Describing Victor Vitry’s film version of his novel Letters from Terra, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry (the director’s wife who played Theresa, a character in Van’s novel), and compares Theresa to some lewd elf:
Three circumstances contributed to the picture’s exceptional success. One factor was, of course, that organized religion, disapproving of Terra’s appeal to sensation-avid sects, attempted to have the thing banned. A second attraction came from a little scene that canny Vitry had not cut out: in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position. Finally, the third, and even more human reason, was that the lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry, after titillating the spectators with her skimpy skirts and sexy rags in the existential sequences, came out of her capsule on Antiterra stark naked, though, of course, in miniature, a millimeter of maddening femininity dancing in ‘the charmed circle of the microscope’ like some lewd elf, and revealing, in certain attitudes, I’ll be damned, a pinpoint glint of pubic floss, gold-powered! (5.5)
Gedda Vitry seems to be a cross between Hedda Gabler (the title character of a play by Ibsen) and Greta Garbo (a Swedish actress). Jacques de Vitry (Jacobus de Vitriaco, c. 1160/70 – 1240) was a French canon regular who was a noted theologian and chronicler of his era. At the beginning of his poem Blednye skazaniya (“Pale Legends,” 1907) Alexander Blok mentions his girlfriend’s elf that has flown away:
- Посмотри, подруга, эльф твой
Улетел!
- Посмотри, как быстролетны
Времена!
“Look, my girl friend, your elf
has flown away!
Look how fast-flying
are the times!”
The girlfriend’s elf that has flown away turns out to be Amur (Amor, a diminutive winged god who left his place on the bookshelf):
И на завесе оконной
Золотится
Луч, протянутый от сердца -
Тонкий цепкий шнур.
И потерянный, влюбленный
Не умеет прицепиться
Улетевший с книжной дверцы
Амур.
Elf is German for "eleven." Blok is the author of Dvenadtsat' ("The Twelve," 1918). The epigraph to Blok's poem Solveig (1906) is from Ibsen's play Peer Gynt: "Solveig comes running on skis." The epigraph to Blok’s poem Vozmezdie (“Retribution,” 1910-21) is from Ibsen’s play The Master Builder: “Youth is Retribution.” In his Foreword to "Retribution" Blok mentions a prophetic article Blizost' bol'shoy voiny ("The Nearness of a Big War") that appeared in 1911 in one of the Moscow newspapers:
Весной 1911 года П. Н. Милюков прочёл интереснейшую лекцию под заглавием "Вооружённый мир и сокращение вооружений". В одной из московских газет появилась пророческая статья: "Близость большой войны".
The newspaper was Utro Rossii ("Russia's Morning") and the article's author, A. P. Mertvago. On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) is known as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor (1.8), Mertvago Forever (2.5) and Klara Mertvago (2.7). As Vivian Darkbloom explains in his ‘Notes to Ada,’ zhiv means in Russian 'alive' and mertv 'dead.'
At the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van tells his father that Dr Krolik (the local entomologist, Ada's beloved teacher of natural history) cannot do much, because he is dead, and Marina cannot tell her servants not to breathe, because they are alive:
Marina,’ murmured Demon at the close of the first course. ‘Marina,’ he repeated louder. ‘Far from me’ (a locution he favored) ‘to criticize Dan’s taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I’m above all that rot, I’m…’ (gesture); ‘but, my dear,’ he continued, switching to Russian, ‘the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki — the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) —’
‘Everybody has eyes,’ remarked Marina drily.
‘Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that’s not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odïshka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It’s depressing. It’s a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.’
‘Look, Dad,’ said Van, ‘Dr Krolik can’t do much, because, as you know quite well, he’s dead, and Marina can’t tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they’re alive.’
‘The Veen wit, the Veen wit,’ murmured Demon. (1.38)
In his poem Neznakomka (“The Unknown Woman,” 1906) Blok mentions p’yanitsy s glazami krolikov (the drunks with the eyes of rabbits) who cry out “In vino veritas!” (in wine is truth):
А рядом у соседних столиков
Лакеи сонные торчат,
И пьяницы с глазами кроликов
"In vino veritas!" кричат.
And drowsy lackeys lounge about
Beside the adjacent tables
While drunks with rabbit eyes cry out
"In vino veritas!"
Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia) in 1901, Van mentions Blok's Incognita:
The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days ‘Alphonse Cinq,’ believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla — here a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’ colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. (3.3)
Mertvago's article "The Nearness of a Big War" brings to mind “a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914-1918 war” mentioned by Van when he describes Vitry’s film:
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)
Athaulf Hindler seems to be a cross between Adolf Hitler and Athaulf, the king of the Visigoths from 411 to 415. In Ravenna, the first poem of his cycle Ital’yanskie stikhi (“Italian Verses,” 1909), Blok mentions Galla Placida, Athaulf’s wife who ruled the Western Roman Empire from 425 to 437 (and who, like Dante, was buried in Ravenna):
Всё, что минутно, всё, что бренно,
Похоронила ты в веках.
Ты, как младенец, спишь, Равенна,
У сонной вечности в руках.
Рабы сквозь римские ворота
Уже не ввозят мозаик.
И догорает позолота
В стенах прохладных базилик.
От медленных лобзаний влаги
Нежнее грубый свод гробниц,
Где зеленеют саркофаги
Святых монахов и цариц.
Безмолвны гробовые залы,
Тенист и хладен их порог,
Чтоб черный взор блаженной Галлы,
Проснувшись, камня не прожёг.
Военной брани и обиды
Забыт и стёрт кровавый след,
Чтобы воскресший глас Плакиды
Не пел страстей протекших лет.
Далёко отступило море,
И розы оцепили вал,
Чтоб спящий в гробе Теодорих
О буре жизни не мечтал.
А виноградные пустыни,
Дома и люди - всё гроба.
Лишь медь торжественной латыни
Поёт на плитах, как труба.
Лишь в пристальном и тихом взоре
Равеннских девушек, порой,
Печаль о невозвратном море
Проходит робкой чередой.
Лишь по ночам, склонясь к долинам,
Ведя векам грядущим счёт,
Тень Данта с профилем орлиным
О Новой Жизни мне поёт.
All things ephemeral, fast-fading
In time's dark vaults, hid by you, lie.
A babe, you sleep, Ravenna, cradled
By slumberous eternity.
Through Rome's old gates the slaves no longer,
Bright slabs of marble bearing, pass.
The gilt looks charred, seems but to smoulder,
Not flame in the basilicas.
The moisture's indolent caresses
Have smoothed the stone of tombs where green
With age the coffins of the blessed,
Of holy monks stand and of queens.
The silent crypts, by all forsaken,
Cold shades invite that o'er them roam
So that the gaze of Galla, wakened,
Might not burn through the mass of stone.
The bloody trace of war's dark horrors
Has been forgot and wiped away
So that she might not sing the sorrows
And passions of a bygone day.
The sea's withdrawn, and o'er the ramparts
The roses climb and form a screen
So that Theodoric might never
Awake or of life's tempests dream.
A realm of death. Men, vineyards, houses
Are all as sepulchres. Alone
The brass of Latin, ageless, rousing,
Blares like a trumpet on the stones.
But in the gaze intent and peaceful
Of the Ravenna girls the sea
Is glimpsed at times, reminder wistful
Of something that no more will be.
And deep at night, the ages counting,
Those meant to come by fate's decree,
The eagle-profiled shade of Dante
Of Vita Nuova sings to me.
Vedya vekam gryadushchim schyot (counting the centuries to come), a line in the poem’s last stanza, brings to mind kholod i mrak gryadushchikh dney ("the cold and murk of the days to come") mentioned by Blok in his poem Golos iz khora ("A Voice from the Choir," 1914) and Athaulf the Future (in Russian, Ataulf Gryadushchiy), a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, mentioned by Van when he describes his novel Letters from Terra:
Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)
In the first poem of his cycle Na pole Kulikovom (“On Kulikovo Field,” 1908) Blok exclaims: Rus’ moya! Zhena moya! (“My Rus! My wife!”):
Река раскинулась. Течёт, грустит лениво
И моет берега.
Над скудной глиной жёлтого обрыва
В степи грустят стога.
О, Русь моя! Жена моя! До боли
Нам ясен долгий путь!
Наш путь - стрелой татарской древней воли
Пронзил нам грудь.
Наш путь - степной, наш путь - в тоске безбрежной -
В твоей тоске, о, Русь!
