As he speaks of Tolstoy's tale of Murat, the
Navajo chieftain, a French general's bastard, shot by Cora Day in his
swimming pool, Van Veen exclaims: "What a soprano Cora had
been!" (1.28)
Charlotte Corday, who stabbed Marat in his
bath, wasn't a singer.
There are no opera singers
in Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, the
novella set, except one
chapter, in the Caucasus.
But there are several female singers in Tolstoy's
Anna Karenin. At a crucial point of her adulterous romance with
Vronsky (Part Five, XXXIII), Anna makes the mistake by going to the theatre
to listen to Carlotta Patti (Adelina's elder sister). At the party given by
Countess Bohl* (Part Seven, VI), the
hostess says to Lyovin: "Очень хороша была Лукка" ("Lucca was superb
yesterday").
Paoline Lucca, Austrian opera singer (dramatic
soprano) of Italian extraction, happens to be a namesake of the city in
Tuscany mentioned in the beginning of Tolstoy's previous novel, War and
Peace:
"Eh bien, mon prince.
Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des
поместья, de la famille Buonaparte."**
(While "Lucques" is the setting of Heinrich
Heine's Die Baeder von Lucca, the toponym "Gênes" occurs in the
title of another part of Heine's Italienische Reisebilder, Die
Reise von Muenchen nach Genua. I discuss the allusions in Ada
to these prose pieces by HH in my previous posts. Btw., Lucca is the
home city of Giacomo Puccini, the famous operatic composer,
while Genoa is the home city of Christopher Columbus)
From War and Peace back to Anna
Karenin. When
Lyovin takes adieux of Countess Bol' and her daughter, the ladies shake
hands with him and bid him to convey mille choses to his wife
(Kitty).
Chose is Van's University in Ada. In Part One,
ch. 27, we see Van playing poker with another Chose student, a cardsharp.
When the game is over, Van throws a handful of cards and chips into Dick's
face.
Cf. in Anna Karenin (Part Three, XIX):
"Such debts amounted to about
four thousand: one thousand five hundred for a horse, and two thousand five
hundred as surety for a young comrade, Venevsky, who had lost that sum to a
cardsharper in Vronsky's presence. Vronsky had wanted to pay the money at the
time (he had that amount then), but Venevsky and Yashvin had insisted that they
would pay and not Vronsky, who had not played. That was so far well, but Vronsky
knew that in this dirty business, though his only share in it was undertaking by
word of mouth to be surety for Venevsky, it was absolutely necessary for him to
have the two thousand five hundred roubles so as to be able to fling it at the
swindler, and have no more words with him."
Venevsky + naiven = Ivan Veen +
Nevsky
Yashvin = vishnya
G. A. Vronsky + Don Juan + Ada =
d'Onsky + navajo + Guan + Dar
naiven - Russ., [he
is] naive
Nevsky - Nevsky Avenue
in St. Petersburg
vishnya - Russ.,
cherry
G. A. Vronsky - a
character in Ada, one of Marina's lovers
d'Onsky - another lover
of Marina
Guan - Don Guan, the
hero of Pushkin's "The Stone Guest"
Dar - Russ.,
gift
As to the name Karenin, of Anna's
husband, Tolstoy derived it from karenon (Greek for "head"), the
word he found in Homer (see S. L. Tolstoy, "Очерки былого", Sketches of
the Past). Cf. Golovin (from golova, "head"), the surname of
the hero of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", golovotyapstvo
(bungling; literally: "head-chopping") in Ilf and
Petrov, and Headless Horseman, Captain Mayne Reid's novel
that on Antiterra turns out to be a poem by Pushkin.
Actually, Pushkin is the author of The
Bronze Horseman. The poem's original title is "Медный всадник".
Медь is Russian for "copper". There is "copper" in Koperveyn, a character
in Tolstoy's Hadji
Murat. The emperor Nicolas I repeats
the name Koperveyn several times as he walks, taking his morning
exercise, along the Neva embankment (ch. XV). On the eve (December 31, 1851) he
was in a masquerade where he met a masked girl. She turned out to be a
Swedish governess' innocent daughter, who had been in love with the tsar since
childhood, and he spent an hour with her in his top-secret
garçonnière.
VN's son Dmitri Nabokov was an opera singer (bass).
Perhaps he can tell us more about several other opera-related details in
Ada. There is, for instance, the young soprano Maria Kuznetsova, whom
Ada resembles in the letter scene in Tschchaikow's opera Onegin
and Olga (1.25). At the picnic in Ardis the Second (1.39) Marina sings the
Green Grass aria from "Traverdiata" (trava is Russian for "grass" and
the name Verdi comes from verde, Italian for
"green").
*Графиня Боль; боль is Russian
for "pain"; боль + векши = большевик (bolshevik); векши, nom. pl., gen.
sing. of векша, obs., squirrel; cf. Mandelshtam:
"И век бы падал векши
легче" (And all my life I would fall down lighter than a
squirrel)
**Ну, князь? Генуя и Лукка -
поместья фамилии Бонапарте (Anna Pavlovna Sherer's words to Prince
Vasiliy Bezukhov; Russian translation is by Tolstoy)
Alexey Sklyarenko