Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) in Paris, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen:
The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days ‘Alphonse Cinq,’ believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla — here a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’ colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye — all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s ‘gem bulbs’ plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman. (3.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): affalés etc.: sprawling in their armchairs.
bouffant: puffed up.
gueule etc.: simian facial angle.
In Don Juan’s Last Fling (a movie that Van and Lucette watch in the Tobakoff cinema hall, 3.5) Ada played the gitanilla. The name of the film’s director, Yuzlik, means in Uzbek “veil.” Sakrama (sic) is Uzbek for “erratic, sporadic.” Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van mentions Aqua’s erratic student years:
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)
Belokonsk is the Russian twin of ‘Whitehorse’ (city in N.W. Canada). In his poem Ya vyshel v noch’ (“I came out into the night,” 1902) Alexander Blok (the author of “The Unknown Woman,” 1906, and “Night, Street, Lamp, Drugstore…” 1912) mentions belyi kon’ (the white horse):
Я вышел в ночь - узнать, понять
Далёкий шорох, близкий ропот,
Несуществующих принять,
Поверить в мнимый конский топот.
Дорога, под луной бела,
Казалось, полнилась шагами.
Там только чья-то тень брела
И опустилась за холмами.
И слушал я - и услыхал:
Среди дрожащих лунных пятен
Далёко, звонко конь скакал,
И легкий посвист был понятен.
Но здесь, и дальше - ровный звук,
И сердце медленно боролось,
О, как понять, откуда стук,
Откуда будет слышен голос?
И вот, слышнее звон копыт,
И белый конь ко мне несётся...
И стало ясно, кто молчит
И на пустом седле смеётся.
Я вышел в ночь - узнать, понять
Далёкий шорох, близкий ропот,
Несуществующих принять,
Поверить в мнимый конский топот.
In her review of Blok’s first collection of poetry, Stikhi o Prekrasnoy Dame (“Verses about the Beautiful Lady,” 1904), Zinaida Hippius quotes the first and last stanza of Blok’s poem:
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 undoubtedness. 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 imaginary clatter of a horse’s hoofs.
According to Hippius, 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 взлётами поднимается над пропастью; но пропасть широка; крылья бабочки не осилят её. Крылья бабочки скоро устают, быстро слабеют. (I)
“The wings of a butterfly skoro ustayut, bystro slabeyut (soon get tired soon, quickly weaken).” Russian for “soon,” skoro brings to mind skorovato (rather soon), a word used Marina in “Ardis the First:”
Marina was about to jingle a bronze bell for the footman to bring some more toast, but Greg said he was on his way to a party at the Countess de Prey’s.
‘Rather soon (skorovato) she consoled herself,’ remarked Marina, alluding to the death of the Count killed in a pistol duel on Boston Common a couple of years ago.
‘She’s a very jolly and handsome woman,’ said Greg.
‘And ten years older than me,’ said Marina. (1.14)
When Van and Lucette enter the Tobakoff cinema hall, Lucette observes that the place is emptovato:
‘Hey, look!’ he cried, pointing to a poster. ‘They’re showing something called Don Juan’s Last Fling. It’s prerelease and for adults only. Topical Tobakoff!’
‘It’s going to be an unmethylated bore,’ said Lucy (Houssaie School, 1890) but he had already pushed aside the entrance drapery.
They came in at the beginning of an introductory picture, featuring a cruise to Greenland, with heavy seas in gaudy technicolor. It was a rather irrelevant trip since their Tobakoff did not contemplate calling at Godhavn; moreover, the cinema theater was swaying in counterrhythm to the cobalt-and-emerald swell on the screen. No wonder the place was emptovato, as Lucette observed, and she went on to say that the Robinsons had saved her life by giving her on the eve a tubeful of Quietus Pills. (3.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): emptovato: Anglo-Russian, rather empty.
Lucette’s emptovato blends “empty” with pustovato ("rather empty" in Russian). The second stanza of Blok’s poem Shagi komandora (“The Commander’s Footsteps,” 1910-12) begins with the line Kholodno i pusto v pyshnoy spal’ne (Cold and empty is the lavish bedroom):
Тяжкий, плотный занавес у входа,
За ночным окном - туман.
