Telling about his uncle, Daniel Veen (the husband of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions a perch that Uncle Dan had once clocked:
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. (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town of Kitezh which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.
In his book “The Fish of Russia. The Life and Fishing (Angling) of Our Freshwater Fish” (1875) Leonid Sabaneyev says that lakes with pure water are the favorite abode of okun’ (the perch) and that the perch is a sedentary fish, never makes distant migrations and often lives the whole year in the same place:
Озера с чистою водою составляют любимое местопребывание окуня, и в них он лучше всего размножается. ...Вообще окунь — рыба оседлая, никогда не совершает дальних странствий, даже перед нерестом, и нередко, как, напр., в прудах и озерах, живет круглый год в одном и том же месте. Это замечается, напр., в тех зауральских озерах, в которых лучат рыбу не только осенью, но и весною, даже летом: во всякое время, в глубоких курьях (заливах) этих озер замечаются огромные окуни, твердую чешую которых не пробивает никакая острога, почему рыбаки даже не бьют их.
In his memoir essay “Isadora Duncan in the Soviet Russia” included in book his Vospominaniya o Rossii (“Reminiscences of Russia,” 1959) Leonid Sabaneyev (a music critic, son of the zoologist) says that in her “performance” in Moscow Isadora Duncan (who was too old and could not dance anymore) crossed diagonally the scene of the Bolshoi Theater with a baby in her arms (that symbolized the birth of the International Communism), with a red flag in her hand and to the sounds of the International:
Очень возможно, действительно, что приезд ее в Россию, и притом какой-то неожиданный и спешный и даже неорганизованный, был продиктован тем, что она в западных странах оказалась в безвыходном положении, что естественно как следствие ее старения. Тем не менее в Москве она все же свершила свое «выступление». Это было в начале ее пребывания в Москве. Выступление было более декоративное, чем содержательное. Так как она уже не могла танцевать, то она ограничилась тем, что прошла по диагонали сцены Большого театра с каким-то младенцем на руках, который, как мне объяснили, символизировал рождающийся интернациональный коммунизм, с красным флагом в руке и под звуки «Интернационала».
According to Sabaneyev, Isadora Duncan first met Esenin (who, as legend has it, became her husband on the same night) in his presence:
На этом памятном вечере и произошло знакомство Айседоры с Есениным — и я был сам свидетелем этого знакомства. Роман был необычайно стремительный и краткий.
Айседора спросила:
«Кто этот молодой человек с таким развратным лицом?» — спросила не без аппетита, — на что мой друг С. А. Поляков, издатель всех «символистов», немедленно ответил:
«Я сейчас вас познакомлю». И предание этой ночи свидетельствует, что в эту же ночь они стали уже супругами.
In his poem Inoniya (1918) Esenin says “I curse the breath of Kitezh and all ravines of its roads:”
Проклинаю я дыхание Китежа
И все лощины его дорог.
Я хочу, чтоб на бездонном вытяже
Мы воздвигли себе чертог.
Языком вылижу на иконах я
Лики мучеников и святых.
Обещаю вам град Инонию,
Где живет Божество живых!
Esenin's poem I nebo i zemlya vsyo te zhe (Both the sky and the earth are the same," 1918) ends in the lines: I v solntsa zolotye mrezhi / Sgonyay srebristykh okuney (And into the sun's golden nets / Drive together silver perches):
И небо и земля всё те же,
Всё в те же воды я гляжусь,
Но вздох твой ледовитый реже,
Ложноклассическая Русь.
Не огражу мой тихий кров
От радости над умираньем,
Но жаль мне, жаль отдать страданью
Езекиильский глас ветров.
Шуми, шуми, реви сильней,
Свирепствуй, океан мятежный,
И в солнца золотые мрежи
Сгоняй сребристых окуней.
By silver perches Esenin means the clouds. Perhaps, Daniel Veen had clocked a cloud? Clocking a cloud is much easier than clocking a fish. Upon his arrival at Ardis, Uncle Dan tells Van that it is going to rain in a few minutes, because it started to rain at Ladore, and the rain takes about half-an-hour to reach Ardis:
Mr Daniel Veen had a curious manner, when advancing toward a guest, of dipping the fingers of his stiffly held right hand into his coat pocket and holding them there in a kind of purifying operation until the exact moment of the handshake came.
