According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), oblivion is a one-night performance:
For half a minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the general ward of Lakeview (Lakeview!) Hospital, between two series of variously bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. When he understood this, his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic. His next request was that he be told how seriously he was hurt and how long he was expected to remain incapacitated. His third action was to resume what constituted the sole reason of his having to visit Kalugano (visit Kalugano!). His new quarters, where heartbroken kings had tossed in transit, proved to be a replica in white of his hotel apartment — white furniture, white carpet, white sparver. Inset, so to speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes — and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed. with the sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed more aptly than she thought ‘that soft dangle.’ An exhibition of his state with a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened, and he never met her again). His suitcase promptly arrived from the hotel; the stick, however, could not be located (it must be climbing nowadays Wellington Mountain, or perhaps, helping a lady to go ‘brambling’ in Oregon); so the hospital supplied him with the Third Cane, a rather nice, knotty, cherry-dark thing with a crook and a solid black-rubber heel. Dr Fitzbishop congratulated him on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus. Doc Fitz commented on Van’s wonderful recuperational power which was already in evidence, and promised to have him out of disinfectants and bandages in ten days or so if for the first three he remained as motionless as a felled tree-trunk. Did Van like music? Sportsmen usually did, didn’t they? Would he care to have a Sonorola by his bed? No, he disliked music, but did the doctor, being a concert-goer, know perhaps where a musician called Rack could be found? ‘Ward Five,’ answered the doctor promptly. Van misunderstood this as the title of some piece of music and repeated his question. Would he find Rack’s address at Harper’s music shop? Well, they used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest, but now some other people had moved in. Ward Five was where hopeless cases were kept. The poor guy had always had a bad liver and a very indifferent heart, but on top of that a poison had seeped into his system; the local ‘lab’ could not identify it and they were now waiting for a report, on those curiously frog-green faeces, from the Luga people. If Rack had administered it to himself by his own hand, he kept ‘mum’; it was more likely the work of his wife who dabbled in Hindu-Andean voodoo stuff and had just had a complicated miscarriage in the maternity ward. Yes, triplets — how did he guess? Anyway, if Van was so eager to visit his old pal it would have to be as soon as he could be rolled to Ward Five in a wheelchair by Dorofey, so he’d better apply a bit of voodoo, ha-ha, on his own flesh and blood.
That day came soon enough. After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin’s coachman, said priehali (‘we have arrived’) and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos).
‘I am Van Veen — in case you are no longer lucid enough to recognize somebody you have seen only twice. Hospital records put your age at thirty; I thought you were younger, but even so that is a very early age for a person to die — whatever he be tvoyu mat’ — half-baked genius or full-fledged scoundrel, or both. As you may guess by the plain but thoughtful trappings of this quiet room, you are an incurable case in one lingo, a rotting rat in another. No oxygen gadget can help you to eschew the "agony of agony" — Professor Lamort’s felicitous pleonasm. The physical torments you will be, or indeed are, experiencing must be prodigious, but are nothing in comparison to those of a probable hereafter. The mind of man, by nature a monist, cannot accept two nothings; he knows there has been one nothing, his biological inexistence in the infinite past, for his memory is utterly blank, and that nothingness, being, as it were, past, is not too hard to endure. But a second nothingness — which perhaps might not be so hard to bear either — is logically unacceptable. When speaking of space we can imagine a live speck in the limitless oneness of space; but there is no analogy in such a concept with our brief life in time, because however brief (a thirty-year span is really obscenely brief!), our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining — no matter how narrowly — between the back panel and fore panel. Therefore, Mr Rack, we can speak of past time, and in a vaguer, but familiar sense, of future time, but we simply cannot expect a second nothing, a second void, a second blank. Oblivion is a one-night performance; we have been to it once, there will be no repeat. We must face therefore the possibility of some prolonged form of disorganized consciousness and this brings me to my main point, Mr Rack. Eternal Rack, infinite "Rackness" may not be much but one thing is certain: the only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain. The little Rack of today is the infinite rack of tomorrow — ich bin ein unverbesserlicher Witzbold. We can imagine — I think we should imagine — tiny clusters of particles still retaining Rack’s personality, gathering here and there in the here-and-there-after, clinging to each other, somehow, somewhere, a web of Rack’s toothaches here, a bundle of Rack’s nightmares there — rather like tiny groups of obscure refugees from some obliterated country huddling together for a little smelly warmth, for dingy charities or shared recollections of nameless tortures’ in Tartar camps. For an old man one special little torture must be to wait in a long long queue before a remote urinal. Well, Herr Rack, I submit that the surviving cells of aging Rackness will form such lines of torment, never, never reaching the coveted filth hole in the panic and pain of infinite night. You may answer, of course, if you are versed in contemporary novelistics, and if you fancy the jargon of English writers, that a ‘lower-middle-class’ piano tuner who falls in love with a fast ‘upper-class’ girl, thereby destroying his own family, is not committing a crime deserving the castigation which a chance intruder —’
With a not unfamiliar gesture, Van tore up his prepared speech and said:
‘Mr Rack, open your eyes. I’m Van Veen. A visitor.’
