Describing his performance in variety shows as Mascodagama, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the Golden Curtain that separates Tartary (a country that on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set, occupies the territory of the Soviet Russia) from the rest of the world:
On February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama’s performance as ‘the most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public.’ It was repeated at the Rantariver Club several times, but nothing in the programme or in publicity notices beyond the definition ‘Foreign eccentric’ gave any indication either of the exact nature of the ‘stunt’ or of the performer’s identity. Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve of the Crimean War) — three dancing girls, a sick old clown with his old speaking goat, and one of the dancers’ husbands, a make-up man (no doubt, a multiple agent) — had already defected between France and England, somewhere in the newly constructed ‘Chunnel.’ Mascodagama’s spectacular success in a theatrical club that habitually limited itself to Elizabethan plays, with queens and fairies played by pretty boys, made first of all a great impact on cartoonists. Deans, local politicians, national statesmen, and of course the current ruler of the Golden Horde were pictured as mascodagamas by topical humorists. A grotesque imitator (who was really Mascodagama himself in an oversophisticated parody of his own act!) was booed at Oxford (a women’s college nearby) by local rowdies. A shrewd reporter, who had heard him curse a crease in the stage carpet, commented in print on his ‘Yankee twang.’ Dear Mr ‘Vascodagama’ received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van’s own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose — the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P.O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id. (1.30)
In Victor Vitry’s film version of Van’s novel Letters from Terra the Golden Curtain becomes the Golden Veil:
Ada, who resented the insufficiency of her brother’s fame, felt soothed and elated by the success of The Texture of Time (1924). That work, she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park. She said she had been somehow responsible for the metamorphoses of the lovely larvae that had woven the silk of ‘Veen’s Time’ (as the concept was now termed in one breath, one breeze, with ‘Bergson’s Duration,’ or ‘Whitehead’s Bright Fringe’). But a considerably earlier and weaker work, the poor little Letters from Terra, of which only half a dozen copies existed — two in Villa Armina and the rest in the stacks of university libraries — was even closer to her heart because of its nonliterary associations with their 1892-93 sojourn in Manhattan. Sixty-year-old Van crustily and contemptuously dismissed her meek suggestion to the effect that it should be republished, together with the Sidra reflections and a very amusing anti-Signy pamphlet on Time in Dreams. Seventy-year-old Van regretted his disdain when Victor Vitry, a brilliant French director, based a completely unauthorized picture on Letters from Terra written by ‘Voltemand’ half a century before.
Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940 by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you remember that horses wore hats — yes, hats — when heat waves swept Manhattan?) and gave the impression — which physics-fiction literature had much exploited — of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time. Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers.
In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies. In an impressive historical survey of Terra rigged up by Vitry — certainly the greatest cinematic genius ever to direct a picture of such scope or use such a vast number of extras (some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors) — kingdoms fell and dictatordoms rose, and republics, half-sat, half-lay in various attitudes of discomfort. The conception was controversial, the execution flawless. Look at all those tiny soldiers scuttling along very fast across the trench-scarred wilderness, with explosions of mud and things going pouf-pouf in silent French now here, now there!
In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive émotion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933, Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914-1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement, and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one). (5.5)
In The Conclusion to The Pilgrim's Progress From This World, to That Which is to Come (1678) John Bunyan says: “Put by the curtains; look within my Veil; Turn up my Metaphors, and do not fail:”
Now Reader I have told my Dream to thee;
See if thou canst interpret me.
Or to thy self, or Neighbours, but take heed
Of mis-interpreting: for that, instead,
Of doing good, will but thy self abuse
By Mis-interpreting, evil ensues.
Take heed also, that thou be not extreme,
In playing with the out-side of my dream:
Nor let my figure, or similitude,
Put thee into a laughter, or a feud,
Leave this for Boys or Fools; but as for thee,
Do thou the substance of my matter see.
Put by the curtains; look within my Veil;
Turn up my Metaphors, and do not fail,
There, if thou seekest them such things to find,
As will be helpful to an honest mind.
What of my Dross thou findest there, be bold
To throw away, but yet preserve the Gold,
What if my Gold be wrapped up in Ore?
None throws away the Apple for the Core.
But if thou shalt cast all away in Vain,
I know not but 'twill make me dream again.
In VN’s novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Vadim’s Ardis (1970) corresponds to VN’s Ada (1968). Telling about his transition from Russian to English, Vadim mentions his Ardis and Ian Bunyan (who compared the free and fluid interplay between the present and the past in Russian to "a dance of the veil performed by a plump graceful lady in a circle of cheering drunks"):
I daresay the description of my literary troubles will be skipped by the common reader; yet for my sake, rather than his, I wish to dwell mercilessly on a situation that was bad enough before I left Europe but almost killed me during the crossing.
