Vladimir Nabokov

Ada's seven luckies & spektrik in Ada

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 7 March, 2022

Describing Flavita (the Russian Scrabble), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Ada’s seven ‘luckies’ (the seven letters Ada had taken from the open case where the blocks lay face down):

 

A particular nuisance was the angry or disdainful looking up of dubious words in a number of lexicons, sitting, standing and sprawling around the girls, on the floor, under Lucette’s chair upon which she knelt, on the divan, on the big round table with the board and the blocks and on an adjacent chest of drawers. The rivalry between moronic Ozhegov (a big, blue, badly bound volume, containing 52,872 words) and a small but chippy Edmundson in Dr Gerschizhevsky’s reverent version, the taciturnity of abridged brutes and the unconventional magnanimity of a four-volume Dahl (‘My darling dahlia,’ moaned Ada as she obtained an obsolete cant word from the gentle long-bearded ethnographer) — all this would have been insupportably boring to Van had he not been stung as a scientist by the curious affinity between certain aspects of Scrabble and those of the planchette. He became aware of it one August evening in 1884 on the nursery balcony, under a sunset sky the last fire of which snaked across the corner of the reservoir, stimulated the last swifts, and intensified the hue of Lucette’s copper curls. The morocco board had been unfolded on a much inkstained, monogrammed and notched deal table. Pretty Blanche, also touched, on earlobe and thumbnail, with the evening’s pink — and redolent with the perfume called Miniver Musk by handmaids — had brought a still unneeded lamp. Lots had been cast, Ada had won the right to begin, and was in the act of collecting one by one, mechanically and unthinkingly, her seven ‘luckies’ from the open case where the blocks lay face down, showing nothing but their anonymous black backs, each in its own cell of flavid velvet. She was speaking at the same time, saying casually: ‘I would much prefer the Benten lamp here but it is out of kerosin. Pet (addressing Lucette), be a good scout, call her — Good Heavens!’

The seven letters she had taken, S,R,E,N,O,K,I, and was sorting out in her spektrik (the little trough of japanned wood each player had before him) now formed in quick and, as it were, self-impulsed rearrangement the key word of the chance sentence that had attended their random assemblage. (1.36)

 

A diminutive of spektr (spectrum), spektrik brings to mind Tyutchev’s poem Raduga (“Rainbow,” 1865). In his poem Russkaya geografiya (“A Russian Geography,” 1848 or 1849) Tyutchev mentions sem’ vnutrennikh morey i sem’ velikikh rek (seven internal seas and seven great rivers):

 

Москва, и град Петров, и Константинов град –
Вот царства русского заветные столицы...
Но где предел ему? и где его границы –
На север, на восток, на юг и на закат?
Грядущим временам судьбы их обличат...

 

Семь внутренних морей и семь великих рек...
От Нила до Невы, от Эльбы до Китая,
От Волги по Евфрат, от Ганга до Дуная...
Вот царство русское... и не прейдет вовек,
Как то провидел Дух и Даниил предрек.

 

Moscow and Peter’s town, the city of Constantine,

these are the cherished capitals of the Russian monarchy.

But where is their limit? And where are their frontiers

to the north, the east, the south and the setting sun?

The Fates will reveal them to future generations.

               

Seven internal seas and seven great rivers

from the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China,

from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube.

This is the Russian empire and it will never pass away,

just as the Spirit foretold and Daniel prophesied.

(transl. F. Jude)

 

The Benten lamp (out of kerosene, because in the Night of the Burning Barn it was used by Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis, to set the barn on fire) seems to hint at Benten, a goddess of the sea (one of the seven lucky gods, Shichifukujin, of Japan) and the name of the indigenous part of Yokohama, mentioned in the "Japanese" chapter of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. In Jules Verne’s novel Phileas Fogg manages to save one day and win the wager by traveling from West to East. After he was rejected by Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother), Daniel Veen (Lucette’s father) set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe:

 

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.

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.

Poor Dan’s erotic life was neither complicated nor beautiful, but somehow or other (he soon forgot the exact circumstances as one forgets the measurements and price of a fondly made topcoat worn on and off for at least a couple of seasons) he fell comfortably in love with Marina, whose family he had known when they still had their Raduga place (later sold to Mr Eliot, a Jewish businessman). One afternoon in the spring of 1871, he proposed to Marina in the Up elevator of Manhattan’s first ten-floor building, was indignantly rejected at the seventh stop (Toys), came down alone and, to air his feelings, set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe, adopting, like an animated parallel, the same itinerary every time. In November 1871, as he was in the act of making his evening plans with the same smelly but nice cicerone in a café-au-lait suit whom he had hired already twice at the same Genoese hotel, an aerocable from Marina (forwarded with a whole week’s delay via his Manhattan office which had filed it away through a new girl’s oversight in a dove hole marked RE AMOR) arrived on a silver salver telling him she would marry him upon his return to America. (1.1)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Durak: ‘fool’ in Russian.

Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town of Kitezh which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.

Mr Eliot: we shall meet him again, on pages 361 and 396, in company of the author of ‘The Waistline’ and ‘Agonic Lines’.

Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s globetrotter, travelled from West to East.

 

During the last game of Flavita that the three young Veens play together Lucette complains of her idiotic Buchstaben:

 

Soon after that, as so often occurs with games, and toys, and vacational friendships, that seem to promise an eternal future of fun, Flavita followed the bronze and blood-red trees into the autumn mists; then the black box was mislaid, was forgotten — and accidentally rediscovered (among boxes of table silver) four years later, shortly before Lucette’s visit to town where she spent a few days with her father in mid-July, 1888. It so happened that this was to be the last game of Flavita that the three young Veens were ever to play together. Either because it happened to end in a memorable record for Ada, or because Van took some notes in the hope — not quite unfulfilled — of ‘catching sight of the lining of time’ (which, as he was later to write, is ‘the best informal definition of portents and prophecies’), but the last round of that particular game remained vividly clear in his mind.

Je ne peux rien faire,’ wailed Lucette, ‘mais rien — with my idiotic Buchstaben, REMNILK, LINKREM...’

‘Look,’ whispered Van, ‘c’est tout simple, shift those two syllables and you get a fortress in ancient Muscovy.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Ada, wagging her finger at the height of her temple in a way she had. ‘Oh, no. That pretty word does not exist in Russian. A Frenchman invented it. There is no second syllable.’

‘Ruth for a little child?’ interposed Van.

‘Ruthless!’ cried Ada.

‘Well,’ said Van, ‘you can always make a little cream, KREM or KREME — or even better — there’s KREMLI, which means Yukon prisons. Go through her ORHIDEYA.’

‘Through her silly orchid,’ said Lucette.

And now,’ said Ada, ‘Adochka is going to do something even sillier.’ And taking advantage of a cheap letter recklessly sown sometime before in the seventh compartment of the uppermost fertile row, Ada, with a deep sigh of pleasure, composed: the adjective TORFYaNUYu which went through a brown square at F and through two red squares (37 x 9 = 333 points) and got a bonus of 50 (for placing all seven blocks at one stroke) which made 383 in all, the highest score ever obtained for one word by a Russian scrambler. ‘There!’ she said, ‘Ouf! Pas facile.’ And brushing away with the rosy knuckles of her white hand the black-bronze hair from her temple, she recounted her monstrous points in a smug, melodious tone of voice like a princess narrating the poison-cup killing of a superfluous lover, while Lucette fixed Van with a mute, fuming appeal against life’s injustice — and then looking again at the board emitted a sudden howl of hope:

‘It’s a place name! One can’t use it! It’s the name of the first little station after Ladore Bridge!’

‘That’s right, pet,’ sang out Ada. ‘Oh, pet, you are so right! Yes, Torfyanaya, or as Blanche says, La Tourbière, is, indeed, the pretty but rather damp village where our Cendrillon’s family lives. But, mon petit, in our mother’s tongue — que dis-je, in the tongue of a maternal grandmother we all share — a rich beautiful tongue which my pet should not neglect for the sake of a Canadian brand of French — this quite ordinary adjective means "peaty," feminine gender, accusative case. Yes, that one coup has earned me nearly 400. Too bad — ne dotyanula (didn’t quite make it).’

‘Ne dotyanula!’ Lucette complained to Van, her nostrils flaring, her shoulders shaking with indignation. (1.36)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Buchstaben: Germ., letters of the alphabet.

c’est tout simple: it’s quite simple.

pas facile: not easy.

Cendrillon: Cinderella.

mon petit... qui dis-je: darling... in fact.

