According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), with braided hair Ada resembles the young soprano Maria Kuznetsova in the letter scene in Tschchaikow's opera Onegin and Olga:
It was the first time he had seen her in that luminous frock nearly as flimsy as a nightgown. She had braided her hair, and he said she resembled the young soprano Maria Kuznetsova in the letter scene in Tschchaikow’s opera Onegin and Olga. (1.25)
Maria Kuznetsova (1880-1966) was a famous Russian opera singer (lyrical soprano) and dancer. She initially debuted at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory as Tatiana in Tchaykovsky’s Eugene Onegin in 1904. The author of Chayka ("The Seagull," 1896), Chekhov married Olga Knipper (a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater) in 1901 and died (in Badenweiler, a German spa) in 1904. In a letter of Nov. 7, 1888, to Suvorin Chekhov (who held Tchaykovsky in great esteem and admired his opera) says that the public weeps when Tatiana writes her letter:
В скверности наших театров виновата не публика. Публика всегда и везде одинакова: умна и глупа, сердечна и безжалостна — смотря по настроению. Она всегда была стадом, которое нуждается в хороших пастухах и собаках, и она всегда шла туда, куда вели ее пастухи и собаки. Вас возмущает, что она хохочет плоским остротам и аплодирует звонким фразам; но ведь она же, эта самая глупая публика, дает полные сборы на «Отелло» и, слушая оперу «Евгений Онегин», плачет, когда Татьяна пишет свое письмо.
It is not the public that is to blame for our theatres being so wretched. The public is always and everywhere the same: intelligent and stupid, sympathetic and pitiless according to mood. It has always been a flock which needs good shepherds and dogs, and it has always gone in the direction in which the shepherds and the dogs drove it. You are indignant that it laughs at flat witticisms and applauds sounding phrases; but then the very same stupid public fills the house to hear “Othello,” and, listening to the opera Eugene Onegin, weeps when Tatiana writes her letter.
In a letter of April 1, 1891, from Rome to Mme Kiselyov Chekhov says that two Dutch girls at the table d’hôte resemble Pushkin’s Tatiana and her sister Olga:
Я обедаю за table d’hôte’ом. Можете себе представить, против меня сидят две голландочки: одна похожа на пушкинскую Татьяну, а другая на сестру её Ольгу. Я смотрю на обеих в продолжение всего обеда и воображаю чистенький беленький домик с башенкой, отличное масло, превосходный голландский сыр, голландские сельди, благообразного пастора, степенного учителя... и хочется мне жениться на голландочке, и хочется, чтобы меня вместе с нею нарисовали на подносе около чистенького домика.
I am dining at the table d’hôte. Can you imagine just opposite me are sitting two Dutch girls: one of them is like Pushkin’s Tatiana, and the other like her sister Olga. I watch them all through dinner, and imagine a neat, clean little house with a turret, excellent butter, superb Dutch cheese, Dutch herrings, a benevolent-looking pastor, a sedate teacher, . . . and I feel I should like to marry a Dutch girl and be depicted with her on a tea-tray beside the little white house.
In Chapter Three (V: 8-9) of Pushkin's novel in verse Onegin tells Lenski that in Olga's features there is no life, just as in a Vandyke Madonna. In Obrazy Italii (“Images of Italy,” 1923) Pavel Muratov (1881-1950) says that Rome of the 18th century is still alive in the gouaches of the Italianized Dutchman Vanvitelli:
Руины, украшавшие картины Пуссэна и Клода, сделались в XVIII веке темой особого искусства, - пейзажа с развалинами. Живописная традиция классического пейзажа к тому времени несколько ослабела, и руины Паннини отражают больше манеру венецианских пейзажистов. В конце века последовал новый прилив к Риму иностранцев. Удивительные рисунки Фрагонара изображают какие-то сны о римской вилле. Для Юбер Робера Кампанья и развалины Рима стали неиссякаемыми источниками благороднейшей и живописной фантазии. Целый ряд более скромных, сухих и точных немцев заносил в свои альбомы и переводил на медные доски гравюр классические линии римских видов. Рим XVIII века сохранился ещё в гуашах итальянизированного голландца Ванвителли, в галереях Корсини и Капитолия. (Roman Campania, 5)
Caspar van Wittel (1652 or 1653 – 1736), known in Italian as Gaspare Vanvitelli (father of the architect Luigi Vanvitelli, 1700-73), was a Dutch painter and draughtsman who had a long career in Rome and who played a pivotal role in the development of the genre of topographical painting known as veduta. On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Giorgio Vanvitelli is an opera singer:
Van regretted that because Lettrocalamity (Vanvitelli’s old joke!) was banned all over the world, its very name having become a ‘dirty word’ among upper-upper-class families (in the British and Brazilian sense) to which the Veens and Durmanovs happened to belong, and had been replaced by elaborate surrogates only in those very important ‘utilities’ — telephones, motors — what else? — well a number of gadgets for which plain folks hanker with lolling tongues, breathing faster than gundogs (for it’s quite a long sentence), such trifles as tape recorders, the favorite toys of his and Ada’s grandsires (Prince Zemski had one for every bed of his harem of schoolgirls) were not manufactured any more, except in Tartary where they had evolved ‘minirechi’ (‘talking minarets’) of a secret make. Had our erudite lovers been allowed by common propriety and common law to knock into working order the mysterious box they had once discovered in their magic attic, they might have recorded (so as to replay, eight decades later) Giorgio Vanvitelli’s arias as well as Van Veen’s conversations with his sweetheart. Here, for example, is what they might have heard today — with amusement, embarrassment, sorrow, wonder. (1.24)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Lettrocalamity: a play on Ital. elettrocalamita, electromagnet.
