Alexey sends his apologies for posting this revised version, which
he promises is much more interesting than the previous version. ~SB
Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
The vague commonplaces of vague
modesty so dreadfully in vogue eighty years ago, the
unsufferable banalities of shy wooing buried in old romances as
arch as Arcady, those moods, those modes, lurked no doubt behind
the hush of his ambuscades, and that of her toleration. (Ada, 1.16)
Russian for "arch", lukavyi can also
mean "the Evil One" (i. e. Satan; cf. ot lukavogo,
"from the Evil One", "from the devil"). In his Gabriel poem
Pushkin calls the Satan lukavyi vrag ("the
arch enemy") or simply lukavyi:
Но, старый враг, не дремлет
сатана!
Услышал он, шатаясь в белом свете,
Что бог имел еврейку на примете,
Красавицу, которая должна
Спасти наш род от вечной муки ада.
Лукавому великая досада...
But the old enemy, Satan does not sleep!
Roaming in the world he heard
That God had his eye on a Jewish girl,
The beauty who should save
Mankind from the eternal torment of hell.
The Evil One is in a great vexation...
Она молчит; но вдруг не стало мочи,
Едва дыша, закрыла томны очи,
К лукавому
склонив на грудь главу,
Вскричала: ах!.. и пала на
траву...
She
[Mary] is silent, but suddenly lost control.
Hardly
breathing, [she] closed her languid eyes,
Bending her
head on the Evil One's chest,
Exclaimed:
"ah!" and fell down on the grass...
Relating
his own version of the Fall, the Satan mentions two apples
hanging on a wondrous branch:
Ты слышала,
как всё произошло?
Два яблока, вися на ветке
дивной
(Счастливый знак, любви симвoл
призывный),
Открыли ей неясную мечту,
Проснулося неясное желанье:
Она свою познала красоту,
И негу чувств, и сердца
трепетанье,
И юного супруга наготу!
Did you
hear how it all happened?
Two apples hanging on a wondrous branch
(A good sign, love's summoning symbol)
Opened her [Eve] a vague dream,
An unclear desire woke up:
She became aware of her beauty
And got to know the mollitude of feelings, and
the heart trepidation,
And the nakedness of her young husband!
Ada to Van: 'It is really the Tree of Knowledge - this
specimen was imported last summer wrapped up in brocade from the
Eden National Park where Dr Krolik's son is a ranger and
breeder.' (1.15)
Soon after that foretaste of
knowledge [when Van and Ada nearly fell
from an apple tree and Van kissed Ada's leg on the inside],
an amusing thing happened. She [Ada] was
on her way to Krolik's house with a boxful of hatched and
chloroformed butterflies and had just passed through the
orchard* when she suddenly stopped and swore (chort!).
(ibid.)
It seems that Eden is not as chaste after all
(and, besides, it was Eve who seduced Adam). Just as the
fourteen-year-old Van is not quite innocent when he comes to
Ardis, the twelve-year-old Ada is not a virgin in the night of
the Burning Barn (1.19), when she first makes love to Van. As
later transpires, her first lover was Dr Krolik's brother,
Karol, or Karapars (Turk., "black panther"), Krolik:
'How curious - in the state Kim
mounted him here, he looks much less furry and fat than I
imagined. In fact, darling, he's a big, strong, handsome old
March Hare! Explain!'
'There's nothing to
explain. I asked Kim one day to help me carry some boxes there
and back, and here's the visual proof. Besides, that's not my
Krolik** but his brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik. A doctor
of philosophy, born in Turkey.' (2.7)
If my theory is correct, Kim Beauharnais, the
kitchen boy and photographer fiend at Ardis who spied on Van and
Ada and who attempts to blackmail Ada, is the son of Arkadiy
Dolgoruki, the hero and narrator in Dostoevski's "The
Adolescent" (1875), and Alphonsine, a character in that
novel. Alphonsine's boyfriend Lambert attempts to
blackmail Princess Akhmakov, a young woman with whom Arkadiy is
in love. When he finds Alphonsine rummaging in
his clothes, Arkadiy exclaims: Alfonsinka - shpion!
("Alphonsine is a spy!")
The Bourbonian-chinned,
dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his
blazer days 'Alphonse Cinq,' believed he
had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian
Vale's golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and
a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went
to see. (3.3)
The father of the twins Greg and Grace, Arkadiy
Erminin "preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel". His
wife committed suicide when she learnt of her husband's romance
with her sister Ruth:
Lady
Erminin, through the bothersome afterhaze of suicide, was,
reflected Marina, looking down, with old wistfulness and
an infant's curiosity, at the picnickers, under the
glorious pine verdure, from the Persian*** blue of her
abode of bliss. (1.13)
At the picnic in Ardis the First Aunt Ruth is pregnant.
Because we do not see her in Ardis the Second (and Colonel
Erminin is now "practically mad"), we can assume that she died
in childbirth (narrationally, the young pregnant woman is
"a great burden").
Arkadina is the stage name of
Irina Nikolaevna Treplev, the actress in Chekhov's play "The
Seagull" (1896). Her maiden name, Sorin, differs only in one
letter from Sirin (VN's Russian nom de plume). Arkadina's son, Treplev, commits suicide at the end
of Chekhov's play.
In Ada (2.2) Ben Sirine is an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of
anagrammatic dreams.
Josephine Beauharnais (known on Antiterra as
"Queen Josephine", 1.5) was Napoleon's first wife. Napoleon and
Satan are mentioned in Nina Zarechnyi's famous monologue:
The bodies of all living creatures have dropped
to dust, and eternal matter has transformed them into stones and
water and clouds; but their spirits have flowed together into
one, and that great world-soul am I! In me is the spirit of the
great Alexander, the spirit of Napoleon, of Caesar, of
Shakespeare, and of the tiniest leech... Satan, father of
eternal matter, trembling lest the spark of life should glow in
you, has ordered an unceasing movement of the atoms that compose
you, and so you shift and change for ever. ("The Seagull", Act
One)
Trigorin + Timur =
Trimurti + groin
Trigorin - a character in "The Seagull", the writer
(Arkadina's lover who has a romance with Nina Zarechnyi); Dorn (flipping through a literary review,
to Trigorin): 'Here, a couple of months ago, a certain
article was printed... a Letter from America, and I wanted
to ask you, incidentally' (taking Trigorin by the waist
and leading him to the front of the stage), 'because I'm
very much interested in that question...' (1.39)
Timur - Tamerlane; Greg Erminin gives Ada a little
camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev in the days of Timur
and Nabok (1.39)
Trimurti - Indian trinity; Lucette to Van: "Dorothy [Vinelander] is
a prissy and pious monster who comes to stay for months,
orders the meals, and has a private collection of keys to
the servants' rooms - which our bumb brunette should have
known - and other little keys to open people's hearts -
she has tried, by the way, to make a practicing Orthodox
not only of every American Negro she can catch, but of our
sufficiently pravoslavnaya mother - though she
only succeeded in making the Trimurti stocks
go up" (3.3) The conversation during
Van's dinner with the Vinelanders (3.8) parodies
Chekhov's mannerisms (Vivian Darkbloom, "Notes to Ada").
groin
- anatomical term; after his sword duel with Demon Skonky died, not 'of his wounds' (as it was
viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the
part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in
the groin
(1.2); according to Van, a brunette, even a sloppy brunette, should
shave her groin before exposing it (1.32)
*Chekhov is the author of "The Cherry Orchard". They've all gone and left me behind, as old
Fierce mumbles at the end of the Cherry Orchard
(Marina was an adequate Mme Ranevski). (1.19)
**In a letter of June 27, 1834, to his wife
Pushkin calls N. M. Smirnov, whose wife (chernookaya
Rossetti, black-eyed Rossetti) just gave birth to twins,
krasnoglazyi krolik (a red-eyed rabbit).
***Grigoriy Aleksandrovich Pechorin (Lermontov's
Hero of Our Time) dies during his trip to Persia. Greg Erminin's
name-and-patronymic is Grigoriy Arkadievich.
Alexey Sklyarenko