"'Okh, nado (I must) passati!'
exclaimed Percy in the Slavic slang he affected, blowing out his cheeks and
fumbling frantically at his fly." (Part One, ch. 39)
In his 'Notes to Ada', Vivian Darkbloom
comments on passati: "pseudo-Russian pun on 'pass water'."
Vulgar Russian for "urinate, make
water" is [po]ssat'. As to passati, it
reminds one of the Italian phrase tempi
passati ("antique"). This phrase is used by A. I. Herzen in his book
of memoirs Byloe i dumy * and by P. D. Boborykin** in his
memoir From Herzen to Tolstoy (1917): "All this is already tempi passati and now Bakunin,*** in
the estimation of our extremists [Lenin & Co.], would probably have been a
backward old chap unfit for any serious propaganda".
Boborykin (1836-1921), whose complete works
would make more than hundred volumes, is the most prolific Russian writer
of all times. Among his novels is "The Great Ruin: a Family Chronicle" (1908). Boborykin spent the last
years of his long life in Switzerland (the above-mentioned memoir was written in
Ragaz, in the Swiss canton St. Gallen)**** and died in
Lugano.
Boborykin is mentioned in The Gift
and, if I'm not mistaken, fleetingly appears, as a fellow traveller on the
train, in VN's earlier Russian novel, Glory.
Ada was written in the late nineteen sixties. Mnogo
vody uteklo**** ("much water has flowed under the bridges") since
1930, when Podvig appeared, and even more since 1899, when VN was born
in the Bolshaya Morskaya street in St. Petersburg, renamed Herzen
street by the Bolsheviks.
TEMPI PASSATI + NADO + OKH = ESTIMATION + PAPA +
SKHOD (skhod is Russian for "descent" and "assembly, gathering;"
skhod = sdokh, vulg., "[he] died")
BAKUNIN + GERALD = BAKU +
LENINGRAD (Gerald is Morris Gerald, the hero of Captain Mayne
Reid's Headless Horseman, Baku is the city on the Caspian sea,
capital of Azerbaijan, Leningrad is the Soviet name of St.
Petersburg)
*"Bygones and Meditations", one of
the favorite books of VN's father.
**PDB was known in the society as Pierre Bobo (a
oneway nickname). I wonder if the harmless psoriatics' bobo's
that, according to Dr Krolik, protect them from bubas and buboes
(1.21) may hint at Boborykin? Bobo means "it hurts" in the
Russian children's cant.
***M. A. Bakunin (1814-76), Russian anarchist and
writer.
****Lenin also lived in Switzerland till
1917.
*****I notice that this
phrase occurs in Boborykin's novel Vasiliy Tyorkin (1892). Half a
century later the Soviet poet Alexander Tvardovski chose the same name for
the hero of his famous epic that sings of the deeds of a Russian
soldier in the WWII.
Alexey Sklyarenko