At the patio party in "Ardis the Second" G. A. Vronsky (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, the movie man who makes a film of Mlle Larivière's novel Les Enfants Maudits) mentions a telegraph pole:
And now hairy Pedro hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).
‘Your leetle aperture must be raccommodated,’ he said.
‘Que voulez-vous dire, for goodness sake?’ she asked, instead of dealing him a backhand wallop.
‘Permit that I contact your charming penetralium,’ the idiot insisted, and put a wet finger on the hole in her swimsuit.
‘Oh that’ (shrugging and rearranging the shoulder strap displaced by the shrug). ‘Never mind that. Next time, maybe, I’ll put on my fabulous new bikini.’
‘Next time, maybe, no Pedro?’
‘Too bad,’ said Ada. ‘Now go and fetch me a Coke, like a good dog.’
‘E tu?’ Pedro asked Marina as he walked past her chair. ‘Again screwdriver?’
‘Yes, dear, but with grapefruit, not orange, and a little zucchero. I can’t understand’ (turning to Vronsky), ‘why do I sound a hundred years old on this page and fifteen on the next? Because if it is a flashback — and it is a flashback, I suppose’ (she pronounced it fieshbeck), ‘Renny, or what’s his name, René, should not know what he seems to know.’
‘He does not,’ cried G.A., ‘it’s only a half-hearted flashback. Anyway, this Renny, this lover number one, does not know, of course, that she is trying to get rid of lover number two, while she’s wondering all the time if she can dare go on dating number three, the gentleman farmer, see?’
‘Nu, eto chto-to slozhnovato (sort of complicated), Grigoriy Akimovich,’ said Marina, scratching her cheek, for she always tended to discount, out of sheer self-preservation, the considerably more slozhnïe patterns out of her own past.
‘Read on, read, it all becomes clear,’ said G.A., riffling through his own copy.
‘Incidentally,’ observed Marina, ‘I hope dear Ida will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can’t be made to recite French poetry.’
‘If she protests,’ said Vronsky, ‘she can go and stick a telegraph pole — where it belongs.’
The indecent ‘telegraph’ caused Marina, who had a secret fondness for salty jokes, to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis’ so smehu vrode Adï): ‘But let’s be serious, I still don’t see how and why his wife — I mean the second guy’s wife — accepts the situation (polozhenie).’
Vronsky spread his fingers and toes.
‘Prichyom tut polozhenie (situation-shituation)? She is blissfully ignorant of their affair and besides, she knows she is fubsy and frumpy, and simply cannot compete with dashing Hélène.’
‘I see, but some won’t,’ said Marina. (1.32)
In G. K. Chesterton’s essay The Telegraph Poles (1910) the narrator says that telegraph poles are ugly and detestable, inhuman and indecent:
"Demon," he said to me briefly, "behold your work. That place of proud trees behind us is what the world was before you civilized men, Christians or democrats or the rest, came to make it dull with your dreary rules of morals and equality. In the silent fight of that forest, tree fights speechless against tree, branch against branch. And the upshot of that dumb battle is inequality-and beauty. Now lift up your eyes and look at equality and ugliness. See how regularly the white buttons are arranged on that black stick, and defend your dogmas if you dare."
"Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of democracy?" I asked. "I fancy that while three men have made the telegraph to get dividends, about a thousand men have preserved the forest to cut wood. But if the telegraph pole is hideous (as I admit) it is not due to doctrine but rather to commercial anarchy. If any one had a doctrine about a telegraph pole it might be carved in ivory and decked with gold. Modern things are ugly, because modern men are careless, not because they are careful."
"No," answered my friend with his eye on the end of a splendid and sprawling sunset, "there is something intrinsically deadening about the very idea of a doctrine. A straight line is always ugly. Beauty is always crooked. These rigid posts at regular intervals are ugly because they are carrying across the world the real message of democracy."
"At this moment," I answered, "they are probably carrying across the world the message, 'Buy Bulgarian Rails.' They are probably the prompt communication between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of His children with whom God has ever had patience. No; these telegraph poles are ugly and detestable, they are inhuman and indecent. But their baseness lies in their privacy, not in their publicity. That black stick with white buttons is not the creation of the soul of a multitude. It is the mad creation of the souls of two millionaires."
"At least you have to explain," answered my friend gravely, "how it is that the hard democratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic outline have appeared together; you have... But bless my soul, we must be getting home. I had no idea it was so late. Let me see, I think this is our way through the wood. Come, let us both curse the telegraph post for entirely different reasons and get home before it is dark."
The narrator's interlocutor quotes the words of Mr. Sampson in Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend (1865): "'Demon—with the highest respect for you—behold your work!" In Ada Demon is the society nickname of Van’s and Ada’s father:
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)
Before the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Demon mentions that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer:
I don’t know if you know,’ said Van, resuming his perch on the fat arm of his father’s chair. ‘Uncle Dan will be here with the lawyer and Lucette only after dinner.’
