Before the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Ada (the title character of a novel, 1969, by VN) mentions “the snake of rhyme” (a play on Van’s words “for the sake of rhyme”):
The neat interplay of harmonious motions, the candid gayety of family reunions, the never-entangling marionette strings — all this is easier described than imagined.
‘Old storytelling devices,’ said Van, ‘may be parodied only by very great and inhuman artists, but only close relatives can be forgiven for paraphrasing illustrious poems. Let me preface the effort of a cousin — anybody’s cousin — by a snatch of Pushkin, for the sake of rhyme —’
‘For the snake of rhyme!’ cried Ada. ‘A paraphrase, even my paraphrase, is like the corruption of "snakeroot" into "snagrel" — all that remains of a delicate little birthwort.’
‘Which is amply sufficient,’ said Demon, ‘for my little needs, and those of my little friends.’
‘So here goes,’ continued Van (ignoring what he felt was an indecent allusion, since the unfortunate plant used to be considered by the ancient inhabitants of the Ladore region not so much as a remedy for the bite of a reptile, as the token of a very young woman’s easy delivery; but no matter). ‘By chance preserved has been the poem. In fact, I have it. Here it is: Leur chute est lente and one can know ‘em...’
‘Oh, I know ‘em,’ interrupted Demon:
‘Leur chute est lente. On peut les suivre
Du regard en reconnaissant
Le chêne à sa feuille de cuivre
L’érable à sa feuille de sang
‘Grand stuff!’
‘Yes, that was Coppée and now comes the cousin,’ said Van, and he recited:
‘Their fall is gentle. The leavesdropper
Can follow each of them and know
The oak tree by its leaf of copper,
The maple by its blood-red glow.’
‘Pah!’ uttered the versionist.
‘Not at all!’ cried Demon. ‘That "leavesdropper" is a splendid trouvaille, girl.’ He pulled the girl to him, she landing on the arm of his Klubsessel, and he glued himself with thick moist lips to her hot red ear through the rich black strands. Van felt a shiver of delight. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): By chance preserved: The verses are by chance preserved
I have them, here they are:
(Eugene Onegin, Six: XXI: 1-2)
Klubsessel: Germ., easy chair.
The nickname of Van’s and Ada’s father, Demon is a form of Demian or Dementius:
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)
In his story Arkhierey (“The Bishop,” 1902) Chekhov mentions Father Demian who was nicknamed Demian Snakeseer:
Кончив молиться, он разделся и лег, и тотчас же, как только стало темно кругом, представились ему его покойный отец, мать, родное село Лесополье... Скрип колес, блеянье овец, церковный звон в ясные, летние утра, цыгане под окном, — о, как сладко думать об этом! Припомнился священник лесопольский, отец Симеон, кроткий, смирный, добродушный; сам он был тощ, невысок, сын же его, семинарист, был громадного роста, говорил неистовым басом; как-то попович обозлился на кухарку и выбранил ее: «Ах ты, ослица Иегудиилова!», и отец Симеон, слышавший это, не сказал ни слова и только устыдился, так как не мог вспомнить, где в священном писании упоминается такая ослица. После него в Лесополье священником был отец Демьян, который сильно запивал и напивался подчас до зеленого змия, и у него даже прозвище было: Демьян-Змеевидец. В Лесополье учителем был Матвей Николаич, из семинаристов, добрый, неглупый человек, но тоже пьяница; он никогда не бил учеников, но почему-то у него на стене всегда висел пучок березовых розог, а под ним надпись на латинском языке, совершенно бессмысленная — betula kinderbalsamica secuta. Была у него черная мохнатая собака, которую он называл так: Синтаксис.
When he had finished his prayers he undressed and lay down, and at once, as soon as it was dark, there rose before his mind his dead father, his mother, his native village Lesopolye . . . the creak of wheels, the bleat of sheep, the church bells on bright summer mornings, the gypsies under the window—oh, how sweet to think of it! He remembered the priest of Lesopolye, Father Simeon—mild, gentle, kindly; he was a lean little man, while his son, a divinity student, was a huge fellow and talked in a roaring bass voice. The priest’s son had flown into a rage with the cook and abused her: “Ah, you Jehud’s ass!” and Father Simeon overhearing it, said not a word, and was only ashamed because he could not remember where such an ass was mentioned in the Bible. After him the priest at Lesopolye had been Father Demian, who used to drink heavily, and at times drank till he saw green snakes, and was even nicknamed Demian Snakeseer. The schoolmaster at Lesopolye was Matvey Nikolaich, who had been a divinity student, a kind and intelligent man, but he, too, was a drunkard; he never beat the schoolchildren, but for some reason he always had hanging on his wall a bunch of birch-twigs, and below it an utterly meaningless inscription in Latin: “Betula kinderbalsamica secuta.” He had a shaggy black dog whom he called Syntax.