He informed Van that it was going to rain in a few minutes, ‘because it had started to rain at Ladore,’ and the rain, he said, ‘took about half-an-hour to reach Ardis.’ Van thought this was a quip and chuckled politely but Uncle Dan looked perplexed again and, staring at Van with pale fish-eyes, inquired if he had familiarized himself with the environs, how many languages he knew, and would he like to buy for a few kopecks a Red Cross lottery ticket?
‘No, thank you,’ said Van, ‘I have enough of my own lotteries’ — and his uncle stared again, but sort of sideways. (1.11)
At the end of 1925 Esenin committed suicide (hanged himself in the Angleterre, an old hotel in Leningrad) and, two years later, Isadora Duncan died in a car accident (she was strangled by her own scarf caught in a wheel). In “Ardis the Second” Marina offers Van a scarf that her lover Pedro left behind:
The dog came in, turned up a brimming brown eye Vanward, toddled up to the window, looked at the rain like a little person, and returned to his filthy cushion in the next room.
‘I could never stand that breed,’ remarked Van. ‘Dackelophobia.’
‘But girls — do you like girls, Van, do you have many girls? You are not a pederast, like your poor uncle, are you? We have had some dreadful perverts in our ancestry but — Why do you laugh?’
‘Nothing,’ said Van. ‘I just want to put on record that I adore girls. I had my first one when I was fourteen. Mais qui me rendra mon Hélène? She had raven black hair and a skin like skimmed milk. I had lots of much creamier ones later. I kazhetsya chto v etom?’
‘How strange, how sad! Sad, because I know hardly anything about your life, my darling (moy dushka). The Zemskis were terrible rakes (razvratniki), one of them loved small girls, and another raffolait d’une de ses juments and had her tied up in a special way-don’t ask me how’ (double hand gesture of horrified ignorance ‘— when he dated her in her stall. Kstati (à propos), I could never understand how heredity is transmitted by bachelors, unless genes can jump like chess knights. I almost beat you, last time we played, we must play again, not today, though — I’m too sad today. I would have liked so much to know everything, everything, about you, but now it’s too late. Recollections are always a little "stylized" (stilizovanï), as your father used to say, an irrisistible and hateful man, and now, even if you showed me your old diaries, I could no longer whip up any real emotional reaction to them, though all actresses can shed tears, as I’m doing now. You see (rummaging for her handkerchief under her pillow), when children are still quite tiny (takie malyutki), we cannot imagine that we can go without them, for even a couple of days, and later we do, and it’s a couple of weeks, and later it’s months, gray years, black decades, and then the opéra bouffe of the Christians’ eternity. I think even the shortest separation is a kind of training for the Elysian Games — who said that? I said that. And your costume, though very becoming, is, in a sense, traurnïy (funerary). I’m spouting drivel. Forgive me these idiotic tears... Tell me, is there anything I could do for you? Do think up something! Would you like a beautiful, practically new Peruvian scarf, which he left behind, that crazy boy? No? It’s not your style? Now go. And remember — not a word to poor Mlle Larivière, who means well!’ (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): raffolait etc.: was crazy about one of his mares.
Marina is much older than her lover. When they first met, Esenin was a twenty-year-old boy and Isadora was already an elderly woman:
Что касается до «молниеносной любви», наподобие Тристана и Изольды, вспыхнувшей между двадцатилетним мальчиком, полуобразованным и уже алкоголиком, и пожилой уже женщиной, которая была «по площади» больше его раза в три, то я совершенно уверен, что это была любовь однобокая — только с ее стороны. Есенин же пошел на всю эту авантюру из озорства или спьяну, как он делал почти все свои поступки в жизни. Его известный стих:
Подошла и прищуренным глазом
Хулигана свела с ума
есть не более как опыт поэтического самооправдания и, может быть, в меньшей степени — опыт запоздалого комплимента. Их «совместная» жизнь была некрасива, тяжка и груба. Он ее бил: уже позднее, когда я увидал Айседору в Москве, она мне сказала на своем самобытном русском языке (она любила говорить по-русски и говорила очень плохо, но смело, как и все, что делала)… Она мне сказала: «Как он меня рюгаль, как колотиль!.. он меня называль старий кобыль!» Это было уже потом, на вечере у художника Якулова, уже перед ликвидацией ее «коммунистическо-хореографической» авантюры.
The hooligan (as Esenin calls himself in a poem quoted by Sabaneyev) brings to mind Hoole's hooliganism mentioned by Van when he describes his dinner with Ada's family in Bellevue (a hotel in Mont Roux):
The first person whom she introduced him to, at that island of fauteuils and androids, now getting up from around a low table with a copper ashbowl for hub, was the promised belle-sœur, a short plumpish lady in governess gray, very oval-faced, with bobbed auburn hair, a sallowish complexion, smoke-blue unsmiling eyes, and a fleshy little excrescence, resembling a ripe maize kernel, at the side of one nostril, added to its hypercritical curve by an afterthought of nature as not seldom happens when a Russian’s face is mass-produced. The next outstretched hand belonged to a handsome, tall, remarkably substantial and cordial nobleman who could be none other than the Prince Gremin of the preposterous libretto, and whose strong honest clasp made Van crave for a disinfecting fluid to wash off contact with any of her husband’s public parts. But as Ada, beaming again, made fluttery introductions with an invisible wand, the person Van had grossly mistaken for Andrey Vinelander was transformed into Yuzlik, the gifted director of the ill-fated Don Juan picture. ‘Vasco de Gama, I presume,’ Yuzlik murmured. Beside him, ignored by him, unknown by name to Ada, and now long dead of dreary anonymous ailments, stood in servile attitudes the two agents of Lemorio, the flamboyant comedian (a bearded boor of exceptional, and now also forgotten, genius, whom Yuzlik passionately wanted for his next picture). Lemorio had stood him up twice before, in Rome and San Remo, each time sending him for ‘preliminary contact’ those two seedy, incompetent, virtually insane, people with whom by now Yuzlik had nothing more to discuss, having exhausted everything, topical gossip, Lemorio’s sex life, Hoole’s hooliganism, as well as the hobbies of his, Yuzlik’s, three sons and those of their, the agents’, adopted child, a lovely Eurasian lad, who had recently been slain in a night-club fracas — which closed that subject. Ada had welcomed Yuzlik’s unexpected reality in the lounge of the Bellevue not only as a counterpoise to the embarrassment and the deceit, but also because she hoped to sidle into What Daisy Knew; however, besides having no spells left in the turmoil of her spirit for business blandishments, she soon understood that if Lemorio were finally engaged, he would want her part for one of his mistresses. (3.8)
Howard Hoole played Don Juan in Don Juan's Last Fling, the movie that Van and Lucette (Dan’s daughter) watch in the Tobakoff cinema hall just before Lucette's suicide. In Yuzlik's film Donna Anna is forty years old:
The main picture had now started. The three leading parts — cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna — were played by solid stars, whose images passed by in ‘semi-stills,’ or as some say ‘translucencies,’ in a brief introduction. Contrary to expectations, the picture turned out to be quite good. (3.5)
After parting with Esenin, Isadora told Sabaneyev that Esenin (who beat his wife) called her stariy kobyl’ (staraya kobyla, “the old mare” in Isadora’s mispronunciation). According to Marina, one of the Zemskis was crazy about one of his mares.
Pedro’s Peruvian scarf brings to mind Peruvian ‘honeysuckle’ mentioned by Van when he describes his debauch á trois with Ada and Lucette in his Manhattan flat:
What we have now is not so much a Casanovanic situation (that double-wencher had a definitely monochromatic pencil — in keeping with the memoirs of his dingy era) as a much earlier canvas, of the Venetian (sensu largo) school, reproduced (in ‘Forbidden Masterpieces’) expertly enough to stand the scrutiny of a borders vue d’oiseau.
Thus seen from above, as if reflected in the ciel mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian dreams (actually all is shadowy up there, for the blinds are still drawn, shutting out the gray morning), we have the large island of the bed illumined from our left (Lucette’s right) by a lamp burning with a murmuring incandescence on the west-side bedtable. The top sheet and quilt are tumbled at the footboardless south of the island where the newly landed eye starts on its northern trip, up the younger Miss Veen’s pried-open legs. A dewdrop on russet moss eventually finds a stylistic response in the aquamarine tear on her flaming cheekbone. Another trip from the port to the interior reveals the central girl’s long white left thigh; we visit souvenir stalls: Ada’s red-lacquered talons, which lead a man’s reasonably recalcitrant, pardonably yielding wrist out of the dim east to the bright russet west, and the sparkle of her diamond necklace, which, for the nonce, is not much more valuable than the aquamarines on the other (west) side of Novelty Novel lane. The scarred male nude on the island’s east coast is half-shaded, and, on the whole, less interesting, though considerably more aroused than is good for him or a certain type of tourist. The recently repapered wall immediately west of the now louder-murmuring (et pour cause) dorocene lamp is ornamented in the central girl’s honor with Peruvian ‘honeysuckle’ being visited (not only for its nectar, I’m afraid, but for the animalcules stuck in it) by marvelous Loddigesia Hummingbirds, while the bedtable on that side bears a lowly box of matches, a karavanchik of cigarettes, a Monaco ashtray, a copy of Voltemand’s poor thriller, and a Lurid Oncidium Orchid in an amethystine vaselet. The companion piece on Van’s side supports a similar superstrong but unlit lamp, a dorophone, a box of Wipex, a reading loupe, the returned Ardis album, and a separatum ‘Soft music as cause of brain tumors,’ by Dr Anbury (young Rattner’s waggish pen-name). Sounds have colors, colors have smells. The fire of Lucette’s amber runs through the night of Ada’s odor and ardor, and stops at the threshold of Van’s lavender goat. Ten eager, evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons caress their helpless bed pet. Ada’s loose black hair accidentally tickles the local curio she holds in her left fist, magnanimously demonstrating her acquisition. Unsigned and unframed.
That about summed it up (for the magical gewgaw liquefied all at once, and Lucette, snatching up her nightdress, escaped to her room). It was only the sort of shop where the jeweler’s fingertips have a tender way of enhancing the preciousness of a trinket by something akin to a rubbing of hindwings on the part of a settled lycaenid or to the frottage of a conjurer’s thumb dissolving a coin; but just in such a shop the anonymous picture attributed to Grillo or Obieto, caprice or purpose, ober- or unterart, is found by the ferreting artist. (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): et pour cause: and no wonder.
karavanchik: small caravan of camels (Russ.).
oberart etc.: Germ., superspecies; subspecies.
According to Van, "sounds have colors, colors have smells" (cf. zvuki Internatsionala, "the sounds of the International," to which Isadora Duncan crossed the scene of the Bolshoi Theater). In his essay “On Rimsky-Korsakov” included in “Reminiscences of Russia” Sabaneyev says that Rimsky-Korsakov perceived sounds not only through his ears, but also with his sense of taste and sense of smell, and mentions Rimsky’s ability to perceive the sound structure also as colors:
Возможно, что эти «девиации» в области иных ощущений вообще были в натуре Римского-Корсакова. Он как-то воспринимал звуки не одним слухом, но одновременно и вкусом и обонянием. Звуковая ткань для него пахла и имела вкус. Я не могу это явление не поставить в связь с его уже ставшей широко известной способностью воспринимать звуковую ткань и как «цвета»: для него (об этом он неоднократно говорил и даже оставил письменные свидетельства) музыкальные тональности представлялись окрашенными в цвета – каждая в свой. Это явление довольно широко распространено среди музыкантов. Оно было предметом довольно многочисленных изучений, но исследования показали, что явление это чрезвычайно индивидуально. Я лично полагаю, что эта способность чрезвычайно обогащает музыкальное восприятие, но было на свете много великих музыкантов, которые не обладали ею (может быть, просто не обращали внимания), и обратно, было много очень слабых музыкантов, которые ею обладали в сильнейшей степени. Во всяком случае, она стоит в связи с изумительным колористическим даром Римского-Корсакова. Его звуки, в особенности его оркестровые звуки, действительно и звучат, и светятся разнообразными светами, и благоухают, и даже имеют дар ассоциировать известное вкусовое впечатление. Его духу вообще был свойственен известный рационализм, даже рассудочность. Тут было что-то опять-таки от «естествоиспытателя». Он и в музыке любил находить «вечные законы» и требовал от композитора точности мысли и действия. Его эстетические теории и построения очень часто имели склонность обращаться в схемы и приемы.
Skazanie o nevidimom grade Kitezhe i deve Fevronii ("The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya," 1907) is an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov. According to Sabaneyev, in Rimsky-Korsakov there was something of a naturalist. Only a passionate naturalist could "clock" a perch.
A perch that took half an hour to cross the reactangular lake diagonally sounds as if it were conditions of a mathematical problem. The author of four works on mathematics, Sabaneyev (the memoirist) studied pure mathematics at the Moscow University. One of his teachers was Professor Bugayev, father of the poet and prose writer Andrey Bely (the author of Peterburg, 1913). The surname Bugayev comes from bugay (bull). 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.’ In his memoirs Sabaneyev mentions Rakhmaninov's choral symphony The Bells (1913), based on Balmont's Russian translation of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. In 1941 Rakhmaninov asked VN to translate Balmont's Russian version of Poe's "The Bells" back into an English libretto that would fit Rakhmaninov's choral symphony.
"That large, oddly rectangular though quite natural body of water" brings to mind moya prodolgovataya zhizn' ("my oblong life"), an amusing solecism at the beginning of Sabaneyev's memoirs:
Я возымел идею написать воспоминания о моей достаточно продолговатой жизни, считая это интересным с исторической точки зрения, так как моя жизнь прошла почти вся среди интереснейших людей и грандиозных исторических событий, относящихся к эпохе, которая несомненно будет отнесена последующими историками как одно из наиболее «роконосных» событий в истории человечества, когда, возможно, откроются небывалые откровения в областях и науки, и мистики, но когда можно ожидать и конечной катастрофы для людей, которые слишком приблизились к познанию вещей, которые не полагается им знать для их собственного блага.
Nebyvalye otkroveniya v oblastyakh i nauki, i mistiki (the unprecedented revelations in the fields of both science and mysticism) and konechnaya katastrofa dlya lyudey, kotorye slishkom priblizilis' k poznaniyu veshchey (the final disaster for people who came too near to the knowledge of things that they are not supposed to know for their own good) bring to mind the Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century and the Great Revelation caused by it:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality. (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
Aqua was not quite twenty when the exaltation of her nature had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically, the initial stage of her mental illness coincided with the first decade of the Great Revelation, and although she might have found just as easily another theme for her delusion, statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable, Revelation caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with religion had in medieval times.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.
Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.) (ibid.)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): entendons-nous: let’s have it clear (Fr.).
The Antiterran L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century seems to correspond to the mock executions of Dostoevski and Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In Dostoevski's novel Brothers Karamazov (1880) Kolya Krasotkin mentions a certain Sabaneyev:
- Сабанеева знаешь? - еще настойчивее и еще строже продолжал Коля.
- Какого те Сабанеева? Нет, не знаю.
- Ну, и чорт с тобой после этого! - отрезал вдруг Коля и, круто повернув направо, быстро зашагал дорогой, как будто и говорить презирая с таким олухом, который Сабанеева даже не знает.
- Стой ты, эй! Какого те Сабанеева? - опомнился парень, весь опять заволновавшись. - Это он чего такого говорил? - повернулся он вдруг к торговкам, глупо смотря на них,
Бабы рассмеялись.
- Мудреный мальчишка, - проговорила одна.
- Какого, какого это он Сабанеева? - все неистово повторял парень, махая правою рукой.
- А это надоть быть Сабанеева, который у Кузьмичевых служил, вот как надоть быть, - догадалась вдруг одна баба. Парень дико на нее уставился.
- Кузь-ми-чева? - переговорила другая баба, - да какой он Трифон? Тот Кузьма, а не Трифон, а парнишка Трифоном Никитычем называл, стало не он.
- Это, вишь, не Трифон и не Сабанеев, это Чижов, - подхватила вдруг третья баба, доселе молчавшая и серьезно слушавшая, - Алексей Иванычем звать его. Чижов, Алексей Иванович.
- Это так и есть, что Чижов, - настойчиво подтвердила четвертая баба.
Ошеломленный парень глядел то на ту, то на другую.
- Да зачем он спрашивал, спрашивал-то он зачем, люди добрые! - восклицал он уже почти в отчаянии: - "Сабанеева знаешь?" А чорт его знает, каков он есть таков Сабанеев?
- Бестолковый ты человек, говорят те не Сабанеев, а Чижов, Алексей Иванович Чижов, вот кто! - внушительно крикнула ему одна торговка.
- Какой Чижов? ну, какой? Говори, коли знаешь.
- А длинный, возгривый, летось на базаре сидел.
- А на кой ляд мне твово Чижова, люди добрые, а?
- А я почем знаю, на кой те ляд Чижова.
- А кто тебя знает, на что он тебе, - подхватила другая, - сам должен знать, на что его тебе надо, коли галдишь. Ведь он тебе говорил, а не нам, глупый ты человек. Аль вправду не знаешь?
- Кого?
- Чижова.
- А чорт его дери Чижова, с тобой вместе! Отколочу его, вот что! Смеялся он надо мной!
- Чижова-то отколотишь? Либо он тебя! дурак ты, вот что!
- Не Чижова, не Чижова, баба ты злая, вредная, мальчишку отколочу, вот что! Давайте его, давайте его сюда, смеялся он надо мной!
Бабы хохотали. А Коля шагал уже далеко с победоносным выражением в лице. Смуров шел подле, оглядываясь на кричащую вдали группу. Ему тоже было очень весело, хотя он все еще опасался как бы не попасть с Колей в историю.
- Про какого ты его спросил Сабанеева ? - спросил он Колю, предчувствуя ответ.
- А почем я знаю, про какого? Теперь у них до вечера крику будет. Я люблю расшевелить дураков во всех слоях общества. Вот и еще стоит олух, вот этот мужик. Заметь себе, говорят: "Ничего нет глупее глупого француза", но и русская физиономия выдает себя. Ну не написано ль у этого на лице, что он дурак, вот у этого мужика, а?
"Do you know Sabaneyev?" Kolya went on even more emphatically and even more severely.
"What Sabaneyev? No, I don't know him."
"Well then you can go to the devil," said Kolya, cutting short the conversation; and turning sharply to the right he strode quickly on his way as though he disdained further conversation with a dolt who did not even know Sabaneyev.
"Stop, heigh! What Sabaneyev?" the young man recovered from his momentary stupefaction and was as excited as before.
"What did he say?" He turned to the market women with a silly stare. The women laughed.
"You can never tell what he's after," said one of them.
"What Sabaneyev is it he's talking about?" the young man repeated, still furious and brandishing his right arm.
"It must be a Sabaneyev who worked for the Kuzmichovs, that's who it must be," one of the women suggested. The young man stared at her wildly.
"For the Kuzmichovs?" repeated another woman.
"But his name wasn't Trifon. His name's Kuzma, not Trifon; but the boy said Trifon Nikitich, so it can't be the same."
"His name is not Trifon and not Sabaneyev, it's Chizhov," put in suddenly a third woman, who had hitherto been silent, listening gravely.
"Alexey Ivanitch is his name. Chizhov, Alexey Ivanych."
"Not a doubt about it, it's Chizhov," a fourth woman emphatically confirmed the statement. The bewildered youth gazed from one to another.
"But what did he ask for, what did he ask for, good people?" he cried almost in desperation."
'Do you know Sabaneyev?' says he. And who the devil's to know who is Sabaneyev?"
"You're a senseless fellow. I tell you it's not Sabaneyev, but Chizhov, Alexey Ivanych Chizhov, that's who it is!" one of the women shouted at him impressively.
"What Chizhov? Who is he? Tell me, if you know."