Что теперь твоя постылая свобода,
Страх познавший Дон-Жуан?
Холодно и пусто в пышной спальне,
Слуги спят и ночь глуха.
Из страны блаженной, незнакомой, дальней
Слышно пенье петуха.
Что изменнику блаженства звуки?
Миги жизни сочтены.
Донна Анна спит, скрестив на сердце руки,
Донна Анна видит сны...
Чьи черты жестокие застыли,
В зеркалах отражены?
Анна, Анна, сладко ль спать в могиле?
Сладко ль видеть неземные сны?
Жизнь пуста, безумна и бездонна!
Выходи на битву, старый рок!
И в ответ - победно и влюбленно -
В снежной мгле поет рожок...
Пролетает, брызнув в ночь огнями,
Черный, тихий, как сова, мотор,
Тихими, тяжелыми шагами
В дом вступает Командор...
Настежь дверь. Из непомерной стужи,
Словно хриплый бой ночных часов -
Бой часов: "Ты звал меня на ужин.
Я пришел. А ты готов?.."
На вопрос жестокий нет ответа,
Нет ответа - тишина.
В пышной спальне страшно в час рассвета,
Слуги спят, и ночь бледна.
В час рассвета холодно и странно,
В час рассвета - ночь мутна.
Дева Света! Где ты, донна Анна?
Анна! Анна! - Тишина.
Только в грозном утреннем тумане
Бьют часы в последний раз:
Донна Анна в смертный час твой встанет.
Анна встанет в смертный час.
A thick, heavy curtain at the entrance,
Mist beyond the nighttime window.
Now that you know fear, Don Juan
What's your hateful freedom worth?
Cold and empty is the lavish bedroom,
Servants sleep in the still night.
From a blissful, foreign, distant land
Comes a rooster's song.
What are sounds of bliss to a betrayer
When his time is up?
Donna Anna sleeps, arms crossed above her heart,
Donna Anna's dreaming...
When his cruel features have frozen,
Echoed within mirrors?
Anna, Anna, is the grave's sleep sweet?
Is it sweet to have unearthly dreams?
Life is empty, crazy , fathomless!
Step outside to fight, old fate!
And in answer - smitten and triumphant -
A horn sounds in snowy darkness...
Splashing light into the night, a car
Rushes by, as black and quiet as an owl.
With his quiet, heavy footsteps
The Commander steps inside the house...
The door gapes. Through the excessive frost
Hoarsely like the tolling of the midnightclocks -
The hour tolls: "You called me here to dinner.
I have come. Are you prepared?.."
To this brutal question there's no answer,
There's no answer – only silence.
Frightening at daybreak is the lavish bedroom,
Servants sleep in the pale night.
Cold and strange is break of day
Night is dim at break of day.
Bride of Light! O, Donna Anna where are you?
Anna! Anna! – only silence.
In the horrifying morning mist
The hour tolls one final time:
In your dying hour Donna Anna will arise.
Anna will arise in the hour of your death.
In his unposted letter to Ada written after Lucette's suicide Van mentions the scaffold of Dona Anna’s black-curtained bed and calls Ada "my Zegris butterfly" and "Spanish orange-tip:"
My only love:
This letter will never be posted. It will lie in a steel box buried under a cypress in the garden of Villa Armina, and when it turns up by chance half a millennium hence, nobody will know who wrote it and for whom it was meant. It would not have been written at all if your last line, your cry of unhappiness, were not my cry of triumph. The burden of that excitement must be... [The rest of the sentence was found to be obliterated by a rusty stain when the box was dug up in 1928. The letter continues as follows]: ...back in the States, I started upon a singular quest. In Manhattan, in Kingston, in Lahore, in dozens of other towns, I kept pursuing the picture which I had not [badly discolored] on the boat, from cinema to cinema, every time discovering a new item of glorious torture, a new convulsion of beauty in your performance. That [illegible] is a complete refutation of odious Kim’s odious stills. Artistically, and ardisiacally, the best moment is one of the last — when you follow barefoot the Don who walks down a marble gallery to his doom, to the scaffold of Dona Anna’s black-curtained bed, around which you flutter, my Zegris butterfly, straightening a comically drooping candle, whispering delightful but futile instructions into the frowning lady’s ear, and then peering over that mauresque screen and suddenly dissolving in such natural laughter, helpless and lovely, that one wonders if any art could do without that erotic gasp of schoolgirl mirth. And to think, Spanish orange-tip, that all in all your magic gambol lasted but eleven minutes of stopwatch time in patches of two- or three-minute scenes!
