Onboard Admiral Tobakoff (a liner on which they cross the Atlantic) Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette asks Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) whom did 'Miss Condor' (a tall mulatto girl who approached Van) look like:
They examined without much interest the objects of pleasure in a display window. Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swimsuit. The presence of a riding crop and a pickax puzzled Van. Half a dozen glossy-jacketed copies of Salzman were impressively heaped between a picture of the handsome, thoughtful, now totally forgotten, author and a Mingo-Bingo vase of immortelles.
He clutched at a red rope and they entered the lounge.
‘Whom did she look like?’ asked Lucette. ‘En laid et en lard?’
‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘Whom?’
‘Skip it,’ she said. ‘You’re mine tonight. Mine, mine, mine!’
She was quoting Kipling — the same phrase that Ada used to address to Dack. He cast around for a straw of Procrustean procrastination. (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): en laid et en lard: in an ugly and fleshy version.
The schoolboy Paduk (in VN's novel Bend Sinister, 1947, the dictator of Padukgrad) resembled en laid the wax schoolboys in the shop windows of tailors:
It is not known how the nickname 'toad' originated, for there was nothing in his face suggestive of that animal. It was an odd face with all its features ill their proper position but somehow diffuse and abnormal as if the little fellow had undergone one of those facial operations when the skin is borrowed from some other part of the body. The impression was due perhaps to the motionless cast of his features: he never laughed and when he happened to sneeze he had a way of doing it with a minimum of contraction and no sound at all. His small dead-white nose and neat blue galatea made him resemble en laid the wax schoolboys in the shop windows of tailors, but his hips were much plumper than those of mannikins, and he walked with a slight waddle and wore sandals which used to provoke a good deal of caustic comment. Once, when he was being badly mauled it was discovered that he had right against the skin a green undershirt, green as a billiard cloth and apparently made of the same texture. His hands were permanently clammy. He spoke in a curiously smooth nasal voice with a strong north-western accent and had an irritating trick of calling his classmates by anagrams of their names — Adam Krug for instance was Gumakrad or Dramaguk; this he did not from any sense of humour, which he totally lacked, but because, as he carefully explained to new boys, one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed. (Chapter 5)
Mannikins bring to mind the farmannikin (a special kind of box kite) mentioned by Van when he describes his first arrival at Ardis:
None of the family was at home when Van arrived. A servant in waiting took his horse. He entered the Gothic archway of the hall where Bouteillan, the old bald butler who unprofessionally now wore a mustache (dyed a rich gravy brown), met him with gested delight — he had once been the valet of Van’s father — ‘Je parie,’ he said, ‘que Monsieur ne me reconnaît pas,’ and proceeded to remind Van of what Van had already recollected unaided, the farmannikin (a special kind of box kite, untraceable nowadays even in the greatest museums housing the toys of the past) which Bouteillan had helped him to fly one day in a meadow dotted with buttercups. Both looked up: the tiny red rectangle hung for an instant askew in a blue spring sky. The hall was famous for its painted ceilings. It was too early for tea: Would Van like him or a maid to unpack? Oh, one of the maids, said Van, wondering briefly what item in a schoolboy’s luggage might be supposed to shock a housemaid. The picture of naked Ivory Revery (a model)? Who cared, now that he was a man? (1.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Je parie, etc.: I bet you do not recognize me, Sir.
“Farmannikin” blends Farman (Henri Farman, an Anglo-French aviator, 1874-1958) with mannikin. Bryusov's poem Komu-to ("To Someone," 1908) begins as follows:
Фарман, иль Райт, иль кто б ты ни был!
Farman, or Wright, or whoever you are!
In his poem Bryusov mentions Dedal (Daedalus, an Athenian architect who built the labyrinth for Minos and made wings for himself and his son Icarus to escape from Crete):
Наш век вновь в Дедала поверил
Our century began to believe in Daedalus again.