‘Capital,’ said Demon.
‘Marina and Ada should be down in a minute — ce sera un dîner à quatre.’
‘Capital,’ he repeated. ‘You look splendid, my dear, dear fellow — and I don’t have to exaggerate compliments as some do in regard to an aging man with shoe-shined hair. Your dinner jacket is very nice — or, rather it’s very nice recognizing one’s old tailor in one’s son’s clothes — like catching oneself repeating an ancestral mannerism — for example, this (wagging his left forefinger three times at the height of his temple), which my mother did in casual, pacific denial; that gene missed you, but I’ve seen it in my hairdresser’s looking-glass when refusing to have him put Crêmlin on my bald spot; and you know who had it too — my aunt Kitty, who married the Banker Bolenski after divorcing that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer.’
Demon preferred Walter Scott to Dickens, and did not think highly of Russian novelists. As usual, Van considered it fit to make a corrective comment:
‘A fantastically artistic writer, Dad.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): ce sera etc.: it will be a dinner for four
Wagging his left forefinger: that gene did not miss his daughter (see p.178, where the name of the cream is also prefigured).
Lyovka: derogative or folksy diminutive of Lyov (Leo).
In his lecture on dreams Van compares himself to the dusty-trousered Marmlad before his Marmlady in Dickens:
In the professional dreams that especially obsessed me when I worked on my earliest fiction, and pleaded abjectly with a very frail muse (‘kneeling and wringing my hands’ like the dusty-trousered Marmlad before his Marmlady in Dickens), I might see for example that I was correcting galley proofs but that somehow (the great ‘somehow’ of dreams!) the book had already come out, had come out literally, being proffered to me by a human hand from the wastepaper basket in its perfect, and dreadfully imperfect, stage — with a typo on every page, such as the snide ‘bitterly’ instead of ‘butterfly’ and the meaningless ‘nuclear’ instead of ‘unclear.’ Or I would be hurrying to a reading I had to give — would feel exasperated by the sight of the traffic and people blocking my way, and then realize with sudden relief that all I had to do was to strike out the phrase ‘crowded street’ in my manuscript. What I might designate as ‘skyscape’ (not ‘skyscrape,’ as two-thirds of the class will probably take it down) dreams belongs to a subdivision of my vocational visions, or perhaps may represent a preface to them, for it was in my early pubescence that hardly a night would pass without some old or recent waketime impression’s establishing a soft deep link with my still-muted genius (for we are ‘van,’ rhyming with and indeed signifying ‘one’ in Marina’s double-you-less deep-voweled Russian pronunciation). The presence, or promise, of art in that kind of dream would come in the image of an overcast sky with a manifold lining of cloud, a motionless but hopeful white, a hopeless but gliding gray, showing artistic signs of clearing, and presently the glow of a pale sun grew through the leaner layer only to be recowled by the scud, for I was not yet ready. (2.4)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Marmlad in Dickens: or rather Marmeladov in Dostoevsky, whom Dickens (in translation) greatly influenced.
During Van’s first tea party at Ardis Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) mentions Dostoevski:
They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada’s black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van’s teacher of history, ‘Jeejee’ Jones.
‘He resembles my teacher of history,’ said Van when the man had gone.
‘I used to love history,’ said Marina, ‘I loved to identify myself with famous women. There’s a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties — Lincoln’s second wife or Queen Josephine.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed — it’s beautifully done. We’ve got a similar set at home.’
‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.
‘Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),’ replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis’ (with a slight smile). ‘Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.’
‘Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.’
‘Pah,’ uttered Ada. (1.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.