The hollow-cheeked, long-jawed face, wax-pale, with a fattish nose and a small round chin, remained expressionless for a moment; but the beautiful, amber, liquid, eloquent eyes with pathetically long lashes had opened. Then a faint smile glimmered about his mouth parts, and he stretched one hand, without raising his head from the oil-cloth-covered pillow (why oil-cloth?).
Van, from his chair, extended the end of his cane, which the weak hand took, and palpated politely, thinking it was a well-meant offer of support. ‘No, I am not yet able to walk a few steps,’ Rack said quite distinctly, with the German accent which would probably constitute his most durable group of ghost cells.
Van drew in his useless weapon. Controlling himself, he thumped it against the footboard of his wheelchair. Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then went back to the article that engrossed him — ‘A Clever Piggy (from the memoirs of an animal trainer),’ or else ‘The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas Help Chinese Troops.’ A diminutive nurse simultaneously stepped out from behind the farther screen and disappeared again.
Will he ask me to transmit a message? Shall I refuse? Shall I consent — and not transmit it?
‘Have they all gone to Hollywood already? Please, tell me, Baron von Wien.’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Van. ‘They probably have. I really —’
‘Because I sent my last flute melody, and a letter for all the family, and no answer has come. I must vomit now. I ring myself.’
The diminutive nurse on tremendously high white heels pulled forward the screen of Rack’s bed, separating him from the melancholy, lightly wounded, stitched-up, clean-shaven young dandy; who was rolled out and away by efficient Dorofey. (1.42)
At the beginning of his poem Euthanasia Lord Byron mentions Oblivion and its languid wing:
When Time, or soon or late, shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,
Oblivion! may thy languid wing
Wave gently o'er my dying bed!
Byron is the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In VN’s novel Lolita (1955) Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character) mentions a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze (Lolita’s father):
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked: “You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own;” and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not known a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. (2.32)
Describing Ada’s eyes, Van mentions an internal parasite resembling the written word ‘deified:’
The eyes. Ada’s dark brown eyes. What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word ‘deified’? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi? Yet I have to describe yours. The iris: black brown with amber specks or spokes placed around the serious pupil in a dial arrangement of identical hours. The eyelids: sort of pleaty, v skladochku (rhyming in Russian with the diminutive of her name in the accusative case). Eye shape: languorous. The procuress in Wicklow, on that satanic night of black sleet, at the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life (Van, thank goodness, is ninety now — in Ada’s hand) dwelt with peculiar force on the ‘long eyes’ of her pathetic and adorable grandchild. How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world! (1.17)
The word “deified” is used by P. B. Shelley at the beginning of his Invocation to Misery:
Come, be happy!—sit near me,
Shadow-vested Misery:
Coy, unwilling, silent bride,
Mourning in thy robe of pride,
Desolation—deified! (I)
In his poem Shelley mentions Oblivion:
Hasten to the bridal bed—
Underneath the grave ’tis spread:
In darkness may our love be hid,
Oblivion be our coverlid—
We may rest, and none forbid. (IX)
In P. B. Shelley’s tragedy The Cenci (1819) Beatrice several times repeats the word “rack:”
Brother, lie down with me upon the rack,
And let us each be silent as a corpse;
It soon will be as soft as any grave.
'Tis but the falsehood it can wring from fear
Makes the rack cruel. (Act Five, scene III)
In his poem Time (1821) Shelley speaks of Ocean of Time sick of prey, yet howling on for more:
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality!
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
Who shall put forth on thee,
Unfathomable Sea?