The Latin name of birch tree, Betula brings to mind the oak tree and the maple in Coppée’s poem. Telling Van about Uncle Dan’s Boschean death, Demon says that he managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk:
‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower — mark the "as if," for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice — but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast! A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’ (2.10)
The Russian twin of 'Whitehorse' (city in N.W. Canada), Belokonsk seems to hint at belyi kon’ (a white horse) mentioned by Alexander Blok (a grandson of the celebrated botanist Andrey Beketov) in his poem Ya vyshel v noch’ (“I came out into the night,” 1902):
И вот, слышнее звон копыт,
И белый конь ко мне несётся...
И стало ясно, кто молчит
И на пустом седле смеётся.
In Chekhov’s play Tri sestry (“The Three Sisters,” 1901) Dr Chebutykin mentions Tsitsikar (Qiqihar, a city in NE China, in Russian spelling):
ЧЕБУТЫКИН (читает газету). Цицикар. Здесь свирепствует оспа.
CHEBUTYKIN [reads from the newspaper]. Tsitsikar. Smallpox is raging here. (Act Two)
Ospa (smallpox) brings to mind Dr. Stella Ospenko’s ospedale mentioned by Van when he describes the family dinner in “Ardis the Second:”
Demon popped into his mouth a last morsel of black bread with elastic samlet, gulped down a last pony of vodka and took his place at the table with Marina facing him across its oblong length, beyond the great bronze bowl with carved-looking Calville apples and elongated Persty grapes. The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina’s pretentious ciel-étoilé hairdress and tried to realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a fact by forcing it into the sensuous center, that here was a woman whom he had intolerably loved, who had loved him hysterically and skittishly, who insisted they make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor (‘as respectable people do in the Tigris-Euphrates valley’), who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a bobsleigh a fortnight after parturition, or arrive by the Orient Express with five trunks, Dack’s grandsire, and a maid, to Dr Stella Ospenko’s ospedale where he was recovering from a scratch received in a sword duel (and still visible as a white weal under his eighth rib after a lapse of nearly seventeen years). How strange that when one met after a long separation a chum or fat aunt whom one had been fond of as a child the unimpaired human warmth of the friendship was rediscovered at once, but with an old mistress this never happened — the human part of one’s affection seemed to be swept away with the dust of the inhuman passion, in a wholesale operation of demolishment. He looked at her and acknowledged the perfection of the potage, but she, this rather thick-set woman, goodhearted, no doubt, but restive and sour-faced, glazed over, nose, forehead and all, with a sort of brownish oil that she considered to be more ‘juvenizing’ than powder, was more of a stranger to him than Bouteillan who had once carried her in his arms, in a feigned faint, out of a Ladore villa and into a cab, after a final, quite final row, on the eve of her wedding. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Persty: Evidently Pushkin’s vinograd:
as elongated and transparent
as are the fingers of a girl.
(devï molodoy, jeune fille)
ciel-étoilé: starry sky.
Dack is a dackel (dachshund) at Ardis. In Chekhov’s story “The Bishop” the name of Father Demian’s dog, Sintaksis (Syntax), is a play on taksik (“little dachshund”). In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN points out that the grandparents of Box II, the Nabokov’s dachshund that followed its masters into exile, were Dr Chekhov’s Quina and Brom.
In a letter of Apr. 21, 1897, to Leontiev-Shcheglov Chekhov promises to write a poem with the rhyme batsilly-krokodily (bacilli-crocodiles):
Ваше стихотворение получил и, прочитав громогласно всему семейству, спрятал его в свой архив. Благодарю и обещаю прислать Вам на Рождество поздравительное стихотворение; я уже подобрал рифмы: бациллы - крокодилы.