Alas, there came a night, in a dismal district of workshops and bleary shebeens, when for the very last time, and only halfway, because at the seduction scene the film black-winked and shriveled, I managed to catch [the entire end of the letter is damaged]. (3.6)
VN’s neologism, “sakarama” is a rhyme word of rama (frame) and diorama, the words used by Pushkin in his epistle (1835) to friends:
Вы за «Онегина» советуете, други,
Приняться мне опять в осенние досуги.
Вы говорите мне: он жив и не женат.
Итак, ещё роман не кончен — это клад:
Вставляй в просторную, вместительную раму
Картины новые — открой нам диораму:
Привалит публика, платя тебе за вход —
(Что даст ещё тебе и славу и доход).
Пожалуй, я бы рад — Так некогда поэт…
...while he's alive, unmarried,
the novel is unfinished. 'Tis treasure.
Into its free and ample frame insert
a set of pictures, start a diorama:
people will flock to it, and you will pocket
the entrance fee, thus gaining fame and profit.
diorama: Webster's says: "A mode of scenic representation invented by Daguerre and Bouton, in which a painting (partly translucent) is seen from a distance through an opening. By a combination of translucent and opaque painting, and of transmitted and reflected light, and by contrivances such as screens and shutters, much diversity of scenic effect is produced" (and this applies to EO, too).
Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1789-1851) gave his first show in 1822, in Paris. A diorama was shown in St. Petersburg in November, 1829, hence the topicality of the verse. The spectator sat in a loge that slowly revolved, with a slight rumble, not drowned by soft music, and took him to Rome, Egypt, or Mt. Chimborazo, "the highest mountain in the world" (it is only 20, 577 ft. high). (Eugene Onegin Commentary, vol. III, p. 377-378)
“The topicality of the verse” brings to mind Van’s exclamation “Topical Tobakoff!” In the closing line of his poem Krasavitse, kotoraya nyukhala tabak ("To the Beauty who Took Snuff," 1814) Pushkin exclaims: Ах, отчего я не табак!.. (Ah, why am I not tobacco!..)
In another poem written at the Lyceum, “On peut très bien, mademoiselle…” (1816) Pushkin compares Princess V. M. Volkonski (a lady-in-waiting whom the young poet mistook for a chambermaid and kissed in a dark corridor of the Tsarkoe Selo palace) to une vieille guenon (an old female monkey; cf. the lousy jade's Parisian gueule de guenon ):
On peut très bien, mademoiselle,
Vous prendre pour une maquerelle,
Ou pour une vieille guenon,
Mais pour une grâce, — oh, mon Dieu, non.
One may very well mistake you, mademoiselle,
for a procuress,
or for an old female monkey,
but for a grace – oh, my God, no.
Une grâce brings to mind Grace Erminin, Greg’s twin sister who marries a Wellington (Erminia was the nickname of Pushkin's friend Eliza Khitrovo, Kutuzov's daughter). In Paris Van meets Greg Erminin and asks him about his sister:
On a bleak morning between the spring and summer of 1901, in Paris, as Van, black-hatted, one hand playing with the warm loose change in his topcoat pocket and the other, fawn-gloved, upswinging a furled English umbrella, strode past a particularly unattractive sidewalk café among the many lining the Avenue Guillaume Pitt, a chubby bald man in a rumpled brown suit with a watch-chained waistcoat stood up and hailed him.
Van considered for a moment those red round cheeks, that black goatee.