The surname Muratov brings to mind Tolstoy's tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper. (1.28)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad, (a Caucasian chieftain) is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
The Demon is also an opera by Rubinstein. ‘Minirechi’ (‘talking minarets’) of a secret make that they had evolved in Tartary seem to hint at Lermontov’s poem Est’ rechi – znachen’ye / temno il’ nichtozhno (“There are talks – their meaning / is dark or insignificant,” 1840):
Есть речи — значенье
Темно иль ничтожно,
Но им без волненья
Внимать невозможно.
Как полны их звуки
Безумством желанья!
В них слёзы разлуки,
В них трепет свиданья.
Не встретит ответа
Средь шума мирского
Из пламя и света
Рождённое слово;
Но в храме, средь боя
И где я ни буду,
Услышав, его я
Узнаю повсюду.
Не кончив молитвы,
На звук тот отвечу,
И брошусь из битвы
Ему я навстречу.
Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (Marina’s twin sister who married Demon Veen, Van’s and Ada’s father), Van mentions Palermontovia (a country that blends Palermo with Lermontov):
Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth — say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia — as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua’s bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health (‘just a little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black’) in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive... But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (1.3)
Yalta is a lovely Crimean town where Chekhov lived. In the first line of his poem Priblizhaetsya zvuk... (“A sound approaches...” 1912) Alexander Blok mentions shchemyashchiy zvuk (a heart-rending sound):
Приближается звук. И, покорна щемящему звуку,
Молодеет душа.
И во сне прижимаю к губам твою прежнюю руку,
Не дыша.
Снится - снова я мальчик, и снова любовник,
И овраг, и бурьян,
И в бурьяне - колючий шиповник,
И вечерний туман.
Сквозь цветы, и листы, и колючие ветки, я знаю,
Старый дом глянет в сердце моё,
Глянет небо опять, розовея от краю до краю,
И окошко твоё.
Этот голос - он твой, и его непонятному звуку
Жизнь и горе отдам,
Хоть во сне твою прежнюю милую руку
Прижимая к губам.
In a letter of Jan. 31, 1906, to Peter Pertsov Blok mentions Tchaykovsky’s opera Pikovaya dama (“The Queen of Spades”):
Граф Сэн-Жермэн и «Московская Венера» совсем не у Лермонтова. Очевидно, я написал так туманно об этом, потому что тут для меня многое разумелось само собой. Это — «Пиковая дама», и даже почти уж не пушкинская, а Чайковского (либретто Модеста Чайковского):
Однажды в Версале aux jeux de la reine
Venus Moscovite проигралась дотла…
В числе приглашенных был граф Сэн-Жермэн.
Следя за игрой… И ей прошептал
Слова, слаще звуков Моцарта…
(Три карты, три карты, три карты)…
и т. д. — Но ведь это пункт «маскарадный» («Маскарад» Лермонтова), магический пункт, в котором уже нет «Пушкинского и Лермонтовского», как «двух начал петербургского периода», но Пушкин «аполлонический» полетел в бездну, столкнутый туда рукой Чайковского — мага и музыканта, а Лермонтов, сам когда-то побывавший в бездне, встал над ней и окостенел в магизме, и кричит Пушкину вниз: «Добро, строитель!» Это — «всё, кружась, исчезает во мгле».