 

In one of Fyodor’s imaginary dialogues with Koncheyev in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937) Fyodor mentions Tyutchev:

 

«Быть может, если мертвые тела убраны, мы примемся за поэтов? Как вы думаете? Кстати, о мертвых телах. Вам никогда не приходило в голову, что лермонтовский “знакомый труп” – это безумно смешно, ибо он собственно хотел сказать “труп знакомого”, – иначе ведь непонятно: знакомство посмертное контекстом не оправдано».
«У меня все больше Тютчев последнее время ночует».
«Славный постоялец. А как вы насчет ямба Некрасова – нету на него позыва?»
«Как же. Давайте-ка мне это рыданьице в голосе: загородись двойною рамою, напрасно горниц не студи, простись с надеждою упрямою и на дорогу не гляди. Кажется, дактилическую рифму я сам ему выпел, от избытка чувств, – как есть особый растяжной перебор у гитаристов. Этого Фет лишен».
«Чувствую, что тайная слабость Фета – рассудочность и подчеркивание антитез – от вас не скрылась?»
«Наши общественно настроенные олухи понимали его иначе. Нет, я все ему прощаю за прозвенело в померкшем лугу, за росу счастья, за дышащую бабочку».

 

“Now that the dead bodies have been removed we might, perhaps, proceed to the poets? All right. By the way, speaking of dead bodies, has it ever occurred to you that in Lermontov’s most famous short poem the ‘familiar corpse’ at the end is extremely funny? What he really wanted to say was ‘corpse of the man she once knew.’ The posthumous acquaintance is unjustified and meaningless.”

“Of late it’s Tyutchev who shares my night lodgings most often.”

“A worthy house guest. And how do you feel about Nekrasov’s iambics—or don’t you have a taste for him?”

“Oh, I do. There is, in his best verse, a certain guitar twang, a sob and a gasp, which for instance Fet, a more refined artist, somehow lacks.”

“I have a feeling that Fet’s secret weakness is his rationality and stress on antitheses—This hasn’t escaped you, has it?”

“Our oafish school-of-social-intent writers criticized him for the wrong reasons. No, I can forgive him everything for ‘rang out in the darkening meadow,’ for ‘dew-tears of rapture shed the night,’ for the wing-fanning, ‘breathing’ butterfly.” (Chapter One)

 

and Koncheyev mentions Buchstaben von Feuer (letters of fire):

 

Простите, это звучит изломом, но дело в том, что у меня с детства в сильнейшей и подробнейшей степени audition colorée».
«Так что вы могли бы тоже…».
«Да, но с оттенками, которые ему не снились, – и не сонет, а толстый том. К примеру: различные, многочисленные “а” на тех четырех языках, которыми владею, вижу едва ли не в стольких же тонах – от лаково-черных до занозисто серых – сколько представляю себе сортов поделочного дерева. Рекомендую вам мое розовое фланелевое “м”. Не знаю, обращали ли вы когда-либо внимание на вату, которую изымали из майковских рам? Такова буква “ы”, столь грязная, что словам стыдно начинаться с нее. Если бы у меня были под рукой краски, я бы вам так смешал sienne brûlée и сепию, что получился бы цвет гутаперчевого “ч”; и вы бы оценили мое сияющее “с”, если я мог бы вам насыпать в горсть тех светлых сапфиров, которые я ребенком трогал, дрожа и не понимая, когда моя мать, в бальном платье, плача навзрыд, переливала свои совершенно небесные драгоценности из бездны в ладонь, из шкатулок на бархат, и вдруг все запирала, и никуда не ехала, несмотря на бешеные уговоры ее брата, который шагал по комнатам, давая щелчки мебели и пожимая эполетами, и если отодвинуть в боковом окне фонаря штору, можно было видеть вдоль набережных фасадов в синей черноте ночи изумительно неподвижные, грозно алмазные вензеля, цветные венцы…».
«Buchstaben von Feuer, одним словом… Да, я уже знаю наперед. Хотите я вам доскажу эту банальную и щемящую душу повесть? Как вы упивались первыми попавшимися стихами. Как в десять лет писали драмы, а в пятнадцать элегии, – и все о закатах, закатах… И медленно пройдя меж пьяными… Кстати, кто она была такая?».
«Молодая замужняя женщина. Продолжалось неполных два года, до бегства из России. Она была так хороша, так мила – знаете, большие глаза и немного костлявые руки, – что я как-то до сих пор остался ей верен. От стихов она требовала только ямщикнегонилошадейности, обожала играть в покер, а погибла от сыпного тифа – Бог знает где, Бог знает как…».

 

“When my eyes opened to the alphabet. Sorry, that sounds pretentious, but the fact is, since childhood I have been afflicted with the most intense and elaborate audition colorée.”

