Uncle Dan in an overstuffed chair was
trying to read, with the aid of one of the dwarf dictionaries for undemanding
tourists which helped him to decipher foreign art catalogues, an article
apparently devoted to oystering in a Dutch-language illustrated paper somebody
on the train had abandoned opposite him - when an abominable tumult started to
spread from room to room through the whole house...
'Good Lord!' he exclaimed, on catching sight of
the gory trophy, 'somebody must have chopped off a thumb!'* Patting his thighs
and his chair, he sought and retrieved - from under the footstool - the
vestpocket wordbook and went back to his paper, but a second later had to
look up 'groote,' which he had been groping for when
disturbed.
The simplicity of its meaning annoyed him. (Ada, 1.11)
She [Lucette] would advance
up to the center of the weedy playground in front of the forbidden pavilion, and
there, with an air of dreamy innocence, start to jiggle the board of an old
swing that hung from the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but
still healthy old oak (which appeared - oh, I remember, Van! - in a century-old
lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast, as a young colossus protecting four cows
and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare). (1.34)
Van remembered that his tutor's great friend, the
learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate
professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the
only vulgar passage in his author's work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets
tearing 'plump and live' oysters out of their 'cloisters' in an unfinished canto
of Eugene Onegin. (1.38)
Groote is Dutch for "large". The tsar Peter I is often called
"Peter the Great" (Dutch: Peter de Grote). In 1697 Peter I visited the
Netherlands where he worked at a shipyard (under the pseudonym Pyotr Mikhailov).
In the last years of his life Pushkin worked on Istoriya Petra (The
History of Peter I). In the unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin
("Fragments of Onegin's Journey", [XIX], 1-4) Pushikin mentions "the Flemish
School's variegated dross":
Порой дождливою намедни
Я, завернув на скотный
двор...
Тьфу! прозаические бредни,
Фламандской школы пёстрый сор!
The other day, during a rainy period,
as I had dropped into the cattle yard -
Fie! Prosy divagations,
the Flemish School's variegated dross!
The Dutch minister in St. Petersburg (and, after his expulsion from
Russia, in Vienna), Baron van Heeckeren (d'Anthès's adoptive
father), had a good collection of paintings. On the other
(left) hand, van Heeckeren was a pederast.
Peter de Rast + Tirana = pederast +
Antiterra
Tirana = tiran + a, Tirana +
t = tatarin, tiran + a = tatarin - t
(Tirana - Albanian capital; Antiterra, or Demonia - Earth's twin planet on which
Ada is set; tiran - Russ., tyrant; tatarin - Russ., a Tatar)
Khan Sosso, the ruthless ruler of the Sovietnamur Khanate (the Antiterran
name of Tartary, 2.2), is tatarin. On the other hand, tatarin
is a character in Gorky's play Na dne (At the Bottom, 1902).
Daniel Veen's favorite painter, Hieronymus Bosch is also
important in Gorky's novel "The Life of Klim Samgin". Gorky's hero is a namesake
of Baron Klim Avidov (anagram of Vladimir Nabokov), Marina's former lover who
gave her children a set of Flavita (Russian scrabble, 1.36). Flavita = alfavit (Russ., alphabet). Of the 225
squares of the Flavita board 165 are flavid (golden-yellow).
Albanians are also mentioned in Ada:
A moment later, however, Van remarked: 'I think I'll
take an Alibi - I mean an Albany - myself.'
'Please note, everybody,' said Ada, 'how voulu
that slip was! I like a smoke when I go mushrooming, but when I'm back, this
horrid tease insists I smell of some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the
woods.' (1.38)
Btw., Otrep'yev comes from otrep'ya (rags).
*The hero of Tolstoy's "Father Sergius" ("Count Tolstoy's famous
anecdote") chops off his finger in order to resist the charms of a
young woman who wants to seduce him (see my post "Cardinal Grishkin, Baron
d'Onsky, Vatican").
Alexey Sklyarenko