Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) quotes Aqua’s words to her doctor “I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten years ago:”
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether.
But that phase elapsed too. Other excruciations replaced her namesake’s loquacious quells so completely that when, during a lucid interval, she happened to open with her weak little hand a lavabo cock for a drink of water, the tepid lymph replied in its own lingo, without a trace of trickery or mimicry: Finito! It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death. Man-made objects lost their significance or grew monstrous connotations; clothes hangers were really the shoulders of decapitated Tellurians, the folds of a blanket she had kicked off her bed looked back at her mournfully with a stye on one drooping eyelid and dreary reproof in the limp twist of a livid lip. The effort to comprehend the information conveyed somehow to people of genius by the hands of a timepiece, or piece of time, became as hopeless as trying to make out the sign language of a secret society or the Chinese chant of that young student with a non-Chinese guitar whom she had known at the time she or her sister had given birth to a mauve baby. But her madness, the majesty of her madness, still retained a mad queen’s pathetic coquetry: ‘You know, Doctor, I think I’ll need glasses soon, I don’t know’ (lofty laugh), ‘I just can’t make out what my wrist watch says... For heaven’s sake, tell me what it says! Ah! Half-past for — for what? Never mind, never mind, "never" and "mind" are twins, I have a twin sister and a twin son. I know you want to examine my pudendron, the Hairy Alpine Rose in her album, collected ten years ago’ (showing her ten fingers gleefully, proudly, ten is ten!). (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255–1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’
Aqua’s “pudendron” seems to blend pudenda (external genital organs, especially of a woman) with rhododendron (hairy alpine rose is the plant Rhododendron hirsutum). In his memoir essay "Vyacheslav Ivanov" included in his book Vospominaniya o Rossii (“Reminiscences of Russia,” 1959) Leonid Sabaneyev (a music critic and composer, 1881-1968) says that Vyacheslav Ivanov compared all those recommendations that would allow him to go abroad (to Italy) to a kind of “pudenda:”
Наконец препятствия были преодолены. Разрешение на выезд было дано. Даны были и чрезвычайно высокие рекомендации от разных почтенных советских учреждений.
Но Иванов был все же в тревоге; он решил получить рекомендательные письма от университета, потому что ехал в Западную Европу и рекомендации советских инстанций там могли иметь разве отрицательные воздействия, особенно в те годы.
С этой целью он решил повидать тогдашнего (одного из последних «выборных») ректора Московского университета, моего коллегу П. Н. Сакулина. Об этом свидании мне рассказывал сам Сакулин, и этот рассказ чрезвычайно характерен и для практической неловкости нашего поэта, и для того, чтобы понять, как человек «слишком мудрый» и слишком ученый может наделать глупостей.
Сакулин мне рассказывал, что «Вячеслав начал с того, что заявил, что он находится в обладании массы рекомендаций, но только от советских учреждений, и что это его удручает. «Все эти рекомендации для меня суть как своего рода "pudenda"» (выразился он, как привык, по-латыни), и что он хочет иметь рекомендации от Московского университета как от учреждения, сохранившего (тогда это было еще так) дозу независимости от властей.
– Я бы мог быть вам и университету полезен, – пояснил Иванов. – Я бы мог для примера рассказать, как героически ведет университет борьбу с властью за свою независимость…
Тут он заметил, что лицо Сакулина не выразило не только никакого восторга, но, напротив, явные признаки беспокойства. Надо помнить, что то были годы решительной и последней схватки университета с властью и что положение самого ректора Сакулина было более нежели неустойчивое (он был «выборный ректор», сторонник автономии и член партии народных социалистов, большевиками ненавидимой).
Заметив это, Вяч. Иванов продолжал совершенно спокойно:
– Ну, если вам это не подходит, я могу сделать там доклад о том, как университет успешно и плодотворно сотрудничает с новой властью…
Тут уже его прервал Сакулин:
– Вячеслав Иванович! Университет не есть фиговый листок для прикрывания ваших «pudenda»!
In the fall of 1921 Fyodor Sologub’s wife Anastasiya Chebotarevski drowned herself in the Neva because her husband was not allowed to leave the country (a little earlier Alexander Blok died because he was granted permission to go to a Finnish sanatorium too late; less than three weeks after Blok's death Nikolay Gumilyov was executed by the Bolsheviks). Poor mad Aqua believes that she can understand the language of her namesake, water. In Sologub’s poem Nedorazumenie s Nevoyu (“A Confusion with the Neva,” 1926) the Neva says that it is sick of its name (btw., neva means in Finnish what veen means in Dutch: “peat bog”) and wants to be renamed Roza or Klara (presumably, after Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin) and indeed is renamed Roza by Soviet authorities (who earlier renamed VN’s home city Leningrad):
Нева не хочет быть Невой,
Уж каламбур наскучил ей избитый,
И плещется она волной сердитой,
Когда ей пушки говорят: не вой!