“So that you too, like Rimbaud, could have—”

“Written not a mere sonnet but a fat opus, with auditive hues he never dreamt of. For instance, the various numerous ‘a’s of the four languages which I speak differ for me in tinge, going from lacquered-black to splintery-gray—like different sorts of wood. I recommend to you my pink flannel ‘m.’ I don’t know if you remember the insulating cotton wool which was removed with the storm windows in spring? Well, that is my Russian ‘y,’ or rather ‘ugh,’ so grubby and dull that words are ashamed to begin with it. If I had some paints handy I would mix burnt-sienna and sepia for you so as to match the color of a gutta-percha ‘ch’ sound; and you would appreciate my radiant ‘s’ if I could pour into your cupped hands some of those luminous sapphires that I touched as a child, trembling and not understanding when my mother, dressed for a ball, uncontrollably sobbing, allowed her perfectly celestial treasures to flow out of their abyss into her palm, out of their cases onto black velvet, and then suddenly locked everything up and did not go anywhere after all, in spite of the impassioned persuasions of her brother, who kept pacing up and down the rooms giving fillips to the furniture and shrugging his epaulets, and if one turned the curtain slightly on the side window of the oriel, one could see, along the receding riverfront, façades in the blue-blackness of the night, the motionless magic of an imperial illumination, the ominous blaze of diamond monograms, colored bulbs in coronal designs …”

“Buchstaben von Feuer, in short… Yes, I know what is coming. Shall I finish this banal and soul-rending tale for you? How you delighted in any poem that happened along. How at ten you were writing dramas, and at fifteen elegies—and all about sunsets, sunsets… Blok’s ‘Incognita’ who ‘passed slowly in between the drunkards.’ By the way, who was she?”

“A young married woman. It lasted a little less than two years, until my escape from Russia. She was lovely and sweet—you know, with large eyes and slightly bony hands—and somehow I have remained faithful to her even to this day. Her taste in poetry was limited to fashionable gypsy lyrics, she adored poker and she died of typhus—God knows where, God knows how.” (ibid.)

 

The allusion is to the lines in Heinrich Heine’s poem Belsazar:

 

Und sieh! und sieh! an weißer Wand
Da kam's hervor wie Menschenhand;

Und schrieb, und schrieb an weißer Wand
Buchstaben von Feuer, und schrieb und schwand.

 

And look! And look! On the wall so white,

There appeared a hand that began to write.

 

And wrote and wrote on the wall quite clear,

Letters of fire, it wrote and then did disappear.

 

Belshazzar’s Feast (1635) is a painting by Rembrandt. Daniel Veen is a Manhattan art dealer. Prophet Daniel (mentioned by Tyutchev in his poem “A Russian Geography”) is famous for successfully interpreting the proverbial “writing on the wall” and miraculously surviving the lions’ den. Ada (who comes to Van from Ardis and brings Lucette her Cranach crayons) can imitate mountain lions:

 

Ada’s hands stopped the water. Luggage was being bumped down allover the flat.

‘I’m not looking,’ said Lucette idiotically, ‘I only dropped in for my box.’

‘Please, tip them, pet,’ said Van, a compulsive tipper — ‘And pass me that towel,’ added Ada, but the ancilla was picking up coins she had spilled in her haste, and Ada now saw in her turn Van’s scarlet ladder of sutures — ‘Oh my poor darling,’ she cried, and out of sheer compassion allowed him the repeat performance which Lucette’s entrance had threatened to interrupt.

‘I’m not sure I did bring her damned Cranach crayons,’ said Ada a moment later, making a frightened frog face. He watched her with a sense of perfect pine-fragrant bliss, as she squeezed out spurts of gem-like liquid from a tube of Pennsilvestris lotion into the bath water.

Lucette had gone (leaving a curt note with her room number at the Winster Hotel for Young Ladies) when our two lovers, now weak-legged and decently robed, sat down to a beautiful breakfast (Ardis’ crisp bacon! Ardis’ translucent honey!) brought up in the lift by Valerio, a ginger-haired elderly Roman, always ill-shaven and gloomy, but a dear old boy (he it was who, having procured neat Rose last June, was being paid to keep her strictly for Veen and Dean).

What laughs, what tears, what sticky kisses, what a tumult of multitudinous plans! And what safety, what freedom of love! Two unrelated gypsy courtesans, a wild girl in a gaudy lolita, poppy-mouthed and black-downed, picked up in a café between Grasse and Nice, and another, a part-time model (you have seen her fondling a virile lipstick in Fellata ads), aptly nicknamed Swallowtail by the patrons of a Norfolk Broads floramor, had both given our hero exactly the same reason, unmentionable in a family chronicle, for considering him absolutely sterile despite his prowesses. Amused by the Hecatean diagnose, Van underwent certain tests, and although pooh-poohing the symptom as coincidental, all the doctors agreed that Van Veen might be a doughty and durable lover but could never hope for an offspring. How merrily little Ada clapped her hands!

