In the spring of 1966, while his work on Ada was progressing, Nabokov and his wife Véra visited Pompeii and the Museo Nazionale in Naples. “There,” writes Brian Boyd in his biography, “Nabokov saw the famous Stabian fresco of a girl strewing flowers, and knew he had to place her in Ada’s opening chapter” (VNAY 512). The many allusions to Pompeii in Ada, its murals and its history, have precedents in Nabokov’s oeuvre. In Glory, Martin, the protagonist, concocts a story about visiting Naples to impress a girl he spends a night with. His friend Darwin is seen at a costumed dance wearing “a tropical helmet with a bandana to protect the nape from a Pompeiian sun” (51, 99). And in 1954, when interrupted by a singing cicada, Nabokov treats his class to an impromptu lecture on this insect and “its appearance in art--the mosaics of Pompeii!--and literature” (VNAY 260).
The reputation of Pompeii became widespread in Russia with the 1833 exhibition of The Last Day of Pompeii, a painting by the Russian artist Karl Briullov. A large canvas, 4.5 x 6.5 metres, it has long belonged to the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg where Nabokov could not have missed it. Briullov was an acquaintance of Pushkin (as was Karl’s brother Alexander who painted the famous watercolour of Pushkin’s wife Natalya [T.J. Binyon, Pushkin. A Biography. London: Harpers Collins, 2003, 389; 534]). Nikolay Gogol called the painting “one of the most important events of the 19thcentury” (quoted in Judith Harris, Pompeii Awakened. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007, 165). The fear of a flood that loomed as a threat to St. Petersburg, like the one described in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, prompted Alexander Herzen’s dictum “Pompeii is the muse of St. Petersburg” (Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance. London: Penguin Books, 2002, 420). Briullov’s painting inspired Edward Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, written in Naples, which became the world’s second best-selling novel (Walter Scott’s Waverley being the first) (Harris 168). Many movies were based on Lytton’s novel, such as the one that Nina Berberova reports seeing in Berlin in the winter of 1923-4, together with friends and her lover Vladislav Khodasevich (The Italics Are Mine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991, 183).
- Pompeii and Eric Veen’s “Essay”
In Strong Opinions Nabokov presents the text of Ada’s “first throb, the strange nucleus of the book that was to grow around it,” that “exists as an inset scene right in the middle of the novel” (310. See Ada 356-8). This text is a dream within a dream: Van dreams that someone called Eric Veen writes an essay called “Villa Venus: an Organized Dream” (346, 348). In his essay, Eric Veen designs the Villa Venus Club, a chain of ornamental bordellos with exquisite courtesans serving its exclusive clientele. Behind this façade a criminal organization is run: children are kidnapped and held captive to be abused and molested by club members. That their “victims had to be hospitalized and removed” (356) suggests that the members’ ruthless bestiality was tolerated rather than curbed. Eventually the children “die,” are killed (“throttled”) or have to be “destroyed” (357; 356; 355).
This club has several similarities to the sexual practices in Pompeii. The society of this ancient city was not very attractive. Its affluence was based on slavery. While their masters lived in “opulent villas” leading “notorious” lives of “orgies” and “drunken beach parties,” the slaves were treated with “careless brutality” (Alex Butterworth & Ray Laurence, Pompeii. The Living City. London: Phoenix, 2005, 71; 66; 75). Sexual violence was valued as “a kind of perverse praiseworthiness” (154). Mural paintings of “orgies and bestiality” were commonplace (152). Slave girls and boys, sometimes kidnapped by slave traders, were exploited savagely and sadistically (74, 165). The name of Villa Venus resembles that of the Temple of Venus, Pompeii’s most prominent building (39). “The Shell Pink Book” (Ada 349) refers to the mural of Venus in the Pompeiian “House of Venus in the Shell,” while the Club’s “system of bells” (351) that Eric Veen has invented is a replica of the “tintinnabula” of Pompeii (Anna Ljunggren, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada: In the ‘Crystal Ball’ of Transcultural Utopia.” Slavic and East European Journal, 62, 3 [2018]: 549-565, 562). That children in the Villa Venus Club have to remain undressed in order to be “ready for love” (349) recalls Horace’s preferred practice, when bothered by lustful whims, to have “a slave girl or homebred slave boy at hand” who make “sex [...] easy and obtainable” (Butterworth & Laurence 158).
