Subject
in vino veritas
From
Date
Body
[Demon to Van:] 'A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I've managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar - flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk - she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel a trois to Ladore, because I don't think -'
Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? (Ada, 2.10)
Tsitsikar (the Russian spelling of Qiqihar, a city in NE China) is mentioned by Dr Chebutykin, a character in Chekhov's play The Three Sisters (1901):
ЧЕБУТЫКИН (читает газету). Цицикар. Здесь свирепствует оспа.
CHEBUTYKIN [reads from the newspaper]. Tsitsikar. Smallpox is raging here. (Act Two)
Ospa (smallpox) brings to mind Dr Stella Ospenko and her ospedale: The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he [Demon] gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina's pretentious ciel-etoile 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). (1.38)
Marina's pleureuses (widow's weeds) remind one of her words to Van in Ardis the Second: 'And your costume, though very becoming, is, in a sense, traurniy (funerary). I'm spouting drivel. Forgive me these idiotic tears... Tell me, is there anything I could do for you? Do think up something! Would you like a beautiful, practically new Peruvian scarf, which he [Pedro] left behind, that crazy boy? No? It's not your style? Now go. And remember - not a word to poor Mlle Lariviere, who means well!' (1.37)
Marina seems to have le vin triste again: The novelist [Mlle Lariviere], who was now quite restored, but still in flowery neglige, had just finished reading her new story in its first fair copy (to be typed on the morrow) to Tokay-sipping Marina, who had le vin triste and was much affected by the suicide of the gentleman 'au cou rouge et puissant de veuf encore plein de seve' who, frightened by his victim's fright, so to speak, had compressed too hard the throat of the little girl he had raped in a moment of "gloutonnerie impardonnable." (1.24)
When Dr Chebutykin gets drunk (The Three Sisters, Act Three), Kulygin (Masha's husband, the teacher of classical languages) quotes a Latin saying:
KULYGIN [laughs]. You've been hitting the bottle, Ivan Romanych! [Slaps him on the shoulder.] Bravo! In vino veritas, the ancients used to say.
On Antiterra Chekhov's play is known as Four Sisters (2.1). In a Hollywood movie based on it Marina has been cast as the deaf nun Varvara (who, in some ways, is the most interesting of Chekhov's Four Sisters) As to Marina's daughter, Ada played Irina on the modest stage of the Yakima Academy of Drama in a somewhat abridged version which, for example, kept only the references to Sister Varvara, the garrulous originalka ('odd female' - as Marsha calls her) but eliminated her actual scenes, so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters, as indeed it appeared in the wittier of the local notices. (2.9)
Upset about Ada's coldness, Van recites Tuzenbakh's last words to Irina in The Three Sisters: 'Tuzenbakh, not knowing what to say: "I have not had coffee today. Tell them to make me some." Quickly walks away.' (1.37)
Just as Van imagines that he resembles Baron Tuzenbakh, Solyony (the bretteur who in the last Act kills Tuzenbakh in a duel) imagines that he resembles Lermontov (the author of Demon who died in a duel).
Solyonyi means "salty." Marina had a secret fondness for salty jokes:
'Incidentally,' observed Marina, 'I hope dear Ida [Mlle Lariviere] will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can't be made to recite French poetry.'
'If she protests,' said Vronsky, 'she can go and stick a telegraph pole - where it belongs.'
The indecent 'telegraph' caused Marina, who had a secret fondness for salty jokes, to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis' so smehu vrode Adi): 'But let's be serious, I still don't see how and why his wife - I mean the second guy's wife - accepts the situation (polozhenie).'
Vronsky spread his fingers and toes.
'Prichyom tut polozhenie (situation-shituation)?
In Russian, polozhenie (situation) also means "pregnancy." Marina arrived in Nice a few days after the duel, and tracked Demon down in his villa Armina, and in the ecstasy of reconciliation neither remembered to dupe procreation, whereupon started the extremely interesnoe polozhenie ('interesting condition') without which, in fact, these anguished notes could not have been strung. (1.2)
Van and Ada are the children of Demon and Marina. According to a Russian saying, yabloko ot yabloni nedaleko padaet ("an apple falls near the apple tree;" in other words: like mother, like child). Yabloko (apple) has Blok in it. In Blok's poem Neznakomka (Incognita, 1906) p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov (drunks with the eyes of rabbits) cry out: In vino veritas!