Russian and English had existed for years in my mind as two worlds detached from one another. (It is only today that some interspatial contact has been established: "A knowledge of Russian," writes George Oakwood in his astute essay on my Ardis, 1970, "will help you to relish much of the wordplay in the most English of the author's English novels; consider for instance this: ‘The champ and the chimp came all the way from Omsk to Neochomsk.' What a delightful link between a real round place and ‘ni-o-chyom,' the About-Nothing land of modern philosophic linguistics!") I was acutely aware of the syntactic gulf separating their sentence structures. I feared (unreasonably, as was to transpire eventually) that my allegiance to Russian grammar might interfere with an apostatical courtship. Take tenses: how different their elaborate and strict minuet in English from the free and fluid interplay between the present and the past in their Russian counterpart (which Ian Bunyan has so amusingly compared in last Sunday's NYT to "a dance of the veil performed by a plump graceful lady in a circle of cheering drunks"). The fantastic number of natural-looking nouns that the British and the Americans apply in lovely technical senses to very specific objects also distressed me. What is the exact term for the little cup in which you place the diamond you want to cut? (We call it "dop," the pupal case of a butterfly, replied my informer, an old Boston jeweler who sold me the ring for my third bride). Is there not a nice special word for a pigling? ("I am toying with ‘snork' said Professor Noteboke, the best translator of Gogol's immortal The Carrick). I want the right word for the break in a boy's voice at puberty, I said to an amiable opera basso in the adjacent deck chair during my first transatlantic voyage. ("I think, he said, "it's called ‘ponticello,' a small bridge, un petit pont, mostik... Oh, you're Russian too?") (2.10)
Describing his difficult metamorphosis, Vadim uses sports analogies:
In the world of athletic games there has never been, I think, a World Champion of Lawn Tennis and Ski; yet in two Literatures, as dissimilar as grass and snow, I have been the first to achieve that kind of feat. I do not know (being a complete non-athlete, whom the sports pages of a newspaper bore almost as much as does its kitchen section) what physical stress may be involved in serving one day a sequence of thirty-six aces at sea level and on the next soaring from a ski jump 136 meters through bright mountain air. Colossal, no doubt, and, perhaps, inconceivable. But I have managed to transcend the rack and the wrench of literary metamorphosis. (ibid.)
Pushkin’s poem Strannik (“The Wanderer,” 1835) is a rendering in verse of the beginning of the first chapter of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. “Ian Bunyan” in LATH seems to be a cross between John Bunyan (1628-88) and Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), VN’s fellow writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933. Louise Adamson (Vadim’s third wife) is frustrated when her husband does not get the Prestigious Prize:
I did not expect much of Louise the Intellectual. The only time I saw her shed big tears, with interesting little howls of real grief, was when on the first Sunday of our marriage all the newspapers carried photographs of the two Albanian authors (a bald-domed old epicist and a longhaired woman compiler of childrens' books) who shared out between them the Prestigious Prize that she had told everybody I was sure to win that year. On the other hand she had only flipped through my novels (she was to read more attentively, though, A Kingdom by the Sea, which I began slowly to pull out of myself in 1957 like a long brain worm, hoping it would not break), while consuming all the "serious" bestsellers discussed by sister consumers belonging to the Literary Group in which she liked to assert herself as a writer's wife. (4.6)
Vadim’s novel A Kingdom by the Sea (1962) corresponds to VN’s Lolita (1955). On Demonia VN’s Lolita is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writers Osberg (1.13, et passim). In his review of Van’s Letters from Terra the poet Max Mispel discerned the influence of Osberg:
The only other compliment was paid to poor Voltemand in a little Manhattan magazine (The Village Eyebrow) by the poet Max Mispel (another botanical name — ‘medlar’ in English), member of the German Department at Goluba University. Herr Mispel, who liked to air his authors, discerned in Letters from Terra the influence of Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists) as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, thus transliterated by Captain de Roux, according to Burton in his adaptation of Nefzawi’s treatise on the best method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females (The Perfumed Garden, Panther edition, p.187, a copy given to ninety-three-year-old Baron Van Veen by his ribald physician Professor Lagosse). His critique ended as follows: ‘If Mr Voltemand (or Voltimand or Mandalatov) is a psychiatrist, as I think he might be, then I pity his patients, while admiring his talent.’ (2.2)
In Yuzlik’s film Don Juan’s Last Fling (that Van and Lucette watch in the Tobakoff cinema hall, 3.5) Ada Ardis (Ada's screen name) played the gitanilla. In a letter to Van (written after Lucette’s suiside) Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) says that most of the film’s copies have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions (3.6). Yuzlik means in Uzbek “veil.”
When Van and Greg Erminin meet in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia), Van tells Greg that Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse) just got the Lebon Academy Prize:
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform 'my lord' that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.
‘Aha,’ said Van, ‘I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.’
‘Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me — yes, Tobak! — that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good health?’ (Van bowed,) ‘And how is the guvernantka belletristka?’
‘Her last novel is called L‘ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.’
They parted laughing. (3.2)
Luc is cul (Fr., "ass"), Lebon is Nobel, Ninel (in LATH, a friend of Vadim's second wife Annette) is Lenin in reverse. In Part Five of LATH Vadim describes his trip to Leningrad. On the plane to Leningrad Oleg Orlov praises the Soviet circus:
I saw him again, but not as clearly, during our transfer by bus from one airport to another through some shabby environs of Moscow--a city which I had never seen in my life and which interested me about as much as, say, Birmingham. On the plane to Leningrad, however, he was again next to me, this time on the inner side. Mixed odors of dour hostess and "Red Moscow," with a gradual prevalence of the first ingredient, as our bare-armed angels
multiplied their last ministrations, accompanied us from 21:18 to 22:33. In order to draw out my neighbor before he and his riddle vanished, I asked him, in French, if he knew anything about a picturesque group that had boarded our aircraft in Moscow. He replied, with a Parisian grasseyement, that they were, he believed, Iranian circus people touring Europe. The men looked like harlequins in mufti, the women like birds of paradise, the children like golden medallions, and there was one dark-haired pale beauty in black bolero and yellow sharovars who reminded me of Iris or a prototype of Iris.
"I hope," I said, "we'll see them perform in Leningrad."
"Pouf!" he rejoined. "They can't compete with our Soviet circus."
I noted the automatic "our." (5.2)