Van’s and Ada’s father, Demon Veen ("Dementiy Labirintovich," as Ada's husband calls him) is the son of Dedalus Veen (1799-1883). While Bouteillan helped Van to fly the farmannikin, grandfather Dedalus Veen helped him to learn to man the Magicarpets:
What pleasure (thus in the MS.). The pleasure of suddenly discovering the right knack of topsy turvy locomotion was rather like learning to man, after many a painful and ignominious fall, those delightful gliders called Magicarpets (or ‘jikkers’) that were given a boy on his twelfth birthday in the adventurous days before the Great Reaction — and then what a breathtaking long neural caress when one became airborne for the first time and managed to skim over a haystack, a tree, a burn, a barn, while Grandfather Dedalus Veen, running with upturned face, flourished a flag and fell into the horsepond. (1.13)
At the picnic on Ada's twelfth birthday (when Van walks on his hands for the first time) Ada and Grace Erminin play anagrams:
But whatever wrath there hung in the air, it soon subsided. Ada asked her governess for pencils and paper. Lying on his stomach, leaning his cheek on his hand, Van looked at his love’s inclined neck as she played anagrams with Grace, who had innocently suggested ‘insect.’
‘Scient,’ said Ada, writing it down.
‘Oh no!’ objected Grace.
‘Oh yes! I’m sure it exists. He is a great scient. Dr Entsic was scient in insects.’
Grace meditated, tapping her puckered brow with the eraser end of the pencil, and came up with:
‘Nicest!’
‘Incest,’ said Ada instantly.
‘I give up,’ said Grace. ‘We need a dictionary to check your little inventions.’ (ibd.)
On the morning after Van's first night in "Ardis the Second" Ada calls Van "sinister insister:"
What had she actually done with the poor worms, after Krolik’s untimely end?
‘Oh, set them free’ (big vague gesture), ‘turned them out, put them back onto suitable plants, buried them in the pupal state, told them to run along, while the birds were not looking — or alas, feigning not to be looking.
‘Well, to mop up that parable, because you have the knack of interrupting and diverting my thoughts, I’m in a sense also torn between three private tortures, the main torture being ambition, of course. I know I shall never be a biologist, my passion for creeping creatures is great, but not all-consuming. I know I shall always adore orchids and mushrooms and violets, and you will still see me going out alone, to wander alone in the woods and return alone with a little lone lily; but flowers, no matter how irresistible, must be given up, too, as soon as I have the strength. Remains the great ambition and the greatest terror: the dream of the bluest, remotest, hardest dramatic climbs — probably ending as one of a hundred old spider spinsters, teaching drama students, knowing, that, as you insist, sinister insister, we can’t marry, and having always before me the awful example of pathetic, second-rate, brave Marina.’
‘Well, that bit about spinsters is rot,’ said Van, ‘we’ll pull it off somehow, we’ll become more and more distant relations in artistically forged papers and finally dwindle to mere namesakes, or at the worst we shall live quietly, you as my housekeeper, I as your epileptic, and then, as in your Chekhov, "we shall see the whole sky swarm with diamonds."’
‘Did you find them all, Uncle Van?’ she inquired, sighing, laying her dolent head on his shoulder. She had told him everything. (1.31)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Uncle Van: allusion to a line in Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya: We shall see the sky swarming with diamonds.
Ada's dream of the bluest, remotest, hardest dramatic climbs makes one think of Dramaguk (as Paduk calls Adam Krug).
"Miss Condor" (a play on con d'or) brings to mind Bryusov's poem Kondor (1921). In Marina Tsvetaev’s memoir essay on Bryusov, Geroy truda (“The Hero of Toil,” 1925), Marina’s eight-year-old daughter Alya (Ariadna Efron) compares Bryusov to Shere Khan (the tiger in Kipling's Jungle Book), and Adelina Adalis (Bryusov's mistress) to a young wolf from Shere Khan's retinue:
Москва, начало декабря 1920 г.
Несколько дней спустя, читая "Джунгли".
— Марина! Вы знаете — кто Шер-Хан? — Брюсов! — Тоже хромой и одинокий, и у него там тоже Адалис. (Приводит:) «А старый Шер-Хан ходил и открыто принимал лесть»… Я так в этом узнала Брюсова! А Адалис — приблуда, из молодых волков.
In her memoir essay Marina Tsvetaev says that Bryusov was trizhdy rimlyanin (a triple Roman):
Три слова являют нам Брюсова: воля, вол, волк. Триединство не только звуковое - смысловое: и воля - Рим, и вол - Рим, и волк - Рим. Трижды римлянином был Валерий Брюсов: волей и волом - в поэзии, волком (homo homini lupus est) в жизни.
