After the patio party in "Ardis the Second" Ada promises to Van to be more careful from now on and not let lousy Pedro come near:
Van left the pool-side patio and strode away. He turned into a side gallery that led into a grovy part of the garden, grading insensibly into the park proper. Presently, he noticed that Ada had hastened to follow him. Lifting one elbow, revealing the black star of her armpit, she tore off her bathing cap and with a shake of her head liberated a torrent of hair. Lucette, in color, trotted behind her. Out of charity for the sisters’ bare feet, Van changed his course from gravel path to velvet lawn (reversing the action of Dr Ero, pursued by the Invisible Albino in one of the greatest novels of English literature). They caught up with him in the Second Coppice. Lucette, in passing, stopped to pick up her sister’s cap and sunglasses — the sunglasses of much-sung lasses, a shame to throw them away! My tidy little Lucette (I shall never forget you...) placed both objects on a tree stump near an empty beer bottle, trotted on, then went back to examine a bunch of pink mushrooms that clung to the stump, snoring. Double take, double exposure.
‘Are you furious, because —’ began Ada upon overtaking him (she had prepared a sentence about her having to be polite after all to a piano tuner, practically a servant, with an obscure heart ailment and a vulgar pathetic wife — but Van interrupted her).
‘I object,’ he said, expelling it like a rocket, ‘to two things. A brunette, even a sloppy brunette, should shave her groin before exposing it, and a well-bred girl does not allow a beastly lecher to poke her in the ribs even if she must wear a motheaten, smelly rag much too short for her charms.’ ‘Ach!’ he added, ‘why the hell did I return to Ardis!’
‘I promise, I promise to be more careful from now on and not let lousy Pedro come near,’ she said with happy rigorous nods — and an exhalation of glorious relief, the cause of which was to torture Van only much later. (1.32)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Ero: thus the h-dropping policeman in Wells’ Invisible Man defined the latter’s treacherous friend.
A young Latin actor, Pedro is a namesake of Don Pedro, in Aldanov's trilogy Klyuch ("The Key," 1929), Peshchera ("The Cave," 1932), Begstvo ("Escape," 1936) a journalist who becomes a movie man in emigration and eventually goes to Hollywood. But he also brings to mind ulichnyi P'yero ("the street Pierrot"), as at the end of his poem Kinematograf ("Cinematograph," 1912) G. Ivanov calls himself:
Воображению достойное жилище,
Живей Террайля, пламенней Дюма!
О, сколько в нем разнообразной пищи
Для сердца нежного, для трезвого ума,
Разбойники невинность угнетают.
День загорается. Нисходит тьма.
На воздух ослепительно взлетают
Шестиэтажные огромные дома.
Седой залив отребья скал полощет.
Мир с дирижабля – пестрая канва.
Автомобили. Полисмены. Тещи.
Роскошны тропики. Гренландия мертва...
Да, здесь, на светлом трепетном экране,
Где жизни блеск подобен острию,
Двадцатый век, твой детский лепет ранний
Я с гордостью и дрожью узнаю.
Мир изумительный все чувства мне прельщает,
По полотну несущийся пестро,
И слабость собственная сердца не смущает:
Я здесь не гость. Я свой. Я уличный Пьеро.
In P'yero there is Ero (by changing his course from gravel path to velvet lawn Van reverses the action of Dr Ero). Tyoshchi (mothers-in-law) mentioned by G. Ivanov bring to mind ma belle-mère (my mother-in-law) in Herb's diary that Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) is reading on Admiral Tobakoff:
Six, seven — no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne, after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off. These steps are something.
While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Dimanche etc.: Sunday. Lunch on the grass. Everybody stinks. My mother-in-law swallows her dentures. Her little bitch, etc. After which, etc. (see p.375, a painter’s diary Lucette has been reading).
In his poem Ya za voynu, za interventsiyu ("I am for the war, for the intervention") G. Ivanov (who in an offensive review of Sirin's novel called VN kukharkin syn, "a cook's son") says that the world is ruled bogami (by the gods), not vshivym proletariatom (by the lousy proletariat):
Я за войну, за интервенцию,
Я за царя хоть мертвеца.
Российскую интеллигенцию
Я презираю до конца.
Мир управляется богами,
Не вшивым пролетариатом…
Сверкнет над русскими снегами
Богами расщепленный атом.
I am for the war, for the intervention,
I am for the tsar, even if he is dead.
I despise to the end
the Russian intelligentsia.
The world is ruled by the gods,
not by the lousy proletariat.
The atom split by the gods
will sparkle one day over the Russian snows.
On Desdemonia (as Van calls Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) artists are the only gods:
That meeting, and the nine that followed, constituted the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age. The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white ‘Nuremberg Virgin’-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor — in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat for the blue haze of an extraordinary October which kept dreamy and warm throughout the duration of adultery, they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus. (3.8)
The name Desdemona means "ill-starred." When Dick C. (a cardsharp with whom Van plays poker at Chose, Van’s English University) asks Van "what on earth is an artist," Van promptly replies "an underground observatory:"
‘I say, Dick, ever met a gambler in the States called Plunkett? Bald gray chap when I knew him.’
‘Plunkett? Plunkett? Must have been before my time. Was he the one who turned priest or something? Why?’
‘One of my father’s pals. Great artist.’
‘Artist?’
‘Yes, artist. I’m an artist. I suppose you think you’re an artist. Many people do.’
‘What on earth is an artist?’
‘An underground observatory,’ replied Van promptly.
‘That’s out of some modem novel,’ said Dick, discarding his cigarette after a few avid inhales.
‘That’s out of Van Veen,’ said Van Veen. (1.28)
Dick is a shuler (cardsharp in Russian). In his epigram (1931) on G. Ivanov VN mentions sem’ya zhurnal’nykh shulerov (a family of the literary cardsharps):
— Такого нет мошенника второго
Во всей семье журнальных шулеров!
— Кого ты так? — Иванова, Петрова,
Не всё ль равно? — Позволь, а кто ж Петров?
“You could not find in all of Grub Street
a rogue to match him vile enough!”
“Whom do you mean – Petrov, Ivanov?
No matter… Wait, though – who’s Petrov?”
(transl. by Vera Nabokov and DN)
The surname Petrov comes from Pyotr (a Russian given name that corresponds to English Peter, Spanish Pedro, etc.).