In a letter of Sept. 8, 1900, to Olga Knipper Chekhov calls his future wife babusya milaya (dear grandma) and krokodil dushi moey (the crocodile of my soul). Like Chekhov, Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband) dies of tuberculosis (3.8). Van never finds out that Andrey and Ada have at least two children and that Mr. Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, “little Violet,” and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van’s and Ada’s death) are Ada’s grandchildren.
Describing the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time), Ada mentions Grandma who gets the Xmas card and the surprised and pleased Serpent:
Oh, Van, that night, that moment as we knelt side by side in the candlelight like Praying Children in a very bad picture, showing two pairs of soft-wrinkled, once arboreal-animal, soles — not to Grandma who gets the Xmas card but to the surprised and pleased Serpent, I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance —
Not now, it’s not a nice sight right now and it will be worse in a moment (or words to that effect).
Van could not decide whether she really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky — now drained of its fire color — or whether total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game. It did not really matter. (1.19)
In the Night of the Burning Barn Van mentions the Nile:
He discarded his makeshift kilt, and her tone of voice changed immediately.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said as one child to another. ‘It’s all skinned and raw. Does it hurt? Does it hurt horribly?’
‘Touch it quick,’ he implored.
‘Van, poor Van,’ she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies, ‘yes, I’m sure it smarts, would it help if I’d touch, are you sure?’
‘You bet,’ said Van, ‘on n’est pas bête à ce point’ (‘there are limits to stupidity,’ colloquial and rude).
‘Relief map,’ said the primrose prig, ‘the rivers of Africa.’ Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. ‘Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact’ (positively chattering), ‘I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom.’
‘God, we all are,’ said Van.
‘Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!’
‘Squeeze, you goose, can’t you see I’m dying.’
But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly — and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.
She looked down in dismay.
‘Not what you think,’ remarked Van calmly. ‘This is not number one. Actually it’s as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Speke.’ (ibid.)
In a letter of May 15, 1889, to Suvorin Chekhov says that he could write a novel about the learned lady doctor who goes to the Nile and with scientific purpose copulates with a crocodile and a rattlesnake:
Воюют же не знания, не поэзия с анатомией, а заблуждения, т. е. люди. Когда человек не понимает, то чувствует в себе разлад; причин этого разлада он ищет не в себе самом, как бы нужно было, а вне себя, отсюда и война с тем, чего он не понимает. Во все средние века алхимия постепенно, естественным мирным порядком культивировалась в химию, астрология — в астрономию; монахи не понимали, видели войну и воевали сами. Таким же воюющим испанским монахом был в шестиде<сятых> годах наш Писарев.
Воюет и Бурже. Вы говорите, что он не воюет, а я говорю, что воюет. Представьте, что его роман попадает в руки человека, имеющего детей на естественном факультете, или в руки архиерея, ищущего сюжета для воскресной проповеди. Будет ли что-нибудь похожее на мир в полученном эффекте? Нет. Представьте, что роман попал на глаза анатому или физиологу и т. д. Ни в чью душу не повеет от него миром, знающих он раздражит, а не знающих наградит ложными представлениями — и только.
Вы, быть может, скажете, что он воюет не с сущностью, а с уклонениями от нормы. Согласен, с уклонениями от нормы должен воевать всякий писатель, но зачем компрометировать самую сущность? Сикст орел, но Бурже сделал из него карикатуру. «Психологические опыты» — клевета на человека и на науку. Неужели, если бы я написал роман, где у меня анатом ради науки вскрывает свою живую жену и грудных детей или ученая докторша едет на Нил и с научною целью совокупляется с крокодилом и с гремучей змеей, — то неужели бы этот роман не был клеветой? А ведь я бы мог интересно написать и умно.
It is not branches of knowledge such as poetry and anatomy, but errors—that is to say, men—that fight with one another. When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself—hence the war with what he does not understand. In the middle ages alchemy was gradually in a natural, peaceful way changing into chemistry, and astrology into astronomy; the monks did not understand, saw a conflict and fought against it. Just such a belligerent Spanish monk was our Pisarev in the sixties.
Bourget, too, is fighting. You say he is not, and I say he is. Imagine his novel falling into the hands of a man whose children are studying in the faculty of science, or of a bishop who is looking for a subject for his Sunday sermon. Will the effect be anything like peace? It will not. Or imagine the novel catching the eye of an anatomist or a physiologist, or any such. It will not breathe peace into anyone’s soul; it will irritate those who know and give false ideas to those who don’t....