И даже мглы - ночной и зарубежной -
Я не боюсь.
Пусть ночь. Домчимся. Озарим кострами
Степную даль.
В степном дыму блеснет святое знамя
И ханской сабли сталь...
И вечный бой! Покой нам только снится
Сквозь кровь и пыль...
Летит, летит степная кобылица
И мнет ковыль...
И нет конца! Мелькают версты, кручи...
Останови!
Идут, идут испуганные тучи,
Закат в крови!
Закат в крови! Из сердца кровь струится!
Плачь, сердце, плачь...
Покоя нет! Степная кобылица
Несётся вскачь!
The river spreads out. It flows, sorrowful, lazy
And washes the banks.
Above the bare clay of the yellow cliff
Haystacks languish on the steppe.
O my Rus! My wife! Our long path
Is painfully clear!
Our path has pierced our breast like an arrow
Of ancient Tatar will.
Our path leads through the steppe, through endless yearning,
Through your yearning, O Rus!
And I do not even fear the darkness
Of night beyond the border.
Let night come. We will speed to our goal, light up
The steppe with campfires.
In the smoky reaches a holy banner will shine
Along with the Khan's steel sabre...
And the battle is eternal! We can only dream of peace
Through blood and dust...
The mare of the steppe flies on and on
And tramples the steppe grass...
And there is no end! the miles and slopes flash by...
Stop!
The frightened thunderheads approach,
The sunset bleeds!
The sunset bleeds! Blood streams from the heart!
Weep, heart, weep.
There is no peace! The mare of the steppe
Flies at full gallop!
In the battle of Kulikovo (1380) the Russians led by Prince Dmitri (surnamed Donskoy) defeated the Tartars led by Khan Mamay. But on Antiterra the Russians must have suffered defeat and migrated, across “the ha-ha of a doubled ocean,” to America. Novaya Amerika ("The New America," 1912) is a poem by Blok. In his poem O pravitelyakh (“On Rulers,” 1945) VN mentions volk v makintoshe, v furazhke s nemetskim krutym kozyr'kom, okhripshiy i ves' perekoshennyi ("the trench-coated wolf in his army cap with a German steep peak, hoarse-voiced, his face all distorted," i. e. Hitler) and compares Stalin (who said that life became better and merrier) to Khan Mamay ("a particularly evil Tartar prince of the fourteenth century"):
Умирает со скуки историк:
за Мамаем все тот же Мамай.
В самом деле, нельзя же нам с горя
поступить, как чиновный Китай,
кучу лишних веков присчитавший
к истории скромной своей,
от этого, впрочем, не ставшей
ни лучше, ни веселей.
The historian dies of sheer boredom:
on the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
Does our plight really force us to do
what did bureaucratic Cathay
that with heaps of superfluous centuries
augmented her limited history
which, however, hardly became
either better or merrier.
On Demonia Stalin is represented by Khan Sosso and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel (one of the seconds in Demon Veen’s sword duel with Baron d’Onsky):
Upon being questioned in Demon’s dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so. Since prudent Veen preferred killing his man in Europe (decrepit but indestructible Gamaliel was said to be doing his best to forbid duels in the Western Hemisphere — a canard or an idealistic President’s instant-coffee caprice, for nothing was to come of it after all), Demon rented the fastest petroloplane available, overtook the Baron (looking very fit) in Nice, saw him enter Gunter’s Bookshop, went in after him, and in the presence of the imperturbable and rather bored English shopkeeper, back-slapped the astonished Baron across the face with a lavender glove. The challenge was accepted; two native seconds were chosen; the Baron plumped for swords; and after a certain amount of good blood (Polish and Irish — a kind of American ‘Gory Mary’ in barroom parlance) had bespattered two hairy torsoes, the whitewashed terrace, the flight of steps leading backward to the walled garden in an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement, the apron of a quite accidental milkmaid, and the shirtsleeves of both seconds, charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, the latter gentlemen separated the panting combatants, and Skonky died, not ‘of his wounds’ (as it was viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston — a city where, incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of Glass Biota at the local museum. (1.2).
The comedian Steller (who played a reluctant king in Vitry's movie) and the Aardvark Hospital in Boston bring 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.