In Dusha Tolstogo (“The Soul of Tolstoy,” 1927) Ivan Nazhivin quotes the words of Tolstoy’s fellow student at the Kazan University with whom Tolstoy was locked up in the dark University cell for the skipping of a lecture in history. “Having noticed that I was reading Lermontov’s “The Demon,” Tolstoy spoke ironically about verses in general and then, turning to Karamzin’s “History” that lay beside me, said that history was the most boring and nearly useless subject:"
"Заметив, что я читаю "Демона" Лермонтова, Толстой иронически отнесся к стихам вообще, а потом, обратившись к лежавшей возле меня истории Карамзина, напустился на историю, как на самый скучный и чуть ли не бесполезный предмет. "История, - рубил он с плеча, - это не что иное, как собрание басен и бесполезных мелочей, пересыпанных массой ненужных цифр и собственных имен. Смерть Игоря, змея, ужалившая Олега, - что же это как не сказки, и кому нужно знать, что второй брак Иоанна на дочери Темрюка совершился 21 августа 1562 года, а четвертый, на Анне Алексеевне Колтовской, в 1572 году, а ведь от меня требуют, чтобы я задолбил все это, а не знаю, так ставят единицу. А как пишется история? Все пригоняется к известной мерке, измышленной историком. Грозный царь, о котором в настоящее время читает профессор Иванов, вдруг с 1560 года из добродетельного и мудрого превращается в бессмысленного и свирепого тирана. Как и почему, об этом не спрашивайте..." (Chapter Three)
Describing his childhood travels, Van pairs Karamzin with Count Tolstoy:
After that, they tried to settle whether their ways had merged somewhere or run closely parallel for a bit that year in Europe. In the spring of 1881, Van, aged eleven, spent a few months with his Russian tutor and English valet at his grandmother’s villa near Nice, while Demon was having a much better time in Cuba than Dan was at Mocuba. In June, Van was taken to Florence, and Rome, and Capri, where his father turned up for a brief spell. They parted again, Demon sailing back to America, and Van with his tutor going first to Gardone on Lake Garda, where Aksakov reverently pointed out Goethe’s and d’Annunzio’s marble footprints, and then staying for a while in autumn at a hotel on a mountain slope above Leman Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed). Did Marina suspect that Van was somewhere in the same general area as she throughout 1881? Probably no. Both girls had scarlet fever in Cannes, while Marina was in Spain with her Grandee. After carefully matching memories, Van and Ada concluded that it was not impossible that somewhere along a winding Riviera road they passed each other in rented victorias that both remembered were green, with green-harnessed horses, or perhaps in two different trains, going perhaps the same way, the little girl at the window of one sleeping car looking at the brown sleeper of a parallel train which gradually diverged toward sparkling stretches of sea that the little boy could see on the other side of the tracks. The contingency was too mild to be romantic, nor did the possibility of their having walked or run past each other on the quay of a Swiss town afford any concrete thrill. But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years — problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space — and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. (1.24)
At the beginning of the same chapter of Ada Van mentions Lettrocalamity:
Van regretted that because Lettrocalamity (Vanvitelli’s old joke!) was banned allover the world, its very name having become a ‘dirty word’ among upper-upper-class families (in the British and Brazilian sense) to which the Veens and Durmanovs happened to belong, and had been replaced by elaborate surrogates only in those very important ‘utilities’ — telephones, motors — what else? — well a number of gadgets for which plain folks hanker with lolling tongues, breathing faster than gundogs (for it’s quite a long sentence), such trifles as tape recorders, the favorite toys of his and Ada’s grandsires (Prince Zemski had one for every bed of his harem of schoolgirls) were not manufactured any more, except in Tartary where they had evolved ‘minirechi’ (‘talking minarets’) of a secret make. Had our erudite lovers been allowed by common propriety and common law to knock into working order the mysterious box they had once discovered in their magic attic, they might have recorded (so as to replay, eight decades later) Giorgio Vanvitelli’s arias as well as Van Veen’s conversations with his sweetheart. Here, for example, is what they might have heard today — with amusement, embarrassment, sorrow, wonder. (ibid.)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Lettrocalamity: a play on Ital. elettrocalamita, electromagnet.
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. The Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850, in our world. In his book “Tolstoy and Dostoevski” (1902) Merezhkovski several times quotes Zinaida Hippius’ poem Elektrichestvo (“Electricity,” 1901). In “The Soul of Tolstoy” Nazhivin mentions Tolstoy's beloved aunt Tatiana Aleksandrovna who asked her nephew how they write letters on telegraph:
И не надо преувеличивать значения пожелтевших томиков Вольтера, Санд, Байрона. Те, кто их лениво читает, - редкое исключение. Большинство же обитателей этих красивых "дворянских гнезд" все же отличается от окружающего их со всех сторон крестьянского моря. Если мужик, разиня рот, глядит на таинственную телеграфную проволоку и уверяет всех, что она протянута только для того, чтобы пустить по ней из Петербурга по всей деревенской России желанную "волю", то любимая тетушка Толстого, Татьяна Александровна, едучи с ним куда-то в карете, спрашивает его:
-- Mon cher Leon, как же это пишут письма по телеграфу?
Племянник усердно объясняет ей устройство телеграфа.
-- Oui, oui, je comprends, mon cher!.. - ласково говорит тетушка, а чрез полчаса недоумевает опять: - Как же это так, mon cher Leon? Целые полчаса вот слежу я за проволокой, а не видала ни одного письма, пробежавшего по телеграфу... (Chapter I)
Tolstoy painstakingly explains to his aunt the working principle of telegraph. Half an hour later she says with perplexity that she has been watching the wire for half an hour now and has not seen a single letter that would run over the telegraph.
In his book Nazhivin quotes a fragment from Tolstoy’s essay Komu u kogo uchit’sya pisat’, krest’yanskim rebyatam u nas ili nam u krest’yanskikh rebyat? (“Who Should Learn Writing of Whom; Peasant Children of Us, or We of Peasant Children?” 1862) in which Tolstoy describes the process of a story composition by the pupils of his Yasnaya Polyana school and uses the phrase rebyata pokatilis’ so smekhu (the boys collapsed in ripples of rolling laughter):
Я предложил, например, описать наружность мужика, - он согласился, но на предложение описать то, что думал мужик, когда жена бегала к куму, ему тотчас же представился оборот мысли: эх, напала бы ты на Савоську-покойника, тот бы те космы-то повыдергал!.. И он сказал это таким усталым и спокойно, привычно серьезным и вместе добродушным тоном, облокотив голову на руку, что ребята покатились со смеху. Главное свойство во всяком искусстве - чувство меры, - было развито в нем необычайно. Его коробило от всякой лишней черты, подсказываемой кем-нибудь из мальчиков. Он так деспотически и с правом на этот деспотизм распоряжался постройкой повести, что скоро мальчики ушли домой, и остался только он с Семкою, который не уступал ему, хотя и работал в другом роде. Мы работали с 7 до 11 часов; они не чувствовали ни усталости, ни голода и еще рассердились на меня, когда я перестал писать; взялись сами писать по переменкам, но скоро бросили: дело не пошло. Тут Федька спросил, как меня звать. Мы засмеялись, что он этого не знает. "Я знаю, - сказал он, - как вас звать, да двор-то ваш как зовут? Вот у нас Фоканычевы, Зябревы, Ермилины...". Я сказал ему. "А печатывать будем?" - спросил он. "Да". "Так и напечатывать надо: сочинения Макарова, Морозова и Толстова". Он долго был в волнении, а я и не могу передать того чувства волнения, радости, страха и почти раскаяния, которые я испытывал в продолжение этого вечера. Я чувствовал, что с этого дня для него раскрылся целый мир наслаждений и страданий, мир искусства; мне казалось, что я подсмотрел то, что никогда никто не имеет права видеть, - зарождение таинственного цветка поэзии. Мне и страшно и радостно было, как искателю клада, который увидал бы цвет папоротника, - радостно мне было потому, что вдруг, совершенно неожиданно, открылся тот философский камень, которого я тщетно искал два года, - искусство учить выражению мыслей; страшно потому, что это искусство вызывало новые требования, целый мир желаний, не соответствующий среде, в которой жили ученики, как мне казалось в первую минуту. Ошибиться нельзя было. Это была не случайность, но сознательное творчество.
For instance, I proposed that he describe the peasant's external appearance ; he agreed : but my proposal that he should describe what the peasant thought while his wife was gone to her neighbor's immediately brought up in his mind this idea : "Ekh! woman ! if you should meet the dead Savoska, he would tear your hair out." And he said this in such a weary and calmly naturally serious, and at the same time good-natured, tone of voice, leaning his head on his hand, that the children went into a gale of laughter. The chief condition of every art - the feeling of proportion was extraordinarily developed in him. He was wholly upset by any superfluous suggestion made by any of the boys. He took it upon himself to direct the construction of this story in such a despotic way, and with such a just claim to be despotic, that very soon the boys went home, and he alone was left with Semka, who did not give way to him, though he worked in a different manner. We worked from seven to eleven o'clock ; the children felt neither hunger nor weariness, and they were really indignant with me when I stopped writing ; then they tried to take turns in writing by themselves, but they soon desisted- -the thing did not work. Here for the first time Fedka asked me what my name was. We laughed at him, because he did not know. " I know," said he, " how to address you ; but what do they call your estate name ? l You know we have the Fokanychev family, the Zyabrevs, the Yermilins." I told him. " And are we going to be printed?" he asked. "Yes." " Then it must be printed : The work of Makarof, Morozof, and Tolstoi ! ' He was excited for a long time, and could not sleep ; and I cannot represent the feeling of excitement, of pleasure, of pain, and almost of remorse which I experienced in the course of that evening. I felt that from this time a new world of joys and sorrows had been revealed to Fedka,—the world of art; it seemed to me that I was witnessing what no one has the right to see,—the unfolding of the mysterious flower of poesy. To me it was both terrible and delightful; just as if a treasure-seeker should find the lady-fern in bloom. The pleasure consisted for me in suddenly, unexpectedly, discovering the philosopher's stone, for which I had been vainly seeking for two years — the art of expressing thought. It was terrible, because this art would bring new demands and a whole world of desires incompatible with the sphere in which the pupils live — or so it seemed to me at the first moment. There could be no mistake. This was not chance, but conscious, creative genius. (Chapter XI)
Tolstoy died in 1910, the year in which G. K. Chesterton wrote “The Telegraph Poles.”