Blok calls Tchaykovsky "a magician and musician." Pushkin's (and Tchaykovsky's) Venus Moscovite brings to mind Venus and the Moustique muscovite mentioned by Van when he describes his nights in “Ardis the First:”
The males of the firefly, a small luminous beetle, more like a wandering star than a winged insect, appeared on the first warm black nights of Ardis, one by one, here and there, then in a ghostly multitude, dwindling again to a few individuals as their quest came to its natural end. Van watched them with the same pleasurable awe he had experienced as a child, when, lost in the purple crepuscule of an Italian hotel garden, in an alley of cypresses, he supposed they were golden ghouls or the passing fancies of the garden. Now as they softly flew, apparently straight, crossing and recrossing the darkness around him, each flashed his pale-lemon light every five seconds or so, signaling in his own specific rhythm (quite different from that of an allied species, flying with Photinus ladorensis, according to Ada, at Lugano and Luga) to his grass-domiciled female pulsating in photic response after taking a couple of moments to verify the exact type of light code he used. The presence of those magnificent little animals, delicately illuminating, as they passed, the fragrant night, filled Van with a subtle exhilaration that Ada’s entomology seldom evoked in him — maybe in result of the abstract scholar’s envy which a naturalist’s immediate knowledge sometimes provokes. The hammock, a comfortable oblong nest, reticulated his naked body either under the weeping cedar that sprawled over one corner of a lawn, and granted a partial shelter in case of a shower, or, on safer nights, between two tulip trees (where a former summer guest, with an opera cloak over his clammy nightshirt, had awoken once because a stink bomb had burst among the instruments in the horsecart, and striking a match, Uncle Van had seen the bright blood blotching his pillow).
The windows in the black castle went out in rows, files, and knight moves. The longest occupant of the nursery water closet was Mlle Larivière, who came there with a rose-oil lampad and her buvard. A breeze ruffled the hangings of his now infinite chamber. Venus rose in the sky; Venus set in his flesh.
All that was a little before the seasonal invasion of a certain interestingly primitive mosquito (whose virulence the not-too-kind Russian contingent of our region attributed to the diet of the French winegrowers and bogberry-eaters of Ladore); but even so the fascinating fireflies, and the still more eerie pale cosmos coming through the dark foliage, balanced with new discomforts the nocturnal ordeal, the harassments of sweat and sperm associated with his stuffy room. Night, of course, always remained an ordeal, throughout the near-century of his life, no matter how drowsy or drugged the poor man might be — for genius is not all gingerbread even for Billionaire Bill with his pointed beardlet and stylized bald dome, or crusty Proust who liked to decapitate rats when he did not feel like sleeping, or this brilliant or obscure V.V. (depending on the eyesight of readers, also poor people despite our jibes and their jobs); but at Ardis, the intense life of the star-haunted sky troubled the boy’s night so much that, on the whole, he felt grateful when foul weather or the fouler gnat — the Kamargsky Komar of our muzhiks and the Moustique moscovite of their no less alliterative retaliators — drove him back to his bumpy bed.
In this our dry report on Van Veen’s early, too early love, for Ada Veen, there is neither reason, nor room for metaphysical digression. Yet, let it be observed (just while the lucifers fly and throb, and an owl hoots — also most rhythmically — in the nearby park) that Van, who at the time had still not really tasted the Terror of Terra — vaguely attributing it, when analyzing his dear unforgettable Aqua’s torments, to pernicious fads and popular fantasies — even then, at fourteen, recognized that the old myths, which willed into helpful being a whirl of worlds (no matter how silly and mystical) and situated them within the gray matter of the star-suffused heavens, contained, perhaps, a glowworm of strange truth. His nights in the hammock (where that other poor youth had cursed his blood cough and sunk back into dreams of prowling black spumas and a crash of symbols in an orchal orchestra — as suggested to him by career physicians) were now haunted not so much by the agony of his desire for Ada, as by that meaningless space overhead, underhead, everywhere, the demon counterpart of divine time, tingling about him and through him, as it was to retingle — with a little more meaning fortunately — in the last nights of a life, which I do not regret, my love. (1.12)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades (‘symbols in an orchal orchestra’).
buvard: blotting pad.
Kamargsky: La Camargue, a marshy region in S. France combined with Komar, ‘mosquito’, in Russian and moustique in French.
That other poor youth who slept in a hammock is Ivan Durmanov (1842-62), Marina’s and Aqua’s elder brother (Van’s and Ada’s Uncle Ivan), a gifted violinist (a friend of M. I. Glinka, the composer who visited Ardis, 2.8) who died young and famous. The author of Ruslan and Lyudmila (the opera), Glinka died in Berlin. “Tschchaikow” is a pseudo-German spelling of the Russian composer’s name. “Billionaire Bill with his pointed beardlet and stylized bald dome” is Shakespeare. Describing Ada’s dramatic career, Van pairs Shakespeare with Chekhov:
At fourteen, Ada had firmly believed she would shoot to stardom and there, with a grand bang, break into prismatic tears of triumph. She studied at special schools. Unsuccessful but gifted actresses, as well as Stan Slavsky (no relation, and not a stage name), gave her private lessons of drama, despair, hope. Her debut was a quiet little disaster; her subsequent appearances were sincerely applauded only by close friends.