2 Flora
Throughout all times volcanic eruptions like that of Vesuvius have been linked to sin and hell (Harris 22, 119, 199). The references to Pompeii in Ada might be compared to those in Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. The third panel depicts Hell with many grisly scenes, its upper half showing houses burning ferociously and mountains blasting infernal fires. The middle panel shows numerous men and women entangled in various sorts of sexual lust, apparently a weightier evil than the other Deadly Sins. The first panel represents the Bible’s story of Paradise and corresponds with the “Arcadian innocence” of “the Ardis part” of Ada (588).
The reference to the Stabian girl (the fresco of a girl picking flowers from the Villa Arianna in Stabia,now in the National Archeological Museum, Naples, reproduced in Gerard de Vries and D. Barton Johnson with an Essay by Liana Ashenden, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2006) in Ada’s opening chapter is eminently suited to illustrate this innocence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabiae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabiae#/media/File:Primavera_di_Stabiae.jpg
Although she is as barefooted as Van and Ada, there is no hint of eroticism as there is in Ada, where the bare feet remind the reader that Van and Ada are “naked” (592). The Stabian girl is elegantly and fully dressed with diaphanous garments. In Ada, she is, however, linked to the Pompeiian vices when Van, acknowledging Ada’s erudite reference to the girl on the fresco from Stabiae (which is five kilometres south of Pompeii), calls her “Pompeianella” (9).
While the Stabian girl is obviously picking flowers, she is twice referred to as “scattering” blossoms (9; 592). Vivian Darkbloom refers to her as “the so-called ‘Spring’” (592), Brian Boyd as “the so-called ‘Primavera’” (ADAonline, Ann.8.31. ada.auckland.ac.nz), as does D. Barton Johnson (op.cit. 100). “Primavera” is Italian for “spring,” a season which clearly befits the mural’s scene. But who is the girl shown in the painting? The Naples Museum presents several options for the painting’s caption, but settles on “Flora” as the girl’s identity (museoarcheologiconapoli.it). According to E. H. Gombrich, the girl “represents one of the Hours” (The Story of Art. London: Phaidon, 1953, 77). The Hours or Horae are divinities from the Greek mythology (Greek culture was much in vogue in Pompeii), and one of them, Thallo, is associated with blossoms and spring. Some myths have confused this “Hora of springtime” with Flora, the Latin goddess of budding springtime and flowers (New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. London: Hamlyn, 1978, 138; 210). In Botticelli’s Primavera Flora is scattering flowers lavishly. This is in accordance with what Lucretius writes about her: “Flora carpets the trail [...] with a wealth of blossoms exquisite in hue and fragrance” (On the Nature of the Universe. Trans. R. E. Latham. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976, 193). Botticelli is the painter most frequently referred to in Nabokov’s novels, and in Look at the Harlequins! Annette Blagovo is linked to Botticelli’s Flora (de Vries, op. cit. 178-80, 82). By having the Stabian girl scattering her flowers instead of picking them, Nabokov seems to indicate that he identifies her as Flora.
Flora reappears as Sig Leyman’s assistant in Van’s novel Letters from Terra, saving his marriage with Antilia by eliminating the seductress Teresa (340). More persistent is Flora’s role as one of Van’s lovers, “a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian?...)” (410). Her possible Rumanian origin links her to Adora, the doomed child in Villa Venus, who shares Ada’s birthday (July 21st) and whom Van remembers as offering “the purest sanglot in the book” (357; 358; 584). And this Flora accompanies Lucette in the recollections Van has of her in one of Ada’s last pages (575). Flora is invoked during highly significant events in the novel, when feminine attractiveness arouses a wide range of responses, touching on extremities of tenderness and cruelty.
In referring to “Pompeianella” Nabokov also links the Arcadian Flora to the perishable sides of Roman culture, similar to the way Hell is foreshadowed in Bosch’s triptych. Its first panel depicts Paradise showing Adam and Eve before an orchard of trees laden with red apples, while a snake coils around a tree, making clear that The Fall is imminent. Van’s nickname for Ada is, however, extraneous to the fresco; the fresco seems free of any omen foreboding adversity. The girl on the fresco is picking flowers which she collects in a basket. This being Flora, she is likely to use these flowers for strewing them around, which are therefore bound to wither soon. By having Flora “scattering her flowers,” Nabokov hints that even this fresco full of pastoral serenity contains the notion that “beauty must die.”
- Times and trees
Not all sins in Ada are of a sexual nature. Mistranslations are no less severe offenses. In fact, mistranslations are compared by Nabokov to Casanova’s sexual perversion (Strong Opinions 81, quoted by Dana Dragunoiu, Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2011, 162. For the far-reaching implications of mistranslations for the understanding of Ada, see also Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Ada. The Place of Consciousness. Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2001, especially 296-7).
A blatant mistranslation is provided by Vivian Darkbloom when rendering a line from Seneca. This line was scribbled as a farewell to the Villa Venus Club when it was about to expire; a final blow was dealt by “earthquakes” (356). Seneca recorded the earthquake that destroyed Pompeii in 62 AD. It was largely rebuilt before it was buried by the eruption of the Vesuvius in 79 AD, but at that time Seneca was no longer alive. The line quoted from Seneca and Darkbloom’s translation is:
Subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt
Mountains subside and heights deteriorate (355, 601)
The translation is not only nonsensical (in what sense can a vertical distance deteriorate?), but an obvious maltreatment of the original as well. One does not need to have Latin to see this. The original line has three words after its caesura, the translation only two. And the English line has three words with Latin roots: “subsidunt” is recognizable in “subside” and “montes” in “mountains.” But there is no word similar to “deteriorate,” coming from the Latin “deteriorare,” as English dictionaries inform their readers. A literal translation is given by Frederick Brittain:
Mountains subside and lofty peaks collapse
(The Penguin Book of Latin Verse.Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962, 48)
Why does Nabokov draw attention to this line by mistranslating it? The answer must be that he wishes the reader to see Seneca’s poem in its entirety, and see its first line:
Omnia tempus edax depascitur, omnia carpit,
which means “voracious time devours everything, destroys everything” (Cf. Brittain 48). “Tempus edax rerum” is a celebrated phrase from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Time, the devourer, ... destroy[s] all things” (Trans. Mary Innes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, 341). Brittain givesSeneca’s poem the title “Devouring time,” and it is this expression that has become well known in English letters. It is used in the seventh line of Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet LVIII”: “deuouring tyme” (Poetical Works. London:OUP, 1932, 572). And Shakespeare’s sonnet 19 opens with:
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws
(Complete Works. London: OUP, 1955, 1108)
These lines don’t anticipate Van’s Texture of Time, as Van’s time is rather a hoarding than a devouring time.
But Shakespeare’s “lion’s paws” recall the “Pied de Lion,” the name Ada gives to the artificial edelweiss made “by a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College” (9). "Barkley" is the English pronunciation of Berkeley; Dana Dragunoiu has examined in detail how this student from Barkley “leads readers into [Ada’s] Berkeleian topography” such as the philosopher’s “idealist monism” and his influence on Van’s meditations on time (“Nabokov’s Berkeley: Fantasy, History, and the ‘Splendor of Lone Thought’.” Op. cit., Chapter Four [186-222], 197; 194). This Chinese boy was a fellow patient of Aqua when she stayed at a Swiss sanatorium to be treated for mental illnesses. She has “sudden dreams of eternity-certainty” and is at times “afloat in infinite non-thingness” (22; 27). The Chinese boy seems to have been close to her: he not only gave her artificial flowers, but also sings in her presence, accompanying himself on a “non-Chinese guitar” (24). Possibly he is treated in the hospital for afflictions similar to those Aqua is suffering from. He might well be the Chinaman Van mentions, who can imagine an “Elysian” “Next-Installment World” (586). There is a “Chinese tree” at Ardis, a ginkgo, the oldest extant tree species in the world (299). The edelweiss he has made from paper is called in French “pied-de-lion” but also “immortelle des neiges” (Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré, Paris, 60th edition, 332). As both Aqua and this Chinese boy seem to dwell in infinity, it seems appropriate that the flowers in Marina’s album they are associated with--the artificial sanicle, the paper edelweiss and the ginkgo leaf--are all immune to the passing of time. Aqua does not “know the date or the season” and “the hands of a clock” have no meaning for her (29. See also 24). (Another connection between an edelweiss and timelessness can be observed in Glory as the hands of Grandfather Edelweiss’ watch “stopped at the same moment as his heart” [1].)
Even when disregarding the artificial flowers, Marina’s herbarium is mystifying. It does not mention any botanical particulars (Marina seems to detest “botanists” [65]). Rather than a floral album, it is a chronicle containing a coded genealogy (see Boyd, VNAY545) and a sort of calendar. The part of the herbarium discussed by Van and Ada covers exactly six months, from October 1, 1869 to March 28, 1870. The various flowers could, however, have been collected at the indicated dates as they blossom during periods including those dates (the “Gentiane de Koch” might have received some help from Dr Lapiner who has a “gentiarium” (8). The use of the blossoming and opening of flowers as a time-measuring device is mentioned by Andrew Marvell in his poem “The Garden.” This poem is mentioned for the first time when Marina remembers that she “once collected flowers” (63). Its last stanza is well worth quoting:
How well the skilful Gardener drew
Of flow’rs and herbes this Dial new;
Where from above the milder Sun
Does through a fragrant Zodiac run;
And, as it works, th’industrious Bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome Hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!
(The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell. Vol. I. Poems. Oxford: OUP, 1971, 53)
In a floral clock the flowers are arranged according to the hours when their blossoms open and close. Marvell has perfected his use by watching the bees which visit only open flowers. Such a chronobiological approach to time is discussed by Van when he observes that “Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple – these are our faithful timekeepers” (537-8). (Ada is however not the first work in which Nabokov airs these chronobiological methods of timekeeping. In Speak, Memory Nabokov measures time by counting the number of human “heartbeats [in] an hour” [19]. And in Lolita, Humbert, not distracted by the prominence of the hourglass, writes an essay on a “theory of perceptual time based on the circulation of blood” [260]).
The best-known phenomenon of nature counting time might be the annual rings that can be seen in cross-sections of tree trunks. Nabokov does mention this sort of clock as well. In her last letter, Aqua mentions the word “klok,” Dutch for “clock” (29). It has the same pronunciation, meaning, and (Latin) root as the English “clock.” Hence, it must be its Dutch origin that is its raison d’être. The next Dutch word one comes across is “groote” (69). This word is nowadays spelled as “grote,” the inflected form of “groot.” This word can be translated into English as “large,” “big,” “great” and so on. Because “groote” belongs to archaic spelling from before the reforms of 1934, I have consulted an older, pre-1934, English-Dutch dictionary. This gives as its first translation “groot” only for “great” (and not for “large” or “big”). So once more we have a word that has a comparable pronunciation, meaning, and (Saxon) root as its English equivalent. No wonder that “the simplicity of its meaning annoyed” Uncle Dan (69).
The reader as well might be puzzled by the seeming emptiness of these references: if one compares the two sets of words, “groote klok” and“great clock,” the Dutch origin of the first set seems to be the main aspect distinguishing them. Uncle Dan found this word in an article about “oystering in a Dutch-language illustrated paper” (68). As Brian Boyd has elucidated, “oystering” refers to the technique of making furniture by “using thin slices of wood branches or roots cut in cross-section” (ADAonline, Ann. 68.19). This technique was mainly used for the production of cabinets and introduced in England by William and Mary, the Dutch princely couple that became king and queen of England in 1689. That Uncle Dan saw this article in an illustrated paper suggests that he saw examples of such cabinets with this sort of veneering, an invitation to readers to visualize what these may look like: polished cross-sections of trunks brilliantly showing their annual rings. Such dials, of Dutch origin,may deserve the epithet “groote klok.”
The arboreal measurement of time is also the subject of the novel Quercus, “the biography of an oak.” By the end of the book the oak “would reach the age of six hundred at least” (Invitation to a Beheading 122). Time measured by a tree must differ distinctly from that by an “ephemeron” as, for example, a May-fly, and this difference suggests a vastness of scope that make the measurement of time even more elusive (Ada 10).
This small sample of Ada’s intriguing riddles shows a certain chronophilia: a herbarium serves as a family chronicle, a line from Seneca points to the chronobiological quality of flowers, and Dutch cabinet-makers emerge as horologists of sorts.
I would like to thank Stephen Blackwell and Priscilla Meyer for their many most welcome suggestions.
--Gerard de Vries, Voorschoten