‘Ne uznayosh’ (You don’t recognize me)?’
‘Greg! Grigoriy Akimovich!’ cried Van tearing off his glove.
‘I grew a regular vollbart last summer. You’d never have known me then. Beer? Wonder what you do to look so boyish, Van.’
‘Diet of champagne, not beer,’ said Professor Veen, putting on his spectacles and signaling to a waiter with the crook of his ‘umber.’ ‘Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum crisp.’
‘I’m also very fat, yes?’
‘What about Grace, I can’t imagine her getting fat?’
‘Once twins, always twins. My wife is pretty portly, too.’
‘Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn’t know it. How long?’
‘About two years.’
‘To whom?’
‘Maude Sween.’
‘The daughter of the poet?’
‘No, no, her mother is a Brougham.’
Might have replied ‘Ada Veen,’ had Mr Vinelander not been a quicker suitor. I think I met a Broom somewhere. Drop the subject. Probably a dreary union: hefty, high-handed wife, he more of a bore than ever. (3.2)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): So you are married, etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Eight: XVIII: 1-4.
After parting with Greg, Van meets his former mistress Cordula de Prey (now married to Ivan G. Tobak):
A moment later, as happens so often in farces and foreign cities, Van ran into another friend. With a surge of delight he saw Cordula in a tight scarlet skirt bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop. Van stroked her with his fingertips, and as she straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition), he quoted the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them:
The Veens speak only to Tobaks
But Tobaks speak only to dogs.
The passage of years had but polished her prettiness and though many fashions had come and gone since 1889, he happened upon her at a season when hairdos and skirtlines had reverted briefly (another much more elegant lady was already ahead of her) to the style of a dozen years ago, abolishing the interruption of remembered approval and pleasure. She plunged into a torrent of polite questions — but he had a more important matter to settle at once — while the flame still flickered.
‘Let’s not squander,’ he said, ‘the tumescence of retrieved time on the gush of small talk. I’m bursting with energy, if that’s what you want to know. Now look; it may sound silly and insolent but I have an urgent request. Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It’s a must!’
‘Really, Van!’ exclaimed angry Cordula. ‘You go a bit far. I’m a happy wife. My Tobachok adores me. We’d have ten children by now if I’d not been careful with him and others.’
‘You’ll be glad to learn that this other has been found utterly sterile.’
‘Well, I’m anything but. I guess I’d cause a mule to foal by just looking on. Moreover, I’m lunching today with the Goals.’
‘C’est bizarre, an exciting little girl like you who can be so tender with poodles and yet turns down a poor paunchy stiff old Veen.’
‘The Veens are much too gay as dogs go.’
‘Since you collect adages,’ persisted Van, ‘let me quote an Arabian one. Paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl’s sash. Eh bien?’
‘You are impossible. Where and when?’
‘Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I’ve never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that’s what tout confort promises — and not much else.’
‘I must be home not later than eleven-thirty, it’s almost eleven now.’
‘It will take five minutes. Please!’
Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five. Very pleased with himself, Van walked with her for a stretch through the brown and green Bois de Belleau in the direction of her osobnyachyok (small mansion).
‘That reminds me,’ he said, ‘I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I’ve had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years — the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan’s place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore. I want to relinquish that flat. Would you like to accept it as a belated wedding present from an admirer? Good. We shall do it again some day. Tomorrow I have to be in London and on the third my favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff, will take me to Manhattan. Au revoir. Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new. Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?’
‘That’s right. And where’s the other?’
‘I think we’ll part here. It’s twenty minutes to twelve. You’d better toddle along.’
‘Au revoir. You’re a very bad boy and I’m a very bad girl. But it was fun — even though you’ve been speaking to me not as you would to a lady friend but as you probably do to little whores. Wait. Here’s a top secret address where you can always’ — (fumbling in her handbag) — ‘reach me’ — (finding a card with her husband’s crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph) — ‘at Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August.’
She looked around, rose on her toes like a ballerina, and kissed him on the mouth. Sweet Cordula! (3.2)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): moue: little grimace.