Dr Krolik is Ada's teacher of natural history (it seems that his brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik, a doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey (2.8), was Ada's first lover). At the family dinner (1.38) Demon mentions Dr Krolik and chelovek (a servant) s glazami (with the eyes):
'Marina,' murmured Demon at the close of the first course. 'Marina,' he repeated louder. 'Far from me' (a locution he favored) 'to criticize Dan's taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I'm above all that rot, I'm...' (gesture); 'but, my dear,' he continued, switching to Russian, 'the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki - the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) -'
'Everybody has eyes,' remarked Marina drily.
'Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that's not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odishka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It's depressing. It's a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.'
'Look, Dad,' said Van, 'Dr Krolik can't do much, because, as you know quite well, he's dead, and Marina can't tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they're alive.'
Chelovek is Russian for "human being." In her last note to Van poor mad Aqua (Marina's twin sister who was made to believe that Van is her son) wrote: Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but 'a tit of it' as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. (1.3)
Chtoby letela sherst' klokami (to make animal hair fly in flocks) is a line in Kunyaev's poem Dobro dolzhno byt' s kulakami... ("Good should have fists..." 1959). In Turkic languages kulak (Russ., "fist") means "ear." The readers of Ilf and Petrov know that uzun kulak ("long ear") is Kazakh for "telegraph." And the readers of Jules Verne know that Uzun Ada (a sea port on the Caspian) means "long island." Ada, who at the age of ten or eleven had read Captain Grant's Microgalaxies (known on Terra as Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, by Jules Verne), after a three-volume History of Prostitution and Hamlet (1.35), would know it! In one of her letters to Van (2.1) Ada invites him to Captain's Grant Horn, a Villa in Verna (in Russian, verna means "faithful"):
Take the fastest flying machine you can rent straight to El Paso, your Ada will be waiting for you there, waving like mad, and we'll continue, by the New World Express, in a suite I'll obtain, to the burning tip of Patagonia, Captain Grant's Horn, a Villa in Verna, my jewel, my agony.
As he talks to Van before the family dinner (1.38), Demon makes an unintentional pun:
He inserted his monocle and examined the bottles: 'By the way, son, do you crave any of these aperitifs? My father allowed me Lilletovka and that Illinois Brat - awful bilge, antranou svadi, as Marina would say. I suspect your uncle has a cache behind the solanders in his study and keeps there a finer whisky than this usque ad Russkum. Well, let us have the cognac, as planned, unless you are a filius aquae?'
(No pun intended, but one gets carried away and goofs.)
'Oh, I prefer claret. I'll concentrate (nalyagu) on the Latour later on. No, I'm certainly no T-totaler, and besides the Ardis tap water is not recommended!'
In a letter of Nov. 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov complains about the absense of alcohol in the works of contemporary artists: "You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade [Chekhov's story "Ward No. 6"], and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is lacking in our productions—the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state that very well... We lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line's being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you..."
In a letter of July 24, 1891, to Suvorin Chekhov asks his correspondent if the poet Merezhkovski (whom Chekhov and Suvorin had met in Venice) and his muse (the poet Zinaida Hippius) are still abroad: И неужели поэт Мережковский и его муза ещё за границею? Ах, ах!
In a letter of February 5, 1893, to Suvorin Chekhov criticizes Merezhkovski's play Proshla groza (The Thuderstorm Passed), in which the situation in the author's family is described: В январской книжке "Труда" напечатана пьеса Мережковского "Гроза прошла". Если не хватит времени и охоты прочесть всю пьесу, то вкусите один только конец, где Мережковский перещеголял даже Жана Щеглова. Литературное ханжество самое скверное ханжество. According to Chekhov, literary hypocrisy is the worst kind of hypocrisy.
Despite its "Permic" name, Tsitsikar is in China. In his essay Gryadushchiy Kham (The Future Ham, 1906) Merezhkovski agrees with Herzen who agrees with J. S. Mill that Europe can turn into China soon:
Герцен соглашается с Миллем: "Если в Европе не произойдёт какой-нибудь неожиданный переворот, который возродит человеческую личность и даст ей силу победить мещанство, то, несмотря на свои благородные антецеденты и своё христианство, Европа сделается Китаем".
In another essay, Prorok russkoy revolyutsii (The Prophet of Russian Revolution, on the 25th anniversary of Dostoevski's death), Merezhkovski speaks of demonocracy (as opposed to theocracy):
В первом случае "государство" понимается как царство Божие, как теократия, то есть безгранично свободная, любовная общественность, отрицающая всякую внешнюю насильственную власть и, следовательно, как нечто не похожее ни на одну из доныне существовавших в истории государственных форм; во втором случае "государство" разумеется как внешняя насильственная власть, как царство от мира сего, царство дьявола - демонократия.
Antiterra (Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) is also known as Demonia.