The surname Ospenko comes from ospa (smallpox). In Chekhov’s play Tri sestry (“The Three Sisters,” 1901) known on Antiterra as Four Sisters (2.1, et passim) Dr Chebutykin reads about smallpox in a newspaper:
Чебутыкин (читает газету). Цицикар. Здесь свирепствует оспа.
Chebutykin (reads from a newspaper): "Tsitsikar. Smallpox is raging here." (Act Two)
Telling Van about Uncle Dan’s Boschian death, Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) says that he managed to trace Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) 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 —’
Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette —
‘— no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is — I mean, Vinelander is — the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols — or whoever they were — who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders — before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.’
‘I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,’ said Van, ‘what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.’
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’ (2.10)
Volk v makintoshe (the trench-coated wolf) in VN’s poem On Rulers reminds one of Cordula de Prey’s ‘garbotosh’ (belted mackintosh):
He looked her over more closely than he had done before. He had read somewhere (we might recall the precise title if we tried, not Tiltil, that’s in Blue Beard...) that a man can recognize a Lesbian, young and alone (because a tailored old pair can fool no one), by a combination of three characteristics: slightly trembling hands, a cold-in-the-head voice, and that skidding-in-panic of the eyes if you happen to scan with obvious appraisal such charms as the occasion might force her to show (lovely shoulders, for instance). Nothing whatever of all that (yes — Mytilène, petite isle, by Louis Pierre) seemed to apply to Cordula, who wore a ‘garbotosh’ (belted mackintosh) over her terribly unsmart turtle and held both hands deep in her pockets as she challenged his stare. Her bobbed hair was of a neutral shade between dry straw and damp. Her light blue iris could be matched by millions of similar eyes in pigment-poor families of French Estoty. Her mouth was doll-pretty when consciously closed in a mannered pout so as to bring out what portraitists call the two ‘sickle folds’ which, at their best, are oblong dimples and, at their worst, the creases down the well-chilled cheeks of felt-booted apple-cart girls. When her lips parted, as they did now, they revealed braced teeth, which, however, she quickly remembered to shutter. (1.27)
At the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday Marina calls Hollywood “Houssaie, Gollivud-tozh:”
The execution was interrupted by the arrival of Uncle Dan. He had a remarkably reckless way of driving, as happens so often, goodness knows why, in the case of many dour, dreary men. Weaving rapidly between the pines, he brought the little red runabout to an abrupt stop in front of Ada and presented her with the perfect gift, a big box of mints, white, pink and, oh boy, green! He had also an aerogram for her, he said, winking.
Ada tore it open — and saw it was not for her from dismal Kalugano, as she had feared, but for her mother from Los Angeles, a much gayer place. Marina’s face gradually assumed an expression of quite indecent youthful beatitude as she scanned the message. Triumphantly, she showed it to Larivière-Monparnasse, who read it twice and tilted her head with a smile of indulgent disapproval. Positively stamping her feet with joy:
‘Pedro is coming again,’ cried (gurgled, rippled) Marina to calm her daughter.
‘And, I suppose, he’ll stay till the end of the summer,’ remarked Ada — and sat down with Greg and Lucette, for a game of Snap, on a laprobe spread over the little ants and dry pine needles.
‘Oh no, da net zhe, only for a fortnight’ (girlishly giggling). ‘After that we shall go to Houssaie, Gollivud-tozh’ (Marina was really in great form) — ‘yes, we shall all go, the author, and the children, and Van — if he wishes.’
‘I wish but I can’t,’ said Percy (sample of his humor). (1.39)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Houssaie: French a ‘hollywood’. Gollivud-tozh means in Russian ‘known also as Hollywood’.
Gollivud-tozh brings to mind Gimalayskoe tozh (known also as Himalayskoe), in Chekhov’s story Kryzhovnik ("Gooseberries," 1898) the country place of Ivan Ivanovich's brother:
В прошлом году я поехал к нему проведать. Поеду, думаю, посмотрю, как и что там. В письмах своих брат называл свое имение так: Чумбароклова Пустошь, Гималайское тож. Приехал я в «Гималайское тож» после полудня. Было жарко. Везде канавы, заборы, изгороди, понасажены рядами елки, — и не знаешь, как проехать во двор, куда поставить лошадь. Иду к дому, а навстречу мне рыжая собака, толстая, похожая на свинью. Хочется ей лаять, да лень. Вышла из кухни кухарка, голоногая, толстая, тоже похожая на свинью, и сказала, что барин отдыхает после обеда. Вхожу к брату, он сидит в постели, колени покрыты одеялом; постарел, располнел, обрюзг; щеки, нос и губы тянутся вперед, — того и гляди, хрюкнет в одеяло.
