Below are several additions to Boyd's "Annotations
to Ada," Part I, ch. 2:
Upon the infinitely wise countrywoman's
suggestion, she goose-penned from the edge of her bed, on a side table with
cabriole legs, a love letter...
"The famous Russian romance" upon which
some pretentious hack based a stage performance whose heroine
plays in Ada Marina Durmanova is apparently Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin. In Pushkin's novel Tatiana doesn't ask, of
course, her nurse's advice and writes a love letter to Onegin of
her own accord: "All at once in her mind a thought was born... / "Go, let me be
alone. / Give me, nurse, a pen, paper, / and move up the table" (Chapter Three,
XXI, 3-6). The adaptator's mistake was probably
prompted by the following lines in Pushkin's novel: "On the nurse's
advice, Tatiana, / planning that night to conjure, / has on the quiet
ordered in the bathhouse / a table to be laid for two." (Chapter Five, X,
1-4)
Tatiana's letter to Onegin is also parodied in
Lolita, in Charlotte Haze's epistolary declaration of love for
Humbert.
Commenting on "Eugene and Lara"
(the title of the stage adaptation of Pushkin's EO), Boyd mentions Lara, the
heroine of Dr Zhivago (1958) by Leonid Pasternak (1890-1960). Leonid
Pasternak was a famous painter (1862-1945). The first name of his son, the
author of Dr Zhivago, was Boris. Zhivago's first name is
Yuri. It reminds one of Yur'ev den' (St George's Day
celebrated on April 23, Old Style). Aqua, Marina's twin sister, married Demon
Veen (who succeded in becoming Marina's lover between the two scenes of "Eugene
and Lara") on April 23, 1869, and Ada's husband, Andrey Vinelander, dies on
April 23, 1922. The Russian saying Vot tebe, babushka, i Yur'ev den'!
(Here's a fine how d'ye do! That's a nice kettle of fish!) is quoted by a
character in Pushkin's tragedy Boris Godunov (1826). The
tsar Boris has famously abolished the ancient right the serfs had had to change
their masters on the (fall) St George's Day, thus introducing serfdom in
Russia.
an amusing Douglas d'Artagnan
position...
Douglas Fairbanks, a Hollywood star who played
d'Artagnan in the film version (1921) of Dumas's "The Three Musketeers," is
mentioned in Ilf and Petrov's The Golden Calf (1931): "the postcards
with portraits of Duglas Fairbanks in a black bautta [v chyornoy
polumaske] on the fat samovar face [na tolstoy samovarnoy
morde] flew out from the printing machine like playing cards from a
card-sharper's sleeve" (Chapter V: "The Underground Kingdom"). Cf. the
mention of samovars (Russian tea-machines) in the same chapter of
Ada: "somebody had goofed - the word 'samovars' may have
got garbled in the agent's aerocable". Card-sharpers (Plunkett,
Dick C.) and a bautta also occur in Ada. Venetsianskaya
bauta (the Venetian bautta) is mentioned in a poem by Mandelstam, author of
"We live not feeling the land beneath us" and other poems mistranslated by
Lowell. Those mistranslations are ridiculed by VN in the same chapter of Ada
("violent dance called kurva" etc., 1.2).
The hilarious program that Demon enjoys in
Ada reminds one of Bender's and Vorobyaninov's visit to the Columbus
Theatre, where they watch an avant-garde stage version of Gogol's play
Zhenit'ba ("The Marriage"), in Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve
Chairs (1928). If I'm not mistaken, the target of Ilf and Petrov's parody
were Meyerhold's experiments. Long before the Revolution, Meyerhold had directed
the stage version of Blok's Balaganchik ("A Little Booth Show," 1906).
Blok is the author of The Twelve (1918). His Incognita (1906)
is directly alluded to in Ada (3.3)
Alexey Sklyarenko