Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that Demon (Van's and Ada's father) sat next to Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) at the Praslin’s last Christmas:
Marina, essentially a dummy in human disguise, experienced no such qualms, lacking as she did that third sight (individual, magically detailed imagination) which many otherwise ordinary and conformant people may also possess, but without which memory (even that of a profound ‘thinker’ or technician of genius) is, let us face it, a stereotype or a tear-sheet. We do not wish to be too hard on Marina; after all, her blood throbs in our wrists and temples, and many of our megrims are hers, not his. Yet we cannot condone the grossness of her soul. The man sitting at the head of the table and joined to her by a pair of cheerful youngsters, the ‘juvenile’ (in movie parlance) on her right, the ‘ingénue’ on her left, differed in no way from the same Demon in much the same black jacket (minus perhaps the carnation he had evidently purloined from a vase Blanche had been told to bring from the gallery) who sat next to her at the Praslin’s last Christmas. The dizzy chasm he felt every time he met her, that awful ‘wonder of life’ with its extravagant jumble of geological faults, could not be bridged by what she accepted as a dotted line of humdrum encounters: ‘poor old’ Demon (all her pillow mates being retired with that title) appeared before her like a harmless ghost, in the foyers of theaters ‘between mirror and fan,’ or in the drawing rooms of common friends, or once in Lincoln Park, indicating an indigo-buttocked ape with his cane and not saluting her, according to the rules of the beau monde, because he was with a courtesan. Somewhere, further back, much further back, safely transformed by her screen-corrupted mind into a stale melodrama was her three-year-long period of hectically spaced love-meetings with Demon, A Torrid Affair (the title of her only cinema hit), passion in palaces, the palms and larches, his Utter Devotion, his impossible temper, separations, reconciliations, Blue Trains, tears, treachery, terror, an insane sister’s threats, helpless, no doubt, but leaving their tiger-marks on the drapery of dreams, especially when dampness and dark affect one with fever. And the shadow of retribution on the backwall (with ridiculous legal innuendos). All this was mere scenery, easily packed, labeled ‘Hell’ and freighted away; and only very infrequently some reminder would come — say, in the trickwork close-up of two left hands belonging to different sexes — doing what? Marina could no longer recall (though only four years had elapsed!) — playing à quatre mains? — no, neither took piano lessons — casting bunny-shadows on a wall? — closer, warmer, but still wrong; measuring something? But what? Climbing a tree? The polished trunk of a tree? But where, when? Someday, she mused, one’s past must be put in order. Retouched, retaken. Certain ‘wipes’ and ‘inserts’ will have to be made in the picture; certain telltale abrasions in the emulsion will have to be corrected; ‘dissolves’ in the sequence discreetly combined with the trimming out of unwanted, embarrassing ‘footage,’ and definite guarantees obtained; yes, someday — before death with its clap-stick closes the scene.
Tonight she contented herself with the automatic ceremony of giving him what she remembered, more or less correctly, when planning the menu, as being his favorite food — zelyonïya shchi, a velvety green sorrel-and-spinach soup, containing slippery hard-boiled eggs and served with finger-burning, irresistibly soft, meat-filled or carrot-filled or cabbage-filled pirozhki — peer-rush-KEY, thus pronounced, thus celebrated here, for ever and ever. After that, she had decided, there would be bread-crumbed sander (sudak) with boiled potatoes, hazel-hen (ryabchiki) and that special asparagus (bezukhanka) which does not produce Proust’s After-effect, as cookbooks say. (1.38)
Duchesse de Praslin (who had been plain Mlle. Sébastian) is a character in Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu ("In Search of Lost Time"):
“You remind me, for it was exactly like this, of a seat that I had for many years until at last I couldn’t keep it any longer because it had been given to my mother by the poor Duchesse de Praslin. My mother, though she was the simplest person in the world, really, had ideas that belonged to another generation, which even in those days I could scarcely understand; and at first she had not been at all willing to let herself be introduced to Mme. de Praslin, who had been plain Mlle. Sébastian!, while she, because she was a Duchess, felt that it was not for her to be introduced to my mother. And really, you know,” Mme. de Villeparisis went on, forgetting that she herself did not understand these fine shades of distinction, “even if she had just been Mme. de Choiseul, there was a good deal to be said for her claim. The Choiseuls are everything you could want; they spring from a sister of Louis the Fat; they were ruling princes down in Basigny. I admit that we beat them in marriages and in distinction, but the precedence is pretty much the same. This little difficulty gave rise to several amusing incidents, such as a luncheon party which was kept waiting a whole hour or more before one of these ladies could make up her mind to let herself be introduced to the other. In spite of which they became great friends, and she gave my mother a seat like that, in which people always refused to sit, just as you did, until one day my mother heard a carriage drive into the courtyard. She asked a young servant we had, who it was. ‘The Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, ma’am.’ ‘Very well, say that I am at home.’ A quarter of an hour passed; no one came. ‘What about the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld?’ my mother asked. ‘Where is she?’ ‘She’s on the stairs, ma’am, getting her breath,’ said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That’s the only way to get really good ones. And they’re the rarest of luxuries. And sure enough the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld had the greatest difficulty in getting upstairs, for she was an enormous woman, so enormous, indeed, that when she did come into the room my mother was quite at a loss for a moment to know where to put her. And then the seat that Mme. de Praslin had given her caught her eye. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ she said, bringing it forward. And the Duchess filled it from side to side. She was quite a pleasant woman, for all her massiveness. ‘She still creates an effect when she comes in,’ one of our friends said once. ‘She certainly creates an effect when she goes out,’ said my mother, who was rather more free in her speech than would be thought proper nowadays. Even in Mme. de La Rochefoucauld’s own drawing-room people weren’t afraid to make fun of her to her face (at which she was always the first to laugh) over her ample proportions. ‘But are you all alone?’ my grandmother once asked M. de La Rochefoucauld, when she had come to pay a call on the Duchess, and being met at the door by him had not seen his wife who was at the other end of the room. ‘Is Mme. de La Rochefoucauld not at home? I don’t see her.’—‘How charming of you!’ replied the Duke, who had about the worst judgment of any man I have ever known, but was not altogether lacking in humour.” (Swann's Way, "Place Names: The Place")
Charles de Choiseul, Duke of Praslin (1805-47) was a French nobleman and politician, who served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1838-42. Choiseul-Praslin's suicide, occurring while he faced trial for the murder of his wife, the Duchess de Choiseul-Praslin (née Fanny Sébastiani), caused a scandal which in turn contributed to the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution and the fall of the July Monarchy.
Proust gives to some of his characters the names of the real historical figures. Describing the family dinner, Van mentions Richard Leonard Churchill's novel about a certain Crimean Khan:
‘Might I have another helping of Peterson’s Grouse, Tetrastes bonasia windriverensis?’ asked Ada loftily.
Marina jangled a diminutive cowbell of bronze. Demon placed his palm on the back of Ada’s hand and asked her to pass him the oddly evocative object. She did so in a staccato arc. Demon inserted his monocle and, muffling the tongue of memory, examined the bell; but it was not the one that had once stood on a bed-tray in a dim room of Dr Lapiner’s chalet; was not even of Swiss make; was merely one of those sweet-sounding translations which reveal a paraphrast’s crass counterfeit as soon as you look up the original.
Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it,’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Tetrastes etc.: Latin name of the imaginary ‘Peterson’s Grouse’ from Wind River Range, Wyo.
Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
Richard Leonard Churchill is a cross between Richard the Lionheart (1157-99), King of England in 1189-99, and Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965), a British statesman who served as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) is known as Khan Sosso, the ruler of ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate (2.2). Charming Monsieur de Pastreuil (whose name seems to blend Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and microbiologist, 1822-95, with Charles de Choiseul) and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel (whose name clearly hints at Stalin), were the two seconds in Demon's sword duel with Baron d'Onsky (1.2). Describing the family dinner, Van mentions a scar that remained on Demon's body after this duel:
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. (1.38)
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.
During the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" the Veens are photographed on the sly by Kim Beauharnais (a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Van blinds for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada):
So the trivial patter went. Who does not harbor in the darkest gulf of his mind such bright recollections? Who has not squirmed and covered his face with his hands as the dazzling past leered at him? Who, in the terror and solitude of a long night —
‘What was that?’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.
‘Sheet lightning,’ suggested Van.
‘If you ask me,’ said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.’
Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. In expectation of the rumble, Marina started to count under her breath, as if she were praying or checking the pulse of a very sick person. One heartbeat was supposed to span one mile of black night between the living heart and a doomed herdsman, felled somewhere — oh, very far — on the top of a mountain. The rumble came — but sounded rather subdued. A second flash revealed the structure of the French window.
Ada returned to her seat. Van picked up her napkin from under her chair and in the course of his brief plunge and ascent brushed the side of her knee with his temple. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): certicle: anagram of ‘electric’.