"That tall, snivelling fellow who used to sit in the market in the summer."
"And what's your Chizhov to do with me, good people, eh?"
"How can I tell what he's to do with you?" put in another.
"You ought to know yourself what you want with him, if you make such a clamour about him. He spoke to you, he did not speak to us, you stupid. Don't you really know him?"
"Know whom?"
"Chizhov."
"The devil take Chizhov and you with him. I'll give him a hiding, that I will. He was laughing at me!"
"Will give Chizhov a hiding! More likely he will give you one. You are a fool, that's what you are!"
"Not Chizhov, not Chizhov, you spiteful, mischievous woman. I'll give the boy a hiding. Catch him, catch him, he was laughing at me."
The woman guffawed. But Kolya was by now a long way off, marching along with a triumphant air. Smurov walked beside him, looking round at the shouting group far behind. He too was in high spirits, though he was still afraid of getting into some scrape in Kolya's company.
"What Sabaneyev did you mean?" he asked Kolya, foreseeing what his answer would be.
"How do I know? Now there'll be a hubbub among them all day. I like to stir up fools in every class of society. There's another blockhead, that peasant there. You know, they say 'there's no one stupider than a stupid Frenchman,' but a stupid Russian shows it in his face just as much. Can't you see it all over his face that he is a fool, that muzhik, eh?" (Chapter III "The Schoolboy")
Kolya thinks that the muzhik is durak (a fool). Daniel Veen is known in society as Durak Walter or simply Red Veen:
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)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Durak: ‘fool’ in Russian.
Describing Demon's romance with Marina, Van mentions the similarities of young bodies of water:
They reveled, and traveled, and they quarreled, and flew back to each other again. By the following winter he began to suspect she was being unfaithful to him, but could not determine his rival. In mid-March, at a business meal with an art expert, an easy-going, lanky, likeable fellow in an old-fashioned dress-coat, Demon screwed in his monocle, unclicked out of its special flat case a small pen-and-wash and said he thought (did not doubt, in fact, but wished his certitude to be admired) that it was an unknown product of Parmigianino’s tender art. It showed a naked girl with a peach-like apple cupped in her half-raised hand sitting sideways on a convolvulus-garlanded support, and had for its discoverer the additional appeal of recalling Marina when, rung out of a hotel bathroom by the phone, and perched on the arm of a chair, she muffled the receiver while asking her lover something that he could not make out because the bath’s voice drowned her whisper. Baron d’Onsky had only to cast one glance at that raised shoulder and at certain vermiculated effects of delicate vegetation to confirm Demon’s guess. D’Onsky had the reputation of not showing one sign of esthetic emotion in the presence of the loveliest masterpiece; this time, nonetheless, he laid his magnifier aside as he would a mask, and allowed his undisguised gaze to caress the velvety apple and the nude’s dimpled and mossed parts with a smile of bemused pleasure. Would Mr Veen consider selling it to him there and then, Mr Veen, please? Mr Veen would not. Skonky (a oneway nickname) must content himself with the proud thought that, as of today, he and the lucky owner were the sole people to have ever admired it en connaissance de cause. Back it went into its special integument; but after finishing his fourth cup of cognac, d’O. pleaded for one last peep. Both men were a little drunk, and Demon secretly wondered if the rather banal resemblance of that Edenic girl to a young actress, whom his visitor had no doubt seen on the stage in ‘Eugene and Lara’ or ‘Lenore Raven’ (both painfully panned by a ‘disgustingly incorruptible’ young critic), should be, or would be, commented upon. It was not: such nymphs were really very much alike because of their elemental limpidity since the similarities of young bodies of water are but murmurs of natural innocence and double-talk mirrors, that’s my hat, his is older, but we have the same London hatter. (1.2)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): en connaissance de cause: knowing what it was all about (Fr.).
According to Sabaneyev, Isadora Duncan was about three times larger than Esenin in area (po ploshchadi).
Marina's impressario who brought the Russian dancers in two sleeping cars all the way from Belokonsk (the Russian twin of Whitehorse, a city in NW Canada), Skotty brings to mind Skotoprigonievsk, the setting of Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov.