Describing his performance in variety shows as Mascodagama, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions the psychiatrist P. O. Tyomkin who was saved by one of the special detectives at Chose (Van’s English University) from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id.:
On February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama’s performance as ‘the most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public.’ It was repeated at the Rantariver Club several times, but nothing in the programme or in publicity notices beyond the definition ‘Foreign eccentric’ gave any indication either of the exact nature of the ‘stunt’ or of the performer’s identity. Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve of the Crimean War) — three dancing girls, a sick old clown with his old speaking goat, and one of the dancers’ husbands, a make-up man (no doubt, a multiple agent) — had already defected between France and England, somewhere in the newly constructed ‘Chunnel.’ Mascodagama’s spectacular success in a theatrical club that habitually limited itself to Elizabethan plays, with queens and fairies played by pretty boys, made first of all a great impact on cartoonists. Deans, local politicians, national statesmen, and of course the current ruler of the Golden Horde were pictured as mascodagamas by topical humorists. A grotesque imitator (who was really Mascodagama himself in an oversophisticated parody of his own act!) was booed at Oxford (a women’s college nearby) by local rowdies. A shrewd reporter, who had heard him curse a crease in the stage carpet, commented in print on his ‘Yankee twang.’ Dear Mr ‘Vascodagama’ received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van’s own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose — the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P.O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id. (1.30)
The secret husband of the Russian Empress Catherine II, Prince Grigoriy Potyomkin (1739-91) was one of her eleven main favorites. There are in Ada eleven main characters:
1 Van Veen
2 Ada Veen
3 Lucette Veen
4 Demon Veen
5 Marina Durmanov
6 Aqua Durmanov
7 Daniel Veen (Uncle Dan)
8 Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband)
9 Dorothy Vinelander (Ada’s sister-in-law)
10 Ronald Oranger (Ada’s grandson)
11 Violet Knox (Ada’s granddaughter)
Eleven players make a football team (in his autobiography Speak, Memory, 1951, VN says that, as a Cambridge student, he was a goalkeeper of his College football team). The Golden Curtain that on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) separates Tartary (the Antierran counterpart of the Soviet Russia) from the rest of the world brings to mind Zolotoy vek (“The Golden Age,” 1930), Shostakovich’s ballet about a Soviet football team in a Western city. Shostakovich is the author of Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda (“Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” 1934), an opera based on a novella of the same title (1865) by Leskov. In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth (a theatrical club in which Van performs as Mascodagama habitually limited itself to Elizabethan plays) Macbeth sees a dagger floating in the air when he is about to kill Duncan. It is covered with blood and pointed toward Duncan's chamber. Three dancing girls (members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then) make one think of Isadora Duncan, an American dancer who performed in Moscow and who married Sergey Esenin, the author of Inonia (from inoy, “other, different”), a poem about Russia (1918) whose title rhymes with Demonia. In 1925 Esenin committed suicide by hanging himself at the Angleterre (a hotel in Leningrad). Two years later Isadora Duncan died in a car accident on Promenade des Anglais in Nice, strangled by her own scarf.
P. O. Tyomkin seems to hint at Dimitri Tiomkin (1894-1979), a Russian-born American film composer and conductor. Bronenosets Potyomkin (“Battleship Potyomkin,” 1925) is a film by Sergey Eyzenshtein, a dramatized account of a naval mutiny in the midst of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 is subtitled “The Year 1905.” In March, 1905, Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7). Van does not realize that his father died because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. Similarly, he never finds out that Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, “little Violet,” and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van’s and Ada’s death) are Ada’s grandchildren.
As a Chose student, Van works under Tyomkin on an ambitious dissertation:
During his first summer vacation, Van worked under Tyomkin, at the Chose famous clinic, on an ambitious dissertation he never completed, ‘Terra: Eremitic Reality or Collective Dream?’ He interviewed numerous neurotics, among whom there were variety artists and literary men, and at least three intellectually lucid, but spiritually ‘lost,’ cosmologists who either were in telepathic collusion (they had never met and did not even know of one another’s existence) or had discovered, none knew how or where, by means, maybe, of forbidden ‘ondulas’ of some kind, a green world rotating in space and spiraling in time, which in terms of matter-and-mind was like ours and which they described in the same specific details as three people watching from three separate windows would a carnival show in the same street. (1.30)
'Eremitic Reality' in the title of Van's dissertation may hint at Prorok Ieremiya (prophet Jeremiah) to whom Esenin's poem Inonia is dedicated. Prorok ("The Prophet" is a poem (1826) by Pushkin (the author of "The Demon," 1823) and a poem (1841) by Lermontov (the author of "The Demon," 1829-40).
Three separate windows and a carnival show mentioned by Van bring to mind “windows giving upon a contiguous world... a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought” to which, according to VN, one critic has compared his figures of speech:
Another independent writer was Ivan Bunin. I had always preferred his little-known verse to his celebrated prose (their interrelation, within the frame of his work, recalls Hardy’s case). At the time I found him tremendously perturbed by the personal problem of aging. The first thing he said to me was to remark with satisfaction that his posture was better than mine, despite his being some thirty years older than I. He was basking in the Nobel prize he had just received and invited me to some kind of expensive and fashionable eating place in Paris for a heart-to-heart talk. Unfortunately I happen to have a morbid dislike for restaurants and cafés, especially Parisian ones—I detest crowds, harried waiters, Bohemians, vermouth concoctions, coffee, zakuski, floor shows and so forth. I like to eat and drink in a recumbent position (preferably on a couch) and in silence. Heart-to-heart talks, confessions in the Dostoevskian manner, are also not in my line. Bunin, a spry old gentleman, with a rich and unchaste vocabulary, was puzzled by my irresponsiveness to the hazel grouse of which I had had enough in my childhood and exasperated by my refusal to discuss eschatological matters. Toward the end of the meal we were utterly bored with each other. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” remarked Bunin bitterly as we went toward the cloakroom. An attractive, frail-looking girl took the check for our heavy overcoats and presently fell with them in her embrace upon the low counter. I wanted to help Bunin into his raglan but he stopped me with a proud gesture of his open hand. Still struggling perfunctorily—he was now trying to help me—we emerged into the pallid bleakness of a Paris winter day. My companion was about to button his collar when a look of surprise and distress twisted his handsome features. Gingerly opening his overcoat, he began tugging at something under his armpit. I came to his assistance and together we finally dragged out of his sleeve my long woolen scarf which the girl had stuffed into the wrong coat. The thing came out inch by inch; it was like unwrapping a mummy and we kept slowly revolving around each other in the process, to the ribald amusement of three sidewalk whores. Then, when the operation was over, we walked on without a word to a street corner where we shook hands and separated. Subsequently we used to meet quite often, but always in the midst of other people, generally in the house of I. I. Fondaminski (a saintly and heroic soul who did more for Russian émigré literature than any other man and who died in a German prison). Somehow Bunin and I adopted a bantering and rather depressing mode of conversation, a Russian variety of American “kidding,” and this precluded any real commerce between us.
I met many other émigré Russian authors. I did not meet Poplavski who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas.
Go to sleep, O Morella, how awful are aquiline lives
His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse. I met wise, prim, charming Aldanov; decrepit Kuprin, carefully carrying a bottle of vin ordinaire through rainy streets; Ayhenvald—a Russian version of Walter Pater—later killed by a trolleycar; Marina Tsvetaev, wife of a double agent, and poet of genius, who, in the late thirties, returned to Russia and perished there. But the author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic structure of society, so the mystagogues of émigré letters deplored his lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when in the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin’s admirers made much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirrorlike angles of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to “windows giving upon a contiguous world… a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.” Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness. (Speak, Memory, Chapter Fourteen, 2)
In his poem Mudrym (“To Wise Men,” 1903-1906) Bunin compares the hero to iskromyotnyi meteor (a sparkling meteor):
Герой – как вихрь, срывающий палатки,
Герой врагу безумный дал отпор,
Но сам погиб – сгорел в неравной схватке,
Как искромётный метеор.
А трус – живёт. Он тоже месть лелеет,
Он точит меткий дротик, но тайком.
О да, он – мудр! Но сердце в нём чуть тлеет:
Как огонёк под кизяком.
In Bunin’s poem meteor rhymes with otpor (repulse; rebuff). Otpor is an anagram of ropot (murmur, grumble) and of topor (axe). ln VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935) Cincinnatus's brother-in-law, the wit, suggests that Cincinnatus reads the word ropot backward:
Возьми-ка слово "ропот", - говорил Цинциннату его шурин, остряк, - и прочти обратно. А? Смешно получается? Да, брат, - вляпался ты в историю. В самом деле, как это тебя угораздило?
"Take the word 'anxiety,'" Cincinnatus's brother-in-law, the wit, was saying to him. "Now take away the word 'tiny', Eh? Comes out funny, doesn't it? Yes, friend, you've really got yourself in a mess. In truth, what made you do such a thing?" (Chapter IX)
In a letter of Feb. 18, 1889, to Leontiev-Shcheglov (a fellow writer who nicknamed Chekhov Potyomkin) Chekhov says that he is not Potyomkin, but Cincinnatus:
Голова моя занята мыслями о лете и даче. Денно и нощно мечтаю о хуторе. Я не Потёмкин, а Цинцинат. Лежанье на сене и пойманный на удочку окунь удовлетворяют моё чувство гораздо осязательнее, чем рецензии и аплодирующая галерея. Я, очевидно, урод и плебей.
Van’s stage name, Mascodagama blends "mask" with Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese navigator who discovered a sea route to India around the continent of Africa. Maska (“The Mask,” 1884) is a story by Chekhov. In his memoir essay “On Chekhov” (included in his book “At Cemeteries,” 1921) Vasiliy Nemirovich-Danchenko quotes the words of Chekhov whom the doctors wanted to go to Africa and who in jest compared himself to Vasco da Gama:
-- А то ещё куда меня гонят? В Африку. Что я Васко да Гама, что ли? Ведь это, слушайте же, в опере хорошо... Ни за что не поеду. Тоже нашли Стенли. Пусть Василий Иванович едет. Его мамка в детстве ушибла. Ему чем дальше, тем лучше... А я ни за что. Мало я черномази видал! Даже если мне ещё тарелку гречневой каши дадут, не поеду!
Chekhov died in 1904, thirteen years before the Lenin coup of 1917. In his essay O Chekhove ("On Chekhov," 1929) written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the writer's death Hodasevich points out that Chekhov died just before the first seismic shock of the Russian Revolution:
- Лет через двести - триста всё само образуется, - утешал Чехов, и люди теснились к нему толпой. А земля под ними уже готова была колыхнуться. Как раз перед первым толчком Чехов умер.