In Kim Beauharnais's album there is a photograph of the cross and the shade of boughs above the grave of Marina’s dear housekeeper, Anna Pimenovna Nepraslinov:
Another girl (Blanche!) stooping and squatting exactly like Ada (and indeed not unlike her in features) over Van’s valise opened on the floor, and ‘eating with her eyes’ the silhouette of Ivory Revery in a perfume advertisement. Then the cross and the shade of boughs above the grave of Marina’s dear housekeeper, Anna Pimenovna Nepraslinov (1797–1883). (2.7)
As she speaks to Onegin, Princess N (Tatiana Larin's married name in Chapter Eight of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin) mentions a cross and the shade of branches over the grave of her nurse:
«А мне, Онегин, пышность эта,
Постылой жизни мишура,
Мои успехи в вихре света,
Мой модный дом и вечера,
Что в них? Сейчас отдать я рада
Всю эту ветошь маскарада,
Весь этот блеск, и шум, и чад
За полку книг, за дикий сад,
За наше бедное жилище,
За те места, где в первый раз,
Онегин, встретила я вас,
Да за смиренное кладбище,
Где нынче крест и тень ветвей
Над бедной нянею моей…"
“But as to me, Onegin, this magnificence,
a wearisome life's tinsel, my successes
in the world's vortex,
my fashionable house and evenings,
what do I care for them?... At once I'd gladly
give all the frippery of this masquerade,
all this glitter, and noise, and fumes,
for a shelfful of books, for a wild garden,
for our poor dwelling,
for those haunts where for the first time,
Onegin, I saw you,
and for the humble churchyard where
there is a cross now and the shade
of branches over my poor nurse." (Eight: XLVI)
There is Praslin in Nepraslinov, a surname that seems to hint at napraslina (Russ., wrong accusation, slander). On the other hand, Nepraslinov brings to mind Pushkin's poem Dar naprasnyi, dar sluchaynyi (Vain gift, chance gift):
Дар напрасный, дар случайный,
Жизнь, зачем ты мне дана?
Иль зачем судьбою тайной
Ты на казнь осуждена?
Кто меня враждебной властью
Из ничтожества воззвал,
Душу мне наполнил страстью,
Ум сомненьем взволновал?..
Цели нет передо мною:
Сердце пусто, празден ум,
И томит меня тоскою
Однозвучный жизни шум.
A gift in vain, a gift by chance,
O Life, why have you been given to me?
And why have you been sentenced to death
By the secret fate?
Who has called me forth from nothingness
By his hostile power,
And filled my soul with suffering
And my mind with anguishing doubt?...
There is no goal before me:
My heart is empty, my mind lies idle,
And the monotonous din of life
torments me with anguish.
Pushkin's poem is dated "May 26, 1828" (the poet's twenty-ninth birthday). At the family dinner Demon asks Ada what she would like for her sixteenth birthday:
The roast hazel-hen (or rather its New World representative, locally called ‘mountain grouse’) was accompanied by preserved lingonberries (locally called ‘mountain cranberries’). An especially succulent morsel of one of those brown little fowls yielded a globule of birdshot between Demon’s red tongue and strong canine: ‘La fève de Diane,’ he remarked, placing it carefully on the edge of his plate. ‘How is the car situation, Van?’
‘Vague. I ordered a Roseley like yours but it won’t be delivered before Christmas. I tried to find a Silentium with a side car and could not, because of the war, though what connection exists between wars and motorcycles is a mystery. But we manage, Ada and I, we manage, we ride, we bike, we even jikker.’
‘I wonder,’ said sly Demon, ‘why I’m reminded all at once of our great Canadian’s lovely lines about blushing Irène:
‘Le feu si délicat de la virginité
Qui something sur son front...
‘All right. You can ship mine to England, provided —’
‘By the way, Demon,’ interrupted Marina, ‘where and how can I obtain the kind of old roomy limousine with an old professional chauffeur that Praskovia, for instance, has had for years?’
‘Impossible, my dear, they are all in heaven or on Terra. But what would Ada like, what would my silent love like for her birthday? It’s next Saturday, po razschyotu po moemu (by my reckoning), isn’t it? Une rivière de diamants?’
‘Protestuyu!’ cried Marina. ‘Yes, I’m speaking seriozno. I object to your giving her kvaka sesva (quoi que ce soit), Dan and I will take care of all that.’
‘Besides you’ll forget,’ said Ada laughing, and very deftly showed the tip of her tongue to Van who had been on the lookout for her conditional reaction to ‘diamonds.’
Van asked: ‘Provided what?’
‘Provided you don’t have one waiting already for you in George’s Garage, Ranta Road.’
‘Ada, you’ll be jikkering alone soon,’ he continued, ‘I’m going to have Mascodagama round out his vacation in Paris. Qui something sur son front, en accuse la beauté!’ (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): pravda: Russ., it’s true.
gelinotte: hazel-hen.
le feu etc.: the so delicate fire of virginity
that on her brow...
po razschyotu po moemu: an allusion to Famusov (in Griboedov’s Gore ot uma), calculating the pregnancy of a lady friend.
protestuyu: Russ., I protest.
seriozno: Russ., seriously.
quoi que ce soit: whatever it might be.
en accuse etc.: ...brings out its beauty.
Demon does not suspect that his life is already sentenced to death and that one day he will become a victim of Ada's vindictiveness. In March 1905 Van's and Ada's father perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to pesuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. Demon learns about his children's affair by chance, thanks to Daniel Veen's Boschean death. During one of their meetings in Mont Roux, in October 1905, Van tells Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) that, as far as they are concerned, Demon was buried on the same day as their uncle Dan:
‘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.’ (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.
N’a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.