Upon his arrival at Ardis, Daniel Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, the husband of Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother Marina) 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)
According to Van, Uncle Dan had once clocked a perch:
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 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 (The sky and earth are both the same," 1918) ends in the lines: I v solntsa zolotye mrezhi / Sgonyay srebristykh okuney (And into the sun's golden fishnets / Drive together silvery 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 silvery perches Esenin means the clouds. Perhaps, Daniel Veen had clocked a cloud? Clocking a cloud (or its reflection on the lake surface) is much easier than clocking a fish.
In his book “The Fish of Russia. The Life and Angling of Our Freshwater Fish” (1875) Leonid Sabaneyev says that perches swim very fast, but tolchkami (with jerks), stopping abruptly and then rushing forward again:
Плавают окуни очень быстро, однако толчками, часто внезапно останавливаясь и потом опять бросаясь вперед.
In VN’s poem Kak ya lyublyu tebya (“How I Love You,” 1934) pumped-up clouds move across the sky edva zametnymi tolchkami (with scarcely discernible jerks):
Над краснощекими рабами
лазурь как лаковая вся,
с накачанными облаками,
едва заметными толчками
передвигающимися.
Ужель нельзя там притулиться
и нет там темного угла,
где темнота могла бы слиться
с иероглифами крыла?
Так бабочка не шевелится
пластом на плесени ствола.
Above red-cheeked slaves
the blue sky looks all lacquered,
and pumped-up clouds
with scarcely discernible jerks
move across.
I wonder, is there nowhere a place there,
to lie low—some dark nook
where the darkness might merge
with a wing’s cryptic markings?
(A geometrid thus does not stir
spread flat on a lichened trunk.)
At the family dinner in “Ardis the Second” Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) tells Marina that he saw her husband sitting in a stopped car and trying to budge it with little jerks of his haunches:
‘I was telling Van a moment ago,’ he continued, raising his voice (he labored under the delusion that Marina had grown rather deaf), ‘about your husband. My dear, he overdoes the juniper vodka stuff, he’s getting, in fact, a mite fuzzy and odd. The other day I chanced to walk through Pat Lane on the Fourth Avenue side, and there he was coming, at quite a spin, in his horrid town car, that primordial petrol two-seater he’s got, with the tiller. Well, he saw me, from quite a distance, and waved, and the whole contraption began to shake down, and finally stopped half a block away, and there he sat trying to budge it with little jerks of his haunches, you know, like a child who can’t get his tricycle unstuck, and as I walked up to him I had the definite impression that it was his mechanism that had stalled, not the Hardpan’s.’ But what Demon, in the goodness of his crooked heart, omitted to tell Marina was that the imbecile, in secret from his art adviser, Mr Aix, had acquired for a few thousand dollars from a gaming friend of Demon’s, and with Demon’s blessings, a couple of fake Correggios — only to resell them by some unforgivable fluke to an equally imbecile collector, for half a million which Demon considered henceforth as a loan his cousin should certainly refund him if sanity counted for something on this gemel planet. And, conversely, Marina refrained from telling Demon about the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get ‘something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology’). (1.38)
Describing the family dinner, Van mentions Marina’s pretentious ciel-étoilé hairdress:
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. (ibid.)
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.
At the end of his poem Proplyasal, proplakal dozhd’ vesenniy (“The spring rain has danced, has wept away” 1917) Esenin mentions zvyozdnyi tvoy Pilat (your starry Pilate):
Проплясал, проплакал дождь весенний,
Замерла гроза.
Скучно мне с тобой, Сергей Есенин,
Подымать глаза…
Скучно слушать под небесным древом
Взмах незримых крыл:
Не разбудишь ты своим напевом
Дедовских могил!
Привязало, осаднило слово
Даль твоих времён.
Не в ветрах, а, знать, в томах тяжёлых
Прозвенит твой сон.
Кто-то сядет, кто-то выгнет плечи,
Вытянет персты.
Близок твой кому-то красный вечер,
Да не нужен ты.
Всколыхнёт от Брюсова и Блока,
Встормошит других.
Но всё так же день взойдёт с востока,
Так же вспыхнет миг.
Не изменят лик земли напевы,
Не стряхнут листа…
Навсегда твои пригвождены ко древу
Красные уста.
Навсегда простёр глухие длани
Звёздный твой Пилат.
Или, Или, лама савахфани, —
Отпусти в закат.
At the beginning of Ada Van mentions Pontius Press (a publishing house):
‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858). (1.1)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. ‘Mount Tabor’ and ‘Pontius’ allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.
Sergey Esenin’s last wife was Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter Sofia Tolstoy-Esenin (1900-57).
See also the updated full version of my previous post, “clocked perch & Pedro's Peruvian scarf in Ada.”