Alexey Sklyarenko (who apologizes for his repetitiousness)
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Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? (Ada, 2.10)
Tsitsikar (the Russian spelling of Qiqihar, a city in NE China) is mentioned by Dr Chebutykin, a character in Chekhov's play The Three Sisters (1901):
ЧЕБУТЫКИН (читает газету). Цицикар. Здесь свирепствует оспа.
CHEBUTYKIN [reads from the newspaper]. Tsitsikar. Smallpox is raging here. (Act Two)
Ospa (smallpox) brings to mind Dr Stella Ospenko and her ospedale: The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he [Demon] gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina's pretentious ciel-etoile 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). (1.38)
Marina's pleureuses (widow's weeds) remind one of her words to Van in Ardis the Second: 'And your costume, though very becoming, is, in a sense, traurniy (funerary). I'm spouting drivel. Forgive me these idiotic tears... Tell me, is there anything I could do for you? Do think up something! Would you like a beautiful, practically new Peruvian scarf, which he [Pedro] left behind, that crazy boy? No? It's not your style? Now go. And remember - not a word to poor Mlle Lariviere, who means well!' (1.37)
Marina seems to have le vin triste again: The novelist [Mlle Lariviere], who was now quite restored, but still in flowery neglige, had just finished reading her new story in its first fair copy (to be typed on the morrow) to Tokay-sipping Marina, who had le vin triste and was much affected by the suicide of the gentleman 'au cou rouge et puissant de veuf encore plein de seve' who, frightened by his victim's fright, so to speak, had compressed too hard the throat of the little girl he had raped in a moment of "gloutonnerie impardonnable." (1.24)
When Dr Chebutykin gets drunk (The Three Sisters, Act Three), Kulygin (Masha's husband, the teacher of classical languages) quotes a Latin saying:
KULYGIN [laughs]. You've been hitting the bottle, Ivan Romanych! [Slaps him on the shoulder.] Bravo! In vino veritas, the ancients used to say.
On Antiterra Chekhov's play is known as Four Sisters (2.1). In a Hollywood movie based on it Marina has been cast as the deaf nun Varvara (who, in some ways, is the most interesting of Chekhov's Four Sisters) As to Marina's daughter, Ada played Irina on the modest stage of the Yakima Academy of Drama in a somewhat abridged version which, for example, kept only the references to Sister Varvara, the garrulous originalka ('odd female' - as Marsha calls her) but eliminated her actual scenes, so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters, as indeed it appeared in the wittier of the local notices. (2.9)
Upset about Ada's coldness, Van recites Tuzenbakh's last words to Irina in The Three Sisters: 'Tuzenbakh, not knowing what to say: "I have not had coffee today. Tell them to make me some." Quickly walks away.' (1.37)
Just as Van imagines that he resembles Baron Tuzenbakh, Solyony (the bretteur who in the last Act kills Tuzenbakh in a duel) imagines that he resembles Lermontov (the author of Demon who died in a duel).
Solyonyi means "salty." Marina had a secret fondness for salty jokes:
'Incidentally,' observed Marina, 'I hope dear Ida [Mlle Lariviere] will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can't be made to recite French poetry.'
'If she protests,' said Vronsky, 'she can go and stick a telegraph pole - where it belongs.'
The indecent 'telegraph' caused Marina, who had a secret fondness for salty jokes, to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis' so smehu vrode Adi): 'But let's be serious, I still don't see how and why his wife - I mean the second guy's wife - accepts the situation (polozhenie).'
Vronsky spread his fingers and toes.
'Prichyom tut polozhenie (situation-shituation)?
In Russian, polozhenie (situation) also means "pregnancy." Marina arrived in Nice a few days after the duel, and tracked Demon down in his villa Armina, and in the ecstasy of reconciliation neither remembered to dupe procreation, whereupon started the extremely interesnoe polozhenie ('interesting condition') without which, in fact, these anguished notes could not have been strung. (1.2)
Van and Ada are the children of Demon and Marina. According to a Russian saying, yabloko ot yabloni nedaleko padaet ("an apple falls near the apple tree;" in other words: like mother, like child). Yabloko (apple) has Blok in it. In Blok's poem Neznakomka (Incognita, 1906) p'yanitsy s glazami krolikov (drunks with the eyes of rabbits) cry out: In vino veritas!
Dr Krolik is Ada's teacher of natural history (it seems that his brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik, a doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey (2.8), was Ada's first lover). At the family dinner (1.38) Demon mentions Dr Krolik and chelovek (a servant) s glazami (with the eyes):
'Marina,' murmured Demon at the close of the first course. 'Marina,' he repeated louder. 'Far from me' (a locution he favored) 'to criticize Dan's taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I'm above all that rot, I'm...' (gesture); 'but, my dear,' he continued, switching to Russian, 'the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki - the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) -'
'Everybody has eyes,' remarked Marina drily.
'Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that's not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odishka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It's depressing. It's a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.'
'Look, Dad,' said Van, 'Dr Krolik can't do much, because, as you know quite well, he's dead, and Marina can't tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they're alive.'
Chelovek is Russian for "human being." In her last note to Van poor mad Aqua (Marina's twin sister who was made to believe that Van is her son) wrote: Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but 'a tit of it' as poor Ruby, my little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. (1.3)
Chtoby letela sherst' klokami (to make animal hair fly in flocks) is a line in Kunyaev's poem Dobro dolzhno byt' s kulakami... ("Good should have fists..." 1959). In Turkic languages kulak (Russ., "fist") means "ear." The readers of Ilf and Petrov know that uzun kulak ("long ear") is Kazakh for "telegraph." And the readers of Jules Verne know that Uzun Ada (a sea port on the Caspian) means "long island." Ada, who at the age of ten or eleven had read Captain Grant's Microgalaxies (known on Terra as Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, by Jules Verne), after a three-volume History of Prostitution and Hamlet (1.35), would know it! In one of her letters to Van (2.1) Ada invites him to Captain's Grant Horn, a Villa in Verna (in Russian, verna means "faithful"):
Take the fastest flying machine you can rent straight to El Paso, your Ada will be waiting for you there, waving like mad, and we'll continue, by the New World Express, in a suite I'll obtain, to the burning tip of Patagonia, Captain Grant's Horn, a Villa in Verna, my jewel, my agony.
As he talks to Van before the family dinner (1.38), Demon makes an unintentional pun:
He inserted his monocle and examined the bottles: 'By the way, son, do you crave any of these aperitifs? My father allowed me Lilletovka and that Illinois Brat - awful bilge, antranou svadi, as Marina would say. I suspect your uncle has a cache behind the solanders in his study and keeps there a finer whisky than this usque ad Russkum. Well, let us have the cognac, as planned, unless you are a filius aquae?'
(No pun intended, but one gets carried away and goofs.)
'Oh, I prefer claret. I'll concentrate (nalyagu) on the Latour later on. No, I'm certainly no T-totaler, and besides the Ardis tap water is not recommended!'
In a letter of Nov. 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov complains about the absense of alcohol in the works of contemporary artists: "You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade [Chekhov's story "Ward No. 6"], and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it. That is just what is lacking in our productions—the alcohol which could intoxicate and subjugate, and you state that very well... We lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line's being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you..."
In a letter of July 24, 1891, to Suvorin Chekhov asks his correspondent if the poet Merezhkovski (whom Chekhov and Suvorin had met in Venice) and his muse (the poet Zinaida Hippius) are still abroad: И неужели поэт Мережковский и его муза ещё за границею? Ах, ах!
In a letter of February 5, 1893, to Suvorin Chekhov criticizes Merezhkovski's play Proshla groza (The Thuderstorm Passed), in which the situation in the author's family is described: В январской книжке "Труда" напечатана пьеса Мережковского "Гроза прошла". Если не хватит времени и охоты прочесть всю пьесу, то вкусите один только конец, где Мережковский перещеголял даже Жана Щеглова. Литературное ханжество самое скверное ханжество. According to Chekhov, literary hypocrisy is the worst kind of hypocrisy.
Despite its "Permic" name, Tsitsikar is in China. In his essay Gryadushchiy Kham (The Future Ham, 1906) Merezhkovski agrees with Herzen who agrees with J. S. Mill that Europe can turn into China soon:
Герцен соглашается с Миллем: "Если в Европе не произойдёт какой-нибудь неожиданный переворот, который возродит человеческую личность и даст ей силу победить мещанство, то, несмотря на свои благородные антецеденты и своё христианство, Европа сделается Китаем".
In another essay, Prorok russkoy revolyutsii (The Prophet of Russian Revolution, on the 25th anniversary of Dostoevski's death), Merezhkovski speaks of demonocracy (as opposed to theocracy):
В первом случае "государство" понимается как царство Божие, как теократия, то есть безгранично свободная, любовная общественность, отрицающая всякую внешнюю насильственную власть и, следовательно, как нечто не похожее ни на одну из доныне существовавших в истории государственных форм; во втором случае "государство" разумеется как внешняя насильственная власть, как царство от мира сего, царство дьявола - демонократия.
Antiterra (Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) is also known as Demonia.
Alexey Sklyarenko (who apologizes for his repetitiousness)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/