Would she like to stay in this apartment till Spring Term (he thought in terms of Terms now) and then accompany him to Kingston, or would she prefer to go abroad for a couple of months — anywhere, Patagonia, Angola, Gululu in the New Zealand mountains? Stay in this apartment? So, she liked it? Except some of Cordula’s stuff which should be ejected — as, for example, that conspicuous Brown Hill Alma Mater of Almehs left open on poor Vanda’s portrait. She had been shot dead by the girlfriend of a girlfriend on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places. It was, Van said, sad. Little Lucette no doubt had told him about a later escapade? Punning in an Ophelian frenzy on the feminine glans? Raving about the delectations of clitorism? ‘N’exagérons pas, tu sais,’ said Ada, patting the air down with both palms. ‘Lucette affirmed,’ he said, ‘that she (Ada) imitated mountain lions.’

He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest.

‘That’s right,’ said the other total-recaller.

And, by the way, Grace — yes, Grace — was Vanda’s real favorite, pas petite moi and my little crest. She (Ada) had, hadn’t she, a way of always smoothing out the folds of the past — making the flutist practically impotent (except with his wife) and allowing the gentleman farmer only one embrace, with a premature eyakulyatsiya, one of those hideous Russian loanwords? Yes, wasn’t it hideous, but she’d love to play Scrabble again when they’d settled down for good. But where, how? Wouldn’t Mr and Mrs Ivan Veen do quite nicely anywhere? What about the ‘single’ in each passport? They’d go to the nearest Consulate and with roars of indignation and/or a fabulous bribe have it corrected to married, for ever and ever.

‘I’m a good, good girl. Here are her special pencils. It was very considerate and altogether charming of you to invite her next weekend. I think she’s even more madly in love with you than with me, the poor pet. Demon got them in Strassburg. After all she’s a demi-vierge now’ (‘I hear you and Dad —’ began Van, but the introduction of a new subject was swamped) ‘and we shan’t be afraid of her witnessing our ébats’ (pronouncing on purpose, with triumphant hooliganism, for which my prose, too, is praised, the first vowel à la Russe).

‘You do the puma,’ he said, ‘but she does — to perfection! — my favorite viola sardina. She’s a wonderful imitatrix, by the way, and if you are even better —’

‘We’ll speak about my talents and tricks some other time,’ said Ada. ‘It’s a painful subject. No tow let’s look at these snapshots.’ (2.6)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): ébats: frolics.

 

Fire (cf. Buchstaben von Feuer) is the element that destsoys Marina (who dies of cancer in 1900 and whose body is burned). In March, 1905, Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster (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). Half a year later, when they meet in Mont Roux, Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) tells Van about her camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect her from lions:

 

‘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.’

‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.

‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’ (3.8)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.

 

One-armed d'Onsky brings to mind Count Osterman-Tolstoy (a hero of the anti-Napoleon war who lost his arm in the battle of Kulm, 1813), a relative of Tyutchev who in June 1822 took Tyutchev to Munich where he became a diplomat at the Russian legation:

 

В 1822 году Тютчев был отправлен в Петербург, на службу в Государственную коллегию иностранных дел. Но в июне месяце того же года его родственник, знаменитый герой Кульмской битвы, потерявший руку на поле сражения, граф А. И. Остерман-Толстой посадил его с собой в карету и увёз за границу, где и пристроил сверхштатным чиновником к русской миссии в Мюнхене. "Судьбе угодно было вооружиться последней рукой Толстого (вспоминает Фёдор Иванович в одном из писем своих к брату лет 45 спустя), чтоб переселить меня на чужбину".

Это был самый решительный шаг в жизни Тютчева, определивший всю его дальнейшую участь.

 

At the beginning of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1886) Ivan Aksakov (the poet’s son-in-law and first biographer) mentions “the sly man” Zakhar Tutchev, the poet’s ancestor whom Dmitri Donskoy sent to the camp of Khan Mamay before the battle of Kulikovo (1380):

 

В Никоновской летописи упоминается "хитрый муж" Захар Тутчев, которого Дмитрий Донской, пред началом Куликовского побоища, подсылал к Мамаю со множеством золота и двумя переводчиками для собрания нужных сведений, - что "хитрый муж" и исполнил очень удачно. (chapter I)

 

It seems that on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) the Russians lost the battle of Kulikovo and migrated, crossing the ha-ha of the doubled ocean, to America. The territory of the Soviet Russia is occupied on Demonia by Tartary, an independent inferno:

 

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.