Like Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher), Percy de Prey (a country gentleman) is one of Ada's lovers. Van calls Ada “Mlle Hypnokush, ‘whose eyes never dwell on you and yet pierce you’:”
The eyes. The eyes had kept their voluptuous palpebral creases; the lashes, their semblance of jet-dust incrustation; the raised iris, its Hindu-hypnotic position; the lids, their inability to stay alert and wide open during the briefest embrace; but those eyes’ expression — when she ate an apple, or examined a found thing, or simply listened to an animal or a person — had changed, as if new layers of reticence and sadness had accumulated, half-veiling the pupil, while the glossy eyeballs shifted in their lovely long sockets with a more restless motion than of yore: Mlle Hypnokush, ‘whose eyes never dwell on you and yet pierce you.’ (1.35)
“Mlle Hypnokush” brings to mind the Hindu Kush mountain range. According to Dr. Fitzbishop, poor Rack was poisoned by his jealous wife who dabbled in Hindu-Andean voodoo stuff.
Byron is the author of The Waltz (1812). In his poem “To A. M. T-ya” (1814-17) Baron Delvig (Pushkin's best friend at the Lyceum) says that, in a waltz’s frenzied whirl, he wished to be all eyes, and, in the poem’s last line, mentions zabvenie (oblivion) and its wing:
Могу ль забыть то сладкое мгновенье,
Когда я вами жил и видел только вас,
И вальса в бешеном круженье
Завидовал свободе дерзких глаз?
Я весь тогда желал оборотиться в зренье,
Я умолял: «Постой, веселое мгновенье!
Пускай я не спущу с прекрасной вечно глаз,
Пусть так забвение крылом покроет нас!»
At the beginning of VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) the jailer Rodion enters Cincinnatus' cell and offers him tur val'sa (to dance a waltz with him):
Спустя некоторое время тюремщик Родион вошёл и ему предложил тур вальса. Цинциннат согласился. Они закружились. Бренчали у Родиона ключи на кожаном поясе, от него пахло мужиком, табаком, чесноком, и он напевал, пыхтя в рыжую бороду, и скрипели ржавые суставы (не те годы, увы, опух, одышка). Их вынесло в коридор. Цинциннат был гораздо меньше своего кавалера. Цинциннат был лёгок как лист. Ветер вальса пушил светлые концы его длинных, но жидких усов, а большие, прозрачные глаза косили, как у всех пугливых танцоров.
Sometime later Rodion the jailer came in and offered to dance a waltz with him. Cincinnatus agreed. They began to whirl. The keys on Rodion's leather belt jangled; he smelled of sweat, tobacco and garlic; he hummed puffing into his red beard; and his rusty joints creaked (he was not what he used to be, alas - now he was fat and short of breath). The dance carried them into the corridor. Cincinnatus was much smaller than his partner. Cincinnatus was light as a leaf. The wind of the waltz made the tips of his long but thin mustache flutter, and his big limpid eyes looked askance, as is always the case with timorous dancers. (chapter 1)
In a letter to his wife Cincinnatus mentions Marthe’s closed eyes and compares her to odna syraya, sladkaya, proklyataya skladochka (one damp, sweet, accursed little fold):
Скажи мне, сколько рук мяло мякоть, которой обросла так щедро твоя твёрдая, гордая, горькая, маленькая душа? Да, снова, как привидение, я возвращаюсь к твоим первым изменам и, воя, гремя цепями, плыву сквозь них. Поцелуи, которые я подглядел. Поцелуи ваши, которые больше всего походили на какое-то питание, сосредоточенное, неопрятное и шумное. Или когда ты, жмурясь, пожирала прыщущий персик и потом, кончив, но ещё глотая, ещё с полным ртом, канибалка, топырила пальцы, блуждал осоловелый взгляд, лоснились воспаленные губы, дрожал подбородок, весь в каплях мутного сока сползавших на оголенную грудь, между тем как приап, питавший тебя, внезапно поворачивался с судорожным проклятием, согнутой спиной ко мне, вошедшему в комнату некстати. "Марфиньке всякие фрукты полезны", - с какой-то сладко-хлюпающей сыростью в горле говорила ты, собираясь вся в одну сырую, сладкую, проклятую складочку, - и если я опять возвращаюсь ко всему этому, так для того, чтобы отделаться, выделить из себя, очиститься, - и ещё для того, чтобы ты знала, чтобы ты знала...
Tell me, how many hands have palpated the pulp that has grown so generously around your hard, bitter little soul? Yes, like a ghost I return to your first betrayals and, howling, rattling my chains, walk through them. The kisses I spied. Your and his kisses, which most resembled some sort of feeding, intent, untidy, and noisy. Or when you, with eyes closed tight, devoured a spurting peach and then, having finished, but still swallowing, with your mouth still full, you cannibal, your glazed eyes wandered, your fingers were spread, your inflamed lips were all glossy, your chin trembled, all covered with drops of the cloudy juice, which trickled down on to your bared bosom, while the Priapus who had nourished you suddenly, with a convulsive oath, turned his bent back to me, who had entered the room at the wrong moment. ‘All kinds of fruit are good for Marthe,’ you would say with a certain sweet-slushy moistness in your throat, all gathering into one damp, sweet, accursed little fold — and if I return to all of this, it is to get it out of my system, to purge myself— and also so that you will know, so that you will know… (Chapter XIII)
According to Van, Ada’s eyelids are sort of pleaty, v skladochku.
In his ode Vol'nost' ("Liberty," 1817) Pushkin calls the Mikhaylovski Castle (where the tsar Paul I was assassinated in March, 1801) zabven'yu broshennyi dvorets (a palace to oblivion cast):
Когда на мрачную Неву
Звезда полуночи сверкает,
И беззаботную главу
Спокойный сон отягощает,
Глядит задумчивый певец
На грозно спящий средь тумана
Пустынный памятник тирана,
Забвенью брошенный дворец —
When down upon the gloomy Neva
The star Polaris scintillates
And peaceful slumber overwhelms
The head that is devoid of cares,
The pensive poet contemplates
The grimly sleeping in the mist
Forlorn memorial of a tyrant,
A palace to oblivion cast.
On Oct. 31, 1838 (Dostoevski’s seventeenth birthday), Dostoevski (a student of the Military Engineer School housed in the Mikhaylovski Caslte) wrote a letter to his brother Mikhail in which he twice used the word gradus (degree):
Друг мой! Ты философствуешь как поэт. И как не ровно выдерживает душа градус вдохновенья, так не ровна, не верна и твоя философия. Чтоб больше знать, надо меньше чувствовать, и обратно, правило опрометчивое, бред сердца.
My friend, you philosophize like a poet. And just because the soul cannot be forever in a state of exaltation, your philosophy is not true and not just. To know more one must feel less, and vice versa. Your judgment is featherheaded – it is a delirium of the heart.
Заметь, что поэт в порыве вдохновенья разгадывает Бога, след<овательно>, исполняет назначенье философии. След<овательно>, поэтический восторг есть восторг философии... След<овательно>, философия есть та же поэзия, только высший градус её!..
Remark that the poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God and consequently does the philosopher's work. Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than poetical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!
In VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) Gradus kills Shade on July 21, 1959. July 21 is Ada's birthday. In his poem "The Nature of Electricity" quoted by Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) Shade mentions Shelley's incandescent soul:
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity," which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead--who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) electricity was banned after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century. It seems that the Antiterran L disaster corresponds to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world.
‘Destroy and forget’ (a phrase repeated in Ada at least three times) seems to hint at oublie ou regret (oblivion or regret), in Pushkin’s story Pikovaya dama (“The Queen of Spades,” 1833) a question with which the three ladies at the ball approach Tomski:
Подошедшие к ним три дамы с вопросами — oubli ou regret? — прервали разговор, который становился мучительно любопытен для Лизаветы Ивановны.
Дама, выбранная Томским, была сама княжна ***. Она успела с ним изъясниться, обежав лишний круг и лишний раз повертевшись перед своим стулом.
Three ladies approaching him with the question: "oubli ou regret?" interrupted the conversation, which had become so tantalizingly interesting to Lizaveta Ivanovna.
The lady chosen by Tomski was Princess Polina herself. She succeeded in effecting a reconciliation with him during the numerous turns of the dance, after which he conducted her to her chair. (chapter IV)
Tomski brings to mind three terrible Toms in Lucette's Literature course at Los:
But what about the rare radiance on those adored lips? Bright derision can easily grade, through a cline of glee, into a look of rapture:
‘Do you know, Van, what book lay there — next to Marina’s hand mirror and a pair of tweezers? I’ll tell you. One of the most tawdry and réjouissants novels that ever "made" the front page of the Manhattan Times’ Book Review. I’m sure your Cordula still had it in her cosy corner where you sat temple to temple after you jilted me.’
‘Cat,’ said Van.
‘Oh, much worse. Old Beckstein’s Tabby was a masterpiece in comparison to this — this Love under the Lindens by one Eelmann transported into English by Thomas Gladstone, who seems to belong to a firm of Packers & Porters, because on the page which Adochka, adova dochka (Hell’s daughter) happens to be relishing here, "automobile" is rendered as "wagon." And to think, to think, that little Lucette had to study Eelmann, and three terrible Toms in her Literature course at Los!’
‘You remember that trash but I remember our nonstop three-hour kiss Under the Larches immediately afterwards.’
‘See next illustration,’ said Ada grimly.
‘The scoundrel!’ cried Van; ‘He must have been creeping after us on his belly with his entire apparatus. I will have to destroy him.’
‘No more destruction, Van. Only love.’
‘But look, girl, here I’m glutting your tongue, and there I’m glued to your epiglottis, and —’
‘Intermission,’ begged Ada, ‘quick-quick.’
‘I’m ready to oblige till I’m ninety,’ said Van (the vulgarity of the peep show was catchy), ‘ninety times a month, roughly.’
‘Make it even more roughly, oh much more, say a hundred and fifty, that would mean, that would mean —’
But, in the sudden storm, calculations went to the canicular devils. (2.7)
Van's and Ada's half-sister, Lucette studies the History of Art at Queenston College for Glamorous and Glupovatïh Girls:
He had not seen her since 1888. In the fall of 1891 she had sent him from California a rambling, indecent, crazy, almost savage declaration of love in a ten-page letter, which shall not be discussed in this memoir [See, however, a little farther. Ed.]. At present, she was studying the History of Art (‘the second-rater’s last refuge,’ she said) in nearby Queenston College for Glamorous and Glupovatïh (‘dumb’) Girls. (2.5)
In a letter of the second half of May (not later than May 24), 1826, to Prince Vyazemski Pushkin says that poetry should be glupovata (silly):
Твои стихи к Мнимой Красавице (ах, извини: Счастливице) слишком умны.-- А поэзия, прости господи, должна быть глуповата.
Your verses To a Would-Be Beautiful (ah, sorry, To a Would-Be Happy) Girl are too clever. And poetry, may God forgive me, should be glupovata (silly).
In Pushkin's poem Tri klyucha ("Three Springs," 1827) the third spring (that quenches heart's ardor most sweetly) is the cold spring of oblivion:
В степи мирской, печальной и безбрежной,
Таинственно пробились три ключа:
Ключ юности, ключ быстрый и мятежный,
Кипит, бежит, сверкая и журча.
Кастальский ключ волною вдохновенья
В степи мирской изгнанников поит.
Последний ключ — холодный ключ забвенья,
Он слаще всех жар сердца утолит.
Three springs in life's unbroken joyless desert
Mysteriously issue from the sands:
The spring of youth, uneven and rebellious,
Bears swift its sparkling stream through sunny lands;
Life's exiles drink the wave of inspiration
That swells the limpid fount of Castaly;
But 'tis the deep, cold wellspring of oblivion
That slakes most sweetly thirst and ecstasy.
(tr. A. Yarmolinski)
Poor Rack was poisoned by the not always lethal 'arethusoides.' In Greek mythology Arethusa was a nymph and daughter of Nereus (making her a Nereid), who fled from her home in Arcadia beneath the sea and came up as a fresh water fountain on the island of Ortygia in Syracuse, Sicily. Nereida ("The Nereid," 1820) is a poem Pushkin:
Среди зеленых волн, лобзающих Тавриду,
На утренней заре я видел Нереиду.
Сокрытый меж дерев, едва я смел дохнуть:
Над ясной влагою полубогиня грудь
Младую, белую как лебедь, воздымала
И пену из власов струею выжимала.
Pushkin saw the Nereid in the midst of green waves that kiss Tavrida (Tauris). Tauris is a name for the Crimea. Another lover of Ada, Percy de Prey goes to the Crimean war and dies on the second day of the invasion.