In his Index to Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a well-known and very courageous master builder and his three young apprentices: Yan, Yonny, and Angeling:
Shadows, the, a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus (q. v.) to assassinate the self-banished king; its leader's terrible name cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar; his maternal grandfather, a well-known and very courageous master builder, was hired by Thurgus the Turgid, around 1885, to make certain repairs in his quarters, and soon after that perished, poisoned in the royal kitchens, under mysterious circumstances, together with his three young apprentices whose first names Yan, Yonny, and Angeling, are preserved in a ballad still to be heard in some of our wilder valleys.
Yonny brings to mind Balmont’s poem Yoni-Lingham (1905):
Напряжённо-могучий Лингам,
Восприимчиво-влажная Йони,
Эта песня лелейная — вам,
Жизнь и свет на немом небосклоне,
Завлекательно-жадная Йони,
Безыстомно-горячий Лингам.
Вы — отрада зверям и богам,
Вы — заветная радость людская,
Вы дари́те гирлянды векам,
И родятся созвездья, сверкая,
Жизнь — всё та же, и вечно — другая,
Нераздельны в ней Йони-Лингам.
Вы подобны пьянящим цветкам,
Вы растёте в далёком Тибете,
Вы влечёте к чужим берегам,
Это вы — Афродита в расцвете,
Адонис в упоительном лете,
И Милитта, о, Йони-Лингам.
Вы подобны бессмертным цветкам,
Вы светло́ зажигаете взоры,
И Венера идёт по волнам,
Будит Пан задремавшие горы,
И в зелёных пещерах Эллоры
Обнимаются Йони-Лингам.
И Изида — добыча мечтам,
И в Истар загорелись порывы,
Стон идёт по холмам и лесам,
И глаза так безумно-красивы
У него, андрогинного Сивы,
Сочетавшего Йони-Лингам.
Balmont is the author of Budem kak solntse (“Let’s Be Like the Sun,” 1903), a collection of poetry. Sol being Norwegian for “sun,” the title of Balmont’s collection and a well-known and very courageous master builder who was hired by Thurgus the Turgid, around 1885, to make certain repairs in his quarters, and soon after that perished, poisoned in the royal kitchens, under mysterious circumstances, together with his three young apprentices bring to mind Ibsen’s play Bygmester Solness (“The Master Builder,” 1892). The epigraph to Alexander Blok’s poem Vozmezdie (“Retribution,” 1910-21), Yunost’ – eto vozmezdie (Youth is retribution), is from Ibsen’s pay “The Master Builder.” In Chapter Three of “Retribution” Blok mentions Flaubert’s strange inheritance – Education sentimentale:
И жаль отца, безмерно жаль:
Он тоже получил от детства
Флобера странное наследство -
Education sentimentale.
And he felt sorry for his father, immensely sorry:
He too had received from childhood
Flaubert’s strange inheritance –
Education sentimentale.
L'Éducation sentimentale (“Sentimental Education,” 1869) is a novel by Flaubert. The name Yonny also seems to hint at Yonville, a small fictional town in Normandy in Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857). On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set) Flaubert’s novel is known as Floeberg’s Ursula:
Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, ‘like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy’ (Floeberg’s Ursula). (1.20)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Floeberg: Flaubert’s style is mimicked in this pseudo quotation.
On the eve, in the Night of the Burning Barn, Van and Ada make love for the first time. Describing the beginning of his almost life-long romance with Ada, Van mentions his sentimental education:
His sentimental education now went on fast. Next morning, he happened to catch sight of her washing her face and arms over an old-fashioned basin on a rococo stand, her hair knotted on the top of her head, her nightgown twisted around her waist like a clumsy corolla out of which issued her slim back, rib-shaded on the near side. A fat snake of porcelain curled around the basin, and as both the reptile and he stopped to watch Eve and the soft woggle of her bud-breasts in profile, a big mulberry-colored cake of soap slithered out of her hand, and her black-socked foot hooked the door shut with a bang which was more the echo of the soap’s crashing against the marble board than a sign of pudic displeasure. (1.9)
The characters of Ada include Ronald Oranger, old Van’s secretary (and the editor of Ada) who marries Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, “little Violet”) after Van’s and Ada’s death. While Fialochka brings to mind Blok’s poem in blank verse Nochnaya fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906), Ronald Oranger recalls les boutons d'oranger (the orange blossoms) of Emma’s wedding bouquet in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:
Un jour qu'en prévision de son départ elle faisait des rangements dans un tiroir, elle se piqua les doigts à quelque chose. C'était un fil de fer de son bouquet de mariage. Les boutons d'oranger étaient jaunes de poussière, et les rubans de satin, à liséré d'argent, s'effiloquaient par le bord. Elle le jeta dans le feu. Il s'enflamma plus vite qu'une paille sèche. Puis ce fut comme un buisson rouge sur les cendres, et qui se rongeait lentement. Elle le regarda brûler. Les petites baies de carton éclataient, les fils d'archal se tordaient, le galon se fondait ; et les corolles de papier, racornies, se balançant le long de la plaque comme des papillons noirs, enfin s'envolèrent dans la cheminée.
Quand on partit de Tostes, au mois de mars, Mme Bovary était enceinte.
One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at lest flew up the chimney.
When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant. (Part I, Chapter 9)
Part One of Ada ends as follows:
His main industry consisted of research at the great granite-pillared Public Library, that admirable and formidable palace a few blocks from Cordula’s cosy flat. One is irresistibly tempted to compare the strange longings and nauseous qualms that enter into the complicated ecstasies accompanying the making of a young writer’s first book with childbearing. Van had only reached the bridal stage; then, to develop the metaphor, would come the sleeping car of messy defloration; then the first balcony of honeymoon breakfasts, with the first wasp. In no sense could Cordula be compared to a writer’s muse but the evening stroll back to her apartment was pleasantly saturated with the afterglow and afterthought of the accomplished task and the expectation of her caresses; he especially looked forward to those nights when they had an elaborate repast sent up from ‘Monaco,’ a good restaurant in the entresol of the tall building crowned by her penthouse and its spacious terrace. The sweet banality of their little ménage sustained him much more securely than the company of his constantly agitated and fiery father did at their rare meetings in town or was to do during a fortnight in Paris before the next term at Chose. Except gossip — gossamer gossip — Cordula had no conversation and that also helped. She had instinctively realized very soon that she should never mention Ada or Ardis. He, on his part, accepted the evident fact that she did not really love him. Her small, clear, soft, well-padded and rounded body was delicious to stroke, and her frank amazement at the variety and vigor of his love-making anointed what still remained of poor Van’s crude virile pride. She would doze off between two kisses. When he could not sleep, as now often happened, he retired to the sitting room and sat there annotating his authors or else he would walk up and down the open terrace, under a haze of stars, in severely restricted meditation, till the first tramcar jangled and screeched in the dawning abyss of the city.
When in early September Van Veen left Manhattan for Lute, he was pregnant. (1.43)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): the last paragraph of Part One imitates, in significant brevity of intonation (as if spoken by an outside voice), a famous Tolstoyan ending, with Van in the role of Kitty Lyovin.
At the beginning of Ada Van turns inside out the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin (1875-77):
‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858). (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. ‘Mount Tabor’ and ‘Pontius’ allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.
Van (who is sterile and cannot hope to have an offspring) never finds out that Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox (a happy "superimperial" couple) are Ada’s grandchildren. In Pale Fire the leader of the Shadows (whose terrible unmetionable name seems to hint at Stalin) is a grandson of a well-known and very courageous master builder.