A waiter at ‘Monaco’ who tells Demon that Van had lived with his mistress (Ada) all winter, Valerio (Bryusov's namesake) is an elderly Roman. The Latin alphabet is composed of twenty-five letters (in the classical Latin alphabet the letter W did not exist). According to Paduk, one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed.
Paduk's sandals (which used to provoke a good deal of caustic comment) make one think of paduka, an ancient form of footwear in India, consisting of a sole with a post and knob which is positioned between the big and second toe. On the other hand, the name Paduk seems to hint at pauk (Russian for "spider"). Ada fears that she may end up as one of a hundred old spider spinsters, teaching drama students. Bagheera is a genus of jumping spiders (native to South America) within the family Salticidae. The genus was first described by George Peckham & Elizabeth Peckham in 1896. The name is derived from Bagheera, the black panther in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. In Kim Beauharnais's album there is a photograph of Karol, or Karapars ("black panther"), Krolik (a doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey), Dr. Krolik's brother who was Ada's first lover.
In a letter of Aug. 24, 19o5, to Georgiy Chulkov Bryusov says that he is mortally afraid of spiders:
Вы правы. Патриотизмом, и именно географическим, я страдаю. Это моя болезнь, с разными другими причудами вкуса, наравне с моей боязнью пауков (я в обморок падаю при виде паука, как институтка).
In the same letter to Chulkov Bryusov mentions his article Fialki v tigele ("Violets in a Crucible," 1905):
Жду Вашего ответа на свои "Фиалки" (печатного, не правда ли?).
At the beginning of his article Bryusov quotes the words of P. B. Shelley in his essay A Defense of Poetry (1821):
"Стремиться передать создания поэта с одного языка на другой, — это то же самое, как если бы мы бросили в тигель фиалку, с целью открыть основной принцип ее красок и запаха. Растение должно возникнуть вновь из собственного семени, или оно не даст цветка, — в этом-то и заключается тяжесть проклятия вавилонского смешения языков".
“Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower – and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.”
The characters in Ada include Violet Knox, old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka (Little Violet) and who marries Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary, the editor of Ada) after Van's and Ada's death:
Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with us in 1957. She was (and still is — ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump [.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has been responsible for typing out this memoir — the solace of what are, no doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother’s children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her [generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her ‘Fialochka’ and allowed herself the luxury of admiring ‘little Violet’ ‘s cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner, lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated had it arisen twenty years earlier. (5.4)
Bryusov's collection Sem' tsvetov radugi ("Seven Colors of Rainbow," 1912-15) begins with Orange and ends in Violet. Nochnaya fialka (“The Night Violet,” 1906) is a poem (subtitled “A Dream”) by Alexander Blok. Blok's cycle Vol'nye mysli ("Free Thoughts," 1907) is dedicated to Georgiy Chulkov.
In her old age Ada amuses herself by translating (for the Oranger editions en regard) Griboyedov into French and English, Baudelaire into English and Russian, and John Shade into Russian and French:
Ada, who amused herself by translating (for the Oranger editions en regard) Griboyedov into French and English, Baudelaire into English and Russian, and John Shade into Russian and French, often read to Van, in a deep mediumesque voice, the published versions made by other workers in that field of semiconsciousness. The verse translations in English were especially liable to distend Van’s face in a grotesque grin which made him look, when he was not wearing his dental plates, exactly like a Greek comedial mask. He could not tell who disgusted him more: the well-meaning mediocrity, whose attempts at fidelity were thwarted by lack of artistic insight as well as by hilarious errors of textual interpretation, or the professional poet who embellished with his own inventions the dead and helpless author (whiskers here, private parts there) — a method that nicely camouflaged the paraphrast’s ignorance of the From language by having the bloomers of inept scholarship blend with the whims of flowery imitation. (ibid.)
Because love is blind, Van fails to see that Andrey Vinelander (Ada's husband) and Ada have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox are Ada’s grandchildren. Nor does Van realize that his father died (in March 1905 Demon Veen 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 persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair.