lot
To meet the wondrous Michael Scott,
A wizard of such dreaded fame
That when in Salamanca's cave
Him listed his magic wand to wave
The bells would ring in Notre Dame.
With Milton Abraham’s invaluable help Marina’s twin sister Aqua organized a Phree Pharmacy in Belokonsk:
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)
Aqua’s “Phree Pharmacy” brings to mind Blok’s poem Noch’, ulitsa, fonar’, apteka (“Night, street, lamp, drugstore,” 1912) from the cycle Plyaski smerti (“Dances of Death”):
Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века -
Все будет так. Исхода нет.
Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.
Night, street, lamp, drugstore,
A dull and meaningless light.
Go on and live another quarter century -
Nothing will change. There's no way out.
You'll die, then start from the beginning,
It will repeat, just like before:
Night, icy ripples on a canal,
Drugstore, street, lamp.
Aqua is aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine when she marries Demon Veen. Lucette commits suicide (by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic) at the age of twenty-five. Quarter century is a period of twenty-five years.
Blok is the author of Pesn' Ada ("A Song of Hell," 1909), a poem written in terza rima (a rhyming verse stanza used by Dante in Divine Comedy), Ravenna, a poem from the cycle "Italian Verses" (1909) in which Dante's shade with the eagle profile is mentioned, and Na pole Kulikovom ("In the Field of Kulikovo," 1908), a cycle of five poems. In Ravenna (the city where Dante lived in exile and where he wrote Divine Comedy) there is a "raven." In 1380, in the field of Kulikovo, the Russians led by Prince Dmitri Donskoy defeated the Tartars led by Khan Mamay. Demon Veen's adversary in a sword duel, Baron d'Onsky (nicknamed Skonky) seems to be a cross between Dmitri Donskoy and Onegin's donskoy zherebets (Don stallion) in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Two: V: 4). Describing Tatiana's dream in Chapter Five (XVII: 8) of EO, Pushkin mentions konskiy top (the stamp of steed):
Еще страшней, еще чуднее:
Вот рак верхом на пауке,
Вот череп на гусиной шее
Вертится в красном колпаке,
Вот мельница вприсядку пляшет
И крыльями трещит и машет;
Лай, хохот, пенье, свист и хлоп,
Людская молвь и конский топ!31
Но что подумала Татьяна,
Когда узнала меж гостей
Того, кто мил и страшен ей,
Героя нашего романа!
Онегин за столом сидит
И в дверь украдкою глядит.
More frightful still, and still more wondrous:
there is a crab astride a spider;
there on a goose's neck
twirls a red-calpacked skull;
there a windmill the squat-jig dances
and rasps and waves its vanes.
Barks, laughter, singing, whistling, claps,
the parle of man, the stamp of steed!31
But what were the thoughts of Tatiana
when 'mongst the guests she recognized
him who was dear to her and awesome —
the hero of our novel!
Onegin at the table sits
and through the door stealthily gazes.
31. Reviewers condemned the words hlop [clap], molv' [parle], and top [stamp] as indifferent neologisms. These words are fundamentally Russian. “Bova stepped out of the tent for some fresh air and heard in the open country the parle of man and the stamp of steed” (“The Tale of Bova the Prince”). Hlop and ship are used in plain-folk speech instead of hlópanie [clapping] and shipénie [hissing]:
“he let out a hiss of the snaky sort”
(Ancient Russian Poems).
One should not interfere with the freedom of our rich and beautiful language. >> (Pushkin's note)