Last year I paid him a visit. I thought I'd go and see how things were with him. In his letters my brother called his estate Chumbaroklov Heath, known also as Himalayskoe. I arrived at Himalayskoe in the afternoon. It was hot. There were ditches, fences, hedges, rows of young fir trees, trees everywhere, and there was no telling how to cross the yard or where to put your horse. I went to the house and was met by a redhaired dog, as fat as a pig. He tried to bark but felt too lazy. Out of the kitchen came the cook, barefooted, and also as fat as a pig, and said that the master was having his afternoon rest. I went in to my brother and found him sitting on his bed with his knees covered with a blanket; he looked old, stout, flabby; his cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like a pig.
Ivan Ivanovich and his brother Nikolay Ivanovich are the sons of Ivan Chimsha-Gimalayski (hence Gimalayskoe tozh):
— Нас два брата, — начал он, — я, Иван Иваныч, и другой — Николай Иваныч, года на два помоложе. Я пошел по ученой части, стал ветеринаром, а Николай уже с девятнадцати лет сидел в казенной палате. Наш отец Чимша-Гималайский был из кантонистов, но, выслужив офицерский чин, оставил нам потомственное дворянство и именьишко. После его смерти именьишко у нас оттягали за долги, но, как бы ни было, детство мы провели в деревне на воле. Мы, всё равно как крестьянские дети, дни и ночи проводили в поле, в лесу, стерегли лошадей, драли лыко, ловили рыбу, и прочее тому подобное... А вы знаете, кто хоть раз в жизни поймал ерша или видел осенью перелетных дроздов, как они в ясные, прохладные дни носятся стаями над деревней, тот уже не городской житель, и его до самой смерти будет потягивать на волю. Мой брат тосковал в казенной палате. Годы проходили, а он всё сидел на одном месте, писал всё те же бумаги и думал всё об одном и том же, как бы в деревню. И эта тоска у него мало-помалу вылилась в определенное желание, в мечту купить себе маленькую усадебку где-нибудь на берегу реки или озера.
Он был добрый, кроткий человек, я любил его, но этому желанию запереть себя на всю жизнь в собственную усадьбу я никогда не сочувствовал. Принято говорить, что человеку нужно только три аршина земли. Но ведь три аршина нужны трупу, а не человеку. И говорят также теперь, что если наша интеллигенция имеет тяготение к земле и стремится в усадьбы, то это хорошо. Но ведь эти усадьбы те же три аршина земли. Уходить из города, от борьбы, от житейского шума, уходить и прятаться у себя в усадьбе — это не жизнь, это эгоизм, лень, это своего рода монашество, но монашество без подвига. Человеку нужно не три аршина земли, не усадьба, а весь земной шар, вся природа, где на просторе он мог бы проявить все свойства и особенности своего свободного духа.
"We are two brothers," he began, "I, Ivan Ivanych, and Nikolay Ivanych, two years younger. I went in for study and became a veterinary surgeon, while Nikolay was at the Exchequer Court when he was nineteen. Our father, Сhimsha-Himalaysky, was a cantonist, but he died with an officer's rank and left us his title of nobility and a small estate. After his death the estate went to pay his debts. However, we spent our childhood there in the country. We were just like peasant's children, spent days and nights in the fields and the woods, minded the horses, barked the lime trees, fished, and so on. . . And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country. My brother pined away in the Exchequer. Years passed and he sat in the same place, wrote out the same documents, and thought of one thing, how to get back to the country. And little by little his distress became a definite disorder, a fixed idea to buy a small farm somewhere by the bank of a river or a lake.
"He was a good fellow and I loved him, but I never sympathized with the desire to shut oneself up on one's own farm. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a man. And I hear that our intellectuals have a longing for the land and want to acquire farms. But it all comes down to the six feet of land. To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.
In Ada VN gives the reader a whole earth (Antiterra, Earth's twin planet), all nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of his free spirit.
See also the updated version of my previous post, "final football match & Lord Goal in Ada."