Revelation can be more perilous than
Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of
another world and this 'Other World' got confused not only with the 'Next World'
but with the Real Word in us and beyond us. Our enchanters,
our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and
mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged
one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded,
had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black
scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female
souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic
spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent
myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the divinities and
devines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient
world. (Ada, 1.3)
Ada is set on Earth's twin planet, Demonia or
Antiterra. In his essay "Пророк русской
революции" (The Prophet of Russian Revolution, on the 25th
anniversary of Dostoevski's* death) Merezhkovski speaks
of demonocracy (as opposed to theocracy):
В первом случае "государство" понимается как
царство Божие, как теократия, то есть безгранично свободная, любовная
общественность, отрицающая всякую внешнюю насильственную власть и,
следовательно, как нечто не похожее ни на одну из доныне существовавших в
истории государственных форм; во втором случае "государство" разумеется как
внешняя насильственная власть, как царство от мира сего, царство дьявола -
демонократия.
In Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin (Part Four)
Samgin reads Merezhkovski's new book "Грядущий Хам" (The Future Ham, 1906) and
recalls the "Boschean" parade of women he and Berdnikov saw in the
Bois de Boulogne:
Самгин взял
книжку Мережковского "Грядущий хам", прилег на диван, но скоро убедился, что
автор, предвосхитив некоторые его мысли, придал им дряблую, уродующую форму. Это
было досадно. Бросив книгу на стол, он восстановил в памяти яркую картину парада
женщин в Булонском лесу.
"Мирок-то какой картинный", -- прозвучала
в памяти фраза Бердникова.
As I pointed out before, the name Berdnikov reminds one of
bredni (fantasies) and bredni bring
to mind Shchedrin's antibredni.
Berdnikov + nabor = bredni + Nabokov
+ r (nabor - recruiting;** levy;
type-setting; composed matter)
*In Dostoevski's story "Сон смешного
человека" (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 1877), the angel
takes the hero who shot himself dead in his dream to Earth's twin
planet whose inhabitants are naive and innocent (see my "Ada as a
Triple Dream").
**a story by VN
Alexey Sklyarenko