Шумит, ревет, взывает в злости ярой:
– Хочу быть Розой или Кларой! —
Склонилась наконец к ее моленью власть,
Ей дали имя Роза,
Но что же за напасть!
Бунтует Роза, нет зимой мороза.
Кондукторша стояла у окна
Чрез Розу проходящего вагона,
И объяснила так она
Причину бунта, рева, стона:
– Вишь, на подъем она легка,
Наделает немало злого.
Да что с воды спросить? Жидка,
Спросить бы надобно иного.
Нелегкие деньки
К нам в Ленинград приходят:
Волна вслед за волной повсюду колобродят,
Жидки.
Услышал эти речи
Внимательный и верный комсомол
И, взяв кондукторшу за плечи,
В милицию отвел.
Что жидко здесь, и что здесь густо,
Все объяснили ей. Идет домой,
Кричит: – Чтоб всем вам было пусто!
Всех, Роза, довела домой! —
Konduktorsha (the tram conductress) in Sologub’s poem brings to mind “Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld” (Aqua’s words to the train conductor after her escape from a lunatic asylum):
At one time Aqua believed that a stillborn male infant half a year old, a surprised little fetus, a fish of rubber that she had produced in her bath, in a lieu de naissance plainly marked X in her dreams, after skiing at full pulver into a larch stump, had somehow been saved and brought to her at the Nusshaus, with her sister’s compliments, wrapped up in blood-soaked cotton wool, but perfectly alive and healthy, to be registered as her son Ivan Veen. At other moments she felt convinced that the child was her sister’s, born out of wedlock, during an exhausting, yet highly romantic blizzard, in a mountain refuge on Sex Rouge, where a Dr Alpiner, general practitioner and gentian-lover, sat providentially waiting near a rude red stove for his boots to dry. Some confusion ensued less than two years later (September, 1871 — her proud brain still retained dozens of dates) when upon escaping from her next refuge and somehow reaching her husband’s unforgettable country house (imitate a foreigner: ‘Signor Konduktor, ay vant go Lago di Luga, hier geld’) she took advantage of his being massaged in the solarium, tiptoed into their former bedroom — and experienced a delicious shock: her talc powder in a half-full glass container marked colorfully Quelques Fleurs still stood on her bedside table; her favorite flame-colored nightgown lay rumpled on the bedrug; to her it meant that only a brief black nightmare had obliterated the radiant fact of her having slept with her husband all along — ever since Shakespeare’s birthday on a green rainy day, but for most other people, alas, it meant that Marina (after G.A. Vronsky, the movie man, had left Marina for another long-lashed Khristosik as he called all pretty starlets) had conceived, c’est bien le cas de le dire, the brilliant idea of having Demon divorce mad Aqua and marry Marina who thought (happily and correctly) she was pregnant again. Marina had spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with him at Kitezh but when she smugly divulged her intentions (just before Aqua’s arrival) he threw her out of the house. Still later, on the last short lap of a useless existence, Aqua scrapped all those ambiguous recollections and found herself reading and rereading busily, blissfully, her son’s letters in a luxurious ‘sanastoria’ at Centaur, Arizona. He invariably wrote in French calling her petite maman and describing the amusing school he would be living at after his thirteenth birthday. She heard his voice through the nightly tinnitus of her new, planful, last, last insomnias and it consoled her. He called her usually mummy, or mama, accenting the last syllable in English, the first, in Russian; somebody had said that triplets and heraldic dracunculi often occurred in trilingual families; but there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever now (except, perhaps, in hateful long-dead Marina’s hell-dwelling mind) that Van was her, her, Aqua’s, beloved son. (1.3)
Lago di Luga makes one think of ozero Lugano (Lake Lugano) mentioned by Sologub in his poem Prosnuvshisya ne rano… (“Having woken up not early,” 1911):
Проснувшися не рано,
Я вышел на балкон.
Над озером Лугано
Дымился лёгкий сон.
От горных высей плыли
Туманы к облакам,
Как праздничные были,
Рассказанные снам.
Весь вид здесь был так дивен,
Был так красив весь край,
Что не был мне противен
Грохочущий трамвай.
Хулы, привычно строгой,
В душе заснувшей нет.
Спокоен я дорогой,
Всем странам шлю привет.
Прекрасные, чужие, —
От них в душе туман;
Но ты, моя Россия,
Прекраснее всех стран.
Having woken up not early,
I came out onto the balcony.
A light dream smoked
Above Lake Lugano.
From the mountain heights
The mists swam to the clouds,
Like festive true stories
Told to the dreams.
The whole view was so wondrous,
The whole land was so beautiful
That a thundering streetcar
Wasn’t revolting to me.
There is no criticism, habitually strong,
In my sleeping soul.
I am calm en route,
To all countries I send greetings.
Beautiful, foreign,
They leave a haze in my soul;
But you, my Russia,
Is more beautiful than all countries.
Describing his love-making with Ada in "Ardis the Second," Van mentions bound volumes of The Kaluga Waters and The Lugano Sun:
The three of them cuddled and cosseted so frequently and so thoroughly that at last one afternoon on the long-suffering black divan he and Ada could no longer restrain their amorous excitement, and under the absurd pretext of a hide-and-seek game they locked up Lucette in a closet used for storing bound volumes of The Kaluga Waters and The Lugano Sun, and frantically made love, while the child knocked and called and kicked until the key fell out and the keyhole turned an angry green. (1.34)
According to Sabaneyev, for Vyacheslav Ivanov Dionysus and Christ (cf. "another long-lashed Khristosik," as G. A. Vronsky called all pretty starlets) were one and the same deity:
Путь его был одновременно и художественный и религиозный, как и полагалось по идеологии символистов: художник — теург, сотрудник Бога в творчестве. Но путь этот был непохож на путь остальных символистов: он был более выдержанным и — я бы сказал — продуманным. В первые годы своего поэтического и художественного служения он был ярко выраженным поклонником античности, Греции и Рима. Он пытался установить единство мистического опыта эллинов и иудео-эллинистического христианского мира. Для него Дионис и Христос были одним божеством. Лейтмотив единства и тождества религиозного опыта был в это время его доминантой мысли: все религии говорят об одном и том же. В его мысли был известный налет византинизма: очень много сложности, пышности, сугубой и вящей торжественности, — сам он был выполнен не в эллинском стиле гармоничной соразмерности, а скорее в византийском стиле — и в его поэзии много византинизмов, избыток и роскошь символов и даже аллегорий, некое религиозное великолепие и перенасыщенность литературными образами, так что к его поэтическим произведениям надо было давать дополнение в виде комментариев, объясняющих символы и аллегории, а порой и просто слова.
The gradual, gradual shade through which they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus (in poor mad Aqua’s fantasy) seems to hint at the poet Shade and his murderer Gradus in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962). Describing his wife, Queen Disa (Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone), Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) quotes a Zemblan saying belwif ivurkumpf wid spew ebanumf ("A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony”):
Since her final departure from Zembla he had visited her twice, the last time two years before; and during that lapse of time her pale-skin, dark-hair beauty had acquired a new, mature and melancholy glow. In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid spew ebanumf, "A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony." And this was the trim scheme nature had followed in Disa's case. There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all. (note to Lines 433-434)
Balmont’s poem Golubaya roza (“The Blue Rose,” 1903) begins with the line Firval’dshtetskoe ozero – Roza Vetrov (Lake Lucerne – a Compass Rose):
Фирвальдштетское озеро – Роза Ветров,
Под ветрами колышутся семь лепестков.
Эта роза сложилась меж царственных гор
В изумрудно-лазурный узор.
Широки лепестки из блистающих вод,
Голубая мечта, в них качаясь, живет.
Под ветрами встает цветовая игра,
Принимая налет серебра.
Для кого расцвела ты, красавица вод?
Этой розы никто никогда не сорвет.
В водяной лепесток – лишь глядится живой,
Этой розе дивясь мировой.
Горы встали кругом, в снеге рады цветам,
Юной Девой одна называется там.
С этой Девой далекой ты слита Судьбой,
Роза-влага, цветок голубой.
Вы равно замечтались о горной весне.
Ваша мысль – в голубом, ваша жизнь – в белизне.
Дева белых снегов, голубых ледников,
Как идет к тебе Роза Ветров!
Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name seems to be Botkin. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade’s “real” name). Nadezhda means “hope.” Izmuchen zhizn’yu, kovarstvom nadezhdy (“By life tormented, and by cunning hope…” 1864) is a poem by Afanasiy Fet (who married Maria Botkin in 1856). Fet is the author of “Rhododendron” (1855):
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Пышный цвет оранжереи,
Как хорош и как наряден
Ты в руках вертлявой феи!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Но в руках вертлявой феи
Хороши не только розы,
Хороши большие томы
И поэзии и прозы!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
Хороши и все нападки
На поэтов, объявленья,
Хороши и опечатки,
Хороши и прибавленья!
Рододендрон! Рододендрон!
It seems that Aqua went mad because she was poisoned by her sister. General Ivan Durmanov (the father of Aqua and Marina) aked his wife why she did not call one of her twins Tofana (Aqua Tofana was a strong poison created in Sicily around 1630). According to Sabaneyev, Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote a sonnet for Olga Davydovna Kamenev (Trotsky's sister who professionally studied dentistry) in which he compared her profile to that of Lucrezia Borgia (the daughter of Pope Alexander VI):
В порядке хлопот о получении права на выезд он, конечно, обратился ко всеобщему защитнику поэтов – литовскому посланнику Балтрушайтису. Тот его познакомил с Ольгой Давыдовной Каменевой, которая тоже понемногу входила в роль высокопоставленной государственной дамы. Вячеслав Иванов написал для нее «сонет», в котором сравнивал ее профиль с профилем Лукреции Борджиа. Сонет этот мне прочел раз Балтрушайтис. Не думаю, чтобы Ольга Давыдовна (имевшая зубоврачебное образование) ясно себе представляла Лукрецию Борджиа и наверное недоумевала, что это – ирония или комплимент? Но потом решила скорее счесть это за изысканный комплимент. Однако и «сонет» не помог – разрешения не давали. Я выразил Балтрушайтису мое недоумение, зачем, собственно говоря, надо было метать столь изысканный бисер для достижения практических целей, и вдобавок зря. Балтрушайтис мне ответил:
– Ты знаешь, ведь Вячеслав по природе своей должен был бы быть придворным поэтом».
Для этого ему дана и сладость, и вкрадчивость языка. Не его вина, что ему пришлось служить при таком… (следовало непечатное выражение) дворе.
И, помолчав добавил:
– Впрочем, и я сам при этом… дворе состою посланником…
Before the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) tells Ada that she simply reeked of some arsenic stuff after seeing her dentist the last time he enjoyed her:
'The last time I enjoyed you,’ said Demon ‘was in April when you wore a raincoat with a white and black scarf and simply reeked of some arsenic stuff after seeing your dentist. Dr Pearlman has married his receptionist, you’ll be glad to know. Now to business, my darling. I accept your dress’ (the sleeveless black sheath), ‘I tolerate your romantic hairdo, I don’t care much for your pumps na bosu nogu (on bare feet), your Beau Masque perfume — passe encore, but, my precious, I abhor and reject your livid lipstick. It may be the fashion in good old Ladore. It is not done in Man or London.’
‘Ladno (Okay),’ said Ada and, baring her big teeth, rubbed fiercely her lips with a tiny handkerchief produced from her bosom.
‘That’s also provincial. You should carry a black silk purse. And now I’ll show what a diviner I am: your dream is to be a concert pianist!’
‘It is not,’ said Van indignantly. ‘What perfect nonsense. She can’t play a note!’ (1.38)
In 1884 Van and Ada visit the family dentist in Kaluga:
They went boating and swimming in Ladore, they followed the bends of its adored river, they tried to find more rhymes to it, they walked up the hill to the black ruins of Bryant’s Castle, with the swifts still flying around its tower. They traveled to Kaluga and drank the Kaluga Waters, and saw the family dentist. Van, flipping through a magazine, heard Ada scream and say ‘chort’ (devil) in the next room, which he had never heard her do before. They had tea at a neighbor’s, Countess de Prey — who tried to sell them, unsuccessfully, a lame horse. They visited the fair at Ardisville where they especially admired the Chinese tumblers, a German clown, and a sword-swallowing hefty Circassian Princess who started with a fruit knife, went on to a bejeweled dagger and finally engulfed, string and all, a tremendous salami sausage. (1.22)
Aqua married Demon in Kaluga:
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. (1.1)
Demon was a great fisherman in his youth:
Daniel Veen’s mother was a Trumbell, and he was prone to explain at great length — unless sidetracked by a bore-baiter — how in the course of American history an English ‘bull’ had become a New England ‘bell.’ Somehow or other he had ‘gone into business’ in his twenties and had rather rankly grown into a Manhattan art dealer. He did not have — initially at least — any particular liking for paintings, had no aptitude for any kind of salesmanship, and no need whatever to jolt with the ups and downs of a ‘job’ the solid fortune inherited from a series of far more proficient and venturesome Veens. Confessing that he did not much care for the countryside, he spent only a few carefully shaded summer weekends at Ardis, his magnificent manor near Ladore. He had revisited only a few times since his boyhood another estate he had, up north on Lake Kitezh, near Luga, comprising, and practically consisting of, that large, oddly rectangular though quite natural body of water which a perch he had once clocked took half an hour to cross diagonally and which he owned jointly with his cousin, a great fisherman in his youth. (ibid.)
Leonid Sabaneyev (the memoirist) was a son of zoologist Leonid Sabaneyev (1844-98), the author of a popular book on fishing.