‘One’s first love,’ she told Van, ‘is one’s first standing ovation, and that is what makes great artists — so Stan and his girl friend, who played Miss Spangle Triangle in Flying Rings, assured me. Actual recognition may come only with the last wreath.’
‘Bosh!’ said Van.
‘Precisely — he too was hooted by hack hoods in much older Amsterdams, and look how three hundred years later every Poppy Group pup copies him! I still think I have talent, but then maybe I’m confusing the right podhod (approach) with talent, which does not give a dry fig for rules deduced from past art.’
‘Well, at least you know that,’ said Van; ‘and you’ve dwelt at length upon it in one of your letters.’
‘I seem to have always felt, for example, that acting should be focused not on "characters," not on "types" of something or other, not on the fokus-pokus of a social theme, but exclusively on the subjective and unique poetry of the author, because playwrights, as the greatest among them has shown, are closer to poets than to novelists. In "real" life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void — unless we be artists ourselves, naturally; but in a good play I feel authored, I feel passed by the board of censors, I feel secure, with only a breathing blackness before me (instead of our Fourth-Wall Time), I feel cuddled in the embrace of puzzled Will (he thought I was you) or in that of the much more normal Anton Pavlovich, who was always passionately fond of long dark hair.’
‘That you also wrote to me once.’ (2.9)
"The fokus-pokus of a social theme" brings to mind vse fokus-pokusy (the humbug) mentioned by Leo Tolstoy in Otrochestvo ("Boyhood," 1854):
Никогда ни в ком не встречал я такого фамильного сходства, как между сестрой и матушкой. Сходство это заключалось не в лице, не в сложении, но в чем-то неуловимом: в руках, в манере ходить, в особенности в голосе в некоторых выражениях. Когда Любочка сердилась и говорила: «целый век не пускают», это слово целый век, которое имела тоже привычку говорить maman, она выговаривала так, что, казалось, слышал ее, как-то протяжно: це-е-лый век; но необыкновеннее всего было это сходство в игре ее на фортепьяно и во всех приемах при этом: она так же оправляла платье, так же поворачивала листы левой рукой сверху, так же с досады кулаком била по клавишам, когда долго не удавался трудный пассаж, и говорила: «ах, Бог мой!», и та же неуловимая нежность и отчетливость игры, той прекрасной фильдовской игры, так хорошо названной jeu perlé, прелести которой не могли заставить забыть все фокус-покусы новейших пьянистов.
Never was there such a family likeness as between Mamma and my sister—not so much in the face or the stature as in the hands, the walk, the voice, the favourite expressions, and, above all, the way of playing the piano and the whole demeanour at the instrument. Lubotchka always arranged her dress when sitting down just as Mamma had done, as well as turned the leaves like her, tapped her fingers angrily and said “Dear me!” whenever a difficult passage did not go smoothly, and, in particular, played with the delicacy and exquisite purity of touch which in those days caused the execution of Field’s music to be known characteristically as “jeu perlé” and to lie beyond comparison with the humbug of our modern virtuosi. (Chapter XXII)
The Russian phrase fokus-pokus comes from Hokuspokus (an exclamation used by magicians, usually the magic words spoken when bringing about some sort of change), a German corruption or parody of the Catholic liturgy of the Eucharist, which contains the phrase hoc est corpus meum (this is my body). Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) marries a Mr Brod or Bred who travels in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii:
So she did write as she had promised? Oh, yes, yes! In seventeen years he received from her around a hundred brief notes, each containing around one hundred words, making around thirty printed pages of insignificant stuff — mainly about her husband’s health and the local fauna. After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada’s choosing the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband’s endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin’s select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the ‘Lyaskan Herculanum’); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another question. (3.8)
In Voyna i mir ("War and Peace," 1869) Tolstoy mentions Krymskiy Brod (a bridge in Moscow across the Moskva river). The action in Aldanov's novel Bred ("Delirium," 1955) takes place in Berlin after World War II. Describing his novel Letters from Terra, Van mentions “Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome:”
On Terra, Theresa had been a Roving Reporter for an American magazine, thus giving Van the opportunity to describe the sibling planet’s political aspect. This aspect gave him the least trouble, presenting as it did a mosaic of painstakingly collated notes from his own reports on the ‘transcendental delirium’ of his patients. Its acoustics were poor, proper names often came out garbled, a chaotic calendar messed up the order of events but, on the whole, the colored dots did form a geomantic picture of sorts. As earlier experimentators had conjectured, our annals lagged by about half a century behind Terra’s along the bridges of time, but overtook some of its underwater currents. At the moment of our sorry story, the king of Terra’s England, yet another George (there had been, apparently, at least half-a-dozen bearing that name before him) ruled, or had just ceased to rule, over an empire that was somewhat patchier (with alien blanks and blots between the British Islands and South Africa) than the solidly conglomerated one on our Antiterra. Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)
Athaulf the Future seems to be a cross between Adolf Hitler and Athaulf, the king of the Visigoths from AD 411 to 415. In the first poem of his cycle Ital’yanskie stikhi (“Italian Verses,” 1909), Ravenna, Alexander Blok mentions Galla Placida, Athaulf’s wife who ruled the Western Roman Empire from AD 425 to 437 and who, like Dante, was buried in Ravenna:
Всё, что минутно, всё, что бренно,
Похоронила ты в веках.
Ты, как младенец, спишь, Равенна,
У сонной вечности в руках.
Рабы сквозь римские ворота
Уже не ввозят мозаик.
И догорает позолота
В стенах прохладных базилик.
От медленных лобзаний влаги
Нежнее грубый свод гробниц,
Где зеленеют саркофаги
Святых монахов и цариц.
Безмолвны гробовые залы,
Тенист и хладен их порог,
Чтоб черный взор блаженной Галлы,
Проснувшись, камня не прожёг.
Военной брани и обиды
Забыт и стёрт кровавый след,
Чтобы воскресший глас Плакиды
Не пел страстей протекших лет.
Далёко отступило море,
И розы оцепили вал,
Чтоб спящий в гробе Теодорих
О буре жизни не мечтал.
А виноградные пустыни,
Дома и люди - всё гроба.
Лишь медь торжественной латыни
Поёт на плитах, как труба.
Лишь в пристальном и тихом взоре
Равеннских девушек, порой,
Печаль о невозвратном море
Проходит робкой чередой.
Лишь по ночам, склонясь к долинам,
Ведя векам грядущим счёт,
Тень Данта с профилем орлиным
О Новой Жизни мне поёт.
All things ephemeral, fast-fading
In time's dark vaults, hid by you, lie.
A babe, you sleep, Ravenna, cradled
By slumberous eternity.
Through Rome's old gates the slaves no longer,
Bright slabs of marble bearing, pass.
The gilt looks charred, seems but to smoulder,
Not flame in the basilicas.
The moisture's indolent caresses
Have smoothed the stone of tombs where green
With age the coffins of the blessed,
Of holy monks stand and of queens.
The silent crypts, by all forsaken,
Cold shades invite that o'er them roam
So that the gaze of Galla, wakened,
Might not burn through the mass of stone.
The bloody trace of war's dark horrors
Has been forgot and wiped away
So that she might not sing the sorrows
And passions of a bygone day.
The sea's withdrawn, and o'er the ramparts
The roses climb and form a screen
So that Theodoric might never
Awake or of life's tempests dream.
A realm of death. Men, vineyards, houses
Are all as sepulchres. Alone
The brass of Latin, ageless, rousing,
Blares like a trumpet on the stones.
But in the gaze intent and peaceful
Of the Ravenna girls the sea
Is glimpsed at times, reminder wistful
Of something that no more will be.
And deep at night, the ages counting,
Those meant to come by fate's decree,
The eagle-profiled shade of Dante
Of Vita Nuova sings to me.
Vedya vekam gryadushchim schyot (counting the centuries to come), a line in the poem’s last stanza, brings to mind Ataulf Gryadushchiy (Athaulf the Future). Blok is the author of Pesn’ Ada (“The Song of Hell,” 1909), a poem written in terza rima in imitation of Dante’s Inferno. Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra, Van calls Tartary (a country that spreads from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean) “an independent inferno.”
Maria Kuznetsova brings to mind Kuznetsov, the main character in VN's play Chelovek iz SSSR ("The Man from the USSR," 1927).
Btw., in his diary (the entry of March 11, 1872) Leo Tolstoy mentions the electromagnet (cf. elettrocalamita):
Опыты вращения и произведения тепла между полюсами электромагнита показывают, что сила электромагнита есть освобожденное тепло.
In Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (1875-77) Vronski and Anna travel in Italy, a fact stressed by Van:
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. When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat for the blue haze of an extraordinary October which kept dreamy and warm throughout the duration of adultery, they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus. (3.8)