Describing Demon’s sword duel with Baron d’Onsky (Skonky), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Gunter’s Bookshop:
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)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Aardvark: apparently, a university town in New England.
Gamaliel: a much more fortunate statesman than our W.G. Harding.
Baron d’Onsky seems to be a cross between Dmitri Donskoy, the Moscow Prince who defeated Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo (1380), and Onegin’s donskoy zherebets (Don stallion) mentioned by Pushkin in Chapter Two (V: 4) of Eugene Onegin:
Сначала все к нему езжали;
Но так как с заднего крыльца
Обыкновенно подавали
Ему донского жеребца,
Лишь только вдоль большой дороги
Заслышат их домашни дроги, —
Поступком оскорбясь таким,
Все дружбу прекратили с ним.
«Сосед наш неуч; сумасбродит;
Он фармазон; он пьет одно
Стаканом красное вино;
Он дамам к ручке не подходит;
Все да да нет; не скажет да-с
Иль нет-с». Таков был общий глас.
At first they all would call on him,
but since to the back porch
habitually a Don stallion
for him was brought
as soon as one made out along the highway
the sound of their domestic runabouts —
outraged by such behavior,
they all ceased to be friends with him.
“Our neighbor is a boor; acts like a crackbrain;
he's a Freemason; he
drinks only red wine, by the tumbler;
he won't go up to kiss a lady's hand;
'tis all ‘yes,’ ‘no’ — he'll not say ‘yes, sir,’
or ‘no, sir.’ ” This was the general voice.
Gunter is the Russian spelling of “hunter,” a horse breed mentioned in Tobias Smollett’s novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751):
Preparations are made for the Commodore's Wedding, which is delayed by an Accident that hurried him the Lord knows whither.
The fame of this extraordinary conjunction spread all over the county; and, on the day appointed for their spousals, the church was surrounded by an inconceivable multitude. The commodore, to give a specimen of his gallantry, by the advice of his friend Hatchway, resolved to appear on horseback on the grand occasion, at the head of all his male attendants, whom he had rigged with the white shirts and black caps formerly belonging to his barge's crew; and he bought a couple of hunters for the accommodation of himself and his lieutenant. With this equipage, then, he set out from the garrison for the church, after having despatched a messenger to apprise the bride that he and his company were mounted. She got immediately into the coach, accompanied by her brother and his wife, and drove directly to the place of assignation, where several pews were demolished, and divers persons almost pressed to death, by the eagerness of the crowd that broke in to see the ceremony performed. Thus arrived at the altar, and the priest in attendance, they waited a whole half-hour for the commodore, at whose slowness they began to be under some apprehension, and accordingly dismissed a servant to quicken his pace. The valet having ridden something more than a mile, espied the whole troop disposed in a long field, crossing the road obliquely, and headed by the bridegroom and his friend Hatchway, who, finding himself hindered by a hedge from proceeding farther in the same direction, fired a pistol, and stood over to the other side, making an obtuse angle with the line of his former course; and the rest of the squadron followed his example, keeping always in the rear of each other, like a flight of wild geese. (Chapter VIII)
The novel’s hero is the son of Gamaliel Pickle, esq.:
An Account of Mr. Gamaliel Pickle—The Disposition of his Sister described—He yields to her Solicitations, and returns to the Country.
In a certain county of England, bounded on one side by the sea, and at the distance of one hundred miles from the metropolis, lived Gamaliel Pickle, esq.; the father of that hero whose fortunes we propose to record. He was the son of a merchant in London, who, like Rome, from small beginnings had raised himself to the highest honours of the city, and acquired a plentiful fortune, though, to his infinite regret, he died before it amounted to a plum, conjuring his son, as he respected the last injunction of a parent, to imitate his industry, and adhere to his maxims, until he should have made up the deficiency, which was a sum considerably less than fifteen thousand pounds. (Chapter I)
Mr. Pickle is a rather phlegmatic person:
The sallies of his youth, far from being inordinate or criminal, never exceeded the bounds of that decent jollity which an extraordinary pot, on extraordinary occasions, may be supposed to have produced in a club of sedate book-keepers, whose imaginations were neither very warm nor luxuriant. Little subject to refined sensations, he was scarce ever disturbed with violent emotions of any kind. The passion of love never interrupted his tranquility; and if, as Mr. Creech says, after Horace,
Not to admire is all the art I know;
To make men happy, and to keep them so;
Mr. Pickle was undoubtedly possessed of that invaluable secret; at least, he was never known to betray the faintest symptom of transport, except one evening at the club, where he observed, with some demonstrations of vivacity, that he had dined upon a delicate loin of veal.
Notwithstanding this appearance of phlegm, he could not help feeling his disappointments in trade; and upon the failure of a certain underwriter, by which he lost five hundred pounds, declared his design of relinquishing business, and retiring to the country. In this resolution he was comforted and encouraged by his only sister, Mrs. Grizzle, who had managed his family since the death of his father, and was now in the thirtieth year of her maidenhood, with a fortune of five thousand pounds, and a large stock of economy and devotion. (ibid.)
Gamaliel Pickle Observes Commodore Trunnion and Lieutenant Hatchway Duel at the Inn (1769) is a painting by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), a British artist of Swiss descent. On Fuseli's painting one of the combatants (Lieutenant Hatchway) has a wooden leg and Trunnion uses his crutch to parry the attack of his adversary. According to Ada, at Marina’s funeral she met d’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’ (3.8)
At Marina's funeral Demon looked "positively Quixotic." In 1755 Tobias Smollett published an English translation of Cervantes' novel Don Quixote, which he revised in 1761. One cannot help recalling Rocinante, Don Quixote’s half-starved horse. Sancho Panza's donkey brings to mind Greg Erminin's beautiful new pony:
Next day, or the day after the next, the entire family was having high tea in the garden. Ada, on the grass, kept trying to make an anadem of marguerites for the dog while Lucette looked on, munching a crumpet. Marina remained for almost a minute wordlessly stretching across the table her husband’s straw hat in his direction; finally he shook his head, glared at the sun that glared back and retired with his cup and the Toulouse Enquirer to a rustic seat on the other side of the lawn under an immense elm.
‘I ask myself who can that be,’ murmured Mlle Larivière from behind the samovar (which expressed fragments of its surroundings in demented fantasies of a primitive genre) as she slitted her eyes at a part of the drive visible between the pilasters of an open-work gallery. Van, lying prone behind Ada, lifted his eyes from his book (Ada’s copy of Atala).
A tall rosy-faced youngster in smart riding breeches dismounted from a black pony.
‘It’s Greg’s beautiful new pony,’ said Ada.
Greg, with a well-bred boy’s easy apologies, had brought Marina’s platinum lighter which his aunt had discovered in her own bag.
‘Goodness, I’ve not even had time to miss it. How is Ruth?’
Greg said that both Aunt Ruth and Grace were laid up with acute indigestion — ‘not because of your wonderful sandwiches,’ he hastened to add, ‘but because of all those burnberries they picked in the bushes.’
Marina was about to jingle a bronze bell for the footman to bring some more toast, but Greg said he was on his way to a party at the Countess de Prey’s.
‘Rather soon (skorovato) she consoled herself,’ remarked Marina, alluding to the death of the Count killed in a pistol duel on Boston Common a couple of years ago.
‘She’s a very jolly and handsome woman,’ said Greg.
‘And ten years older than me,’ said Marina. (1.14)
In his poem Prochti i katay v Parizh i v Kitay (“Read and Go to Paris and to China,” 1927) Mayakovski says that if we are like horses, the Japanese people are like ponies:
Легко представить можете
жителя Японии:
если мы — как лошади,
то они —
как пони.
Marina tells Demon that d'Onsky, a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. Demon finds out that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa. Greg Erminin’s arrival in Ardis on a pony seems to be a parody of Jesus' riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.
In his essay on Mayakovski, Dekol'tirovannaya loshad’ (“The Horse in a Décolleté Dress,” 1927), Hodasevich compares VN's "late namesake" to a circus horse:
Представьте себе лошадь, изображающую старую англичанку. В дамской шляпке, с цветами и перьями, в розовом платье, с короткими рукавами и с розовым рюшем вокруг гигантского вороного декольтэ, она ходит на задних ногах, нелепо вытягивая бесконечную шею и скаля желтые зубы.
Такую лошадь я видел в цирке осенью 1912 года. Вероятно, я вскоре забыл бы ее, если бы несколько дней спустя, придя в Общество свободной эстетики, не увидел там огромного юношу с лошадиными челюстями, в черной рубахе, расстегнутой чуть ли не до пояса и обнажавшей гигантское лошадиное декольтэ. Каюсь: прозвище "декольтированная лошадь" надолго с того вечера утвердилось за юношей... А юноша этот был Владимир Маяковский. Это было его первое появление в литературной среде, или одно из первых. С тех пор лошадиной поступью прошел он по русской литературе -- и ныне, сдается мне, стоит уже при конце своего пути. Пятнадцать лет -- лошадиный век.
A horse that wears a hat and is made to imitate an old Englishwoman makes one think of Doch' Albiona (“A Daughter of Albion,” 1883), Chekhov's story about the English governess of a Russian landowner's children. Chekhov is the author of Loshadinaya familiya ("A Horsey Name," 1885) and Duel' ("The Duel," 1891).