'"Ten years and one have gone by-abye since I
left Moscow"' - (Ada, now playing Varvara, copied the nun's 'singsongy
devotional tone' (pevuchiy ton bogomolki, as indicated by Chekhov and
as rendered so irritatingly well by Marina). (Ada,
2.9)
In a letter of February 2, 1900, to I. L. Leont'yev
(Shcheglov) Chekhov apologizes for pevuchiy ton bogomolki
(singsongy devotional tone): Простите, что я заговорил
певучим тоном богомолки. On the other hand, it is
Olga, a character in Chekhov's story Muzhiki (Peasants), who
speaks in a sing-song voice and walks like bogomolka (a pilgrim
woman):
Ольга говорила степенно, нараспев, и походка у
неё была, как у богомолки, быстрая и суетливая.
(Olga spoke sedately, in a sing-song voice, and she walked
like a pilgrim woman, with a rapid, anxious step.)
A critic compared the impassive author of
Muzhiki to a vivisector (see my previous post). "Alibi" is
mentioned several times in another story by Chekhov. "The
vivisectional alibi" provided by the dead boy (Aqua's and Marina's brother Ivan)
seems to suggest that Marina is not as innocent after all.
'You know, children,' interrupted Marina
resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, 'when I was your age, Ada, and
my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies,
and the last fête-d'enfants, and the next picnic, and - oh, millions of nice
normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows
what!'
'But you just said you collected flowers?'
said Ada.
'Oh, just one season, somewhere in
Switzerland. I don't remember when. It does not matter now.'
The reference was to Ivan Durmanov: he had
died of lung cancer years ago in a sanatorium (not far from Ex, somewhere in
Switzerland, where Van was born eight years later). Marina often mentioned Ivan
who had been a famous violinist at eighteen, but without any special show of
emotion, so that Ada now noted with surprise that her mother's heavy make-up had
started to thaw under a sudden flood of tears (maybe some allergy to flat dry
old flowers, an attack of hay fever, or gentianitis, as a slightly later
diagnosis might have shown retrospectively). (1.10)
We have no evidence to incriminate Marina (who would know that
some plants are poisonous) poor Aqua's madness and death, but she is
certainly responsible for the miscarriage Aqua sufferred after skiing
with her sister (who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a bobsleigh a
fortnight after giving birth to Van: 1.38) and for making mad Aqua believe that
Van was her, Aqua's, son (1.3).
Alexey Sklyarenko