According to VN, N. M. Karamzin is the author of one
the best Russian epigrams: Что наша жизнь? - Роман. Кто
автор? - Аноним. Читаем по складам, cмеёмся, плачем, cпим... ("Life?
A romance. By whom? Anonymous. We spell it out; it makes us laugh and weep, and
then puts us to sleep.") Its target is clearly the anonymous author of a
romance that we all read only once (there will be no
rereading).
Pushkin, too, read his life as a novel: И с отвращением читая жизнь мою, я трепещу и проклинаю, и горько
жалуюсь, и горько слёзы лью, но строк печальных не смываю. ("Then, as
with loathing I peruse the years, I tremble, and I curse my natal day, Wail
bitterly, and bitterly shed tears, But cannot wash the woeful script
away." Remembrance, 1828, transl. Maurice
Baring; or, if you prefer an unrhymed translation: "And I, repulsed, review the
story of my life, I shudder and I curse, Weep bitter tears and bitterly
complain, But cannot wash the dismal lines away.") One also remembers EO's
closing lines: "Blest who life's banquet early left,
having not drained to the bottom the goblet full of wine; who did not read
life's novel to the end and all at once could part with it as I with my
Onegin."
In his bogaryr fairy tale Ilya Muromets (1794)
Karamzin (the future author of History of the Russian
State) exclaims: Ах, не всё нам реки слёзные лить
о бедствиях существенных! На минуту позабудемся в чародействе красных
вымыслов! (Ah, not all
the time shall we shed floods of tears because of actual disasters!
Let us forget ourselves
for a moment in the magic of fair
inventions!)
In my article "The Fair Invention in
Nabokov's Ada and Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin" (The
Nabokovian #58) I quote Boris Sadovskoy who in a short poem written in 1935 said
that Earth was a tear shining in God's eye (слеза в зенице
Бога) and suggest that Antiterra (Earth's twin planet on which
Ada is set) is but a tear Nabokov shed weeping for
Russia, his home country.
Van's patients described Terra as
"a green world* rotating in space and spiraling in
time." (1.30) Lucette who sheds an aquamarine tear as Van and Ada fondle
her in their bed (2.8) actually has green
eyes.
Furnished Space,
l’espace meublé (known to us only as furnished and full even if its
contents be ‘absence of substance’ - which seats the mind, too), is mostly
watery so far as this globe is concerned. In that form it destroyed Lucette.
Another variety, more or less atmospheric, but no less gravitational and
loathsome, destroyed Demon. (3.7)
The astronauts would confirm that our planet is blue rather
than
green.
According to Van and Ada, "nobody knew
how far Terra, or other innumerable planets with cottages and cows, might be
situated in outer or inner space: 'inner,' because why not assume their
microcosmic presence in the golden globules ascending quick-quick in this flute
of Moёt or in the corpuscles of my, Van Veen's - (or my, Ada Veen's) -
bloodstream, or in the pus of a Mr Nekto's ripe boil newly lanced in Nektor
or Neckton."
(2.2)
Why not assume
that Earth is Lucette's (or God's) aquamarine
tear?
*Earth's twin
planet reached by the hero of Dostoevski's story "Сон
смешного человека" (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 1877) after
he had committed suicide in his dream is also green.
Alexey
Sklyarenko